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Google Needs Sex

krugman.blogs.nytimes.com

21–30 of 39 posts

Re: Google Needs Sex

#21
Here we see a search engine in his native habitat, foraging the fields of the world wide web for his sustenance, advertising targets. These beautiful lumbering beasts play an important part in the ecosystem, processing great quantities of flora and excreting them into little packets for the creatures further down the chain.

Master of his niche and with no natural predators, the mighty search engine's greatest threat is the ongoing habitat destruction by Mankind, as slash and burn development techniques replace the verdant fields of pages with cheap plastic knockoffs and gaudy littering, which the mighty search engine haplessly consumes, but grows fat and slow from gorging on the empty calories. If this practice is not soon ended, the search engines may have to be placed on the endangered species list.

But hark! What's that sound? A female search engine in the throes of heat has entered the clearing! Her mating call reaches deep into the soul of the male search engine... "ACK kwire! ACK kwire!" and the male must have her. He unfurls his spectacular page index count to impress the female, and truly this is a virile male, for his index count easily reaches into the trillions! A rare specimen indeed. The female is impressed and approaches the male to exchange their algorithmic details. Soon the deed is done and satiated, the male wanders off in disinterest. Soon four or five baby search engines will be born, each of which to thrive in the harsh environment of the web must eventually kill and consume their parents, a difficult feat that no baby search engine has accomplished in many years, but such is the harsh reality of the untamed wilderness.

Tune in next week when we'll follow the adventures of the cutest little baby search engine as he grows, encounters his first clickbot, and acquires his first distracting side business, all before facing his first mortal threat of acquisition by the trophy-seeking megacorporate hunter who wishes to gut the young search engine and turn it into the something to hang on his intranet to impress his fellow megacorporates.

Re: Google Needs Sex

#22
The author is dead wrong about benefits of sex. The key benefit of sex is the ability to preserve huge gene pool and try out multiple combinations. The battle against parasites does not worth huge reproductive complexity that sex introduces.

On the other hand the author is right that Google is inefficient in fighting web spam.

Re: Google Needs Sex

#23

If I was a web search company, I'd allow users to upvote or downvote their search results (this would increase or decrease their prominence on subsequent searches). This could be done on a per-site, or per-page basis. Then I'd use one person's preferences to alter how other people receive search results (on an optional basis; if people didn't want their results filtered like this, they wouldn't have to.) But I wouldn…

"I'd allow users to upvote or downvote their search results" Google already did that. But for some reason they were unable to efficiently use results of that project. I think something is broken in Google's mid-management.

That's because average users don't vote on search results.

Re: Google Needs Sex

#25

If I was a web search company, I'd allow users to upvote or downvote their search results (this would increase or decrease their prominence on subsequent searches). This could be done on a per-site, or per-page basis. Then I'd use one person's preferences to alter how other people receive search results (on an optional basis; if people didn't want their results filtered like this, they wouldn't have to.) But I wouldn…

"I'd allow users to upvote or downvote their search results" Google already did that. But for some reason they were unable to efficiently use results of that project. I think something is broken in Google's mid-management.

I'd guess that the clickstream data can yield conclusions that are nearly as accurate as manual voting, if not moreso. It's not worth cluttering the interface for data with such low marginal value.

Re: Google Needs Sex

#26

What the author is saying, as I understand it, is that Google needs a way to mix up their algo's so they aren't easily "gamed" by scammers and spammers. The question is not whether Google is doing this actively but how fast and decisively they do this as well as what specific issue they deem as priority to address. Google's algo, as I understand it, is an array of knobs that are turned up and down to increase or decr…

> what is clear to many is that the sole object of adjusting these knobs in not to make the results pages more relevant.

You're implying there is a sole objective. There isn't. And if there was one, it would most certainly be to maximise relevancy.

Re: Google Needs Sex

#27
post #21

Here we see a search engine in his native habitat, foraging the fields of the world wide web for his sustenance, advertising targets. These beautiful lumbering beasts play an important part in the ecosystem, processing great quantities of flora and excreting them into little packets for the creatures further down the chain. Master of his niche and with no natural predators, the mighty search engine's greatest threat…

Bravo! You, sir, are an artist.

[Edit] What I originally wanted to comment on is that the metaphor this article uses seems invalid. Google is no stationary target. I presume the engineers working there are not just sitting around getting massages all day long.

Re: Google Needs Sex

#28

This is quite possibly the dumbest article about technology I've seen in a mainstream publication. What Google really needs is a willingness to accept a way higher threshold of false negatives in weeding out content. I'd love to have a "known good" version of Google that risked leaving out some content. Let's start by banning all .info domains along with any that include a hyphen.

> This is quite possibly the dumbest article about technology I've seen in a mainstream publication. Come on, it's in the NYTimes & by Paul Krugman (an economist) - not bad for that combination. After reading lots of articles by technologists, you need to remember to temper your expectations when you visit the website of a mainstream publication. That said, his theory isn't entirely false - Google may actually need s…

You mean former economist. He's now a columnist and since seems to have abandoned most of his critical thinking skills.

Re: Google Needs Sex

#30

The author is dead wrong about benefits of sex. The key benefit of sex is the ability to preserve huge gene pool and try out multiple combinations. The battle against parasites does not worth huge reproductive complexity that sex introduces. On the other hand the author is right that Google is inefficient in fighting web spam.

yeah, especially considering that a huge chunk of species on this planet reproduces, clonally, just fine.
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