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

331–340 of 552 posts

Re: Google Memory Loss

#331

Post by batushka2 »

m12k wrote: post #324
telltruth wrote: post #252

I'm wondering if rackless Ruth, Google's bean-counter-in-chief, is behind all these. At Bing, bean counters often had calculated that if you cut down index to half (after certain size), you reduce half of the cost but don't lose half of the revenues. So there is a sweet spot where you can maximize revenue if you are willing to let go few demanding customers. When quarterly results needs a little push, everything is a…

Did you really intend to call her "rackless Ruth" or was the slur an accidental misspelling of reckless? Because pointless and crude name-calling like that really detracts from any valid points you might have brought up.

Snowflake alert! Just stop harassing vivid language, please.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#332

Post by Santosh83 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #159
fixermark wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the interesting question is: if you optimize the design to return rarely-accessed results reliably, what feature that we take for granted does that design sacrifice?

To me it's obviously speed. Reducing the search space or cache or however you want to define it is the best way to increase speed. When milliseconds count that's important.

This is sad because humans are much much slower than computers and even 1 whole second is nothing to us. At least I am quite willing for Google to take a second or more to give me more thorough results. A query that takes 900 milliseconds is better than the same one taking 150 milliseconds but returning poorer results. The additional 750 milliseconds are virtually unnoticeable in human time and a small sacrifice to make for excellent search coverage.

The only place where every millisecond may count is the case of automated queries running into the thousands and millions. I'm not aware Google even allows something like that and it's a corner case anyway. Human typed search is the majority use case.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#333

Post by emmelaich »

copx wrote: post #213
red75prime wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

That was just a random example of a phrase. I made it up on the fly.

Not sure what you expect then.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#334

Post by bsaul »

This post and some comments about the lack of predictability of today’s AI behaviors, makes me wonder: could this be the start of a new trend for startups ? « 100% predictable, AI-free product » ?

Re: Google Memory Loss

#335

Post by shangxiao »

m12k wrote: post #324
telltruth wrote: post #252

I'm wondering if rackless Ruth, Google's bean-counter-in-chief, is behind all these. At Bing, bean counters often had calculated that if you cut down index to half (after certain size), you reduce half of the cost but don't lose half of the revenues. So there is a sweet spot where you can maximize revenue if you are willing to let go few demanding customers. When quarterly results needs a little push, everything is a…

Did you really intend to call her "rackless Ruth" or was the slur an accidental misspelling of reckless? Because pointless and crude name-calling like that really detracts from any valid points you might have brought up.

According to Merriam-Webster [1] "rackless" is a variant of "reckless".

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rackless

Re: Google Memory Loss

#336

Post by geocar »

greenhouse_gas wrote: post #300
propman wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Na…

> I remember trying the same in the 1990s.

A major issue, that affected finding "Raspberry Pi assembly" in the 1990s was that the Raspberry Pi didn't exist yet.

A lesser issue, and perhaps one that may have made it difficult to figure out how to "write an OS (just for fun)" is that few people had done this and published tutorial-style material for absolute beginners on the web- and most of those tutorials that did exist weren't on the world wide web (but on e.g. usenet).

Re: Google Memory Loss

#337

Post by flexie »

gizmo686 wrote: post #287
copx wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they don't but I know what you are referring to. Most of the time I get the result: No results found for [phrase] Results for [phrase] (without quotes) ..but the thing is that I know websites containing [phrase] exist. Often many of them and they aren't "dark web" either. Google used to be able to find them but no longer is. This gets more confusing because sometimes it does work. Namely if you look for phrases w…

It seems to work [0]. [0] https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=f6xdWs2KJq7k_Qb0k...

Indeed a very nice way to prove this thread wrong :-)

Re: Google Memory Loss

#338

Post by emanreus »

ternaryoperator wrote: post #6

This is definitely a thing. Many sites when they update take down old content that was getting few views. Many times that content is irretrievably lost. This shows the value of actually grabbing content that you plan to use or hope to refer to in the future, rather than merely bookmarking it. And it also underscores the value of the Internet Archive.

Very much so. Recently I was able to retrieve geolocation data for some Panoramio photos thanks to IA. Another thing I appreciate a lot is Web Archive (MHTML) as "Save As" file format in FF.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#339

Post by fergie »

Yes, I have noticed this recently too, although I have no hard and fast examples.

Google _seems_ to be returning more popular/mainstream sites at the expense of less popular sites that may be more relevant.

Also- Google has stopped penalising sites that don't contain all of the search terms. It has always removed "stopwords" (words that are too common to be relevant: and, it, or, etc.) which is fine, but now it seems to remove significant terms as well. This makes a big difference if you are searching for programming stuff, particularly error messages.

From a pure search point of view Google is losing ground to its competitors, and that has _never_ happened before.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#340

Post by cshenton »

m12k wrote: post #324
telltruth wrote: post #252

I'm wondering if rackless Ruth, Google's bean-counter-in-chief, is behind all these. At Bing, bean counters often had calculated that if you cut down index to half (after certain size), you reduce half of the cost but don't lose half of the revenues. So there is a sweet spot where you can maximize revenue if you are willing to let go few demanding customers. When quarterly results needs a little push, everything is a…

Did you really intend to call her "rackless Ruth" or was the slur an accidental misspelling of reckless? Because pointless and crude name-calling like that really detracts from any valid points you might have brought up.

Not OP, but I'd assumed it was referring to removal of literal data centre racks.
Post reply on HN