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Google Memory Loss

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Re: Google Memory Loss

#411
Maybe this means there is room for someone to start a new search engine for hackers. That would be very exciting news, because that's what Google was originally: the search engine hackers used.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me a crazy person, lately I've been thinking long and hard about going back to the BB (BB Bold 9930) and am willing to make all the sacrifices that come with it for a lot of the frustrations with smartphone OSes listed in this thread. Maybe I'm getting older and my demands on what I expect from a phone are beginning to normalize and simplify: Text, Calls, Email, a browser for sports scores and reading news artic…

I never used a BB, but I did have a bunch of "dumb" cell phones, and I miss them. Making calls on them was easy: Flip open, press Talk, dial, Success! Now it's: Turn the phone on (which takes approximately 60 seconds on my Samsung because it can't see keystrokes until it finishes trying to connect to wifi), hit Home button, wait 3 seconds for that to work, hit Phone icon, wait 2 seconds, hit keyboard button, wait 1 s…

I think you need a better phone. I have none of these problems on my Samsung Galaxy Note 4.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#413

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.

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.

You don't even need foreign languages to run into this problem. English is the only language I speak fluently, but I'm Australian. I'm also a programmer, and I have some american friends. So, depending on context sometimes I spell 'color' (programming or talking to Americans), and sometimes I spell 'colour' (talking to Australian friends and family). Same with behaviour / behavior, favour / favor, etc. The context for which spelling I decide to use is complicated. In the same document I might name the `getColor` function, but describe it as getting the colour of a pixel. I might have two chat windows open side-by-side with different people and in each window spell the same words differently.

All my devices insist on shaming me (or autocorrecting me) for one of those spellings. At this point it feels like a complete gamble which I'll get corrected on. I'm just slowly getting used to correcting the autocorrect. :(

Re: Google Memory Loss

#414
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, >90% searching for "furce" probably meant force. For the rest it's one click more.

I can understand "firce" and "fprce" or even "f9rce" but "furce" is, on a standard QWERTY keyboard, two keys away so more unlikely to be a typo.

Do Google do spelling correction based on letter locality on the expected user keyboard? Never seen any corrections that would suggest that, often wondered why not.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#415
post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't help that it seems every other project out there is trying to name itself after common words in the lexicon. I dare you to try finding information on the Box library.

This one? http://www.wiltshire.gov.uk/librarylocations.htm?act=show&li... It seems that context-sensitive search is a curse as well as a blessing. Wikipedia at least offers you disambiguation pages; perhaps a search engine should let you pick a "domain" to prioritise search in.

Didn't Google used to do this, one of the SE did definitely - they'd group results into subject areas.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#416
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…

> Startup idea: a service that will let you search your inbox. Aka google for searching.

I don't mean to pick on you but picturing the perspective behind this comment is very funny and a little sad to me.

grep is almost 40 years old. It is free software, fast, and doesn't share your data with anyone. Small knowledge of the file structure of MIME enables more advanced search. This is all without mentioning desktop-based email clients.

Reading your comment, I can only picture some web-page javascript-based track-you-and-show-ads 15-employee company whom you give your email password so they can connect to another service and make high-latency queries on your behalf.

Shows how far we've come?

Re: Google Memory Loss

#417
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! You need to beat Google with a stick to enable searching for the furce awakens (that's not a typo) poster which Disney itself produced. Used to be that quotes around a phrase stopped this typo correcting but no longer. BTW. this is my go-to example for the "piracy is a service problem" -- this is 100% Disney IP for the fans of two billion dollar movies and you can't buy it as a poster. https://images.moviepilot.…

Huh? I just searched for "the furce awakens". And got: Showing results for "the force awakens" Search instead for "the furce awakens" And hitting that got me the Zootopia stuff. So?

But this is the wrong way around. At least make it an option to offer the typo correction instead of forcing it on you. Think of how much money Amazon made with one click. Two clicks is twice the clicks. Focus on fast and relevant searches not trying to guess what I meant. It's great to have a typo correction on offer but let me decide whether I want that to be default -- I don't. I know what I am searching for.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#418
post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sincerely doubt that the Chief Financial Officer of one of the biggest companies in the world has time to read random comments on HN, so whether they 'can handle it' is moot. There is certainly a place for cursing and maybe even name-calling (though I'm surprised you'd bring up the British parliament as an example worthy of imitation) but Hacker News is not it, cf. why I quoted its guidelines. Indeed, sometimes cur…

The only one detracting from anything is you. The rest of us read the comment just fine. I'm american myself and know the "rack" slang but the meaning you suggested didn't occur to me until you pointed it out. I assumed the name had something to do with where this person (I don't know who he's talking about) used to work or some infamous project that went badly or something. Understanding the name didn't seem critica…

No, not all of us. I didn't read the comment just fine either. I assumed a person who uses irrelevant misogynist slurs may have a personal grudge against the person he's insulting, so I'm not going to take anything he says about her very seriously.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail is not just a free service; g-suite costs money, and if this affects corporate email this definitely has real world implications

If it does not affect corporate email, it does not have real world implications?

Not necessarily, he didn't say "if and only if"

Re: Google Memory Loss

#420
Slightly off topic; Not on the Results Accuracy for a minutes.

Ob­vi­ous­ly, in­dex­ing the whole Web is crush­ing­ly ex­pen­sive, and get­ting more so ev­ery day

Why? CPU, Memory, SSD has all gotten a lot faster and bigger. Bandwidth is also a lot cheaper for Google since they essentially owns the fibre. Faster Algorithm may have an even bigger impact.

I would have thought information, in terms of text ( Not Video and Pictures which is a few order of magnitude larger ) would now be cheaper then the old days.

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