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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#371

Post by __loam »

potatolicious wrote: post #339
JohnFen wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning This better echoes my personal experience with the decline of Google search than TFA: it seems to be connected to the increasing use of ML in that the more of it Google put in, the worse the results I got were.

It's also a good lesson for the new AI cycle we're in now. Often inserting ML subsystems into your broader system just makes it go from "deterministically but fixably bad" to "mysteriously and unfixably bad".

This is why hallucinations will never be fixed in language models. That's just how they work.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#372

Post by __loam »

oblio wrote: post #364
jokoon wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's not something ML people would like to hear

Is ML the new SOAP? Looks like a silver bullet and 5 years later you're drowning in complexity for no discernible reason?

Don't forget about that expensive GPU infrastructure you invested in.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#373

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

oblio wrote: post #364
jokoon wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's not something ML people would like to hear

Is ML the new SOAP? Looks like a silver bullet and 5 years later you're drowning in complexity for no discernible reason?

> SOAP

Argh. My PTSD from writing ONVIF drivers just kicked in.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#374

Post by temporarely »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #359
temporarely wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chuck, curious if you have ever posted here on what happened to Sun Micro. Love to read your take on it.

I don't think so. At one of the Sun Reunion events a bunch of us sat around and talked about it. I suggested someone should write a companion volume to "Sunrise: The first 10 years of Sun" called "Sunset: The last 10 years of Sun." But as far as I know nobody followed up (if they did they didn't reach out to me for my take)

Quit teasing. Give us a taste, then. [:)]

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#375

Post by cogman10 »

mulmen wrote: post #196
wrs wrote: post #81

This sounds an awful lot like the Boeing story, even including the “[engineering] class traitor” running the failing division.

Boeing was put on the path to failure by James McNerney. He was their first non-engineer MBA CEO. A literal Jack Welch apprentice. He divested Spirit and chose to build the MAX instead of the 797. Dennis Muilenburg was an engineer and handled the MAX crisis poorly but wasn’t responsible for the decision to divest key capabilities from Boeing or to optimize short-term sales over long-term survival by building the MAX…

Welch and Reagan teamed up to destroy the middle class.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#376

Post by juped »

sailfast wrote: post #240
wayne-li2 wrote: post #222

Even though I agree with what the author is saying, the tone of this article is off putting to me. There are ways to call out people for being bad at their job without resorting to “class traitor” and “ratfucker”. That being said, Google search is 100% dead. I append “reddit” to every Google query to get actual results from people, and I don’t see it on Reddit, I give up on my query.

Agreed - I can appreciate the sentiment and the history, but the ad hominem is not really necessary to prove the point and undermines the credibility of the post. I still use Google, but man has it become difficult to get to what I want.

Using a pejorative is not an "ad hominem".

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#377

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

ot1138 wrote: post #76

Phenomenal article, very entertaining and aligns with my experience as a prominent search "outsider" (I founded the first search intelligence service back in 2004, which was later acquired by WPP. Do I have some stories). The engineers at Google were wonderful to work with up to 2010. It was like a switch flipped mid-2011 and they became actively hostile to any third party efforts to monitor what they were doing. To…

I enjoy reading this chap's stuff. It's not the way that I would write, but he's got a much broader audience than I do, so he obviously is meeting the needs of the reading population.

I do feel that I can't argue with his stuff, although it is very dark and cynical (and, truth be told, I have a lot of dark and cynical, in me, as well, but I try not to let it come out to play, too often).

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#378

Post by dang »

Jasper_ wrote: post #348
dang wrote: post #101

Anybody have a better title? 'Better' here means (1) less baity; (2) more accurate and neutral; and (3) preferably a representative phrase from the article itself. "The man who killed Google Search" is too baity. See the 'unless' in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html : " Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait " Edit (since there are objections): I'm not taking a position for…

> I'm not taking a position for or against the article; I haven't read it. If you haven't read it, why are you in a position to suggest whether the title is accurate to the article's contents or not?

I didn't read it, I skimmed it. In this context, "read" means "read it enough to form my own view of the story"; "skim" means "read it enough for moderation purposes", such as title editing.

Moderation relies on the fact that those two are not the same. It is impossible to read all the articles; it is possible to skim enough of them to make moderation feasible.

(I did end up reading the OP out of curiosity later. My own view of the story is that I am pretty persuaded by it, but I don't like the personal attack aspect, which shows up as a mob dynamic in the comments here.)

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#380

Post by mike_hearn »

AlbertCory wrote: post #270
gregw134 wrote: post #250

Ex-Google search engineer here (2019-2023). I know a lot of the veteran engineers were upset when Ben Gomes got shunted off. Probably the bigger change, from what I've heard, was losing Amit Singhal who led Search until 2016. Amit fought against creeping complexity. There is a semi-famous internal document he wrote where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning, or at leas…

Amit was definitely against ML, long before "AI" had become a buzzword.

He wasn't the only one. I built a couple of systems there integrated into the accounts system and "no ML" was an explicit upfront design decision. It was never regretted and although I'm sure they put ML in it these days, last I heard as of a few years ago was that at the core were still pages and pages of hand written logic.

I got nothing against ML in principle, but if the model doesn't do the right thing then you can just end up stuck. Also, it often burns a lot of resources to learn something that was obvious to human domain experts anyway. Plus the understandability issues.

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