[HN Gopher] Google's AI doesn't understand restaurant menus ___________________________________________________________________ Google's AI doesn't understand restaurant menus Author : edent Score : 156 points Date : 2022-06-12 11:49 UTC (11 hours ago) (HTM) web link (shkspr.mobi) (TXT) w3m dump (shkspr.mobi) | logicalmonster wrote: | Regarding the price discrepancies, why can't they program some | kind of outlier check into this type of system? If an average | burger costs $12.00 in an area, but the system interprets the | price as either $1,200.00 or $0.12, it should be relatively easy | to flag that as a likely error. | mellavora wrote: | until you get to the upscale restaurant which is selling $150 | burgers, skewing the statistics. | | or a crazy synthetic meat burger, how much did the first one of | those cost, wasn't it in the millions? | edent wrote: | That doesn't come up on LeetCode so must be pretty difficult to | implement. | hoosieree wrote: | If it's not on LeetCode it's not a real problem. | kwertyoowiyop wrote: | New problem: invert this menu and sort it by the third letter | converted to lower-case, filtering out seafood. Present all | item descriptions with infix notation. | ohgodplsno wrote: | What, do you mean reversing an octree in the 4th dimension | doesn't solve that ? But it's the only thing I practiced for | my interview! | ChuckNorris89 wrote: | I'm not sure if you're being satirical or not but I | definitely chuckled. | isoprophlex wrote: | I'm sorry, no, you must be mistaken about the sheer scale at | which google operates. Sanity checks simply don't scale, you | see. | | By necessity, it'll be "pour it into this big stew of linear | algebra" or nothing. Any kind of sensibility is simply | impossible when you're as big as google! | ethbr0 wrote: | Incidentally, a continuously updated average price of a burger | (et al.) in different cities would be a valuable data set on | its own. | mellavora wrote: | something like the big mac index? | ethbr0 wrote: | The Big Mac Index simplifies McDonald's into a perfectly | efficient burger producing machine, in all possible | countries, and then evaluates purchasing power parity | between currencies by normalizing against a Big Mac. | | An average burger price in a given city would be different. | There the intent would be to assume profit margins are | consistent (albeit perhaps not hyper-thin) from city to | city, and thus get a sense of the relative costs of burger- | related inputs (chiefly: labor, real estate, utilities, | taxes, and transportation). | ape4 wrote: | Google Maps already asks regular users questions. It could ask if | the menu is accurate. | dash2 wrote: | Actually, "plain paper" could easily be a "plain poppadum", since | the Hindi word is pronounced papaD, with a deep D that is close | to an R (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papadam#Spelling_and_pronu | ncia...). I've seen this mistake before on restaurant menus, so | it may not be Google AI at fault. | abrax3141 wrote: | Fortunately, misreading a menu won't drive you into a tree. A | friend of mine told me that he can't use his un-named supposedly | intelligent car on the side roads near his home because it reads | the house numbers and thinks they're speed limits. It's okay | going up the long hill to his place when the numbers go down, but | going down hill the last number before a down hill sharp curve is | house number 65!!! The many joys of our modern AS (as in AI, but | not so much) world. | [deleted] | tgv wrote: | They'll just train an even bigger network. | jgalt212 wrote: | They can't because grokking restaurant menus is a moving | target. Restaurants are constantly looking for new ways to | describe new things and new ways to describe slightly updated | things. | ethbr0 wrote: | I've found adjective count on the menu to be inversely | correlated with food value (quality/price). And am not | joking: it's pretty damn reliable. | | E.g. "chicken" vs "locally-raised, hormone-free poultry" | briandear wrote: | Why can't a restaurant simply have an RSS feed for the menu | and google use that? Very easy to do. Can simply use the menu | data from the POS system. | Barrin92 wrote: | I wonder how things would look like if the 'semantic web' (the | actual web3?) had taken off and we had regular and rich, machine- | readable metadata for just about everything rather than having to | rely on what is largely subpar scraping and 'AI' systems. | | People have pointed out recently how Google search seems to | struggle as sites on the internet turn more and more into apps | rather than standardized documents and they just go and search on | reddit. Having a standard to encode semantics seems honestly | necessary at this point if you want to keep things interoperable. | warkdarrior wrote: | I think Google Search struggles because of SEO/spammed, not | webapps. Not sure why SEO will go away in the semantic web. | warning26 wrote: | If anything, the semantic web would probably have been | _easier_ to do SEO spamming with. | ghaff wrote: | The semantic web came out of a very academic tradition | where scammers and spammers weren't lurking around every | corner. Yeah, in addition to its other problems, it wasn't | especially attuned with the Internet as it actually came to | exist. | lmm wrote: | Google "won" in the first place by being _less_ semantic than | their competitors (who used meta keyword tags etc. which made | them very vulnerable to spam) and just reading the text of the | page (and especially of links to the page) instead. | alistairSH wrote: | Does anybody actually rely on Google for this sort of info? | Hours, menu, etc are so flaky that I always go to the restaurants | website for more info. | lemursage wrote: | This reminds me of a story my father used to tell us. Once he | travelled to Finland (70s) with my grandfather and they ended up | in some restaurant. Having no clue what was in the menu, as | neither of them spoke Finnish, they decided to go for the | cheapest thing on the menu first. | | The waiter brought them heated plates. | | Turns out that the cheapest thing on the menu was a heated plate | service. | jahnu wrote: | While travelling around China and speaking none of the local | languages I resorted to either pointing at other peoples food | or picking random items on the menu. I had learned how to ask | for rice and beer so that worked well with what was usually a | bunch of random but very interesting and tasty dishes. | | One day while in a border town in the south near Laos, my wife | and I were in a suitability weird and humid restaurant with a | slow ceiling fan keeping us a bit cool. On the only other | occupied table sat a bunch of police with what looked like the | local police chief due to the hat on his head but otherwise | naked torso. They were just getting drunk so we couldn't point | at food and order. We asked for a menu. I pointed at 6 random | things. They gave me a funny look. I then asked for 2 beers in | Chinese. They confirmed "two beers?" with an inquisitive look. | I confirmed. Then I asked for rice and remembered how to ask | for spicy cucumber, a delicious side in china I had come to | love. Eyebrows were raised. | | Shortly thereafter out came two beers, spicy cucumber, and 6 | mocktails in tall sundae glasses with umbrellas and curly | straws. | | The police table almost died laughing. Good times :) | idk1 wrote: | I did a similar thing, I assumed a cheaper item was the side, | and ordered four Dosa as a side in India. Needless to say | breakfast was taken care of. | bigwheeler wrote: | Even if the restaurant has bothered to create the appropriate | machine-readable descriptions, google doesn't bother doing | anything with them. Even if the descriptions literally mirror the | visual display on the page. I see it all the time, like, on this | page (https://www.anthonyspizzabelmar.com/menus/menu), which is | easily parsed as valid menu schema through the schema.org | validator. | | If restaurants were rewarded with actual updated menus on google, | you can bet the restaurants would care about creating the micro | data, but it's a waste of time. | geoduck14 wrote: | The restaurant owners don't need to go through the effort. I'm | in a consortium of companies that use ML in their business. One | of the companies is a competitor to GrubHub. They use ML to: | read scanned menus, understand items, look at pictures... then: | predict what ingredients items have; populate if the item is | one of entree, meal, desert, or snack; populate if the item is | one of gluetn-free, vegetarian, or some other similar stuff | | All of this without the mom-and-pop restaurant owners lifting a | finger. It gives them a competitive edge over their | competitors. All of this to say: Google doesn't care - but | GrubHub, UberEats, and the ilk _do_ care | mattcwilson wrote: | Warning: potentially biased opinion. Speaking only for | myself, but informed by my job. | | There are lots of problems with scraping-based approaches. | | One, yes, you need some really good tech to scrape data from | menus, which, even though they are "structured", next time | you're at a sit-down restaurant, pay attention to all the | subtle discrepancies in formatting between different | sections/categories on the menu. | | Two, if the menu isn't html, but is an image or a pdf upload, | now you need some strong OCR on top. | | Three, the website is generally not likely to be current with | what's actually on offer in the establishment itself. | Specials, seasonal dishes, or items that are out of | ingredients ("86'd") will still appear on the menu. That's | going to lead to complaints, refunds, or generally bad | customer experience from whoever's consuming your data / | using it to buy food. | | Four, you're going to want to to be paid for all this tech | and customer support you're electing to intermediate between | the end purchaser and the restaurant, as a service, and so | you're going to tack on some fees and either jack the price | up on the consumer or try getting the restaurant to pay you a | finder's fee, cutting in to their already narrow margins. | | Five, if you're trying to provide ordering service and not | just menu data, you still need to submit the order into the | store itself, somehow. Which either means calling it in, | robo-submitting an online order (if you're lucky), or sending | a courier to place the order and wait. And then, on the other | side, whoever's taking orders for the restaurant has to punch | in the request to the register to actually complete the | transaction. Which means the system you really want to talk | to isn't the website, it's the point-of-sale. | | Good luck with all that. | | Source of bias: I work for a company that helps restaurants | enable online ordering and POS integration so they can pay | much less in fees and focus on making exceptional food. | passivate wrote: | >In the glorious future, every website will be chock-full of | semantic metadata. Restaurants won't have a 50MB PDF explaining | the chef's vision for organic cuisine | | That is a good idea, especially for visually impaired users - but | why can't we have both? I sometimes like seeing the fancy fonts, | and images if I have never eaten that dish before, etc. | StevenWaterman wrote: | You can do all that with HTML (with semantic markup) and CSS | though | MontyCarloHall wrote: | I've found that these sorts of annotations are a lot better in | the US than in other industrialized countries. In foreign | countries, points of interest in Google Maps are often missing | basic info like opening hours or even telephone numbers. Often | times the actual location is misplaced on the map. | | When it comes specifically to restaurant menus in the US, most | seem to be manually transcribed by the restaurant staff. The | items and prices are correct (but often out of date), and food | descriptions faithfully reproduce non-native spelling/grammar | mistakes. In addition, I almost always see user-uploaded photos | of the menus. | | This does not point to a difference in Google's automatic parsers | or in the level of Google-generated content; it seems that US | users contribute to map and PoI content a lot more. | | I wonder why this is. My guess is that there are far fewer staff | members at Google curating crowdsourced content outside of the | US, which makes non-American users much less likely to | contribute, since their contributions will appear much more | slowly, if at all. I've contributed my own corrections to PoI | data in the US (e.g. opening hours updates) and seen it reflected | on the map in a few days. This probably wouldn't happen elsewhere | in the world. | makeitdouble wrote: | Your guess is probably right. | | Outside of curation, I think Maps lacks polish from non-US | devs, and that results in weirdly unconvenient maps for a lot | of cities, leading to people using it and contributing less to | it. | | For instance train station mapping (where are the | entries/exits) is a feature available in some local map | services and is a big quality of life improvement in europe or | SEA cities, but never made it to Google Maps. | | Same for the lack of multi-story building mapping, where | there's only a single shop for a single address, which can | still work out for shopping malls (they have their own site), | but is crazy for densely packed neighborhoods. Looking for | restaurants in Paris or Tokyo through Google Maps is just | frustrating. | lozenge wrote: | If I get public transport directions in Tokyo using Google it | advises on exits, best train boarding position, and fares. In | London none of these are available. Admittedly, I think the | first two are deliberate, but surely London can provide fare | data. | | Another bias I've noticed is US sites "collapsing" opening | hours as if there is no siesta, ie opening hours are just | displayed as 10am-11pm. | briandear wrote: | Does most of the world have a siesta? | [deleted] | kuschku wrote: | Even in Germany pretty much any pharmacy, doctor's | offices, and even phone repair shops will close for | lunch. It's not like this only affects a few people. | ohgodplsno wrote: | It's not just Google Maps. Google gives absolutely zero shits | about any country that is not the US. Actions for Google | doesn't let you make custom intents if it's not in en-US. The | Pixel for the longest time released US-only/US-first. Features | are always locked and only available for the US. | yeputons wrote: | > points of interest in Google Maps are often missing basic | info like opening hours or even telephone numbers. | | To be fair, sometimes neither of these exist. A place in some | parts of the EU may be open whenever the owner feels like it. | You can't even approximate opening hours and holidays unless | you actually ask the person over the counter when they're | actually open. | elijaht wrote: | Tangential but Google will call restaurants with their | automated assistant to verify hours | notahacker wrote: | I imagine this often gets treated with the same disdain I | treat Google's emails asking me if my family's structural | engineering business is open on Christmas Day. (Funnily | enough, no human has ever asked this!) | ramchip wrote: | In Japan Tabelog is a lot more popular than Google Maps for | restaurant reviews, photos, etc. I think it caters better to | the local market. | hunter2_ wrote: | > it seems that US users contribute to map and PoI content a | lot more. | | I can't point to an example or cite a source (as this is just a | guess), but maybe US users unknowingly contribute via Google | Photos doing OCR (and other analysis) and combining it into | Maps data, while Google is more careful about running AI | against every photo taken by EU users (and using it to help in | ways that go beyond exclusively the UX of the photographer) for | data privacy compliance reasons? | [deleted] | visarga wrote: | > Google has discovered that it takes 90% of the effort to get | 90% of the way there - but the last 10% takes the next 90% of the | effort. | | I can confirm, I am working on information extraction and 90% is | the glass ceiling for current models. With much labelled data you | can get higher scores but they don't generalise from one vendor | to another. | faddypaddy34 wrote: | The biggest problem with Google and restaurant menus IMHO is the | fact that the actual restaurant website (if the have one) is | often several links below or often off screen to a bunch of | review sites and other sites like Google maps with unreliable | information. | jthrowsitaway wrote: | Google likes to push you into a textual/parsed format of the | menu, which is often incomplete and difficult to navigate. Just | show me the pictures of the menu, please. | dawnerd wrote: | And make it obvious when the menu is from. Too often menus | are years old. And with prices going up overnight everywhere | pricing has gotten really hard to figure out. | amelius wrote: | Google's AI doesn't understand much. For example, a Google search | for "Jeans $BRAND waist $WAIST length $LENGTH" already is too | much to ask. | yunohn wrote: | This is actually very true. Any such query that is specific | gets normalised into something uselessly general. | visarga wrote: | It seems to be unable to parse word order, like a "bag of | words" model from 2000. | | For example, if I search "similar pairs of sentences", it | replies with "similarity between two sentences". No, I want a | pair of sentences (A1, B1) that is similar to another pair (A2, | B2). I am not talking about similarity between sentences, but | between pairs. The distinction is lost on Google. And they | claim to be using transformer neural nets for search. Pfft! | s1mon wrote: | I would be happy if Google and Yelp could even get the opening | hours of restaurants correct. With Covid, and even now that | things have been re-opening and getting busier, so many places | have incorrect hours or are outright closed for good, despite | active listings. I've defaulted to at least trying to call first | if I'm set on going to a particular place, because inevitably if | I don't, the restaurant isn't open or is about to close. Of | course then the issue is half the time no one answers the phone | anymore at restaurants and they don't bother with voice mail. If | they do have voice mail, it's still probably got an announcement | about the special meal that they offered for Valentines day or | Christmas. Sometimes the only solution is just to go see if they | are open. | | To some degree the real issue is that each restaurant can change | hours (or menus) at a moments notice, and at many places, the | staff and management is not super computer savvy. So no one | thinks to update these sources of info, and/or they don't know | how. Google has the added data (from tracking phones) of how busy | the restaurant is at a given time, but that is presumably some | sort of moving average over time, and not necessarily current or | accurate. | | When I first saw the headline for this post, I thought it was | going to be about a related issue: even if AI is really good at | understanding general spoken/written languages, the names and | wording of menus is its own weird thing. If you're then trying to | auto-translate that to another language it can be next to | impossible. Ethnic restaurants in different places which | supposedly speak the same language can have all kinds of | spellings and ways of describing the same dish. In the US we call | a long sandwich a sub, grinder, hero, or hoagie (to name a few), | depending on where you live etc. Or the same name can mean wildly | different things. | splonk wrote: | I've never bothered looking at Google's interpretations of menus | on Google Maps. When available, I'm just always going to go to | the actual restaurant website and look there instead. | | What I have found occasionally useful is the (presumably | automatic) categorization of photos into a menu category. Those | at least generally let me know whether something's up to date | (especially useful the last couple years as restaurant concepts | have fluctuated wildly), and are very helpful for places that | don't have much online presence - street food stands, pubs, local | fast food places, that kind of thing. | robswc wrote: | Seems people rediscover every few years that despite how awesome | the AI is now, its still just the same statistics under the hood. | | This is not at all to detract from the hard work and | accomplishments made... its just still fairly easy to confuse | even the most advanced AI. I guess its impressive that its only | easy if you know how they work though, might take the average | person awhile to find a way to trip them up. | chillingeffect wrote: | Previous generations knew this and left it alone. This | generation is happy to provide 90% quality. Neither is wrong, | just instances of values | jeffbee wrote: | So this guy is just angry that Tesseract isn't perfect? I hardly | see the point of this post. | asveikau wrote: | To me it points out that they could put additional filters | (something to flag entries for the PS2000 meal, or USD being | used in the UK), or greater manual review, maybe when an | algorithm detects such absurdities. | progfix wrote: | Does Google ask the restaurants for permission to do that? | Couldn't they get sued for damage of reputation when they show | wrong prices? | hackmiester wrote: | I'd hope so, but who's got that kind of money? | mrweasel wrote: | It is also a potential copy-right violation, not the I think | Google care. | nmstoker wrote: | No, generally it won't be, since you cannot copyright facts. | mrweasel wrote: | What about titles on signature dishes? | nmstoker wrote: | No again :) | | https://copyrightservice.co.uk/services/knowledge- | base/kb_na.... | nmstoker wrote: | They could possibly register a trademark, but few | restaurants seem to. | | I can't imagine this creating much of a barrier - Google | would stop if told to by the restaurant but then they | might not list the restaurant, and what restaurant would | see that as worth it? | izacus wrote: | Even with a trademark, you can't prevent people from | talking about the facts related to it. Despite the crazy | reach of IP law, they still can't silence you from | uttering "Big Mac(tm) costs 4.99$ here." | nmstoker wrote: | Highly unlikely, as Google would say it was a mistake and point | out that they correct details when venues notify them. | | On a slight tangent: bear in mind also that Google is not party | to whatever agreement there is between venue and customer, | which is why it's so foolish that one frequently sees people | asking questions on Google Maps as if they are directly | communicating with the venue. Eg people ask "Can i get a | child's cot in my room" - all it takes is for some joker to say | yes, the naive asker to proceed to the venue and then find out | that they offer no cots, at which point naive person has no leg | to stand on (venue quite rightly says we've no idea what you're | talking about). | jwilk wrote: | > they correct details when venues notify them. | | Do they? The article says there's "no way for a user to | contact Google". | nmstoker wrote: | The articles not strictly right that there's no way for | users (ie the public) to contact Google in this regard; | Google Maps Local Guides certainly can contact them and | anyone can become one of those. | | However, putting that aside: Venues/business owners can | contact Google and i suspect would get a slightly better | response rate (not saying it'll be perfect or even super | easy for an owner to get through but they can as there are | often links indicating "Are you the owner of this | business?") | mattzito wrote: | Fwiw, this at least partially not google's fault. Just about | everybody uses one of a few companies for restaurant menu data, | and the biggest one is far and away SinglePlatform. | SinglePlatform is still powered largely by scanning menus and | having contractors enter them by hand, which is where many of | these errors happen. | | More forward-looking restaurants manage this all themselves as | part of their digital strategy, but it's still a small percentage | and disproportionately located in the US. | | I'm not saying Google doesn't also scrape or use other sources, | I'm sure they do, but this is one of those situations where the | whole system is broken. Tbh one of the bank shot benefits of | having all of these digital delivery services is that some | restaurants are using aggregators that can also publish menu | data. | | As far as the authors idea about markup for menus, that's great, | but highly improbable for a bunch of reasons: most restaurants | don't update their menu frequently, dishes are often difficult to | represent structurally, POS systems are often modeled differently | than the printed menus, etc. | tialaramex wrote: | The most notable restaurant near me, (Garden Restaurant) can't | even spell its own name correctly on its expensive | professionally produced menus in the restaurant, your chance of | _scraping_ good enough menu data from their web site is | negligible. | | I actually went to the web site just to see, and it's worse | than I thought. Even their Western menu, the stuff random | Westerners think is "Chinese food" is presented as JPEGs of | photographs (sometimes out of focus) of the physical menu, | which is itself strewn with typographical errors and mysterious | annotations. | | So, to get even the bad text an actual patron has in the | physical restaurant you need to scrape the site, download the | images, and successfully OCR from low resolution out-of-focus | photographs. It's not _impossible_ but good luck to you, and at | the end the results will still be pretty unsatisfactory. | "Frind pok" is actually what they wrote, they _meant_ Fried | Pork, but that 's not an OCR error it's really what they paid | to have printed. | passivate wrote: | Since its near you, have you tried going there and explaining | it to the manager? | tialaramex wrote: | My friend Chris spends a _lot_ more time in their | restaurant and is at least as pedantic about this sort of | thing as I am, also he knows the people who own it fairly | well, so I 'm confident he's mentioned it. | | However while the restaurant's manager might care, as I | understand it her husband is the hard core chef who ensured | it's a success, why should he give a shit? Presumably the | errors are just in the text for stupid barbarians like me - | many of them don't even order from his real menu anyway. | His taste is what matters, nobody comes to the restaurant | because of the typography or web site design, they come to | eat his food. | briandear wrote: | Does the manager not know their menu is misspelled? | philsnow wrote: | Perfect spelling and/or beautiful layout on a Chinese | restaurant menu is a bit of a red flag for me. | mitchdoogle wrote: | Why? I can understand cutting Chinese restaurants some | slack because of a possible language barrier with owners, | but what's wrong with ones who are fluent in English? Or | have the resources to hire a good agency to put together | their menu and proofread it? | philsnow wrote: | Sibling post by Moru has it mostly right | | Additionally, I have it in my head that not bothering to | fix menus shows a certain admirable pragmatism. "Frind | pok" is not correct but it _is_ correct enough. | Moru wrote: | Not GP but I have the same red flag system. If it's | perfect english (or whatever native language you use) | it's more likely that not the restaurant is run by a | native, not a real chinese family. So warning flags, most | likely not the best the chinese kitchen can deliver :-) | wincy wrote: | If my family is any indication, the menu won't get | corrected until the restaurant owner sends their child to | American schools and the kid gets old enough to fix it. | Just give it 11 or 12 years. | ClumsyPilot wrote: | I think it's a strike against our industru thay we failed to | define a way to publish standard platform independant menu and | price list file that any apply application could parse and | represent | | Instead eveyone is busy building their own little feudal | kingdom and they call it platform even if it's actually just a | toll booth | mattzito wrote: | The issue isn't one of format, it's distribution. Menu data | is usually in hard copy form, and the utility to a restaurant | in going to the trouble to duplicate it online and keep it up | to date is almost certainly not worth it (in their eyes). | | So I'm sure you could sign up yelp and google and Uber eats | and everyone else for a common data standard, but you'd then | still have to go chasing the restaurants to go put that | information in a system somewhere. | | We haven't even really been able to convince businesses to | put their opening hours online, it's still such a problem | that one of my interview questions at google in 2018 was | "name as many ways as possible you might be able to discover | a business's opening hours online" | | Menus are about an order of magnitude more complex than that | - it's a tough thing to get restaurants to do. | mellavora wrote: | maybe menus and price lists have edge cases? | onurcel wrote: | This is 100% Google's responsability. If you claim to have a | feature but it is broken it's your fault, you should just not | claim that you can actually do this. The restaurant guys | provide exactly what they want: a pdf menu, if google can't | parse it correctly it should show the raw information instead | of trying to do something fancy | mattzito wrote: | Except that Google isn't doing the parsing, it's a third- | party, who is then providing the data to Google (and a bunch | of others). Sadly, mixed in with the parsed/PDF-scanned data | is accurate data that was hand-edited or auto-uploaded from a | restaurant POS or kitchen management system. | | So, Google and these other companies, the option is - build | it yourself and try to do better, or buy data from the | companies that do this at varying degrees of quality, or | don't have menu data at all. Except the last option, people | _want_ menu data, it's one of the most common things people | want to know about a restaurant. | enos_feedler wrote: | I don't trust Google's extraction of anything. I follow links and | read myself. I got burned too many times for open hours | especially. | | Example: | | https://www.google.com/search?q=stanford+dish+hours&ie=UTF-8... | weird-eye-issue wrote: | The hours appear correct for me | | On the site it says "April-August Public Access Hours: | 6:00am-7:30pm" | | And I see the same on Google | enos_feedler wrote: | So actually, it's either fixed or its a broken clock is right | twice a day. I google regularly to get to the page at the | beginning of each month and it doesn't extract based on time | of year. It just picks one. But maybe it's been fixed! :D | weird-eye-issue wrote: | I don't think the hours are pulled from the webpage. You | can even go and suggest changes to the hours yourself on | Google | thomasahle wrote: | 6am to 7.30pm. That seems correct from the website for June. | Though I guess it may get confused some months, or lag behind? | nikolay wrote: | Sentient AI is not interested in food... which it cannot consume. | marsven_422 wrote: | Sreyanth wrote: | I see a CAPTCHA opportunity here. Show the line item and ask | people to type both the dish name and price in two boxes. Or may | be give a couple of options that the end user must confirm before | they can proceed. | mellavora wrote: | Hoy, boy, is that going to be fun! Imagine having to properly | label thai food items to view websites! Or register for | government services! | hunter2_ wrote: | Yep, anyone remember having to key in house numbers from street | view photos? Similar idea. But I think human/bot | differentiation no longer demands so much effort of users | lately, so this labor pool could be a relic of the past. | enos_feedler wrote: | I worked at Google helping news publishers add metadata to | extract live/evolving news coverage for the real time / breaks | coverage carousel above the search results. Google will never | believe what authors use for meta data. It is just a hint and | that will always be the case. There is too much opportunity for | deception. | RicoElectrico wrote: | Sorry, but Google is so stupid at times that it mistakes date- | like strings in URLs for publication dates. Heuristics my ass. | enos_feedler wrote: | Yes that is a problem. And the worst part is because the | heuristics are a black box there are no developer controls to | fix it yourself. You are the whim of Google's ability to | correctly interpret what it sees. Sometimes its wrong | edent wrote: | I can understand that problem for some sectors. But what's the | advantage to a restaurant in publishing an inaccurate menu | (fake foods!)? | splonk wrote: | I've worked in this field. In every sector there will be | someone trying to game the system one way or another. Someone | will publish a menu including items they don't actually have | in order to try to rank higher in a search ("oh, we don't | have that any more, but since you're here, why don't you try | X..."). Someone will publish a menu with lower prices to get | someone in the door ("oops, Google must have an old menu of | ours"). Someone will publish a menu including something with | their competitor's name in hopes of hijacking their searches. | A steakhouse will mark a steak as vegetarian in hopes of | tricking someone into thinking they have a vegetarian entree. | | You'd be lucky if 50% of the restaurant supplied data is | accurate, 40% is out of date, and 10% is actively incorrect. | Personally I'd guess that the ratio would be more like | 20/60/20. | madisp wrote: | perhaps instead of nefarious usecases it could just be out of | date | enos_feedler wrote: | Yes this too | wzdd wrote: | I'm not really convinced by the "intentionally inaccurate" | arguments (if they want to deceive, then surely they could | also just serve a fake PDF to Googlebot). But I suppose it's | reasonable to assume that restaurants would be less likely to | keep their metadata up-to-date than they would their PDF | menu. Unintentional inaccuracy, in other words. | enos_feedler wrote: | Maybe not intentional but more like "inflation has raised | our burger prices by $5 in the last 3 years and the meta | data is wrong. Do we fix it?" Hmmm | vander_elst wrote: | Maybe fake prices... It could help lure customers in. | enos_feedler wrote: | I don't know, but maybe the metadata prices are inaccurate so | that the query "burgers under $8" surfaces that menu. There | are just all kinds of reasons to game the system to get your | results in the page. Trusting meta data over user visible | information just opens a portal to these kind of things where | you tell the search engine one thing for SEO and show the | user something else. You could police this of course, but | it's much easier to just extract the info from the page since | there is more incentive to be accurate for readers. | marban wrote: | Google News is a strict whitelist AFAIK so what's the problem? | rightbyte wrote: | > Google will never believe what authors use for meta data. | | Then why trust the site at all if it fakes metadata? | | This fuzzy we-know-better algorithms has wrecked Google search. | lmm wrote: | The whole web runs on the principle of taking crazy tag soup | and extracting as much as you can out of it. I wish XHTML had | succeeded but the market has spoken. | mitchdoogle wrote: | Chances are the restaurant doesn't want to mislead people | looking at their website. After all, that will just lead to | disappointment and lost revenue. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-06-12 23:00 UTC)