Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The man who killed Google Search?

wheresyoured.at

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 939 posts

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#491

Post by space_fountain »

ytdytvhxgydvhh wrote: post #477
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 that’ll define the industry for the coming decades. I used to work in machine translation and it was the same. The older rules-based engines that were carefully crafted by humans worked well on the test suite and if a new case was found, a human could fix it. When machine learning came on the scene, more “impressive” models that were built quicker came out - but when a translation was bad no one knew how to f…

Yes, but I think the other lesson might be that those black box machine translations have ended up being more valuable? It sucks when things don't always work, but that is also kind of life and if the AI version worked more often that is usually ok (as long as the occasional failures aren't so catastrophic as to ruin everything)

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#492

Post by overgard »

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.

I'm not generally for singling out a person and slinging mud at them, but, I also feel like unless there's a real social cost to acting the way these parasitic executives act, there's little incentive for them to change their behavior. There should be a sense of shame in ruining a once good product for career benefits and short term growth. I think the tone is appropriate in that it conveys that this is not a good-faith effort gone wrong, but rather an executive acting in a cynical and reprehensible way.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#493

Post by ytdytvhxgydvhh »

space_fountain wrote: post #491
ytdytvhxgydvhh wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’ll define the industry for the coming decades. I used to work in machine translation and it was the same. The older rules-based engines that were carefully crafted by humans worked well on the test suite and if a new case was found, a human could fix it. When machine learning came on the scene, more “impressive” models that were built quicker came out - but when a translation was bad no one knew how to f…

Yes, but I think the other lesson might be that those black box machine translations have ended up being more valuable? It sucks when things don't always work, but that is also kind of life and if the AI version worked more often that is usually ok (as long as the occasional failures aren't so catastrophic as to ruin everything)

Can’t help but read that and think of Tesla’s Autopilot and “Full Self Driving”. For some comparisons they claim to be safer per mile than human drivers … just don’t think too much about the error modes where the occasional stationary object isn’t detected and you plow into it at highway speed.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#494

Post by yifanl »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #331
yifanl wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, because this ends up with implying that if you just got rid of That One Fucking Guy, then everything with Google Search would be good. Which... is not a claim I'd agree with without extremely convincing evidence.

Someone can still be responsible for decisions made in a system with poor incentives.

Oh, yes, I agree that we should name and shame, but I suspect the list of names to be a lot longer than one or two people.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#495

Post by romanhn »

phyzome wrote: post #481
romanhn wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I struggled to keep going after "computer scientist class traitor". A very juvenile take that reflects poorly on the author, IMO.

"Class traitor" isn't a juvenile insult. It has a fairly well-defined meaning and describes a set of problematic behaviors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_traitor Are you saying that it's an incorrect description, or are you just generally against accusing people of things?

It's a ridiculous term that promotes polarization and dumbs down the level of discourse. I have the same reaction to it as when I see "bootlicker" as applied to anyone who takes the company's side (or is in management in general). There's too much adversarial name-calling these days, and not enough seeking understanding.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#496

Post by superluserdo »

peoplenotbots wrote: post #462
998244353 wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

See this >15-year-old video "How to get featured on YouTube" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uzXeP4g_qA, which I remember as being originally uploaded to the official Youtube channel but looks like it's been removed now, this reupload is from October 2008.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#497

Post by yifanl »

cbsmith wrote: post #427
potatolicious wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehh, I don't think that's really what it implies. It implies that getting rid of That Fucking Guy is a necessary but likely insufficient condition for improving things. Orgs that have been dysfunctional for a long time tend to have very complex dysfunctions, but there are still ways to fix these orgs, and it often starts by removing poor leadership from their posts. Does it immediately make everything sunshine and lo…

In terms of understanding the dynamic though, That Fucking Guy doesn't really help. At best it can be emblematic of the underlying dysfunction, but in reality, with complex organizational dynamics, it's the underlying forces that empower That Fucking Guy that are important to understand, because the whole problem is that their function in the organization are an inevitable consequence of the dysfunction, and with pro…

Err, I'll walk it back a little. Corporate decisions are just people's decisions, and though it's probably not just Raghavan, it was _somebody_'s decision to have Google spam our homepages.

Maybe we just need to be better at navigating who _somebody_ is, organizations can only be so complex at the top.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#498

Post by space_fountain »

ytdytvhxgydvhh wrote: post #493
space_fountain wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but I think the other lesson might be that those black box machine translations have ended up being more valuable? It sucks when things don't always work, but that is also kind of life and if the AI version worked more often that is usually ok (as long as the occasional failures aren't so catastrophic as to ruin everything)

Can’t help but read that and think of Tesla’s Autopilot and “Full Self Driving”. For some comparisons they claim to be safer per mile than human drivers … just don’t think too much about the error modes where the occasional stationary object isn’t detected and you plow into it at highway speed.

Well Tesla might be the single worst actor in the entire AI space, but I do somewhat understand your point. The lake of predictable failures is a huge problem with AI, I'm not sure that understandability is by itself. I will never understand the brain of an Uber driver for example

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#499

Post by yifanl »

yifanl wrote: post #224

I think the blogpost spend a lot of time focusing on the uninteresting part. If it wasn't Raghavan, it'd just be someone else, Google (the corporation) wanted more search query metrics and Google is large enough to enforce its will, I doubt 2024 Google Search would be dramatically better if anyone else was promoted to Gomes' position (obviously, Gomes would have been kicked off regardless, because KPIs)

Replying to myself, after re-reading from a different perspective, I wanna walk back on "uninteresting". At first I was expecting more out of why Gomes was kicked, but I realized I answered myself.

And the choice for Raghavan specifically seems like it does matter - there's a certain type of leadership that's empowered that wasn't before, and getting insight into what and why is quite interesting.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#500

Post by mining »

dingnuts wrote: post #276
kelnos wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange, I rarely don't find what I need on Kagi, and when I do and fall back to Google, the results there are no more helpful.

this is my experience as well. sometimes I accidentally search Google and I find it extremely annoying and the results to be demonstrably worse most of the time the example I like to show people is searching "how to fix a leaky faucet" Kagi shows helpful answers and videos from sites like This Old House. Google shows ads for plumbers near me. If I had wanted a plumber, I would've searched for that.

Searching "how to fix a leaky faucet" on Google turned up the page from "This Old House" immediately (top 3 results, top 2 were wikiHow and a YouTube video that seemed OK at a glance).

I'm not sure why my personal results are often so much better than posts like this one whenever I do the experiment - maybe it's based on location?

Post reply on HN