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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#661

Post by simion314 »

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.

> For some comparisons they claim to be safer per mile than human drivers

They are lying with statistics, for the more challenging locations and conditions the AI will give up and let the human take over or the human notices something bad and takes over. So Tesla miles are miles are cherry picked and their data is not open so a third party can make real statistics and compare apples to apples.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#662

Post by beefnugs »

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, who exactly looked at the 70% accuracy of "live automatic closed captioning" and decided Great! ship it boys!

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#663

Post by tflol »

sn41 wrote: post #610

Great article. But the author can't be serious about no one knowing who Prabhakar Raghavan is. He is, for instance, the co-author of the definitive text on randomized algorithms [Motwani and Raghavan]. He has also been a well-respected database researcher for many years. In a previous avatar, Raghavan was a pure theoretical computer scientist. As a student, he won the best student paper in FOCS, the Machtey award, wh…

i love this person google scholar, it is important to this employee resume that the moment i click on this link i immediately see compact list of articles with brief introductions in plaintext. very easy to see everything and access exactly what i'm interested in almost immediately with a swift skim.

it sadly ironic how google search used to look like this, now it looks like bloated shit, this dude pushed ruining it, yet this guys resume google scholar page just looks so slick. wow what a slick, _compact_, looking resume page. wish google search looked like this

EDIT: we should advertise between the articles, missed revenue google scolar

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#664

Post by barfbagginus »

ddfs123 wrote: post #642
polyphaser wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this comment is a wonderful exercise in logic.

it sounds like they used gpt to wrote that

I didn't, that was my own analysis.

I just sound like I am GPT, because I am a pedantic autist that simply MUST split hairs about EVERYTHING

I honestly take it as a compliment

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#665

Post by Anotheroneagain »

taco_emoji wrote: post #125
neilv wrote: post #35

I think this article would work better if it were written entirely like textbook traditional investigative journalism. And less like the modern TV opinion personality, or the random strong-opinion Web comments in which many of the rest of us (including myself) indulge.

this is such a tiresome criticism. "this would be better if it were more boring" yeah okay and 4 people would read it and 2 of them would fall asleep during

I think that you unintentionally hit the core of why things are turning into crap.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#666

Post by barfbagginus »

skydhash wrote: post #643
barfbagginus wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used the duck duck Go for over 90% of my searches for The last 5 years, as a part of a boycott against Google. I estimate I have withheld about 75,000 searches from Google in that time, or about $8,000 in revenue. I fall back on Google only when absolutely necessary. And these days I almost never have to fall back on Google ( When I do fall back, the results are invariably crap. Quality has degraded so much that…

Maybe because when I started fiddling with computers (around 2009), I only got like 1 or 2 hours of internet connection (cybercafes), so I had to find books and other types of offline information, I’ve never relied on Google Search or others that much. Even today, I treat them more like a bookmark database. If I can’t remember some specific terms to get to the page I need, I don’t even bother searching for it. I’ve a…

Re: link and PDF hoarding

Consider using zotero to expand and organize your library of references, if you don't already use it or something like it. It does great for PDFs, but it also captures and stores local copies of websites. Also lets you create bibliographies.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#667

Post by pkphilip »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #611
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…

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…

[flagged]

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#668

Post by choppaface »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #611
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…

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…

SEO Spam didn't kill search so much as Google failed to retain Matt Cutts or replicate his community involvement https://www.searchenginejournal.com/matt-cutts-resigns-googl...

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#669

Post by disqard »

bane wrote: post #590
ChuckMcM wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really glad the article came out though, it fills in some gaps that I was fairly confident about but didn't have anything other than my sense of the players and their actions to back up what I thought was going on. I and a number of other people left in 2010. I went on to work at Blekko which was trying to 'fix' search using a mix of curation and ranking. When I left, this problem of CPC's (the amount Google got…

ChuckMcM, I just wanted to say, I really appreciate the long view you bring to HN discussions. When you've been in tech for a few decades you start to see predictable patterns. History may not repeat, but it often rhymes.

Piggybacking on this to also express my appreciation. If/when you write a memoir someday, it would be a valuable historical record. If not, your hn comments are a wonderful corpus too :)

Thank you for sharing your experiences, Chuck!

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#670

Post by robertlagrant »

barfbagginus wrote: post #602
robertlagrant wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who talks about class traitors, or almost any sort of traitor, outside of a real war, is deeply misguided on this point.

Read some marx. There is a whole analysis and theory behind class traitorship, it's causes and effects. You can't be ignorant of something as fundamental as marxian theory in this context, and then act as if it's the author making the faux pas...

Sorry I think you've made a lot of this up. Where did I say I was ignorant of something, and where did I say anything about a faux pas?
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