From the Narrow Desert: Google

Showing posts with label Google. Show all posts

Friday, May 3, 2024

Baptisation? Baptisation.

I put russell brand into Google to try to get context for a Babylon Bee article, and I added a new word to my vocabulary.

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Above Majestic (with an excursus on turban jokes)

Last Halloween, I posted "Francis Bacon, papal keys, triple tiara, Denver Airport," which included a meme referencing that airport's sinister reputation. Yesterday, in "Hashtags, Keywords, Stones, and X," William Wright posted a still from an Elmo video, noting the striking similarity to the meme:

The character next to Elmo is supposed to be Rapunzel with her hair up, which makes it look an awful lot like the alien's golden tiara. Rapunzel and the alien both have green skin and mostly white eyes with what looks like heavy black mascara. The alien is flanked by two annoyingly cute little guys -- Minions with SpongeBob faces, I think. If you look closely, you'll see that Rapunzel is similarly flanked by two Elmos (the gold standard for "annoyingly cute") -- a picture of Elmo on one side and the muppet himself on the other. The main difference is that the alien is enjoining silence, while Rapunzel has her mouth wide open.

This made me curious about where the meme image had originally come from. It turns out to be from the poster for Above Majestic, a 2018 documentary about the "secret space program":

Take a look at that coin or medallion the alien is holding. I think that's meant to be one of the daughters of Akhenaten. She might appear to be wearing a beehive-shaped headdress like the alien's, but actually that's just how her head is shaped -- just as Rapunzel's "tiara" is actually part of her body.

Have you ever seen a cartoon where a guy is wearing this enormous turban, and he takes it off to reveal that his head is actually shaped like that? I know I've seen a comic strip like that, either in English or in Spanish, but I can't seem to find it now. Apparently, Google is deliberately making it hard to find such "disturbing or hurtful" content. Check out the very first image result with the English search prompt, though:

Seriously, six of the first ten results are from this "turban jokes to fight stereotypes" site. That's how self-parodying Google has become. And even these have a surgeon general's warning slapped on them. I can literally type bomb making instructions into the search bar and not get a warning, but here, red alert, "Memes about groups of people might be disturbing or hurtful!" Ya think? It's a strange thing to say about one of the biggest tech companies in the world, but it's hard to fight the impression that no one at Google quite understands how the Internet works.

Also, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that it is strictly impossible to use turban jokes to fight stereotypes. You can fight stereotypes by including a few totally normal people who just happen to wear turbans in a movie or something, but there's no way to make a turban joke unless there are stereotypes about turbans that you can count on your audience to share, or at least effortlessly understand. Take the first search result for instance. It assumes, and depends on, a widespread understanding that seeing someone with a turban on a plane is scary. Without that, the joke can't even get off the ground, as you can see if you replace the turbans with polo shirts or something without making any other changes. I guess the cartoonist thinks he's "fighting" this stereotype by subverting it -- in this case people avoid the turban-wearer because he smells bad, not because he might be a terrorist! -- but humor always subverts expectations and in doing so reinforces them as the norm. That's why so much humor is inherently racist and sexist and whatever-phobic. Whoever came up with this "turban jokes to fight stereotypes" project is either retarded or else a god-tier troll. Hopefully the latter, but probably not. I'll bet it says somewhere in his bio that he has a Sikh sense of humor.

Anyway, coming back to our topic here, look at what the stinky-not-scary gentleman in the blue pagri is saying: "So, I was flying to Denver . . . ." The search prompt was just turban joke cartoon, but here we are back at the Denver Airport, of all places.

I assume the movie name Above Majestic is referring to Majestic 12, the secret UFO task force allegedly created by Harry Truman. Whitley Strieber wrote a novel called Majestic, also referring to this organization. As documented in "Light shining through yellow flowers," I finished reading Majestic on October 29, 2023 -- just two days before I posted that Denver Airport meme, not knowing until today that it was from a movie called Above Majestic.

Above Majestic is available in its entirety on YouTube. It's over two hours long, but I'll probably try to watch it when I have the time:

Note added: A few hours after posting the above, I ran across this at AC. I think the implication is that she is stuck in the Denver Airport:

Thursday, January 11, 2024

Google is now deciding some already-published comments are spam

Something weird is going on where Google will retroactively decide that some comment that has already been published here and has been visible for days is actually spam, and then it disappears. Sometimes this even happens with signed-in comments by me, the author of the blog! I just discovered this today, when I found that the comment count on some of my recent posts was going down. I've manually restored all the spammed comments (100% of which were real comments from regular readers, not spam) and will try to figure out how to prevent shenanigans of this kind in the future.

Sunday, April 16, 2023

Moonlight Shadow

Note added: Given some of the topics I discuss on this blog, and my well-known penchant for thinly veiled hate speech and malinformation, I never dreamed that my very first post to be deleted for violating Community Guidelines would be this completely innocuous 1983 music video hosted on YouTube (same company as Blogger) and posted here (originally) without comment! Well, I guess everybody's got to start somewhere.

Banned by Google! For 36 minutes, but still. I feel like all my hard work is finally starting to pay off.

Update: Google deleted it again at 3:07 and reinstated it again at 7:00. No idea what’s going on.

Wednesday, February 8, 2023

More Google incompetence

It shouldn't be surprising. I mean, obviously the more time and energy a company dedicates to Being Evil, the less is spent on maintaining what were historically its core functions. Still, it does surprise me how far Google has fallen. It really used to be a pretty good search engine.

Today I read a passing reference to one Zoe Quinn. I was about 70% sure that that was the name of the central figure in that "Gamergate" thing from a few years back, and that she was supposed to have been the victim of some sort of misogynistic something-or-other (I was never really very clear on the details). Anyway, I Googled the name just to make sure I was remembering correctly.

At the top of the results, before the links, was a helpful little thing with Quinn's nationality, occupation, and photo -- a photo of a dude, with a full beard!

Of course in the Current Year it is by no means beyond the realm of possibility for a dude with a full beard to call himself Zoe Quinn and claim to be a victim of misogyny, but the rest of the results made it pretty clear that Quinn is (or looks like) a woman, so I figured this was just some random Australian bloke posing with a book by Zoe Quinn.

Actually, though, it turns out to be even weirder. A big of poking around online reveals that this is Z. T. Quinn (first name Zac), a very obscure writer (no Wikipedia page) posing with his own book. Biographical information is hard to come by, but he's apparently Australian, not American, and shows no signs of ever having been a video game developer or the alleged target of a misogynistic harassment campaign.

His only connection with Zoe Tiberius Quinn is that the share initials and a surname. That was enough, though, for Google to make him the face of Gamergate and to claim that his book Sanlundia was actually written by Zoe.

Sunday, December 4, 2022

Mysterious are the ways of the YouTube recommendation algorithm

Sunday, November 27, 2022

BREAKING: Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn't exist, and Jim Carrey is now Paul Giamatti

Just when you thought Google couldn't get any faker or gayer . . .

None of this has been photoshopped. I have no idea what's going on, how long it's been like this, or how long it will continue.

Sunday, November 20, 2022

Challenge: Find any search string that returns more than 500 Google results

Remember Jorn Barger's "Elvis Index" from the golden age of the Internet? The idea was to use the Altavista search engine to quantify the relative poularity of various things by taking the number of search results for any given topic and comparing it to the number of results for the string elvis.

Suppose we tried the same thing with Google now. If I put in elvis, Google tells me there are about 348 million results, so that number is 1 elvis. For world cup, there are supposedly 2.84 billion results, so that's 8.16 elvises. Self-cleaning terrarium yields 1.85 million results, so that's about 5.32 millielvises. That seems plausible enough. Everyone knows that the World Cup is considerably bigger than Elvis, and that Elvis is orders of magnitude more popular than self-cleaning terraria.

But suppose we look at the real number of Google results. After searching for elvis and being told that there are 384 million results, we patiently click through to the very last page of those results -- which, rather surprisingly, turns out to be the 19th page!

So we click to "repeat the search with the omitted results included" -- we want every result -- and once again click through to the last page. This time, we find that there are 40 pages, and a whopping 400 results.

And that's it! You've reached the end of the Internet, as far as Google is concerned. I mean they did say about 348 million, not precisely that number. So the real value of one elvis is 400.

I've tried this with a wide variety of search strings, and the most results I've ever been able to get (Jesus Christ and basketball are tied for the number-one place, closely followed by rancho cucamonga and fruit salad) is 434, or 1.085 elvises.

Nor have I been able to find any strings (other than literal gibberish) that return less than half an elvis. The not-very-popular dinosaur styracosaurus returns 94 centielvises, just edging out covid-19. Even vendergood, the name of an extremely obscure language invented by child prodigy William James Sidis at the age of eight, returns 66 centielvises.

Google search is a scam. It says it has millions of hits for whatever you're searching for, but it doesn't. It doesn't even have 500, for anything. If it weren't free, I think this would literally be fraud.

Bing is the same. If you search for elvis, it's impossible to click beyond the 14th page, so only 134 results are visible. DuckDuckGo doesn't provide numbers, but you can only click "more results" 10 times before you reach the end of its elvis offerings. Yandex offers 25 pages of results. No search engine actually delivers the millions of results they advertise.