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Google Memory Loss

tbray.org

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Re: Google Memory Loss

#241

Post by klodolph »

gaius wrote: post #227
epistasis wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

On iOS, one press of delete and what you originally typed will show as a suggestion.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#242

Post by njarboe »

red75prime wrote: post #192
copx wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Google would return websites containing that exact phrase. That no longer works. Er, what? No search engine finds "It never rains on a Wednesday in Rockshire". Results for "It never rains on a Wednesday" with exact matches Google - 6 pages Bing - 3 pages Yandex - 0 pages Duck Duck Go - 3 pages

Well now it does. Strangely, for Bing this thread is third on the list but does not show any of the searched for text in the text blurb like the other suggestions.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#243

Post by mherdeg »

BjoernKW wrote: post #75
mherdeg wrote: post #67

I have some questions about information retrieval and SLOs: * Is there a metric of search quality which is appropriate here -- specifically, "when I search for [site:tbray.org rock roll], and receive a set of results, that set includes Tim's article"? What do we call this metric? The metric would be lower when the result set is empty (no relevant results returned) and higher when the result set contains the desired a…

This won’t answer all of questions but the measures you’re looking for are called ‘recall’ and ‘precision‘: - recall: number of relevant documents retrieved / number of relevant documents - precision: number of relevant documents in result set / number of documents in result set

Yeah you know, it's funny, the last time I worked on question-answering code, we were trying really hard to find algorithms that could improve a particular metric (F-score, a synthetic agglomeration of precision and recall) ... I don't remember hearing very many conversations at all about whether we were measuring the right thing.

Given a query like [site:tbray.org "rock n roll animal"], and knowing that the 1 relevant document we actually want is the review at https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/03/13/Rock-n-Ro... , I think we can say that

* if Google search returns 4 results for the query, not including the review: precision is 0/4, recall is 0/1 (so p=0, r=0)

* if Google search returns 5 results for that query, including the review: precision is 1/5, recall is 1/1 (so p=0.2, r=1)

But while I _kind of_ understand how we can use these measures to assess the outcome of a single query, I'm really not sure I understand what meaningful ways are available to aggregate those metrics. Suppose we're going to get 1M queries in the next hour. Do we prefer an algorithm which has the highest mean F-score per query? highest median F-score per question? or which has the highest 1st percentile F-score per question (99% of queries get the best possible outcomes?)

If there is published literature on how search quality is measured I'd love to see it. Would be especially interesting to see real-time data -- e.g. what is the impact of 1 data shard outage on overall user-experienced quality according to some metric?

Re: Google Memory Loss

#244

Post by njarboe »

I imagine that people who work at Google would like to have a good search engine that works well for software engineers while at work and not one optimized for selling ads. Is there such a thing internally? I remember when exact quotes of error messages from software would usually return something helpful. Now almost never. Can I pay for that please.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#245

Post by cbar_tx »

Haven't used google's search engine in years. It was obvious to me back then that google products are designed primarily around googles's incentives, and the user second. SEO seems like it would be something great...if the "optimization" was in fact user-centric but it's not. I don't like being guided by algorithms and I don't really shop around for stuff online. When I search for something, it's usually for some very specific type of information. I mean I'm usually pretty sure about what exactly I'm looking for. Granted, most people probably don't use the web the same way I do so it's not like I expect them to do what they do differently. I just don't use google, and whenever I do tell someone to "google it", I'm being sarcastic and probably not in the mood to answer questions that can be answered with a few minutes at a keyboard.

Furthermore, when someone links me to an amp.whatever page, I might be in an even worse mood if I have to talk with them about it afterwards. imo, Google and facebook algorithms are half of what's causing most of the conflict and hate on the internet these days. The machines have literally taken over, and they've started with our minds. YouTube suggestions have devolved into nothing more than a rabbit hole that gets scarier the further you follow. Either they are completely out of touch with what people want or the mentality of society/humanity is way more fucked off than I'd ever imagined it could be. Until they provide actually useful and configurable settings for people who can think for themselves, I will not return to using these products.

Besides, how fair would it be for me to freeload off an ad company's services when my hosts file hasn't allowed an ad to load in my browser as long as I can remember?

Re: Google Memory Loss

#247

Post by cbar_tx »

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.

that's not Android keyboard. That's Google keyboard. Solution: use a different keyboard. I've used the AOSP keyboard since I started using Android. Sure it's made by google but it does what I say rather than what some proprietary idiot robot thinks I think. While your'e at it, use the send feedback function to let them know you hate it.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#248

Post by confounded »

aglionby wrote: post #69
ohazi wrote: post #17

I've convinced myself that this happens in gmail / hangouts history search too. It'll very confidently tell you that here are the only six results for your search term going back to the beginning of time, but if you go and manually dig up something that you know is there from ten years ago, then all of a sudden there are seven results the next time you search for the same term. I haven't done this methodically, and I…

I've had this for Chrome history as well. There have been multiple times where I'm sure I've browsed a site with some keyword in the title and it just doesn't show up in search. I don't tend to have a clue about the time window it would be in either so I can't go looking for it, so I can't prove it.

The address Bar in Firefox is great for this. I fire off a fraction of the searches I used to after switching.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#249

Post by CurtMonash »

taneq wrote: post #230
foobarian wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Also, it gets ever harder to keep up over time, as good links either go away or deteriorate in value.

Perhaps not coincidentally, both the Yahoo Directory and DMOZ have been entirely shut down.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#250

Post by confounded »

cromwellian wrote: post #209
fixermark wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertising is an incredibly profitable industry.

Gmail doesn't show ads anymore.

It provides a pretty good incentive to keep that Google cookie in your browser though (as well as your access to your interests, online purchase history, address book etc. etc. ad nauseam)
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