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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#691

Post by WA »

barfbagginus wrote: post #571
posix_monad wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs and astro-turfing have ruined that approach. I honestly don't know where to get information from these days.

Get information from llms after learning how to prompt them so that they won't hallucinate. Get information from searches by using llms to filter through the crap results. Get information from scientific papers on Google scholar and the arxiv. Get information from textbooks on the library Genesis. Get information from audiobooks on the audiobook Bay. Get information from peers trained in specific domains. Get informa…

> Get information from llms after learning how to prompt them so that they won't hallucinate.

That is structurally impossible, because LLMs have no mechanism of knowing which answer is right or wrong. Please provide information how this prompting is supposed to look like.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#692

Post by davidgerard »

romanhn wrote: post #368
davidgerard wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I notice you're not supplying that alleged "full context".

Obviously I don't have it. The author doesn't either and he is the one making the big claims. Regardless, I'm not arguing the extent to which Prabhakar Raghavan contributed to Google Search quality, I haven't even heard the name before this post. I'm not a fan of the writing style, that is all.

Then you're loudly making a non-claim that things in general can't be written. However, Zitron has literally supplied and linked his evidence.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#693

Post by jrflowers »

romanhn wrote: post #368
davidgerard wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I notice you're not supplying that alleged "full context".

Obviously I don't have it. The author doesn't either and he is the one making the big claims. Regardless, I'm not arguing the extent to which Prabhakar Raghavan contributed to Google Search quality, I haven't even heard the name before this post. I'm not a fan of the writing style, that is all.

This makes sense. If you personally don’t like someone’s writing style it means that they do not have the factual basis to back up their claims even if they provide them. The exonerating context exists because the meanness online cannot be both correct and not to your stylistic preference

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#694

Post by freeone3000 »

baryphonic wrote: post #619
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…

What I don't understand about this explanation is that Google's results are abysmal compared to e.g. DuckDuckGo or even Brave search. (I haven't tried Kagi, but people here rave about it as well.) Sure, all the SEO is targeting googlebot, but Google has by far more resources to mitigate SEO spam than just about anyone else. If this is the full explanation, couldn't Google just copy the strategies the (much) smaller r…

When a large search engine deranks spam websites, the spam websites complain! Loudly! With Google they have a big juicy target with lots of competing ventures for an antitrust case; no such luck for Kagi or DDG.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#695

Post by mrkeen »

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…

> 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 least contain it as much as possible, so that ranking stays debuggable and understandable by human search engineers.

There's a lot of ML hate here, and I simply don't see the alternative.

To rank documents, you need to score them. Google uses hundreds of scoring factors (I've seen the number 200 thrown about, but it doesn't really matter if it's 5 or 1000.) The point is you need to sum these weights up into a single number to find out if a result should be above or below another result.

So, if:

  - document A is 2Kb long, has 14 misspellings, matches 2 of your keywords exactly, matches a synonym of another of your keywords, and was published 18 months ago, and

  - document B is 3Kb long, has 7 misspellings, matches 1 of your keywords exactly, matches two more keywords by synonym, and was published 5 months ago
Are there any humans out there who want to write a traditional forward-algorithm to tell me which result is better?

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#696

Post by underdeserver »

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…

I've heard this argument again and again, but I never see any explanation as to why SEO is suddenly in the lead in this cat-and-mouse game. They were trying ever since Google got 90%+ market share.

I think it's more likely that Google stopped really caring.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#698

Post by raincole »

baryphonic wrote: post #619
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…

What I don't understand about this explanation is that Google's results are abysmal compared to e.g. DuckDuckGo or even Brave search. (I haven't tried Kagi, but people here rave about it as well.) Sure, all the SEO is targeting googlebot, but Google has by far more resources to mitigate SEO spam than just about anyone else. If this is the full explanation, couldn't Google just copy the strategies the (much) smaller r…

Have you read the article this thread is about?

To summarize it: Google reverted an algorithm that detected SEO spams in 2019.

(Note that I never work for Google and I don't know whether it's true or not. It's just what this article says.)

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#699

Post by raincole »

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…

But rule-based machine translation, from what I've seen, is just so bad. ChatGPT (and other LLM) is miles ahead. After seeing what ChatGPT does, I can't even call rule-based machine translation "tranlation".

*Disclaimer: as someone who's not an AI researcher but did quite some human translation works before.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#700

Post by exodust »

Willish42 wrote: post #536

> And in my next newsletter, I'm going to walk you through how a very specific kind of managerial mindset has poisoned Silicon Valley, making career failures unfathomably rich while your favorite tech products decay. I look forward to this one as somebody with a personally vested interest! More seriously, Ed Zitron's podcast Better Offline is great for those who enjoyed this article. I love his opinionated perspectiv…

A glowing endorsement, but deserved? Under "more like this" we find multiple hit-pieces by Zitron, hating on one man. You guessed it, Musk Bad Man.

Never heard of Zitron, but I won't be back. His bitterness is on verge of unhealthy obsession. Oddly word-stuffed rants, sounds like he spent ages constructing different ways to criticise Musk.

> "He has spent $44 billion in an attempt to make people love him only to be left with a very expensive way to make people angry at him every single day for the rest of his life."

So much hot air. "Fresh air of tech journalism," you say?

Another piece "Musk Is Dangerous To Society" I didn't read since the spoiler is kind of right there in the title!

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