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Google Memory Loss

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Re: Google Memory Loss

#441

Post by m12k »

cup-of-tea wrote: post #438
yots wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wait, misogynistic? You think "rackless" was a comment about her body? If it was that would be strange and innapropriate. I didn't read it that way and it didn't occur to me before this comment. I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt that it wasn't meant to be that because it would be so unexpected.

> If it was that would be strange and innapropriate

Yes, that was my thought too, hence why I asked them if that was indeed what they meant by it. An archaic/dialectic spelling of reckless is strange too though, so I'm not really sure which is more likely. Just out of curiosity - if it only just now occurred to you that 'rackless' could refer to her body, then what did you think I was calling the comment out for?

Re: Google Memory Loss

#442

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Santosh83 wrote: post #332
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Presumably if Google spend 150ms of processing time typically, they don't want to spend 900ms (I'm ignoring transit times, etc.) on one query as they could get 6x as many ad impressions for that processing cost.

They don't even need to do better than the competition, only well enough to stop customers leaving despite having to do 4-5 searches.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#443

Post by dragonwriter »

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 suspect more that Google's focus on being the best general purpose search engine for the general public and its focus on personalization, predicitive search, etc., is behind it.

It takes a different design of index and algorithms to do what Google has openly had as a goal since well before Porat came on board than it does to be the kind of highly literal search engine Google started as.

There's a market for both, and the market for a well-designed, comprehensive, highly literal engine probably pays a lot more per user than the kind Google is focussed on. But it also is much narrower if there is a Google around. (It's also not clear that the web is the highest-value corpus for such an engine; the really commercially successful ones are more specialized and have large, human curated and annotated datasets is specialized domains, notably law.)

Re: Google Memory Loss

#445

Post by baud147258 »

baud147258 wrote: post #372
aglionby wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had this for Chrome history as well. There have been multiple times where I'm sure I've browsed a site with some keyword in the title and it just doesn't show up in search. I don't tend to have a clue about the time window it would be in either so I can't go looking for it, so I can't prove it.

I think Chrome history might be limited in time. Something like 3

Something like 3 months. I forgot a word apparently.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#446

Post by homero »

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.

Swype taught me, it has helpful tips and I still use their keyboard to this day

Re: Google Memory Loss

#447

Post by naasking »

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…

> will try to rewrite your queries and omit words (including the very word that makes all the difference --- I didn't put it in the search query for nothing!)

I've always double quoted the specific term I'm looking for. That usually bypasses this, ie. searching for "foo" will look specifically for foo and not food or what have you.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#448

Post by naasking »

cptskippy wrote: post #53
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…

This definitely happens. I have 1 email that is about 5 years old that I reference once or twice a year, often enough that it is a suggested search term. Recently Gmail has been unable to find it and I restored to starring it. It is literally the only starred email I have but I can no longer search for it.

Has happened to me too. Actually, the Android gmail app is even worse on searching. I often have to launch a browser and search via the web interface because the app returns no results.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#449

Post by neves »

endless1234 wrote: post #319
gonvaled wrote: post #293

Earlier 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.

I have 3 languages in my GBoard. I've just arrived from a Spanish speaking country, and now when I try to write in Portuguese it still completes with spanish words. Sure they are are very similar languages.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#450

Post by Uristqwerty »

nkoren wrote: post #358
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 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,…

When a system tries to do something automagically and makes a mistake, it is very frustrating, especially because, to allow seamless large changes, hide competitive details, or make the UI more "streamlined", such systems rarely give users options to tune the results. A system that gives controls to the user and expects them to tweak their own experience is so much better in my opinion, except in the metrics of first-time usage (or first-time-since-major-change), when those controls look like information overload and make the system seem like something that must be learned before it can be used.

And yet, when the latter inevitably breaks on an edge case, users can try to fix it themselves. They don't hit a wall of frustrated "I can't do anything", they hit a challenge that they are empowered to try overcoming. They already know what they want and can set things that way, rather than trying vaguely to teach a system (machine learning, hardcoded heuristics engine, department of humans making seemingly unconnected changes to a GUI with each passing version and no obvious plan) to understand their desires.

I miss the days when users were seen as intelligent professionals who are willing to change settings, create and re-dock an assortment of toolbars to every edge of every screen/window to suit their daily tasks, read a manual (or at least search the integrated help entries) to overcome problems. Rather than "busy" phone users who just want to complete a task with minimal time spent learning and get back to posting on facebook or whatever, and who accept the automagical solution because adequate results instantly are somehow considered better than great results with some work.

Ugh, that whole block of text just kept growing; I had better leave and go ramble/rant at trees or clouds or something elsewhere.

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