- [Narrator] Whenever a question comes to mind,
Search is one of the first places we turn to.
Google Search has fundamentally changed the way
we access information,
but how much do we really know about it?
We partnered with Google and invited someone
from the Search team to speak with our viewers,
so that we could ask them anything.
Thanks to Google for sponsoring this episode.
- My name's Danny Sullivan.
I am Google's Public Liaison for Search.
I work within our Search team
to help offer two-way communications
with people who are outside of Google
and bring some of the questions and interests and issues
that they may raise back into our Search team,
and I'm super excited to answer
a lot of the questions people have here today.
- Hi. - Hi.
- Hi, Danny. - Hi, Danny.
- Nice to meet you.
Thanks for coming with some questions today.
- So my first question is,
is there someone on the other side
judging my search history?
- No. (chuckles)
- You sure?
- Yes.
When I first came to Google,
I was asking about something and I said,
"Well, here, I just did this.
Can you undo that?" And he goes, "Oh, I can't." (chuckles)
He's like, I literally can't look at that
because it's your private information.
I don't have the ability to access that.
There's no group of people going, "Ha!"
- That's a big relief, thank you. (chuckles)
- Good, good, good.
So feel free to search away.
- How do you decide what's most important?
- It helps if I talk maybe a little bit
about the parts of a search engine.
So, we go out, we visit pages across the internet,
we store them in like sort of a big book of the internet,
we kinda crawl through that book
and pick out the pages that are relevant
and different things we use to rank out some of those pages.
If you were to take the index
and all the pages that we have found,
I think our statistic is it might go to the moon
12 times and back.
- Oh, wow.
- Most of those are cat videos,
and we make use of what we call, signals.
Like, what are the words in the document?
How do people link to this page?
Are those good quality links?
Is this page super loaded down
with a bunch of ads and popups?
Is this page load really quickly on a mobile device?
We put that all together
and then that's how we decide what seemed
to be the most relevant thing to show.
- That's really like, cool.
It's so fast.
- Yeah.
- What happens to my search?
Is it something that's saved?
Does it goes to a (indistinct)?
- If you are searching with a Google account,
then it'll be stored into your search history.
You have the option to go through
and say, I wanna delete that all.
If you really, really want to,
you can just use Google Incognito.
One of the things I was really exciting to think about,
like six months or so ago we rolled it out
so you could automatically delete your search history
so that, you can say, after three months,
or I think the other one's after 18 months,
just automatically delete all this stuff,
I don't wanna keep it going.
And then I think the other part that's important
is well, why have that information?
And the reason we use it for Google searches
because it will let us make better search results for you.
- Yeah. - Because if you walked
into a library and you went, "Backpack!" (laughs)
Right? People will be like, "Okay".
You know, and they would have a conversation with you.
We don't kind of have that opportunity,
but we do have the opportunity
when you do a series of searches
so it's sort of that approximation.
- So they kinda like connect the dots
for the searches that you make.
And then my second question is
do they track your conversations?
Like when you say stuff?
When I'm talking and like my phone's off
and I see ads of something exactly
for that same thing, like, is that true or no?
- I've had it happen to me before as well.
And you're like, "Uh, how did that happen?"
And it's like, no.
I'll speak for Google.
It's really not.
You gotta push something or do something
to send us what you're talking about.
Like, you use the wake word
then the wake word will transmit that back to us.
It's just not going out there and just, you know,
constantly transmitting a stream of information back.
Wouldn't be that useful anyway, right?
- Did the pandemic change the user behavior?
- Yes. Wow, did it ever.
We'd never seen so many searches
for a single topic over a sustained period of time.
So at first it's like, what are the symptoms of it?
And then it's like, what are treatments
or what are testing centers?
And then it's, what's open?
How do I make a stay at home gym?
How do I make sourdough bread?
It's changed, you know, the way we've had to react
to try to make sure we're getting all the best information
out there in response for people as well.
- It's like, we are all, there's like a kind of union
in a kind of sad way, but we're all together.
- It's definitely been so much sadness
but there's also been, I think, a lot of hopefulness
in the way a lot of people have unified
and carried on and found ways to keep going.
- I feel like the country is in such a polarizing time now.
So I guess one example I'm thinking of
is getting the flu shot.
There are people who say it can help prevent COVID 19
and there are people who say
it gives you a greater chance of it.
If someone had previously looked things up related to,
for example, the anti-vaccination side of it,
would it be more difficult for them to find something
that could possibly change their mind?
- No, it shouldn't be more difficult at all.
So what you're referring to
sometimes gets termed as a filter bubble.
So it's like, you've looked at all this information
and so now you're gonna get more information
that aligns with say your preconceived view.
A lot of people think that the search results
for every individual are super personalized.
They're not, they're really not.
You're really gonna get the same information.
It's not gonna change.
I think one of the reasons
why people sometimes get confused is because
sometimes two different people can see
very different results for the same search.
That's not personalization when it happens.
That's almost always localization.
You said you were in Canada, is that right?
- Yeah, exactly.
- Yeah, if we both search for pizza places
we're gonna get different results.
You don't wanna know the best pizza places in a city
that's a hundred miles away from you.
So people can sometimes see that and go,
"Oh my results are much different because
they personalize them," and it's like, no at all.
That's why- - I mean, just for me.
My second question is a big one.
Can the algorithm determine the difference
between fact and fiction?
And if not, does that worry you a little bit?
- So no, it can't.
Human beings can't even figure that out sometimes.
It's like really complicated,
but to the broader point,
it's really that people want to be able to search for things
and know that they're getting good, reliable information.
And we think so, we hope so
and we certainly do our best
to show the most reliable information we can.
- Yeah, after all you guys are a search engine
you're not like the fact checkers, right?
So it makes sense.
- Yes, but we do do a lot of work
to try to make sure we are surfacing good,
like fact checking.
Sometimes if you search for something
and we surface a fact check
we can even have it tell you
like true or false according to that fact checker.
- So one thing I wanna know is can the algorithm be racist?
- So the algorithm is not designed to be racist.
The web, just like society as a whole,
can have racist or problematic content that's on it.
That doesn't mean that we just say,
"Well, that is what's out there
and that's why it happens
and that's our excuse."
That's really more to explain why it can sometimes happen.
There's always the chance that you could possibly
do some kind of a search that might bring forward
what sometimes is called a data void.
This refer to the idea that there's not really good content
that's written about a particular topic.
- Yeah, I mean, are there any concrete examples
where, you know, racism in the world
was influencing what was naturally maybe getting aggregated
and you guys had a course correct it?
- There's one good example.
It's been very public that we talked about
which was a few years ago.
If you searched for, did the Holocaust happen?
We would tend to list a lot of Holocaust denial sites.
It was quite simply because it's such a known fact
that authorities were not writing content saying,
"Yes, the Holocaust happened."
One of the things that we learned from that was
that we needed to do a better job of understanding
in cases where we don't have good, reliable information
that maybe we need to go beyond
just the exact order of the words
and the exact phrasing of the words
and go more into the concept
so that instead of surfacing content
that is, did the Holocaust happen?
No, it didn't happen, is denial content.
You're surfacing more content about
say the Holocaust in general.
And then that helps people better understand
the whole concept overall.
- I'm finding that I'm spending
a lot of time on Google these days,
especially leading up to the election
just trying to understand the issues
and candidates and all of that.
Do you think that the search engine algorithm
can contribute to political polarization
that's kind of occurring sometimes in the states?
- We hope that they don't.
Our systems don't understand
that any kind of content has any political lean
or political polarizations, we don't know like,
that's a left leaning page or a right leaning page.
Our systems also don't understand,
when someone's searching,
if they have any kind of political lead.
So we don't have any of the ingredients to polarize
even if we wanted to in the first place,
we really believe that there should be
a commonality in the search results
and that really our goal is to try to show everybody
the best information, the most reliable information we can
and hopefully people take from that
and they make their own decisions.
And they look at a variety of information
from a variety of resources
and come to their own conclusions from that.
- I've always wanted to know
how does the auto complete feature on Google work?
Because so many times it's freakishly close
to what I'm actually thinking.
- At the basic level we're going through
and trying to predict what's likely
that you're gonna type next
based on all the searches that we've seen before.
It saves, we figure, about 25% of the time
that you would normally spend typing
and I think we even calculated one stat
that like all the time savings
is like 200 years of typing saved up each day.
I'll also mentioned by the way
that we won't always just show
the most common searches that happen,
that we won't show things
that we think might be harmful or perhaps derogatory
or that might be advancing stereotypes.
- So is a good thing that, I guess,
there's a lot of people in the world
that think like me.
So that sort of makes the world a little bit smaller.
- It totally resonated to me when you say
I don't feel low 'cause it was exactly how I felt.
I think I even remark to my wife on the couch,
like, "Oh we're not the only ones searching,"
about that character or who that is.
- Do you think having access to so much information
increases anxiety, especially in young adults
or young people?
- I hope not.
I don't think it should make you anxious
that you have access to lots of information.
I think if you're better informed
you should make you less anxious, you know, hopefully.
Sometimes it's pretty straightforward information
like, you know, I wanna buy a suitcase,
sometimes it's like, I need to get to an earthquake shelter
or a hurricane shelter or I need to understand
if I have a symptom or something.
- I love that.
Especially like now you're not limited
to learning just in school.
Google really does help educate people
and like get them resources
that they wouldn't be able to get as immediately.
- But one thing I would say is that
it's not, I think so much to, we are educating,
but the latter part of what you said,
get you to the resources and information
and ultimately it's really that people educate themselves
or they have great teachers
or they have great people who have support them
and brought them up.
So it's nice that we're complimentary,
we're part of that overall process.
- Yeah, critical thinking is like essential
to live in a society like this because we never know.
- Yes.
Well it's very, very nice to meet you.
- Thank you so much. Nice meeting you, Danny.
- This has been a, it's been a highlight of my month.
You know, who talks to anybody anymore, right?
I mean you're talking, it's all new people.
- I will say hi to you in my next Google search.
- I won't see it because of privacy.
- I was testing you. I was testing.
- Hey good humans.
Thank you so much for watching this video
and thanks to Google for partnering with us
and sponsoring this episode.
I literally use Google for everything
from fact checking statements
to seeing that Chinchilla are scared of paper.
Thank you Danny, for hanging out with us
and answering some challenging questions.
As always please don't forget to like, comment, subscribe
and check out our other Asking Me Anything videos
where we give you an in depth look
on different people and topics.
Stay safe everyone. Bye.