Google Launches an Alternative Fact Search Engine That Helps People Confirm Their Non-factual Beliefs
Photo by Brian McMahon on Unsplash
In a Bold Move, Google announced Google Alt, an alternative fact search engine for people looking to confirm their beliefs in alternative facts. In a video press conference, Gigi Gobirds, Senior Product Manager for Google Alternative Fact Products, gave an overview of the new capability, “We at Google recognize that a segment of the population knowingly or unknowingly has beliefs that are contrary to actual facts. For example, it is estimated that more than 6 million people in the U.S. believe that the world is flat. While there are countless items that can be found on the internet or in any textbook that can prove that the world is round, what if that’s not the answer you want?” Gobirds then took a lengthy pause, “With Google Alt you can find a source to back up anything you believe. If you need definitive proof that Obama was born in Kenya, our Google Alt search engine will serve up some video, article, blog or rant of someone who has the “facts” to prove it.”
In A Bold Move reached out to experts in the field of search technology who said they were floored after hearing the announcement. Professor Kiran Mahadic from the UC Berkeley Computer Science department stated in her blog #Search, “Scientists and historians seek to organize and curate factual information in logical frameworks, and traditional search engines point to curated facts to provide factual results. Somehow Google Alt has been able to source and curate non-factual beliefs and link them to non-factual supporting sources. It’s some real heavy lifting that makes Wolfram Alpha (1) look like child's play.”
In an interview with In A Bold Move, Gobirds explained the high level architecture of the Google Alt solution. “Our first challenge was collecting and categorizing ‘Alt Beliefs’, be they political, scientific, health, historical, or spiritual. To do this, we pointed a machine learning algorithm at millions of social media posts and alternative fact websites like Infowars, Newsmax, Breitbart, parts of Fox News, and Whitehouse COVID-19 press conferences. We then took these ‘Alt Beliefs’ and ran them through all of the information that can be accessed through Google and identified the supporting ‘Alt Facts’ for each ‘Alt Belief’. It was easy for some and hard for others. For widespread ‘Alt Beliefs’ like “Climate Change is a Hoax” or “Obama is a Muslim”, we found plenty of non-factual supporting statements from a variety of sources, including President Trump. More obscure ‘Alt Beliefs’ like “Eating Yeti meat can cure night blindness” or “The major cause of hemorrhoids is alien probing” were more challenging, but our search engine was still able to find several supporting sources. The internet is bottomless when it comes to crazy people with crazy opinions.”
One of the real challenges that Google faced in designing Google Alt was the user experience. During beta tests, ‘Alt Fact’ believers became irate when an actual fact was accidently presented in their search results. This often resulted in them damaging the device on which the information was being displayed. Others immediately went onto social media and created a conspiracy theory about Google Alt, forcing Google to expand its traditional search results to display ‘Alt Facts’ about Google Alt. “We realized that we had to present 100% non-factual information or we would be trapped in an endless “do loop” created when you have a nested conspiracy theory, which is a conspiracy about a conspiracy theory” shared Dabirds.
We asked Gobirds if this product will make us more polarized and amplify half baked ideas. Her response was, “Crazy people need a confirming search engine, and Google Alt is their product. Go crazies!”
Fact Checker: Please don’t make this come true. I saw someone yesterday saying they would not get vaccinated for COVID-19 when it is available because they are worried it will have a microchip in it to track their activities.
Wolframalpha.com is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from externally sourced "curated data" rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a traditional search engine might.