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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#461

Post by gverrilla »

delfinom wrote: post #439
gverrilla wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YT Shorts recommendations are a joke. I'm an atheist and very rarely watch anything related to religion, and even so Shorts put me in 3 or 4 live prayers/scams (not sure) the last few months.

I imagine my blocked channels list is stress testing YouTube at this point from the amount of shit Shorts results it's fed me after 2 years. Lol Besides the religious crap, ill randomly get shit in India in hindu, having had not watched anything Indian and not even remotely Indian.

I only get those when it's new content with <20 likes and they are testing it out. Doesn't bother me, I like to receive some untested content - even though 99% of it is pure crap (like some random non-sense film with a trendy music on top).

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#462

Post by peoplenotbots »

998244353 wrote: post #406
fuzztester wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here with YouTube, assuming they use ML, which is likely. They routinely give me brain-dead suggestions such as to watch a video I just watched today or yesterday, among other absurdities.

For what it's worth, I do not remember a time when YouTube's suggestions or search results were good. Absurdities like that happened 10 and 15 years ago as well. These days my biggest gripe is that they put unrelated ragebait or clickbait videos in search results that I very clearly did not search for - often about American politics.

Long long time ago; youtube "staff" would manually put certain videos on the top of the front page when they started. Im sure there we're biases and prioritization of marketing dollars but at least there was human recommending it compared to poorly recorded early family guy clips. I dont know when they stopped manually adding "editors/staff" choice videos but I recall some of my favorite early youtubers like CGPGgrey claim that recommendation built the career.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#463

Post by VikingCoder »

senderista wrote: post #365
anothername12 wrote: post #188

Favorite bit: > very difficult to find much on Raghavan’s history [..] but from what I’ve gleaned, his expertise lies primarily in “failing up,”

Yeah he only co-authored 2 highly influential CS textbooks when he wasn't failing upward

That doesn't mean his insights are correct, that he's a good leader, or that his efforts have been good for us users.

It's hard to find a bigger name in AI than Minsky, and he wrote one of the most influential books in Computer Science, which put a huge damper on all neutral network progress for decades... Arguably, that was a bad thing.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#464

Post by gverrilla »

epcoa wrote: post #416
gverrilla wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YT Shorts recommendations are a joke. I'm an atheist and very rarely watch anything related to religion, and even so Shorts put me in 3 or 4 live prayers/scams (not sure) the last few months.

Prayers for the unbelievers makes some sense. But I associate YouTube promotions with garbage any how. The few things I might buy like Tide laundry detergent are entirely despite occasional YouTube promotion.

Lmao. I'm very positive that the conversion rate for placing an atheist in a live mass out of the blue is very very very low. Because I never stayed for more than 3 seconds, I'm not sure if it's real religious content or a scam, though - and they don't even let me report live shorts :(

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#466

Post by mm263 »

ed_mercer wrote: post #370
imzadi wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just recently switched to Kagi. It's worth paying a few bucks to get decent results.

Kagi seems to have their heads up their asses though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011314

After reading the author's article and the emails, the only thing I'm convinced is that the author has an axe to grind and Vlad comes off as entirely normal and reasonable.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#467

Post by acdha »

coldpie wrote: post #131
lo_fye wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently tried Kagi search (kagi.com) just to see what it was all about, and was instantly shocked at how different it felt, and that difference was mostly due to the complete absence of ads. It made me want to subscribe immediately.

Friend! Get thee to https://ublockorigin.com/ ! You can thank me later!

This is how you get more spam masquerading as content. Ad blockers are useful but with billions of dollars on the line it’s not stable unless you switch to a company with a different business model.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#468

Post by relaxing »

cbsmith wrote: post #431
flakiness wrote: post #184

Prabhakar Raghavan is an author of "Introduction to Information Retrieval", the definitive textbook on search at that time. This fact metaphorically depicts how sad this story is. https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Information-Retrieval-Ch...

> This fact metaphorically depicts how sad this story is. It also highlights how selective the information & context provided in the story is.

His authorship is mentioned in the story.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#469

Post by jorblumesea »

munk-a wrote: post #394
potatolicious wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I think - I hope, rather - that technically minded people who are advocating for the use of ML understand the short comings and hallucinations... but we need to be frank about the fact that the business layer above us (with a few rare exceptions) absolutely does not understand the limitations of AI and views it as a magic box where they type in "Write me a story about a bunny" and get twelve paragraphs of text out. A…

> technically minded people who are advocating for the use of ML understand the short comings and hallucinations

really, my impression is the opposite. They are driven by doing cool tech things and building fresh product, while getting rid of "antiquated, old" product. Very little thought given to the long term impact of their work. Criticism of the use cases are often hand waved away because you are messing with their bread and butter.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#470

Post by spacemadness »

munificent wrote: post #458
munk-a wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think - I hope, rather - that technically minded people who are advocating for the use of ML understand the short comings and hallucinations... but we need to be frank about the fact that the business layer above us (with a few rare exceptions) absolutely does not understand the limitations of AI and views it as a magic box where they type in "Write me a story about a bunny" and get twelve paragraphs of text out. A…

> I hope, rather - that technically minded people who are advocating for the use of ML understand the short comings and hallucinations. The people I see who are most excited about ML are business types who just see it as a black boxes that makes stock valuation go vroom. The people that deeply love building things, really enjoy the process of making itself, are profoundly sceptical. I look at generative AI as sort of…

They wouldn’t think this way if stock investors weren’t so often such naive lemmings ready to jump off yet another cliff with each other.
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