Both sites could use a little SEO. Google being imperfect isn't a new thing.
Google Memory Loss
351–360 of 552 posts
Re: Google Memory Loss
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
SwiftKey seems to manage three languages (Finnish, Swedish, English) simultaneously pretty well. No need to explicitly switch language either, it figures out the current language as you type.
Yes, SwiftKey works almost perfect for me too in three languages scenario (Bosnian, English, Dutch).
The only thing it is confused about is the letter "i", which means "and" in Bosnian, and SwiftKey often capitalizes it where it shouldn't. Probably happens because I often mix Bosnian and English in the same message (instead of translating technical terms).
Re: Google Memory Loss
#353Earlier 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…
Search engines didn't exist until the very end of the 90s. The 00's is the golden age I compare too. And yes there are still some small websites. But they are a lot less common. Especially if you aren't searching for them intentionally. They've made sure you won't accidentally stumble across them. For instance, I just searched "raspberry pi" and most of the results are companies selling them. There's also the official site, official social media accounts, and the wikipedia page.
There was actually a result for a small wiki of pi enthusiasts. But it was buried 10 links down on page 2, and mixed in with all the other noise. There's also a lot of news sites and blogspam (a lot of links have a little indicator that says "x hours ago". As if good articles expire.)
Re: Google Memory Loss
#354Earlier 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…
You can add a plus (+) before a word you require to be in the search results. Eg. "+VBS array loop". You can filter out word by prepending a minus (-). You can surround exact phrases in quotes (") and you can even allow synonyms by prepending a tilde "~" Example query: +vbs array ~loop "magic number" If Google does not find anything it will remove some parts so that you will get any results at all
That stopped some time and and it's now extremely frustrating as the main article describes. I'm sure I read that putting the search in quotes is like the old + but it doesn't seem to be, rather just priority to that search.
I feel this is more a case of Google thinking it knows better.
I have a similar problem with ebay, if I'm looking for an "HP Z430" then I'll get pages of other items where Z430 isn't even in the description.
I can see some value in searching for alternative spellings and related items but there should still be the ability to be exact in your search terms.
Re: Google Memory Loss
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use Swift keyboard on Android, never had these kinds of issues, its predictions are remarkably good.
And it's guaranteed not to have postdictions?
Nope, the autocorrect works until you press space. It doesn't go back and "fix" the word you're already finished with.
Re: Google Memory Loss
#356Hmm. 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…
>Google found all three.
All five? Or 3/5?
Re: Google Memory Loss
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's unfortunate, because their simpler system worked better.
I don't think so. A few years ago, Google worked much better when you knew how to phrase queries. I often helped family members to find something online, just by rephrasing their original query. Today, it doesn't matter how you build your query, Google returns good results in any case. That also means that you can't search for specific info by phrasing queries differently but for the vast majority of people it makes…
You have a good point here. However, it would be great if both directions would be maintained. One, with "good enough" results for the common crowd, and another one, with a scalpel sharp ability to dissect it.
Re: Google Memory Loss
#358Earlier 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.
It actually does this with such consistency that I think it's a very specific mistake. For example, I frequently swipe "See you soon." It always, always renders as "See you son", which I then have to manually retype. Sometimes twice. I don't have a son, and I'm not a blind old cowboy who jocularly refers to any random person as "son". I honestly just want to type "soon", for the love of... anyhow, this is an ongoing, totally inane battle of wills with my phone.
I think what's happening here is that there's a very impressive and sophisticated heuristic for predicting the probability of what you want to type by looking at the frequency of what you have typed in similar contexts. It uses its state-of-the-art AI to evaluate the context and build an array of candidate words, along with their respective probabilities. I suspect it is very accurate as it does this. Then it sorts the array by probability and pops the top element into the predictive text input.
Alas -- per my pet theory anyways -- it sorts like this:
candidateWords.sort((a,b) => a.probability - b.probability);
candidateWords.sort((a,b) => b.probability - a.probability);
Re: Google Memory Loss
#359Anecdota, plural of data and all that, I know, but Google is able to find 15 years old posts from rather obscure french blogs.
https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=fr&q=%22Dans%20mon%20...
https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=fr&q=%22Eh%20bien%2C%...
BUT, interestingly enough, it can find posts for the very first months of the blog existence, but stays clueless for several posts dated a few years later. For instance, several exact strings from this page are not found by Google :
Re: Google Memory Loss
#360So from a business point of view, it’s hard to make a case for Google indexing everything, no matter how old and how obscure. I don't get that line of thought, somehow people have starting defend lack of quality as something expected or reasonable. The whole point of going to google is to find stuff, that includes "boring" old and obscure stuff that won't sell ads. But that is part of the deal, if google don't…
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