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

451–460 of 552 posts

Re: Google Memory Loss

#451

Post by novia »

fsloth wrote: post #399
novia wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please teach me. It's driving me crazy.

On my S8 keyboard the configuration menu can be opened using the gear icon appearing in the keyboard. In the configuration menu there should be a bunch of options under "Smart typing" including 'Predictive text' which can be turned off. This is in the european market, though, I don't know if it's configured differently for different markets. On google the query "samsung turn off keyboard autocorrect" provides links s…

Here's the problem. I already turned off all those options long ago, but the annoying behavior remains. To be clear, I don't mind the keyboard predicting things. It's only the retroactive changes that bother me.

Someone else suggested Swift keyboard, so I'm going to give that a try.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#452

Post by danmaz74 »

mikehollinger wrote: post #437
danmaz74 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, it depends a lot on how much competition there is from content farms. If your niche isn't targeted by those, it's easy to find the good blogs. Otherwise, it's very difficult. I suppose that this is a use case where ML could help a lot to recognize "content farmed + SEO optimized" content. Hopefully Google could improve the situation in the future - supposing they are trying.

One of the most entertaining "bugs" that popped up recently while I was looking around for some opinion content that I would _hope_ is recent was that one of the content farm sites plagiarized a rather good blog post, sentence for sentence, for pages and pages. Instead of "I found that ..." they'd thinly-edited it to "Now, let us find..." The annoying thing was that the content farm appeared _above_ the original cont…

Probably because they employed better SEO than the original author :(

Re: Google Memory Loss

#453

Post by nkoren »

tokenizerrr wrote: post #365
nkoren wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> 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?

Wow, I... didn't know that gesture was a thing. Thank you! It seems to help a bit! I'm now getting a 50/50 son/soon ratio. That said: when I manually type "soon" -- definitely with a double "o" -- it still autocorrects to "son" on the first try. So, going to keep my pet theory intact.

The weird thing is that if I type nothing at all, the contextual predicted "next word" on GBoard is actually very good -- I wasn't praising it for comedic effect. But it really does seem like there's a sign error in a sort function which kicks in after you start typing.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#454

Post by pjmlp »

josteink wrote: post #408
ShabbosGoy wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4 years ago was a very different time. Software quality in general continues to drop. I’m not sure if that’s due to increasing incompetence in the software engineering workforce (unlikely, but possible), malice (more unlikely), or apathy (most likely). When wages don’t grow over 10 years, what incentive is there to write the best software you can?

> 4 years ago was a very different time. Software quality in general continues to drop. I’m not sure if that’s due to increasing incompetence in the software engineering workforce (unlikely, but possible), malice (more unlikely), or apathy (most likely). I think another dimension is how deployability has changed. Before... When you wrote and shipped software, getting your software out was a big problem, a big deal. T…

This will only get fixed when software starts to get liability and refunds.

If enough people start suing or asking back for their money, companies will surely improve their QA.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#455

Post by amelius »

ryanianian wrote: post #423
amelius wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The important point is that it's orthogonal to search. You can make SEO-penalization as complicated as you want without affecting search. The only thing search should be able to deal with is a SEO-penalty which is just a number.

Is your point that SEO-penalization is just a sorting implementation concern? I think Google does far more than that - perhaps removing/banning sites or categories of content that are deemed to be gaming their system.

No, I was replying to what derefr said.

And removing/banning sites can be done by setting the SEO-penalty to infinity.

I'm not trivializing anything. All I'm saying is that the concerns can be separated.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#456

Post by habosa »

Many people here are pining for the old days of Google search where if you knew the operators and some tricks you could develop very specific queries and get a page that matches exactly.

I remember those days too. It did feel like Google search skill was a super power. I also remember my non technical friends and family being pretty much unable to find what they were looking for online. Google did not turn their rambling approximate queries into the results they want.

Now I find that although the precision of the old style is gone, Google is incredible at guessing what you want. Back in the day I might find the page I was looking for on the twelfth 'o' of 'Goooooooogle'. Now I rarely have to venture outside the top 3 results. I find that my family no longer needs my help to fast craft a search query.

Isn't it possible that Google just made the choices that are better for the average user and left some of us advanced users out? If your response to that is "they could leave me an advanced mode", consider how much work it would be to maintain to serve a tiny customer subset.

I think if you want a search engine for power users you want DDG

Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on Search or anything close.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#457

Post by londons_explore »

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…

The timing of this correlates with the sharp rise and unavailability of DDR4 memory...?

Coincidence? No...

Re: Google Memory Loss

#458

Post by dandare »

bo1024 wrote: post #416
dandare wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-bas…

Firstly, that startup idea was an overt irony aimed at Google :). Secondly, my guess would be that maybe 0.001% of gmail users are familiar with command line interface and regular expressions. Not everybody is a coder and that is not necessarily bad.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#459

Post by londons_explore »

fixermark wrote: post #138
timbray wrote: post #74

[Tim here] Folks might notice that the article is once again find-able. Being 2 links from the top of Hacker News will do that…

Or the dataset outage was temporary. Remember, it's a distributed data corpus.

This needs more attention. The rarest pages are probably not very redundantly stored.

Sometimes the datacenter your search query lands in might not have a copy of the necessary page. Now they have to decide if they delay the entire search query to remotely query another datacenter, or not. I would guess returning the results early is nearly always more important than returning a result which is so rare it has never been clicked in the past decade.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#460

Post by londons_explore »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #382
dx034 wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Keeping old code running within Google is surprisingly hard...

Most big services (eg. Google Docs) have entire teams of people who run them (SRE's). Without those people to keep the system going, it would probably break within a few weeks.

Post reply on HN