Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Memory Loss

tbray.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 552 posts

Re: Google Memory Loss

#181

Post by eitland »

nostromo wrote: post #123
userbinator wrote: post #93

I've noticed this many times too, particularly recently, and I call it "Google Alzheimer's" --- what was once a very powerful search engine that could give you thousands (yes, I've tried exhausting its result pages many times, and used to have much success finding the perfect site many dozens of pages deep in the results) of pages containing nothing but the exact words and phrase you search for has seemingly degraded…

Searching using “Verbatim” can be helpful. What’s particularly infuriating is when searching with verbatim still ignores keywords.

I've reported that at least once.

After that it started working again for me within a couple of days and has been more or less working as expected (hmmm. That's what I thought at least) until recently.

Frustratingly they refuse to send any feedback so I just had to try again,

Yes, and I've also gotten the capchas.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#182

Post by 40four »

Great tip about the intext: operator from @wahnfrieden. I'll admit I was unaware of this. Many of us could probably benefit from learning how to actually use Google more skillfully, instead of expecting the algorithm to spit out a 'perfect' answer every time. http://www.powersearchingwithgoogle.com intext: operator is covered in the Power Searching course, section 3.5! I share many of the same frustrations I've seen in other comments, but I'm going to work though these courses & hopefully become a better googler.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#183

Post by aikinai »

Puer wrote: post #110
jakecopp wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that it is intentionally bad so people don't realize how much Google knows about them.

Meanwhile their image recognition gets better and better. For those of you who use Google Photos backup, try a keyword image search in Google Drive sometime of your untagged photos ("beach", "face," etc.) You'll be creepily surprised on what Google is indexing, even against what they claim they don't (try some sketchier words).

Where has Google claimed they don't index certain terms?

Re: Google Memory Loss

#184

Post by cbr »

trendia wrote: post #149
fixermark wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why can't webmasters spider everything Google returns? I'm sure you could start client-side caching every search you ever do to Google. But if you're searching enough to eat up Google's bandwidth, they're paying for that data and they're under no obligation to keep serving you as a client (much as any server is under no particular obligation to serve a search spider).

> But if you're searching enough to eat up Google's bandwidth, they're paying for that data and they're under no obligation to keep serving you as a client Do you not see the irony?

Sites allow search engines to index them (instead of telling them to go away with robots.txt) because the search traffic is worth it to them.

Search engines don't allow people to scrape them (resorting to blocking after scrapers ignore robots.txt) because they don't get anything similarly valuable in return.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, though not on search.)

Re: Google Memory Loss

#186

Post by gh02t »

derefr wrote: post #164
colordrops wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This same AI effect can be seen in the Android keyboard, where _properly_ spelled words will be replaced after typing another word or two because it's been determined to be more likely what you want. It's infuriating.

I don't know; I'm pretty happy that I don't have to type apostrophes any more. I can just go on typing words like "ill" and "wed" and it'll figure out after a few more words that those should be "I'll" and "we'd".

What the parent comment is talking about is something more extreme and I've noticed it too. It sometimes changes prior words that are valid after you have moved on to the next word. It's not correcting the word you just typed, it's correcting a previous word without any sort of feedback like you get for normal corrections- it's going backwards and changing earlier words, and then you try and fix it but the exact same correction applies automatically again over and over.

Unfortunately I can't remember any examples at the moment, it's just something that happens to me every so often. They're really irritating though, because they aren't well expressed in the current autocorrect UI (which works on the current word) and it doesn't seem to get the hint when you go back and correct it, so it keeps applying it over and over.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#187

Post by fouc »

I think the solution would be for some sort of personal proxy that captures all the searches and webpages we visit. Then when we go to make new searches, we can first search locally (to re-find things we're thinking of) and then externally (to find new things). Not sure if something like this exists yet

Re: Google Memory Loss

#188

Post by copx »

userbinator wrote: post #93

I've noticed this many times too, particularly recently, and I call it "Google Alzheimer's" --- what was once a very powerful search engine that could give you thousands (yes, I've tried exhausting its result pages many times, and used to have much success finding the perfect site many dozens of pages deep in the results) of pages containing nothing but the exact words and phrase you search for has seemingly degraded…

What annoys me the most is that Google seemingly no longer allows searching for phrases at all. In the past I could search for a specific phrase like this..

  "It never rains on a Wednesday in Rockshire"
..and Google would return websites containing that exact phrase. That no longer works. Nowadays parentheses are largely ignored as far as I can tell. This is super annoying because quite often I am really looking for a website/websites containing a specific phrase.

It seems they internally switched to indexing single words only. So if you search for a phrase Google will instead return websites containing (some of) the words in your phrase in no specific order and maybe not even next to each other.

I think I understand why: Indexing / searching based on words is massively easier and massively less resource intense than a system which can search for specific phrases.

Furthermore the type of searches Google wants/expects you to do e.g. "best hairdryer" work well enough, in fact work better if you only search for single words and then filter / organize the results using AI / using information you have collected about the user.

EDIT: I was wrong. It still does work for many phrases, just not the ones I tend to search for. See below.

EDIT 2: I actually have no idea what is going on there. I know that searching for exact phrases doesn't work for me like it used to but I have no idea why..

Re: Google Memory Loss

#189

Post by cbr »

Hmm. I just tried to reproduce this with old posts of my own and couldn't. I picked random phrases from five early 2006 blog posts that get basically no traffic and searched for them:

    "I had been playing the accordion Davy lent to
    Rosie during winter break"

    "The language they're using is not that different
    from the one I wrote PlayGUI to use"

    "I've been playing a decent amount of music lately,
     mostly guitar and piano."

    "warm dry socks was the most important aspect of the
    festival"

    "This wouldn't be that bad, if it was not exactly what
    happened a year and a half ago."
Google found all three. For each one there were either 2 or 3 results: first my old post, then one or two from rssing.com which seems to do something with my rss feed.

Trying them with Bing, it also found all five of my posts, and ranked them first in four cases. In the fifth case ("This wouldn't be that bad, if it was not exactly what happened a year and a half ago.") it ranked a goodhousekeeping.com post higher, which had all the individual words but none of the phrases.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, though not in search.)

Re: Google Memory Loss

#190

Post by epistasis »

colordrops wrote: post #126
Declanomous wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> has seemingly degraded into an approximation of a search engine that has knowledge of only very superficial information, will try to rewrite your queries and omit words (including the very word that makes all the difference...) I think the biggest irony is that the web allows for more adoption of long-tail movements than ever before, and Google has gotten significantly worse at turning these up. I assume this has s…

This same AI effect can be seen in the Android keyboard, where _properly_ spelled words will be replaced after typing another word or two because it's been determined to be more likely what you want. It's infuriating.

Oh man, Android does that too? This awful, terrible, no good fake "AI" behavior on iOS was one of the many quality issues with modern iOS that was making Android look more attractive.

iOS keyboards have been getting worse with every update, probably as more and more engineers feel the need to make a mark, or are required to fix bugs, and they spoil it. The simple and predictable statistical model of the original iOS was better than what we have now. So much of iOS was better back then, IMHO.

Post reply on HN