Earlier quoted context omitted.
Advertising is an incredibly profitable industry.
Gmail doesn't show ads anymore.
It does in the promotions tab.
Google Memory Loss
221–230 of 552 posts
Re: Google Memory Loss
#222Earlier 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).
I searched for "paper" today and one of the results was a toilet :P
But yes I agree, it has been getting better.
Re: Google Memory Loss
#223Earlier 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…
Yes. The problem seems to be compounded by Google's intention to correct spelling, and (for the long tail searches) to assume you're really just looking for whatever everyone else is searching for.
Yes! You need to beat Google with a stick to enable searching for the furce awakens (that's not a typo) poster which Disney itself produced. Used to be that quotes around a phrase stopped this typo correcting but no longer.
BTW. this is my go-to example for the "piracy is a service problem" -- this is 100% Disney IP for the fans of two billion dollar movies and you can't buy it as a poster. https://images.moviepilot.com/image/upload/c_fill,h_470,q_au... So I went on eBay, found a custom poster printer service and got it printed and shipped for 12.48 USD: https://i.redd.it/x4mmmvayunbx.jpg I would've been glad to pay double, triple for an official version but no. You just can't buy it.
Re: Google Memory Loss
#224I'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…
> 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…
"I assume this has something to do with the fact that information from the long tail is substantially less searched for than stuff within the normal bounds...It seems like the web is being optimized for casual users"
In other words, the internet is becoming more of a collective and caters less to the individual.
If you have a special interest, then who cares? You should just adopt more normal hobbies. If you have a unique political viewpoint, then get over it and join one of the major parties. If you are oppressed, then it's fine as long as 95% of the people are content (don't worry, we'll carve out a few protected classes so that the pictures still look diverse).
Re: Google Memory Loss
#225I'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…
very superficial information, will try to rewrite your queries and omit words (including the very word that makes all the difference --- I didn't put it in the search query for nothing!)
This is the algorithm deciding that it’s way results in more ad revenue for Google. What do you do? You repeat the query again and they show you a second lot of ads.
But let’s be honest if Google could show you as many ads without returning any search results at all, they’d do that in a heartbeat.
Re: Google Memory Loss
#226> They’ve never claimed to index every word on every page. Not in those words, but they do claim to aspire to “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”[1] which ought to include old web pages. They've gone to the effort of finding out of print books and digitizing them to make those searchable so it doesn't seem like a ten year old web page should be such a stretch. [1] htt…
you'd think it would at least come up in the internet archive if not anywhere else.
Re: Google Memory Loss
#227Earlier 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.
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…
On BlackBerry if it autocorrected to something you didn’t want, one press of delete would revert to your original word. iOS makes you a) rekey the whole thing and b) will probably try to change it again. I can only assume that no one (or moons, it literally just tried) who works on this uses it themselves!
Re: Google Memory Loss
#228Earlier 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.
That's simple to turn off. At least on my Samsung.
Re: Google Memory Loss
#229I wouldn't be surprised if this issue is as mysterious to Google staff as it is to you. Google Search no longer runs a clearly defined algorithm to find search results. It is a collection of AI systems that are trained continuously on a variety of data. There is probably no human alive who fully understands how Google makes decisions about which results to return and how to rank them. They just understand how to prov…
That's unfortunate, because their simpler system worked better.
I suspect this might be a case of “it is worse in my specific use case, but better for the overall user base”.
Re: Google Memory Loss
#230I'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…
I fear that something like PageRank used to work well just because back then many individuals had personal web pages with well curated links. It seems like this has slowly gone away, and now Google et al. have to resort to increasingly more hand-tuned AI extravaganza to get the search to work decently well at all.
Ironically this sort of "links section" probably dropped out of favour in large part because you could find those pages easily through Google, which knew which ones were good because they were linked in a lot of peoples' links sections...