Google Memory Loss • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Memory Loss

#291

Post by krisdol » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 7:56 AM UTC

GordonS wrote: post #270

haraldooo wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn‘t they drop the + operator when they launched Google+? I thought now you have to surround your term with „“ instead of +?

Yes, you're right, they did this a looong time ago... BUT, sometimes Google still insists on showing you results that don't contain the word or phrase that you've explicitly requested must be in the results - utterly infuriating !

You now have to go into Search Settings -> Verbatim. Unfortunately you’d have to do this for each search session as it doesn’t persist.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#292

Post by Chriky » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 7:58 AM UTC

therein wrote: post #255

cma wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, when that was changed you could at that time just quote a single word to get the old +word behavior.

Years ago when I interviewed for a Software Engineer position at Google, the person I was matched to eat lunch with between the interviews was from the Search team. I asked him these exact questions. He said, the last time he checked, quoting a single word to mark it mandatory worked for him and that he definitely would know if it didn't. I didn't insist much at the time but I knew he didn't know what he was talking…

Are you saying the quote-a-single-word thing doesn't work for you?

Re: Google Memory Loss

#293

Post by gonvaled » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 8:01 AM UTC

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.

Try switching between languages. I work in English, my wife is Italian, my colleagues are french speaking, I am Spanish and have Catalan friends, and I live in Germany. I gave up on predictive keyboards long ago.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#294

Post by bambax » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 8:02 AM UTC

l33tbro wrote: post #265

While we're all grumbling about Google, my main gripe is the increasing indexing of Pinterest in web search. It was bad enough a few years ago when they statted clogging up image searches, but I've noticed a lot of links to Pinterest now in the first few web results of a search.

Concurred. Pinterest is really bad. You need to create an account to do anything with it. Now I have to add -site:pinterest.com to most of my image searches.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#295

Post by paulie_a » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 8:03 AM UTC

nbsd4lyfe wrote: post #259

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…

Those captchas are the worst. Google asks me to answer one whenever I make search queries in the middle of the night.

The wierd thing is: Google created two captchas. One to digitize books and a shockingly awful one they use for their own services. Seriously the one they use for their own services is complete garbage and obnoxious to even attempt to deal with

Re: Google Memory Loss

#296

Post by rspeer » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 8:03 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #236

yorwba wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably because the spelling is corrected based on a machine-learned model, whose corpus is likely to contain many instances where "its" and "it's" were swapped.

Which means the corpus is broken. But regular people rarely care about correct spelling, in my experience, and so I doubt corpus maintainers will care either...

You're imagining that people who make NLP corpora actually vet the text going into them? I dream of a world where people can be convinced to care that much. I'm not even talking about the scenario you suggest of filtering for proper word usage, I'm talking about filtering at all.

The corpora used for popular word embeddings are full of weird nonsense text (in the case of word2vec) or autogenerated awfulness like spam and the text of porn sites (in the case of fastText) or both (GloVe). And most people who implement ML don't care how their data is collected.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#297

Post by tallanvor » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 8:04 AM UTC

Larrikin wrote: post #266

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.

It's all the keyboards. Swype used to work great, but now when it actually gets words right, if I have sentence with a second word that could possibly have been two similar words on the path it will just straight up replace both rendering the sentence completely incomprehensible. Who are these people that don't correct their sentences until the second incorrect word?

I'm glad it's not just me that's seen Swype getting progressively worse! Either you have to really emphasize what letters you want, or you give up and type it out. I'm about finished with it.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#298

Post by eltoozero » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 8:06 AM UTC

klodolph wrote: post #241

gaius wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s only when you actually catch it mid stream.

Once you hit space and start a new word it’s game over.

Frequently happens at the worst moment when you’re trying to mash out a complex explanation in a rushed fury.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#299

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 8:08 AM UTC

Larrikin wrote: post #266

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.

It's all the keyboards. Swype used to work great, but now when it actually gets words right, if I have sentence with a second word that could possibly have been two similar words on the path it will just straight up replace both rendering the sentence completely incomprehensible. Who are these people that don't correct their sentences until the second incorrect word?

[deleted]

Re: Google Memory Loss

#300

Post by greenhouse_gas » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 8:11 AM UTC

propman wrote: post #282

Houshalter wrote: post #193

Google drank too much of their own koolaid. They were always seen as an "AI company", but they really weren't. As late as 2008, Google's head of AI said they used very little machine learning in search. And actually tried to avoid using it as much as possible. Because they found it very unreliable and it gave weird an unpredictable edge cases. Everything was painstakingly hand engineered. But now we are at peak AI hy…

The little passionate website in the 2000s used to be the best source of information if properly vetted. Now it's only big websites regurgitating the same superficial content written by paid writers who have no expertise in the subject matter. They instead just copy other superficial sources. I think this has dumbed down society because it certainly has dumbed down me. Also, complicated topics are dumbed down to 1 se…

On the other hand, from my experience:

I wanted to see how Raspberry Pi assembly worked - quite a niche subject (who programs? In assembly? On a Raspberry Pi?).

Yet I found quite a few blogs going through the subject - a tutorial of sorts.

I was also looking up how to write an OS (just for fun) - another fairly niche field. Yet I found tons of tutorials in C, C++, and Rust.

I remember trying the same in the 1990s.

Nada.

You couldn't find nothing. I mean maybe you'll find a basic site with the source-dump of an OS (often without building instructions), but you want to dig into the meat (here is how you get from bootloader to x86-64 in 21 days, and why it works)? Foggetaboutit.

I definitely don't want to go back to pre-google web1.0.