Because prepending that doesn't solve the problem Google wants to solve: once Google figures out that you typed in a question, they want to give you the answer to your question. Not tell you what other people think the answer is. (I agree that it is broken in a lot of cases now, but prepending that is a very bad workaround).
> once Google figures out that you typed in a question, they want to give you the answer to your question
And that's the problem that the article rightfully denounces. Having the answer to every question is not something that you can automate, not without strong AI.
> Prepending that is a very bad workaround
I strongly disagree; for me it's a very sensible thing to do - and in fact is how we do it in a social context ("I'm totally not making this shit up, I've read it in a scientific article / this morning newspaper / a tweet message"). We rely on the context where the knowledge came from as a proxy for how accurate its content might be.
The default posture of engineers to a problem of inaccuracy is "make it more accurate". That's the logical method when you're building bridges, where we can describe the physics to an extremely accurate degree and where it would fall out or quickly degrade if you make a mistake.
But for problems that rely on inaccurate or uncertain information, and where no exact models exists, the only reasonable way to build them is to degrade gracefully. If you don't handle failures, it will fail in spectacular ways - because it will fail sometimes.
The system should provide an escape hatch, and allow the user to be in control. The user of an automated system should always be able to inspect how the system came to the provided result, and be able to override the given results in those cases where it will get it wrong
(at least by some users in a supervising role, which other users could notify to).
Unless a revolution happens, Artificial Intelligence will only ever work in the large if we put humans in the decision loop.
They do always append a link below their answer to the site where they got it. Personally I find this to be the exact same solution as yours (not literally). The problem is some people don't clicks links anymore. It's a problem people are stupid, but its not googles problem, even if idiots uses google (like everyone else).
> Personally I find this to be the exact same solution as yours (not literally).
It may be the same for you (if you remember to follow the link for every single result that you get from Google, ever), but it's not enough for a mass-targeted product; the way in which the information is laid out and its relative prominence is essential to the way it will be perceived by the majority of the people using the service.
This is not people being stupid, is how people's brain is hardwired to be efficient and only care about information that looks important from the way it's presented - rather than having to make a rational analysis of the relative importance of every information snippet that you find in your way.
An upfront warning "this fact is brought to you by..." will have much more impact than a small, semi-hidden link that you have to remember to press, even if both convey the same information. (Moreover, the link is not available in the voice interface.)
You might be right if Google wants to answer all questions ever, but they can just limit this feature to situations where they do know what the answer is (you already see this when you type in math, conversions between different units, etc).
> and in fact is how we do it in a social context ("I'm totally not making this shit up, I've read it in a scientific article / this morning newspaper / a tweet message").
That's not how I converse with people around me at all, I only talk about the source if there is some disbelieve about whether it is true.
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When someone asks me for some information, I will answer and that is the context the person places me in. I won't tell that person "I heard this from Craig, he heard if from Judy and she was told by Bob, etc..". Google wants to become this person / context.
The whole idea is that you don't have to click / verify / think about the potential webpage, because Google has already ranked all webpages that mention your query, and it will only snippet the top one (which is the result Google thinks will most likely answer your question).
Adding the source is:
- extra noise (the user now needs to look at the text & look at who said it and determine whether it might be true or not).
- easily spoofable: you either rely on some meta tag for an Author, which websites can spoof. Or on a URL, which will lead to people doing stuff like "nytimes.com.quotefromgoogle.com".
> The system should provide an escape hatch, and allow the user to be in control.
Below the snippet are the 10 links that you can still click, functionality available since the mid 90s.
> The user of an automated system should always be able to inspect how the system came to the provided result
> You might be right if Google wants to answer all questions ever, but they can just limit this feature to situations where they do know what the answer is (you already see this when you type in math, conversions between different units, etc).
That argument was valid when they limited answers to simple calculations, coins exhange and the current weather. They are now trying to answer why fire cars are red and whether Obama is part of a conspiracy. For that kind of content, it's essential to be aware where the answer came from.
> That's not how I converse with people around me at all, I only talk about the source if there is some disbelieve about whether it is true. When someone asks me for some information, I will answer and that is the context the person places me in.
When you converse with people, there's a context of what you were talking about and your previous relations. Plus, you trust that the person will filter the sources that might interest you, and that they will apply common sense when selecting the sources and will warn you if they have little confidence in the answer. And you could further inquire them about the sources if the information looks fishy.
Nothing of this applies to Google. The question and answer are devoid of any context in a conversation. Plus it doesn't have common sense, it takes sources from the whole web, and it won't tell you how it selected the sources used to find the reply. The answer being provided by a secret algorithm should make you always disbelieve whether it is true.
> The whole idea is that you don't have to click / verify / think about the potential webpage, because Google has already ranked all webpages that mention your query, and it will only snippet the top one (which is the result Google thinks will most likely answer your question).
Right. And it should be clear that doing it this way is a sure recipe for spectacular failures.
> (the user now needs to look at the text & look at who said it and determine whether it might be true or not)
The user always needs to (be able to) do that. Pretending that they don't is deluding themselves, both the company and the users. Just ask Wikipedia what happens when you build a large scale knowledge repository and you don't follow this principle.
> Below the snippet are the 10 links that you can still click, functionality available since the mid 90s.
> Just click the top link?
You don't have any of those in the conversational interface, which is the default mode and primary interface for which this functionality is being created.
However prepending is possible. Figuring out 'the true answer' is in many cases impossible (what is the meaning of life, is x beautiful etc) and in many others merely several orders of magnitude harder than current tech can cope with (is there a polynomial time solution to TSP, why is public discourse so vacuous these days). So if that's what Google is gunning for it's going to be broken for a long time.
