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Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

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Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#251

Post by rtsil »

jquery wrote: post #244
rtsil wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned a foreign language (English), I search Google in that foreign language. My browser's language is set in that foreign language. My search parameters are set to only show results in English. I use Google.com, not my localized version of Google. And yet about half the time when I search using keywords (as opposed to long expressions), there are always two or three links in my language (French) in the first pag…

A VPN is what you need. Or perhaps simply changing your location would work, when I visited France I didn’t get any French-language results.

> A VPN is what you need.

What I needed was to use a different search engine. DuckDuckGo gives me a toggle to include or not French results.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#252

Post by jquery »

rtsil wrote: post #251
jquery wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A VPN is what you need. Or perhaps simply changing your location would work, when I visited France I didn’t get any French-language results.

> A VPN is what you need. What I needed was to use a different search engine. DuckDuckGo gives me a toggle to include or not French results.

ah! you had the solution all along!

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#253

Post by hnfong »

mrcartmeneses wrote: post #205
mattkrause wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't buy the tickets sight unseen, but I would trust you that it's actually a real place, actually in Croatia, and not being conflated with similar-sounding places. Humans, unless they're disturbed or malicious, tend not to hallucinate things out of whole cloth.

So... we’ve got ML models to the point of being able to hallucinate?

"Yes"?

The whole point of these models is to make up something that seems "realistic", but not regurgitate the original contents. If that's not hallucination I don't know what is.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#254

Post by hnfong »

unsafecast wrote: post #217
jsemrau wrote: post #179

90% of content writers that I have talked during product validation are using Google to search for writing financial content. They mirrored the sentiment of the author that search results have gotten significantly worse and do not provide much auxiliary insights. The noise/hit ratio is really high. Interestingly, Google Search works really well for Stack Overflow.

> Interestingly, Google Search works really well for Stack Overflow. Maybe it's because people who use these kinds of websites are generally less tolerant of BS websites than the average person, so Google tends to derank the crappy ones just because we always click away instantly.

Maybe it's because Google Search is maintained by software engineers and they actually dog food their stuff in this context?

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#255

Post by summerlight »

drc500free wrote: post #142
soulofmischief wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google simply returns human written results, so delegating the trust problem. You can track author's record and judge if they're trustworthy yourself. Doing the same thing for GPT-3 is much harder. How are you going to debug the model? Probably there is only a handful amount of people who is capable of debugging the model even with all necessary access granted. You can think it as autonomous driving which already has reached to a good level for 99% of use cases (at least for Waymo and Cruise), but no one think it's going to mass deploy robotaxi anytime soon.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#257

Post by amf12 »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #100
didip wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree because it’s 100% within Google power to purge junk websites, see Panda in 2011. But they didn’t want to do that anymore. Why? Because of ads money. To drive the point home, it is not that difficult for Google to have a junk score and simply phase out the junkiest of junks. But they didn’t even want to do that.

If Google purged sites at their own digression to such a degree, then HN would just be complaining about that instead.

More to this, no algorithm can accurately detect spamy websites. There is bound to be some inaccuracy and bias. Cue to posts on HN lamenting that "Google purged my website".

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#258

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

alecbz wrote: post #148
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

GraphQL is a format and contract for exposing APIs, just like REST is a structure for exposing APIs, just like SOAP is a format and structure for exposing APIs, just like gRPC is a format for exposing APIs.

Those are all the right analogies for comparing GraphQL. GraphQL doesn't say anything about how the underlying data is queried - at the end of the day it's just a bunch of resolver functions that you can implement however you want.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#259

Post by [deleted] »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #258
alecbz wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> somehow is a generic query language for data. In what sense is GraphQL not a generic query language for data?

GraphQL is a format and contract for exposing APIs, just like REST is a structure for exposing APIs, just like SOAP is a format and structure for exposing APIs, just like gRPC is a format for exposing APIs. Those are all the right analogies for comparing GraphQL. GraphQL doesn't say anything about how the underlying data is queried - at the end of the day it's just a bunch of resolver functions that you can implement…

[deleted]

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#260

Post by [deleted] »

akrymski wrote: post #249
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet Google encourages this type of search, where Google operates as some sort of oracle. What seems like an endless army of Google proponents (perhaps they are simply "status quo" proponents) discourage anyone from even attempting to think about how the web could be organised without the need for a Google. In a library, I can do searches restricted to certain subject areas. I might only be searching certain databases…

Trademarks are incredibly easy and cheap to get. Spammers already pay for domains and servers. Adding the cost of a trademark doesn't make things much more difficult I'm afraid. Also which country's trademark office would be the gate keeper? There's one in every country. I assume you mean the USA trademark database in this case, but that only covers US trademarks.

[deleted]
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