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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#521

Post by ethbr1 »

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)

> Yes, but I think the other lesson might be that those black box machine translations have ended up being more valuable?

The key difference is how tolerant the specific use case is of a probably-correct answer.

The things recent-AI excels at now (generative, translation, etc.) are very tolerant of "usually correct." If a model can do more, and is right most of the time, then it's more valuable.

There are many other types of use cases, though.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#522

Post by etc-hosts »

robertlagrant wrote: post #393
jrflowers wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense. It is possible that Google search got better and not worse since it was taken over by the guy that used to run Yahoo search, in which case context would thoroughly vindicate the choice to promote SEO spam sites and make ads and search results nearly indistinguishable.

This is like that scene in the Simpsons where Lisa tries to teach Homer that correlation does not equal causation by telling him that a rock keeps bears away, and he responds by wanting to buy the rock. Correlation isn't causation. Don't just buy that someone is fully to blame because someone told you they were fully to blame.

Zitron spends paragraphs trying to convince the reader that Google Search sucks now mostly because of the efforts of one person.

I don't understand the correlation isn't causation argument in this context. If no one ever tried to convince others of their thesis, with numerous arguments, what's the point of writing?

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#523

Post by 1024core »

jokoon wrote: post #385
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…

simplicity is always the recipe for success, unfortunately, most engineers are drawn to complexity like moth to fire if they were unable to do some AB testing between a ML search and a non-ML search, they deserve their failure 100% there are not enough engineers blowing the whistle against ML

> most engineers are drawn to complexity like moth to fire

Unfortunately, Google evaluates employees by the complexity of their work. "Demonstrates complexity" is a checkbox on promo packets, from what I've heard.

Naturally, every engineer will try to over-complicate things just so they can get the raises and promos. You get what you value.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#524

Post by ajross »

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?

So... obviously SOAP was dumb[1], and lots of people saw that at the time. But SOAP was dumb in obvious ways, and it failed for obvious reasons, and really no one was surprised at all.

ML isn't like that. It's new. It's different. It may not succeed in the ways we expect; it may even look dumb in hindsight. But it absolutely represents a genuinely new paradigm for computing and is worth studying and understanding on that basis. We look back to SOAP and see something that might as well be forgotten. We'll never look back to the dawn of AI and forget what it was about.

[1] For anyone who missed that particular long-sunken boat, SOAP was a RPC protocol like any other. Yes, that's really all it was. It did nothing special, or well, or that you couldn't do via trivially accessible alternative means. All it had was the right adjective ("XML" in this case) for the moment. It's otherwise forgettable, and forgotten.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#525

Post by ethbr1 »

fragmede wrote: post #519
munificent wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

We get it, you're skeptical of the current hype bubble. But that's one helluva no true Scotsman you've got going on there. Because a true builder, one that deeply loves building things wouldn't want to use text to create an image. Anyone who does is a business type or an executive producer. A true builder wouldn't think about what they want to do in such nasty thing as words. Creation comes from the soul, which we al…

> Using English, instead of C, to get a computer to do something doesn't turn you into a beaurocrat any more than using Python or Javascript instead does.

If one uses English in as precise a way as one crafts code, sure.

Most people do not (cannot?) use English that precisely.

There's little technical difference between using English and using code to create...

... but there is a huge difference on the other side of the keyboard, as lots of people know English, including people who aren't used to fully thinking through a problem and tackling all the corner cases.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#526

Post by FullstakBlogger »

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.

15 years ago, I used to keep many tabs of youtube videos open just because the "related" section was full of interesting videos. Then each of those videos had interesting relations. There was so much to explore before hitting a dead-end and starting somewhere else.

Now the "related" section is gone in favor of "recommended" samey clickbait garbage. The relations between human interests are too esoteric for current ML classifiers to understand. The old Markov-chain style works with the human, and lets them recognize what kind of space they've gotten themselves into, and make intelligent decisions, which ultimately benefit the system.

If you judge the system by the presence of negative outliers, rather than positive, then I can understand seeing no difference.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#527

Post by 1024core »

distances wrote: post #454
deepakarora3 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been using Google search for many years now and for the past few years have been wondering if the search has really gone bad or is it just me. I remember the days when searching for something used to bring up a few sponsored links separately and I could go page after page with different results on each page allowing me to access a wealth of information and extending my reach deep into the internet. Now, it is…

Kagi is that alternative I suppose, at least for those who use search enough to pay for it. HN has a lot of testimonials on how good Kagi is.

Until Kagi becomes popular. Then the same "SEO" bullshit that plagues Google will bite Kagi too. Right now Kagi is too small to make it worthwhile to spend resources "optimizing" for it.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#528

Post by makeitdouble »

Certhas wrote: post #300
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies this size die several years before the body hits the floor. They're dead when everyone starts to hate them and someone says "no, look how much money they're making, they're fine." That's the fatal blow, because they think they're fine, and keep doing the things that make everyone hate them. At that point you're just waiting for someone else to offer an alternative. Then people prefer the alternative because…

Any examples of this actually playing out with a company as established as Google? You can read comments like this on many companies... Microsoft (70B$ income), Meta (40B$), Oracle (8.5B$), IBM(7.5B$), SAP (6B$), yet none of them seem to ever actually enter the predicted death spiral. And the internet isn't new anymore. There is no vast landscape of unexplored new technological possibilities, and no garage start up w…

Microsoft and Meta reinvented themselves a few times over. At this point Windows is just an legacy business unit for instance, and Meta literally changed name to mark the turn.

Oracle, IBM and SAP have the advantage(?) of being heavily business focused from the start, and I don't see them ever die a natural death in our lifetimes. As long as they have the money to outbribe the competition they'll be there, and it will require a small miracle to break that loop.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#529

Post by barnabyjones »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #488
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.

YT Shorts itself is kind of a mystery to me. It's an objective degradation of the interface; why on earth would I want to use it? It doesn't even allow adjustment of the playback speed or scrubbing!

I think there is a large demo of people now who actually prefer to watch videos in portrait.
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