This "if (q.contains('gun')) return null;" approach is such a ham-fisted hack that causes such collateral damage that anyone who thought Google can be trusted anymore to responsibly wield their power over human commerce and thought and not act impulsively based on political whims should reconsider their position. Even if it is a mistake this kind of change should never be possible to ship. And if it's not a mistake, then I don't know what to say.
They did a similar thing with "confederate flag" not that long ago. I'm convinced Google Shopping is more for political PR than an actual place where anyone shops (Google probably knows this so doesn't care if they break their service to virtue signal)
Google is supposed to be the data driven organization that changes things in a way that will minimize collateral damage. Even if Google Shopping doesn't draw much traffic in relative terms, at Google scale I'm sure it provides meaningful revenue to all sorts of companies that have products that include the term "gun" that do not include weapons. To make such a change and not methodically try to reduce the blast radius for these people effectively proves that whoever is in charge over there is not rolling out changes to search algorithms in the way Google is supposed to be famous for.
I worked on search algorithms for an ecommerce site that would kill for the kinds of traffic Google Shopping probably gets, and the idea that this would ever pass code review is laughable because of all of the blatantly obvious negative effects it would have on recall. At the very least, you would whitelist bigrams in query logs that go along with "gun" that do not include weapons. This is a truly amateur move, several steps away from what I would consider acceptable from the worlds premier search organization. I would fail a student taking an information retrieval course on a question if they provided this as a solution to removing a category of products from a search engine.
Yeah, which is kind of annoying... I’m European and shed no tears whatsoever for the supposed loss of precious “second amendment” rights (never had such a thing, never wanted such a thing), but I work in the paint business where we use electrostatic guns to apply powder coatings... and those have all disappeared (as has “electron gun” of the cathode ray tube variety), all of which is quite annoying collateral damage.
Yeah this way to over-reaching. It's a cheap ploy to gain public favor. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Google shopping results were a major contributing factor in gun sales.
You (if you're an appropriately licensed federal firearms dealer) can sell guns commercially. You can put up a webpage advertising those guns. You can accept payment for those guns. But you cannot ship the guns to the buyer. You must ship the guns to another licensed federal firearms dealer (FFL) designated by the buyer, and that second FFL completes the transfer, according to all federal regulations which include a background check or equivalent.
Where there's confusion is that it's technically legal, if the State doesn't have any regulations, to conduct a private sale from one state resident to another resident of the same state. The catch is you can't do that as a business — or, if you get caught, you'll be in serious trouble. Being in the business of firearms dealing requires a federal license. If you have a webpage advertising guns, even if it's a mere few guns from your "private collection", it's going to be very difficult to convince the ATF that you shouldn't be required to have a license.
And anyone who thinks FFL regulations are too loose, just try getting one (other than a C&R).
There are ebay-like firearm trading websites, but a lot of the sellers are FFLs, and even the ones who aren't probably aren't in your state, so the transfer would have to go through a FFL, as previously mentioned.
It's conceivable that you could find someone, on such a site, who lives in your home state, with whom you could arrange a private transfer, and it could be they're genuinely not in the business of selling firearms (i.e. it really is a gun from their private collection), but those types of sites are unlikely to show up in google shopping search results to begin with.
Not to mention they only banned words whose predominant circulation is among uninformed media and those whose only association with firearms is that same media. Google decided "gun" was dangerous, but not "firearm", "AR", "556", "Saint", or "Ruger".
Consider this: Google blocked the search of Burgundy wine, but not the simple search for "556" that returns a result for 2,000 rounds of ammunition in the caliber most AR-15s take [1]. They almost absolutely could not demonstrate greater ignorance or incompetence, or a greater desire to make a toothless and ineffective political statement.
It's even worse than I imagined. As of now, at least in Canada, Google Shopping returns zero result when I search for "Burgundy" [1]. For comparison, Amazon.com returns 100,000 results for the same query [2]. We have known about Scunthorpe problem [3] for decades now. There is no excuse for this.
But they haven't done anything to lots of the other exclusions people have noted, or to the fact that misspellings that still correct to the banned term (“pistil”, “rifel”) evade the filter entirely. It's kind of odd that they would correct it to let “burgundy” work but not address any of the other issues.
So, if nothing else, the nature and priority of their corrections (if that is what it is) is noteworthy.
The silly thing is they already perfected this technology for porn years ago. If you go to GIS and type in "naked mole rat", as disturbing as the results are, there's no porn.
> Matt Cutts, the Google engineer who designed SafeSearch four years ago, said his algorithm looks for a "relatively small" number of trigger words in a Web page's address. If one of those words appears, the SafeSearch algorithm puts the address on a block list and does not take the next step of evaluating the content of the site. "We try to find the best trade-off of precision, recall and safety," Cutts said. "People who opt in to SafeSearch are mostly OK with us being on the conservative side."
Matt “Cutts” your traffic since 2000. Though he’s not at Google anymore he was always emblematic of the stop-doing-that-on-my-site-(that-I-crawled-the-internet-to-put-you-on) culture at Google. Always taking a machete to a scalpel fight and always to the customer facing side first and never to the ingest and analysis side
Yeah, this is, frankly, one more reason why they need to be broken up. It's unwise to allow a monopoly (or near monopoly) in something as essential as search, and doubly so if the monopoly isn't exceedingly scrupulous to act and appear to act neutrally, especially in regards to political controversies.
I mean we can already call this abuse kind of. What if I meant to search for 'nerf gun', 'water gun', 'air gun', 'bb gun' or 'glue gun'? It doesn't seem like google thought much about this change.
In the US, toy guns are blamed as part of the gun culture and people may want to restrict them in reaction to a school shooting. I'm not saying it's rational, just that it may have been intentional.
Staying silent isn't an endorsement of the status quo. Similarly, we shouldn't have any expectation that company X or Hollywood celebrity Y owes it to us to denounce whatever the twitterverse currently finds distasteful. Entitled people on social media love the fact that they can bait companies into every political squabble nowadays.
> Staying silent isn't an endorsement of the status quo.
Yes, acceptance of the status quo without active opposition is endorsement of the status quo as good enough.
It may be “good enough” because you actually approve or “good enough” because it's too far down your list of priorities to do anything about right now or “good enough” because you can't even be bothered to care what's going on, among other options, but it all effectively amounts to the same thing in practical terms, however different they might be in terms of your internal feelings.
>If you stay silent, supporters of the status quo can simply say “see? people are happy with it; if they weren’t more would complain”.
And their fallacious reasoning should be laughed at. Loudly and often.
The alternate is even MORE conductive to enforcing the status quo. When people have to be maximally political all the time, they either have to constantly deal with the blowback inherent to sharing ideas that aren't palatable to the status quo, or outwardly agree with the status quo (for convenience and/or safety).
If everyone voices an opinion (but not necessarily THEIR opinion), supporter of the status quo can simply say "see? people are happy with it; if they weren't more people would be dissenting"
Supporters of the status quo can say whatever they want; that doesn't make it true. The absence of complaints does not imply that people are "happy" with the situation, and silence is not an endorsement of anything. Anyone who claims otherwise should take some time to learn about basic logical fallacies.
There might not be only one opposing view, but it's true that "staying out of politics" usually means handing more power to whoever is in power already.
Indifference ~= I support status quo Q, for any value of Q under consideration.
Indifference is a thing, and it's not a positive statement in support of anything. Attempts to portray it as such seems to be a trick to try to draw people into polarized political debates.
How about the view of looking for exceptions and false statements and questions politician not by a party line nor a policy but by individual reasoning for said content? Being critical of all.
Except for the dichotomy between "Change things" and "leave them more or less as they are".
If you choose to be politically active, there are a million roads you could go. But if you are inactive, then you are choosing a single road: allow those with power to keep on as they are.
Still, inactivity is not equivalent to choice. Otherwise we wouldn't have the term "negligence" (for when you really should be acting, but aren't), and the life in society would be an impossibility - after all, you and I, and most of us here, are very inactive about world hunger, human trafficking, human rights abuse, climate change, social justice, etc.
Moreover, inactivity/neutrality is different from just "supporting status quo" in the sense that when the status quo changes, you still remain inactive/neutral, instead of fighting against the "new normal".
"negligence" means, "choosing inaction when you _should have_ acted. It's a kind of choice. There is a bias that weights action more heavily than inaction, but that bias isn't 1:0, and that bias isn't supported by the authority of moral philosophical consensus
It's interesting to me that you assume I am as inactive as you are. As it happens, when I'm not writing code for my job, I'm engaged in activism for those very causes.
Remaining inactive or neutral is a choice. Even when that choice is made from apathy. And notice, when negligence leads to direct harm, we treat it as if it were a conscious choice -- with equivalent consequences.
Of course there are limits to what any of us can achieve, and we all prioritize things differently. My point wasn't that we can be perfectly active, attempting to solve all problems at once.
My point was that choosing not to engage is, in itself, a choice. A choice to let the course of events go as it will, with out attempting to affect it. History shows that often means letting those with power keep it and continue to govern as they will. That only changes when enough people choose to work to change things.
> But if you are inactive, then you are choosing a single road: allow those with power to keep on as they are.
Reducing politics to "choosing who has power" is a dangerous oversimplification, and one that I think is at the root of our shitty, polarized political culture that's unable to compromise on anything.
Even outside of Google's own organic political preferences, people with political preferences aren't excluded from markets Google is trying to win, so (without regulations applying to all market participants), Google has strong incentives for reactive involvement in politics.
Google is very political, to begin with. And if they're afraid that their product might be involved in getting people killed, it makes sense to change the product. You don't have to be too "political" to make that decision.
If you can't find results for "paint guns" then it was clearly a ham-handed political change and not something driven or even vetted by engineering. Also, last I checked, Google returns results for "body disposal", "Anarchist's Cookbook", and a host of information useful for doing harm to other human beings. I don't see how that makes them complicit in anything.
Maybe they should change their mission statement: "To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, unless it's this month's politically sensitive topic trending on Twitter."
True, the way they've implemented this seems calculated to cause a splash. I expect they'll roll out a more nuanced version after the attention passes.
I don't think it was calculated at all. It's highly likely this was just a few lines adding "gun/rifle/revolver/etc." to the blacklist of forbidden search terms for that service. It's the same list containing terms like "child porn" and as long as one of the file owners approves the CL it goes into production immediately. I really doubt this went through a regular launch process and had an Ariane bit flipped as part of a proper review.
Well you know more about Google than I do. It just seems like a big change with a lot of very predictable/testable collateral damage as pointed out in the rest of this thread.
That's unbelievably unsophisticated. That combined with not using their vast ML resources to understand when something isn't a firearm (e.g. glue gun) makes me wonder how this feature has come about.
Is it possible this was just a mistake or maybe a rogue employee? I can't imagine Google allowing someone of this low competence to make changes to search.
I can't imagine a single developer would have the power to make this change either?
I guess it's possible that filtering has existed for a long time for very specific queries and 'gun' was added to a list.
It seems weird that this feature could be put live in this state getting passed QA though. That makes me worried what other changes could get live without much oversight.
For an ecommerce site such as Google Shopping it goes beyond QA -- incremental rollouts should have triggered alerts noting this as causing a drop in recall (to effectively zero) for a large category of high traffic queries that convert (presumably there are some, like "nerf gun" or "glue gun", given that "gun" is an extremely common term that has high purchase intent for non-weapons) and it should have been prevented from being deployed by automation.
Presumably if they are doing things correctly there are probably several overrides that needed to be enabled to let this change out. Or, they're not doing things correctly. In nearly any other situation, automated systems would recognize "change goes out -> large number of queries suddenly return zero results" as a major catastrophic bug and prevent it from being deployed.
I'm hesitant to accept this was intentional because QA process, since this change was clearly made by someone who didn't know what they were doing.
As another user pointed out, the word burgundy triggers the filter. And if you spell something incorrectly the "did you mean" results are unaffected.
I'm imagining a higher level manager with very little technical expertise (just enough to write an if statement) pushing this into prod against Google's wishes, or maybe by accident.
My point was that at Google, a single person should not be able to break things to this degree. The automation should roll it back automatically. This is, technically due to the drop in recall, a bug, unless it is overridden as a special case so it is not recognized as a bug. To break things this bad you not only should have to make the change to the code but you should also have to "sign off" on the dynamics flagged by the X% rollout test as being acceptable somehow.
So no matter what this paints Google extremely poorly -- either Google Shopping is one git commit away from going down completely, or they're placing shipping a hacky, poorly executed political statement higher on their priorities than potentially damaging the livelihood of those who are collateral damage.
Obviously some manager went all "we have to do it quick, now, before news cycle changed and our virtue signal would be wasted". So of course there were no time to talk to people who actually understood how the system worked and can do it right.
I notice this has been pushed down the rankings on the frontpage (it was near the top a few minutes ago). Surely this sort of incompetent implementation of a politically-motivated decision by a major tech company is worthy of our attention?
(Exactly how submissions end up at a position other than their natural ranking has always been a bit mysterious to me - should I blame some algorithm thing or malicious actors?)
I'm trying to figure out Google's angle here. Is this just a dumb legal-initiated move to shelter Google from culpability for any future gun crimes committed with guns purchased after looking at Google Shopping? Is this an attempt to shield against bad PR on social media from "supporting those evil gun sellers"? Or is this an attempt by Google to throw their weight around for ideological reasons, to try to make gun purchasing as much as a pariah as the Confederate flag became after Dylan Roof (when major online retailers did the same censoring)?
Whatever the case, it's definitely making breaking up Google look a lot more appealing. Encourage your friends and family to get off of Google and use something like DuckDuckGo instead. For too many people, "Google = Internet", and it's becoming increasingly clear that that mindset will leave people vulnerable to inhabiting only a small curated collection of approved mindsets.
Virtue signaling at the highest corporate levels. Must have been approved by Pichai himself. He probably felt insufficient backing to say no (which would have been in the interest of the company) to the aspiring apparatchik that executed this as her career move.
"Do no evil" as a marketing ploy, even if they dropped that officially.
One person's evil is another person's free speech rights, or ambiguity (forget the 2nd Amendment for a moment).
It reminds me a bit of a commercial I saw: in slow motion, people of different races were smiling and holding hands (nevermind that they looked like models, all of them), with some motto about diversity. I think the sun was rising, or setting. A few seconds later: a Nike logo at the bottom.
There you have it, folks, that's what happens when politicial discourse is about symbols and words (ideas) and most importantly feelings instead of laws and economic policy.
I am horrified. Whatever ones oppinion about gun control might be, and whether it is ok to remove actual guns from search results, it is absolutely horrible that a company like Google would consider it reasonable to build a filter just around the three letters "gun" in the search text.
It does return results containing "guns". If you search for "germs" and "steel", it returns the book "Guns, Germs and Steel". However it does not appear to return results if you search for "guns".
Like the title states, it's only "Shopping" and while it can be more specific than "gun" -- for example, "AR-15" will not result in any "Shopping" results -- "AR-15" under "All" will give results for places to purchase an AR-15.
Wow, this was implemented poorly. Even just adding "gun" to the list of stop words I assume they have would have allowed "burgundy" to keep returning results. String contains boolean condition?
Bing Shopping also returns zero results for the search term "gun," but does return results for "gun safe," "burgundy," etc.
Yahoo! Shopping seems to have the best compromise, returning relevant results for the search term "gun," like water guns and such, but filtering out "real" guns.
The beautiful thing about the internet is we can go to another search engine, like DuckDuckGo. I would rather have Google mess this up and have to go to another site than the federal government attempt to increase regulatory control of internet traffic.
I'm actually not getting any results from any query period. Apparently Google realized online shopping is virtually non-existent in my country and just gave up?
That's strange. Apparently nothing is spidered in my country and I can't find an easy way to switch countries. A lot of people shop abroad.
Google Shopping is a "good enough" experience for the end user, ready to be shoved in your face when you are searching for links to websites that contain your search query.
Not just “gun”; “pistol” also works. Funny interaction with their matching / DWIM logic is that a query for “water pistol” returns no results, but “water pistil” returns lots of water pistols.
I understand why they did this, but I think this might be a bit too broad.
There are plenty of things that I might buy that have the word "Gun" that are not directly related to weapons; my favorite XBox game is named "Gun", there is a Gregory Peck movie I like called "The Guns of Navarone", and there's the aforementioned "Guns, Germs, and Steel".
I find it hard to believe that anyone would seriously compare a non-profit membership organization whose mission includes educating American citizens of responsible gun ownership and defending citizens' second amendment rights, to a global for-profit corporation with over 100 billion USD in annual revenue, directly affecting hundreds of millions of lives every day, with the power to promote or censor search results, advertisements, and more, and consequently shape what people think. Surely the former does not have sufficient power to positively shape how it's presented by major media corporations, and it often takes the blame when those corporations distribute stories of gun violence--events which, when the intensity of media attention is brought to them, we can all point to and feel visceral reactions to. But it's obvious that the political whims of the latter (Google) can be, and has been, carried out at a massive scale with great(er) efficiency and little(r) checks or balances.
The fact that we have not yet developed and distributed concise-enough language to discuss the monumental impact of entities like Google is a sign that there is a problem we are not devoting enough energy to.
While I have to say I wholly disagree with your viewpoint on the NRA, I don't really disagree with your thesis, which makes me wonder how I'm "part of the problem".
Interestingly, I get a lot of results for 1911 (none seem to be actual firing guns, despite pictures), but nothing for Glock or Colt. Funny thing is the 1911 results have a lot of "Colt" words in the title, so it's an obvious block, and a pretty stupid one (as they all are) at that.
I love it. Thank you, Google! A lot of other tech companies - Paypal, Square, Stripe and Apple pay announced years ago that they would not allow their services to be used for the sale of firearms.
I hope other companies like Amazon, visa, master card will follow your footsteps.
Google Shopping still shows firearms, it just shows no results for correctly-spelled searches including “gun”, “pistol”, “rifle”. Search for either specific models, or misspellings for “rifel" or “pistil” or “revoler”.
