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Google Memory Loss

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Re: Google Memory Loss

#381

Post by dreamcompiler »

dandare wrote: post #316
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…

Startup idea: a service that will let you search your inbox. Aka google for searching. Seriously, this is egregious. You rely on your email provider to accurately search your inbox - some emails are important business, tax, and legal documents that are relevant for years, even decades. Or at least be fucking transparent about the fact that you are not really searching all emails. I know Gmail is a free service and in…

Apple has the opposite problem. On my version of OSX, Spotlight searches in the Finder return email results too, which increases the noise-to-signal results dramatically. You can turn it off but this requires you to enter your search term as a formula every time--there's no way to make it the default. If I want to search my email, I'll switch to the Mail program and search there. I neither want nor need to search my mail in the Finder.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#382

Post by Dylan16807 »

dx034 wrote: post #370
brain5ide wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you can do that at Google's scale I'm sure they'd be happy to hear your proposal. I really doubt Google's engineer wanted to give up the precision (they'll use it for their daily job as well), I just think they couldn't justify the additional resources.

Don't make it sound like a lack of ability. They could keep giving time slices to the old code if they wanted to. And it wouldn't that that many resources, "justified" or not.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#383

Post by Dylan16807 »

Joe-Z wrote: post #348

>My men­tal mod­el of the Web is as a per­ma­nen­t, long-lived store of humanity’s in­tel­lec­tu­al her­itage. And that's where I don't agree with the author. I've been thinking about this and to me it seems we need to try to foster a culture of forgetting. Just because we can store everything forever, doesn't mean we should. That kind of thinking is exactly where this 'track everything everyone does'-mentality comes…

Personal info, sure. There's no reason to get rid of informational articles just because they're not popular enough to get into an encyclopedia.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#384

Post by Baeocystin »

Chriky wrote: post #371
Baeocystin wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has not been a guarantee for several years, now. At best it seems to be a slightly firmer suggestion.

Do you have some example searches? I believe you, just never seen it myself. Perhaps I switched some obscure setting on years ago.

None that are guarantees, unfortunately. It's maddeningly inconsistent from day to day. But it isn't that rare, either. I only perform 10~20 searches using the quote feature a day, and I hit a case where it's ignored several times a week.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#385

Post by carlosperate »

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 definitely have this exact issue with Google Calendar as well. I search for the exact wording of an event, and it doesn't show any results that are old. I then manually go back in the calendar and find it, do the search again and ta-da! it now shows up as a search result...

Re: Google Memory Loss

#386

Post by userbinator »

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…

I bet Sundar Pitchai doesn't want to look bad as "CEO" who can't meet analyst expectations.

Whenever I see horrible search results, I often wonder if those people who work at Google, and surely use their own search engine as much as anyone else, have noticed the degradation and what they think of it --- especially those who are in charge of or even working on the search engine themselves. Does Sundar search, get horrible results, and think "Why is my search engine half-broken? This is my company's most prominent product, and it's not working as well as it used to." No doubt it affects all their engineers too, the ones who will tend to be looking for the most obscure things.

I think your point about metrics and revenue is very true --- they are numbers that can be easily compared, while the quality of search results is not (and also subject to a lot of different conditions); being a "data driven" company, they obviously place much emphasis on the former, ignoring the negative but not easily quantifiable effect on search quality.

As the catchy saying goes, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts." Unfortunately a lot of Google's management don't seem to believe in it.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#387

Post by krylon »

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…

> And there's never any point of going past page 1, because every other page is like that too.

To be honest, I kind of like that part. Most of the time, if there are no useful links on the first page, I know to refine my search terms right away, instead of wasting my time clicking through pages and pages of useless stuff.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#389

Post by tokenizerrr »

AndrewOMartin wrote: post #379
tokenizerrr wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I frequently swipe "See you soon." It always, always renders as "See you son" This works fine for me with GBoard. Are you drawing a little circle on the o to indicate you want the double letter?

If this comment is what teaches me I've been expected to do that, I'm going to throw my toys out of the pram. I've specifically googled for instructions on how I might be expected to use the swipe-style keyboards, and turned up nothing.

As far as I know it's in the tutorial they insist you do upon first enabling swiping

edit: Don't actually see a tutorial in the app. Maybe I'm confused with another app such as Swype, but the same technique seems to apply to all.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#390

Post by smoyer »

m12k wrote: post #361
shangxiao wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Merriam-Webster [1] "rackless" is a variant of "reckless". [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rackless

Do you consider it likely that the poster I replied to routinely uses the dialectal variant rackless over the common spelling reckless?

You should also consider which areas of the world use "rack" as a slang for "breasts". (I'm not disagreeing with you - as a native English speaker I didn't know that rackless and reckless were synonyms).
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