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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#541

Post by satvikpendem »

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…

As someone who worked in rules-based ML before the recent transformers (and unsupervised learning in general) hype, rules-based approaches were laughably bad. Only now are nondeterministic approaches to ML surpassing human level tasks, something which would not have been feasible, perhaps not even possible in a finite amount of human development time, via human-created rules.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#542

Post by lupire »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #475
dekhn wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that Google fire all the engineers who work on Cloud? That would... be a very interesting business decision, likely closing any door for them working with enterprise in the future. Here's a few more realistic changes that Alphabet could make: - shut down X - shut down Verily - sell calico or shut it down if no buyers - sell Fiber or shut it down if no buyers - shut down Intrinsic, Wing, and all the…

I was suggesting that they fire all the engineers that work on things that don't make money. It was only last quarter that Cloud actually made a profit. That said, I think you make a reasonable restructuring case; Now you just have to figure out how to get leadership to buy in and execute on that plan. In my experience two things work against that. 1) If it isn't their idea that don't believe it will do any good and…

But Google seems to be doing decently well compared to blekko and Watson?

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#543

Post by someguydave »

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.

relevant to the grandparent’s point: I am demoing FSD in my Tesla and what I find really annoying is that the old Autopilot allowed you to select a maximum speed that the car will drive. Well, on “FSD” apparently you have no choice but to hand full longitudinal control over to the model.

I am probably the 0.01% of Tesla drivers who have the computer chime when I exceed the speed limit by some offset. Very regularly, even when FSD is in “chill” mode, the model will speed by +7-9 mph on most roads. (I gotta think that the young 20 somethings who make up Tesla's audience also contributed their poor driving habits to Tesla's training data set) This results in constant beeps, even as the FSD software violates my own criteria for speed warning.

So somehow the FSD feature becomes "more capable" while becoming much less legible to the human controller. I think this is a bad thing generally but it seems to be the fad today.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#544

Post by satvikpendem »

pbar wrote: post #533
fragmede wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Was it intentional to reply with another no true Scotsman in turn here?

Yeah, I was also reading their response and was confused. "Creation comes from the soul, which we all know machines, and business people, don't have" ... "far deeper than you'll ever know", I mean, come on.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#545

Post by lupire »

sumanthvepa wrote: post #537

Full Disclosure: Prabhakar Raghavan was my skip-level manager at Yahoo! and I'd known of him well before that, from my days at IBM Research. The author says very few people knew who Raghavan was. Clearly he isn't a computer scientist. It is more an indication of the ignorance of the writer than anything else. Raghavan's contributions to Computer Science and, Search in particular, which were made long before he joined…

My favorite thing about McKinsey is that they are hated for 2 reasons:

1. Allegedly ruining companies with mismanagement.

2. Making companies people don't like too successful.

That's more an indictment of the business skills of the critics than McKinsey.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#546

Post by Narishma »

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.

I do remember when Youtube would show more than 2 search results per page on my 23" display.

Or when they would show more than 3 results before spamming irrelevant videos.

Or when they didn't show 3 unskippable ads in a 5 minute video.

Or when they had a dislike button so you would know to avoid wasting time on low quality videos.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#547

Post by applied_heat »

arromatic wrote: post #79
dhosek wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of AI ruining Google search, https://bsky.app/profile/dahosek.bsky.social/post/3kqm25jwsf...

That's crazy.

The result is still available it appears to come from this page https://www.mapquest.com/travel/destinations/landmarks/place...

Maybe that page is AI generated but Google is displaying a relevant although incorrect result

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#548

Post by w10-1 »

Leaving aside the tone and accepting the facts at face value, this only shows that Prabhakar was in charge when search failed at Yahoo and then at Google.

Business and technical decisions are often made by incompetent people with adverse incentives; they are sustained in their decisions and positions by larger forces and by avoiding consequences. Attacking specific (useful) idiots is less helpful than identifying how the organization evolved away from good vetting, good feedback, and incentive alignment -- the "eternal vigilance" required for the freedom to create at scale.

Please look past the heroes and villains to identify what's enabling them, particularly if you have access and care about the organization or its impacts.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#549

Post by sundalia »

wepple wrote: post #392
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. But what do you expect when the boss comes from McKinsey? Not only does the place teach a particular skillset, it also selects for very peculiar employees. It would be downright weird if an ex-McKinsey employee were anything like a decent engineer.

Are there known examples of ex-McKinsey employees that are generally considered a force for good in general?

Jeremy Howard comes to mind. The sheer good that fast.ai brought as free quality educational material feels enough for "good in general" :)

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#550

Post by ryeights »

sumanthvepa wrote: post #537

Full Disclosure: Prabhakar Raghavan was my skip-level manager at Yahoo! and I'd known of him well before that, from my days at IBM Research. The author says very few people knew who Raghavan was. Clearly he isn't a computer scientist. It is more an indication of the ignorance of the writer than anything else. Raghavan's contributions to Computer Science and, Search in particular, which were made long before he joined…

The author called Sundar a McKinsey consultant, not Raghavan.

>A quick note: I used “management consultant” there as a pejorative. While he exhibits all the same bean-counting, morally-unguided behaviors of a management consultant, from what I can tell Raghavan has never actually worked in that particular sector of the economy.

It also seems like a stretch to say that Yahoo's former "Chief Strategy Officer" had no influence on Yahoo's management direction.

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