“ For example, have you ever noticed that the main content of most websites is something like 70% down the page? Every recipe site I’ve ever seen is like this — nobody cares about how this recipe was originally your great-grandmother’” If anyone is curious, this is at least part due to copyright law. A recipe is a set of facts, which is no copyrighted. But recipes with substantial literary expression (making it uniqu…
I see this claim repeated but is there any evidence for it? It’s not like writing a long story adds any protection for the recipe. Seems the author’s explanation is simpler (though even simpler is that the audience of those long-winded sites appreciates the content, or the authors enjoy creating it).
GPT-3 prompt: I really love the vibe of Koh Lanta in Thailand. It has tourist amenities without really being touristy. I find it charming, slow and cheap. Is there a place in Croatia like it? Completion: There is no exact place in Croatia that has the same vibe as Koh Lanta in Thailand. However, there are places in Croatia that have a similar charm and slower pace. These places include Hvar Island, Korcula Island, an…
The next problem is verifying all of that information. It will require multiple dozen auxillary Google searches and reading through countless articles and message boards. GPT-3 is a great research tool as a brainstorming engine, but sadly cannot currently be formally trusted to output truthful information, even with conditioning. It takes someone with prior knowledge or subsequent research in order to make use of the…
Google's answer box also can't be trusted to output truthful information.
This is a clear demonstration of the user's expectation of search having exceeded what's possible today. From the article: > Lets look at some examples. One of my favorite places in the world is Koh Lanta, Thailand. When traveling, I’m always on the lookout for places that give off the Koh Lanta vibe. What does that mean? Hard to say, exactly, but having tourist amenities without being touristy. Charming, slow, cheap…
It is not only that. This search specifically is something that it's impossible because if the search worked, those "places out of the beaten path" the author is searching for, would immediately become popular and they wouldn't be true results anymore. They not being "indexed" by Google (or the internet in general) is what makes them the way they are.
Sort of like how I hope no one ever learns about my city/state and it can keep being pleasant and affordable.
This is a clear demonstration of the user's expectation of search having exceeded what's possible today. From the article: > Lets look at some examples. One of my favorite places in the world is Koh Lanta, Thailand. When traveling, I’m always on the lookout for places that give off the Koh Lanta vibe. What does that mean? Hard to say, exactly, but having tourist amenities without being touristy. Charming, slow, cheap…
Eh, I dunno. I feel like if there had been a human somewhere blogging or writing on a forum "I was thrilled to find this village in Croatia which really reminded me of my trip to Koh Lanta, one of my favorite places" -- then Google of 15 years ago would have found it and put it on the first page. Even if there are ten such things on the web today, I don't think it's gonna wind up in my google search. But am I overly…
IIRC Google of 15 years ago would have prioritised high PageRank sites containing the strings "Ko Lanta" and "Croatia" which would probably have been the Ko Lanta listings page of popular travel booking websites (with "Croatia" referenced somewhere in the sidebar).
It was less likely to ignore the absence of a particular keyword but certainly wasn't better at NLP
>Nowadays, Mr Joe Blogs writes on Medium, shares on Facebook and potentially has an outdated instagram account with 4 pictures of his passion. All buried down by algorithm to never be found, because his passion "isn't sexy". From what I've observed, the opposite tends to be true more often than not. Plenty of people have been able to create communities around niche interests because platforms bring something independ…
Yeah but you get no independence that way. Slip up and post the wrong "badspeak" phrase of the month? Shadow banned. As long as content is sitting underneath a huge lingering banhammer, the content will never be as raw and authentic as content was back in 2006. This reinforces the echo chamber issue and also makes the internet feel contrived and soulless.
Getting banned isn't an issue for most people, at least not under the politically driven terms you're describing (just look at the kind of extremist content than flies on Twitter), but even thought banning exists (and it did on the "old" web as well) there's still far more authentic content out there than ever. It just happens that the web is more complex than it was in 2006, and far more culturally culturally diverse, and most people can be authentic on the internet now without also being edgelords or pushing the bounds of TOS.
The next problem is verifying all of that information. It will require multiple dozen auxillary Google searches and reading through countless articles and message boards. GPT-3 is a great research tool as a brainstorming engine, but sadly cannot currently be formally trusted to output truthful information, even with conditioning. It takes someone with prior knowledge or subsequent research in order to make use of the…
Google's answer box also can't be trusted to output truthful information.
I believe this is the point that @drivebycomment was making, that answering such a query is not possible right now. The query needs to be reframed by using keywords like the GPT-3 prompt did, and even further refined than that, and you still have to finish the last mile of research.
“ For example, have you ever noticed that the main content of most websites is something like 70% down the page? Every recipe site I’ve ever seen is like this — nobody cares about how this recipe was originally your great-grandmother’” If anyone is curious, this is at least part due to copyright law. A recipe is a set of facts, which is no copyrighted. But recipes with substantial literary expression (making it uniqu…
Surely they could put that crap after and achieve the same status?
yes but we can build our own query tools, for ex. Im using `$ so graphql vs sql` and such terminal commands more and more these days
Sorry, unrelated, but your comment hit a pet peeve of mine. I love GraphQL, and I think it has a number of features that make it better and more usable for most APIs than a RESTful interface. The thing I despise about GraphQL is they put "QL" in the name, so legions of software developers think that it is somehow comparable to SQL, or somehow is a generic query language for data. GraphQL has absolutely nothing to do…
> somehow is a generic query language for data.
In what sense is GraphQL not a generic query language for data?
This is a clear demonstration of the user's expectation of search having exceeded what's possible today. From the article: > Lets look at some examples. One of my favorite places in the world is Koh Lanta, Thailand. When traveling, I’m always on the lookout for places that give off the Koh Lanta vibe. What does that mean? Hard to say, exactly, but having tourist amenities without being touristy. Charming, slow, cheap…
>having tourist amenities without being touristy. Charming, slow, cheap. Ugh, this reminds me of the people that move from high tax places to low tax places but want all the benefits of high tax places at low cost. Now, back to the main point, if this was searchable it wouldn't exist. The number one complaint people have today is popular places are too busy, too many tourists come and prices go up and it's over ran.…
FTA: > Why don’t other search engines compete on search results? It can’t be hard to do better than Google for the long tail. I think that's the "citation needed" that the author's missing. It's not like Google is unaware of this problem, and a huge piece of their research spend goes into improving search. It's entirely possible nobody's doing better than Google because nobody knows how. The entire paradigm Google's…
Except that “improving search” here means maximizing Google profits, from ads in particular, as opposed to what users would consider an improvement to search.
There are probably thousands or tens of thousands of people working on search. Some of them are interested in and interface with the business side but I'm sure most of them have objectives just related to search. It's possible they've found and not implemented massive improvements because it's getting sat on by higher ups who are more aware of the business and objectives of the ads teams. If that were the case though you'd probably hear about it and see people leaving in droves to start competitors