ChatGPT is my default now basically.. almost anything I search for is technical in nature and it gives me the proper result almost all the time. Even if it's setting up a dedicated server for a game etc
Caveat - it can't provide current information.
The man who killed Google Search?
671–680 of 939 posts
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#672Ex-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…
I don't know, but Youtube seems to have a more solid algorithm. I'm typically not subscribed to any channel, yet the content I want to watch does find me reasonably well. Of course, heavily promoted material also, but I just click "not interested in channel" and it disappears for a while. And I still get some meaningful recommendations if I watch a video in a certain topic. Youtube has its problems, of course, but in the end I can't complain.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#673Earlier 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.
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.
Just because you're an atheist doesn't mean you won't engage with religious content though. YT rewards all kinds of engagement not just positive ones. I.e. if you leave a snide remark or just a dislike on a religious short that still counts as engagement.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#674Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
I have no experience with Tesla and their self-driving features. When you wrote "chill" mode, I assume it means the lowest level of aggressiveness. Did you contact Tesla to complain the car is still too aggressive? There should be a mode that tries to drive exactly the speed limit, where reasonable -- not over or under.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#675Why 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?
Kagi gives you significant control over how their search engine works for you. One of the options is to search non-commercial sites.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#676Earlier 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, who exactly looked at the 70% accuracy of "live automatic closed captioning" and decided Great! ship it boys!
My guess: They are hoping user feedback will help them to fix the bugs later -- iterate to 99%. Plus, they are probably under unrealistic deadlines to delivery _something_.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#677Earlier 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.
It all depends on your use case but a lot of people seem to be in agreement it fell off in the mid to late 10s and the suggestions became noticeably worse.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#678Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wil…
The one thing that has kept Microsoft afloat is their business oriented part. They are deeply entrenched in any company that needs to use Office and only ever hires Windows admins who won't even look beyond Windows. That is pretty much every non tech small to medium company. When things were shifting to the cloud they were smart enough to make sure it would be their cloud, locking customers even deeper into their own technology.
Anything else they do is a bonus.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#679Earlier 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.
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.
> Or when they didn't show 3 unskippable ads in a 5 minute video.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#680Its always the management consultants and finance guys that ruin things ...