How often do you cook ? How good you are at cooking ?? How does one caramelize Onion ? - Caramelization is the browning of sugar, a
process used extensively in cooking for the resulting sweet nutty flavor and
brown color. To put is simple it is
cooking onions with sugar so that it
becomes coated with caramel. Ever tried
doing that ?
Most likely that one would
google or search on the web in a search engine ~ and when you hit the search
button, You want the answer, not trillions of webpages. – and
that happens with Algorithms, the computer programs that look for clues to give
you back exactly what you want. For a typical query, there are thousands, if
not millions, of webpages with helpful information. A search in google on yours
truly ‘sampspeak’ for example yields - about 12,700 results (0.64 seconds) !
Algorithms are the
computer processes and formulas that take your questions and turn them into
answers. Today Google’s algorithms rely on more than 200 unique signals or
“clues” that make it possible to guess what you might really be looking for.
These signals include things like the terms on websites, the freshness of
content, your region and PageRank. Each
year, Google changes its search algorithm around 500–600 times. While most of
these changes are minor, Google occasionally rolls out a "major"
algorithmic update (such as Google Panda and Google Penguin) that affects
search results in significant ways.
Why is that so difficult
? - finding useful information on the World Wide Web is something many of us
take for granted. According to the Internet research firm Netcraft, there are
nearly 150,000,000 active Web sites on the Internet today. The task of sifting
through all those sites to find helpful information is monumental. That's why
search engines use complex algorithms -- mathematical instructions that tell
computers how to complete assigned tasks. Google's algorithm does the work for
you by searching out Web pages that contain the keywords you used to search,
then assigning a rank to each page based several factors, including how many
times the keywords appear on the page. Higher ranked pages appear further up in
Google's search engine results page (SERP), meaning that the best links
relating to your search query are theoretically the first ones Google lists.
Google's keyword search
function is similar to other search engines. Automated programs called spiders
or crawlers travel the Web, moving from link to link and building up an index
page that includes certain keywords. Google references this index when a user
enters a search query. The search engine lists the pages that contain the same
keywords that were in the user's search terms. Google's spiders may also have
some more advanced functions, such as being able to determine the difference
between Web pages with actual content and redirect sites -- pages that exist
only to redirect traffic to a different Web page.
Complex and interesting ~
yet all that may not be true, is what Tom Scocca has posted in Sydney Morning
Herald today. Here is something
excerpted from the article - : Google's
algorithm is lying to you about onions, and blaming me for it
A little under five years ago, I got angry about a piece of fake
information, and I decided to do something about it. I was reading a recipe in
the New York Times, and the recipe told me, as many, many recipes had told me
before, that it would take about 10 minutes of cooking to caramelise onions.
I knew from personal experience that this was a lie. Recipes
always said it took five or 10 minutes to caramelise onions, and when you
followed the recipes, you either got slightly cooked onions or you ended up 40
minutes behind schedule. So I caramelised some onions and recorded how long it
really took — 28 minutes if you cooked them as hot as possible and constantly
stirred them, 45 minutes if you were sane about it — and I published those
results on Slate, along with a denunciation of the false five-to-10 minute
standard.
When asked about onions, Google can't tell the difference
between the truth and an obvious falsehood. What else is it wrong about? It might be the most valuable journalistic work I've ever done.
After the piece went up, I heard again and again from readers who had thought they
were incompetent cooks, because they'd trusted recipes that deceived them. The
New York Times began publishing accurate onion-cooking times and even cited the
Slate article. The work made it into the Wikipedia page for caramelisation for
a while, until someone dinged it because I am "not a trained chef"
(and because some crank had tried to rebut it with a high-powered restaurant
stove). Years after the fact, people still tell me that reading the truth made
a difference in their lives.
So when I saw the news that Google's search result box has been
giving people bogus information in its algorithmic search for the One True
Answer to various, I thought about the onions. If Google can't figure out
whether Barack Obama is plotting a coup or not, or whether or not MSG is
lethal, can it at least recognise that the lie about cooking onions is a lie? I typed "how long does it take to
caramelize onions" into Chrome. The answer was worser than I could have
imagined ~ for it said about five minutes, linking to my own article in slate.com – scocca 2012 on how to cook
onions – why recipe writers lie :
Not only did Google, the world's preeminent index of
information, tell its users that caramelising onions takes "about 5
minutes", it pulled that information from an article whose entire point
was to tell people exactly the opposite. A block of text from the Times that I
had published as a quote, to illustrate how it was a lie, had been extracted by
the algorithm as the authoritative truth on the subject. Five years after I
thought I had buried the falsehood about quick onion cooking, Google was
dragging it out of its grave to send it shambling into unsuspecting users'
kitchens. In fact, it made the lie even worse, because Google's automated text
analysis is too dumb to recognise that "about 5 minutes" followed by
"about 5 minutes longer" means 10 minutes. Do not try caramelising onions in five minutes.
And do not listen to Google – is what the author has to say !
.. .. .. but don’t get carried away –
we will continue googling – it could be the author’s experience, need not
necessarily be ours !
With regards – S. Sampathkumar
9th Mar 2017.
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