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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#651

Post by ineedaj0b »

jatins wrote: post #647

I think the HN crowd loves the attack on management consultant types. However, this reads like an over exaggerated Fox news story, trying to create a hero vs villain narrative, written solely for the purpose of personal attack on a person

When I was younger I thought heroes and villains were real, then I got older and realized heroes and villains are never clear cut (is it even a useful distinction?) - then I got older and realized I was right all along, heroes and villains existed all along.

Evil is real. But so too is good. You’re in the middle stage

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#652

Post by Zuiii »

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...

And yet, two search engines failed under his tenure. Maybe those who can't do should stick to teaching.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#653

Post by chaostheory »

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.

Totally agree. His post loses credibility when he turns it into a class war instead of just focusing on why search quality was destroyed.

Still, I haven’t read this account from anywhere else. Everyone else missed the story.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#654

Post by indus »

Why is no one working on an exclusion algorithm that excludes search results, such as:

- do not show me results that have advertising in it

- do not show me results whose content ranks high on SEO score

- do not show me results content hidden behind paywall or login

This was common during 2001 when toolbar or browser plugins would rerank the results based on several criteria--why is this no longer a thing now?

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#655

Post by Anotheroneagain »

satvikpendem wrote: post #541
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…

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.

The thing is that AI is completely unpredictable without human curated results. Stable diffusion made me relent and admit that AI is here now for real, but I no longer think so. It's more like artificial schizophrenia. It does have some results, often plausible seeming results, but it's not real.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#656

Post by Zuiii »

taf2 wrote: post #567
eric_khun wrote: post #562

I guess 2024, revenue is still prioritized over search quality? Anyone found better alternative to Google Search, even paid?

ChatGPT is much better…

hell, even local LLMs are better - and I'm talking original mixral-quality here, not the capable models that were released a few days ago.

My workflow now for "Google-grade" queries is to query a LLM and then use search to verify and look up additional information. DDG-grade queries still get handled by duckduckgo.

Google looks like it's circling the drain from where I'm standing.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#657

Post by bergen »

madcoderme wrote: post #638
barbariangrunge wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine learning or not, seo spam sort of killed search. It’s more or less impossible to find real sites by interesting humans these days. Almost all results are Reddit, YouTube, content marketing, or seo spam. And google’s failure here killed the old school blogosphere (medium and substack only slightly count), personal websites, and forums Same is happening to YouTube as well. Feels like it’s nothing but promoters…

It's like "Do some SEO magic and Tada!" And who forgot the recent Reddit story.

Could you link it please? I have unfortunately no idea what you are referencing

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#658

Post by MattyRad »

Terr_ wrote: post #518
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds a lot like Kodak. I remember running into Kodak engineers, at an event in the 1990s, and they were all complaining about the same thing. They were digital engineers, and they were complaining that film people kept sabotaging their projects. Kodak invented the digital camera. They should have ruled the roost (at least, until the iPhone came out). Instead, they imploded, almost overnight. The film part was…

I'm not a Steve Jobs fan, but one business-quote I do like: "If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will." In other words, it could have been better for Kodak as a whole if they allowed their digital-arm to compete more with their film-arm, so that as the market shifted they'd at least be riding the wave rather than under it.

I'm also not a Steve Jobs fan, and this reminds me of how Flash died[1].

The Flash Renaissance was the counter-era to the search despair era we currently find ourselves in.

In the same vein as Kodak, I wonder what the alternate timeline would look like where Adobe cannibalized native apps.

[1] https://youtu.be/65crLKNQR0E?si=mXPgXxlMRxU-xjcu&t=2472

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#659

Post by dazc »

freetinker wrote: post #640
barbariangrunge wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine learning or not, seo spam sort of killed search. It’s more or less impossible to find real sites by interesting humans these days. Almost all results are Reddit, YouTube, content marketing, or seo spam. And google’s failure here killed the old school blogosphere (medium and substack only slightly count), personal websites, and forums Same is happening to YouTube as well. Feels like it’s nothing but promoters…

A bit chicken-and-egg. Another perspective: Google’s system incentivizes SEO spam. Search for a while hasn’t been about searching the web as much as it has been about commerce. It taps commercial intent and serves ads. It is now an ad engine; no longer a search engine.

Best exercise bike articles, and such, are what lots of people people actually search for. There is no incentive to provide quality work which answers these queries hence the abundance of spam and ads.

If you want to purchase consumer products at your own expense and offer an impartial opinion on each of them then you will have no problem getting ranked highly on google. You will lose a lot of money doing so, however, and will also be plagiarized to death in a month. The sites you want to be rid of will outrank you for your own content, I have been there and have the t-shirt.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#660

Post by FullstakBlogger »

Aerroon wrote: post #626
FullstakBlogger wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The relations between human interests are too esoteric for current ML classifiers to understand. I would go further and say that it is impossible . Human interests are contextual and change over time, sometimes in the span of minutes. Imagine that all the videos on the internet would be on one big video website. You would watch car videos, movie trailers, listen to music, and watch porn in one place. Could the algo…

>I would go further and say that it is impossible. Human interests are contextual and change over time, sometimes in the span of minutes.

Theres a general problem in the tech world where people seem to inexplicably disregard the issue of non-reducibility. The point about the algorithm lacking access to necessary external information is good.

A dictionary app obviously can't predict what word I want to look up without simulating my mind-state. A set of probabilistic state transitions is at least a tangible shadow of typical human mind-states who make those transitions.

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