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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#851

Post by astrange »

rvba wrote: post #719
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…

They probably optimize your engagement NOW - with clickbaity videos. So their KPIs show big increases. But in long term you realize that what you watch is garbage and stop watching alltogether. Someone probably changed the engine that shows videos for you - exactly as with search.

I have to say, all my YouTube recommendations are good and they're rarely clickbait. If you sign out they're pretty bad though.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#852

Post by astrange »

rugina wrote: post #753
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…

I think NM translation was broken all along. Not in the neural network part but in choosing the right answer. https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.398.pdf

Since LLMs are loosely based on NM models, it seems research on newer sampling methods like Mirostat might help here.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#853

Post by astrange »

otikik wrote: post #752
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…

Perhaps using a ML to craft the deterministic rules and then have a human go over them is the sweet spot.

Rules could never work for translation unless the incoming text was formatted in a specific way. Eg, you just couldn't translate a conversation transcript in a pro-drop language like Japanese into English sentence-by-sentence, because the original text just wouldn't have sentences in it. So you need some "intelligence" to know who is saying what.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#854

Post by justinbaker84 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #568
lupire wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That it is, but a more apt comparison would be Duck Duck Go which was a contemporary of Blekko and definitely out performed relative to Blekko's success. DDG still going strong and even buying TV ads, so yeah. That said, how Blekko and Watson ended up squandering good technology in search of something else is also an interesting learning experience/tale.

I agree with everything you are saying, but the stock price is up 6x over the last 10 years and revenue is still growing 13% a year so nobody at google is going to listen to any of this.

Basically ad dollars have continued to transition from old media to digital media over the last decade+ and that mass migration has created enough revenue to cover up all of Google's core problems.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#855

Post by fuzztester »

snickerer wrote: post #705
throwaway2037 wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or when they didn't show 3 unskippable ads in a 5 minute video. On desktop Chrome, a modern ad-blocking browser extension will block 100% of YouTube adverts. I haven't watched one, literally, in years. I don't watch YouTube from a mobile phone, but I think the situation is different. (Can anyone else comment about the mobile experience?)

On Android devices I use the app PipePipe to avoid the YouTube ad hell. I recommend it. I also use Firefox for Android, which has Addon support. Ublock Origin works on the phone and disables a a lot of the ad horror.

>PipePipe

It feels a bit funny asking this, since we're talking about Google (i.e. YouTube), but did you mean ;) PipeTube? I know there is a PeerTube too.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#856

Post by interstice »

KetoManx64 wrote: post #841
octopusRex wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a Reverse Google search that will weed out the garbage.

https://kagi.com/ de-prioritizes SEO ad sites and also lets you blacklist sites from your search reaults. Never going back to google after trying it

I’ve been toggling between Kagi and Perplexity, can honestly say I don’t miss google search (still use maps though)

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#857

Post by kelseydh »

eitland wrote: post #823
baryphonic wrote: post #762

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't responding to the article; I was responding to the claim that Google's results are bad because of all the SEO. It's a claim I've heard from Google apologists including some people I know at Google. I think it's nonsense both for the reasons I stated and for the reasons enumerated in the article.

You are totally correct I think. This isn't about what is possible. It is about Google not wanting to say goodbye to the sweet dollars from spammy sites. Otherwise making the probably number one requested feature, a personal block list, wouldn't have been impossible for a company with so many bright minds. I mean: little bootstrapped Kagi had it either from the beginning or at least since shortly after they launched.…

Google's search results are just bad. For example, search: "Does Quebec have an NHL team?"

The results suggest that Quebec does not have an NHL team, because it confuses the province of Quebec with Quebec City. Montreal, in Quebec, has the Montreal Canadiens and this isn't mentioned in the search results at all.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#858

Post by CatWChainsaw »

dpkirchner wrote: post #786
exodust wrote: post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Musk is objectively a bad man, though. Remember when he called someone a "pedo guy" because that someone dares to disagree with his proposal for saving trapped people? Inexcusable.

On the bright side, he got away with it because he managed to sell a court on the idea that it was just an endearing nickname, so now we can call also Musk a pedo guy without fear of legal reprisal.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#859

Post by dekhn »

barfbagginus wrote: post #624
dekhn wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the people who think it's goofy may have actually put some thought behind their statements and have good reasons? For example, I find the oath as written to be effectively impossible to implement- it's very lofty sounding, but depends greatly on the nature of "honesty": "I shall participate in none but honest enterprises" Who defines honesty in this context? What if two engineers disagree in their interpretat…

Wait so because different people have different concepts of honesty you reject the concept of honesty wholesale? Like surely you have some concept of honesty that you strive for... Unless you're like a sociopath? I'm not saying it would be wrong to be a sociopath or to genuinely have no concept of an honest enterprise. I'm just trying to understand if you are truly amoral here, and that's why you can't formulate the…

I stopped reading at "I have asked GPT4". Write your own words.
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