Ex-Googlers Work On Biased NLP Solutions
October 6, 2021
Google is on top of the world when it comes to money and technology. Google is the world’s most used search engine, its Chrome Web browser is used by two-thirds of users, and about 29% of 2021 digital advertising were Google ads. Fast Company asks and investigates important questions about Google’s product quality in: “It’s Not Just You. Google Search Really Is Getting Worse.”
Over 80% of Alphabet Inc.’s revenue, Google’s parent company, comes from advertising revenue and about 85% of the world’s search engine traffic feeds through Google. Google controls a lot of users’ screen time. The search engine’s quality results have been studied and researchers have learned that very few users scroll past the “fold” (all of the available content on a screen). Advertising space at the top of search results is incredibly valuable. It also means that users are forced to scroll further and further to reach non-paid results.
Alphabet Inc. has another revenue generating platform, YouTube. A huge portion of videos include multiple ads. Users can avoid ads by paying for a premium subscription, but very few do.
Google does want to improve its search quality. Currently a lot of information from queries are distributed across multiple Web sites. Google wants to condense everything:
“Google is working on bringing this information together. The search engine now uses sophisticated “natural language processing” software called BERT, developed in 2018, that tries to identify the intention behind a search, rather than simply searching strings of text. AskJeeves tried something similar in 1997, but the technology is now more advanced.
BERT will soon be succeeded by MUM (Multitask Unified Model), which tries to go a step further and understand the context of a search and provide more refined answers. Google claims MUM may be 1,000 times more powerful than BERT, and be able to provide the kind of advice a human expert might for questions without a direct answer.”
Google controls a huge portion of the Internet and how users utilize it. Alphabet Inc. is here to stay for a long time, but there are alternatives such as Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, and Tor browsers. Google, however, will one day fade. Sears Roebuck, Blockbuster, Kmart, cassettes, etc. were al household names, until they became obsolete.
Whitney Grace, October 6, 2021
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
