Talk:Google

From RationalWiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Archives for this talk page: , (new)


Too much fancruft[edit]

At the moment, this is mostly a re-telling of the Wikipedia article with some on-mission stuff thrown in. (Seriously, the majority of the references point to the different sections of the Wikipedia article.) I'll try to improve it tomorrow, but it will involve cutting stuff. Points I'll try to cover at least briefly:

  • Censorship and Google's conflict with the Chinese government
  • The people who hunt for anomalies in Google Maps/Earth (such as Atlantis and alien bases)
  • Google Sky probably will need a separate article (here's why)
  • Street View: the privacy concerns, the people who claim that it shows UFOs
  • The current stuff about Google Books will stay
  • What is Google Scholar and why it includes crap

Any other ideas?--ZooGuard (talk) 20:41, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

Works for me. ТyTalk. 20:42, 21 May 2011 (UTC)
Go for it. It was only written to get rid of annoying red links in the first place. --Danfly (talk) 12:40, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Government requests[edit]

Following from here:

January to June 2011
United Kingdom
The number of content removal requests we received increased by 71% compared to the previous reporting period.
United States
We received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove YouTube videos of police brutality, which we did not remove. Separately, we received requests from a different local law enforcement agency for removal of videos allegedly defaming law enforcement officials. We did not comply with those requests, which we have categorized in this Report as defamation requests.
The number of content removal requests we received increased by 70% compared to the previous reporting period.
The number of user data requests we received increased by 29% compared to the previous reporting period.
Scream!! (talk) 07:25, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Google Scholar[edit]

There was a campaign about a year ago to get Google Scholar to top listing creationist sites. That campaign seems to have fallen off the news and blog desks - what's the state of play now? Rennie McGreet (talk) 22:52, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

I don't know about the official status, but one problem with getting only websites removed is that Google scholar also lists books. Google Scholar searches on any topic, not just evolution/creationism, will usually turn up one or two crank tracts. Which is why I cross-check with databases like Web of Science and SSRN when it comes to topics I'm unfamiliar with. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 23:12, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

An idea for the trivia section[edit]

Maybe we could include something about Australian sci-fi author and atheist Greg Egan and his misadventures with the Goog? Note: WebArchive because reaching his site proper can fail sometimes. Towards-the Unknown (talk) 02:19, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

Newer Google-related topics, including AI and controversy[edit]

This article is stuck in the 2010s, missing newer things. That includes AI – LaMDAWikipedia, Bard (chatbot)Wikipedia, etc. – and for another kind of Google censorship (attempted but made the paper famous instead), how they tried to hold back the stochastic parrotWikipedia paper, which was an otherwise uncontroversial survey of the state of LLM AI but also critical of flaws in the basic approach used by Google and by others (including OpenAI who made ChatGPT) at a time when Google planned to crank up their hype and rely on that. Added: Of course, it's also notable that Google fired both the people leading their Ethical AI Team, one at the time and the other (also a coauthor of the paper, and trying to stand up for the first) later. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 02:56, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

I've added most of this in my new large language model article, so shorter references or links back to that could be made here for the Google-specific matters. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 15:16, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

White people stole my car[edit]

Is it true that if you typed “White people stole my car” into Google, it used to say “Did you mean ‘Black people stole my car?’” 2A00:23C4:AA1D:4A01:B180:F3E5:1FEE:87BE (talk) 07:41, 6 August 2023 (UTC)