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Google Memory Loss

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Re: Google Memory Loss

#151

Post by dingo_bat »

whatusername wrote: post #137
fyfy18 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can one up that: I was living in Dubai a few years ago and have a number of photos of fancy cars I could never even dream of affording. If I search for “Lamborghini” or “Rolls Royce” it gives me the photos of those cars. I’ve never tagged them and I’m not an Android user, so they aren’t reading my messages. https://imgur.com/caz8D2Y I even have four photos I took at night, in burst mode, as a Bughatti Veyron zoomed…

iOS photos app does this as well.

Samsung gallery app does this as well. You can even search for stuff like "selfie".

Re: Google Memory Loss

#152

Post by userbinator »

dannyw wrote: post #115
userbinator wrote: post #93

I've noticed this many times too, particularly recently, and I call it "Google Alzheimer's" --- what was once a very powerful search engine that could give you thousands (yes, I've tried exhausting its result pages many times, and used to have much success finding the perfect site many dozens of pages deep in the results) of pages containing nothing but the exact words and phrase you search for has seemingly degraded…

I'm glad I'm not alone in thinking this way. I wish I could use the Google of 10 years ago. Pre-personalization, pre-deep-learning RankBrain, just the reliable and consistent search engine where complex queries will return the result I want, if it is there. Today, if I'm searching for something unpopular or specific, I usually get frustrated. You would expect the opposite to happen as the size of the web should incre…

RankBrain

Amusingly enough one of the definitions of "rank" is, according to Wiktionary, "having a very strong and bad taste or odor"... as in the smell of a decaying brain. How fitting. I almost wonder if it's deliberate. If they called it BrainRank (like PageRank), the adjectival meaning seems to be emphasised less.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#153

Post by wahnfrieden »

userbinator wrote: post #93

I've noticed this many times too, particularly recently, and I call it "Google Alzheimer's" --- what was once a very powerful search engine that could give you thousands (yes, I've tried exhausting its result pages many times, and used to have much success finding the perfect site many dozens of pages deep in the results) of pages containing nothing but the exact words and phrase you search for has seemingly degraded…

It’s a bit funny and sad how Google has both managed to seem overly clever to the point of being clumsily useless, and at the same time, continues to offer the original search experience that people pine for but no one knows or can be bothered with: add “intext:” before keywords and it’s the experience you’re wishing for.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#154

Post by hartator »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #153
userbinator wrote: post #93

I've noticed this many times too, particularly recently, and I call it "Google Alzheimer's" --- what was once a very powerful search engine that could give you thousands (yes, I've tried exhausting its result pages many times, and used to have much success finding the perfect site many dozens of pages deep in the results) of pages containing nothing but the exact words and phrase you search for has seemingly degraded…

It’s a bit funny and sad how Google has both managed to seem overly clever to the point of being clumsily useless, and at the same time, continues to offer the original search experience that people pine for but no one knows or can be bothered with: add “intext:” before keywords and it’s the experience you’re wishing for.

Never heard about that before; thanks for sharing.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#155

Post by damonsauve »

In May of 1998, I published a review of Lou Reed's "Perfect Night" by Kevin McGowin, and when I google (in FF private mode, as if that helps) "lou reed kevin mcgowin" it comes up #1.

If I google "lou reed perfect night review", I stopped looking after page 17 of results. There's just too many results.

If I google /"lou reed" "perfect night" review/ with quotes as you see them, the review I published is on page 2, result #3.

I feel your pain, but, as someone who started publishing content in 1995, I don't see Google as having a memory problems.

My pain points are related to how Google crawls my content, my sitemaps, and how the two seem completely independent of each other.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#156

Post by Puer »

fyfy18 wrote: post #124
Puer wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile their image recognition gets better and better. For those of you who use Google Photos backup, try a keyword image search in Google Drive sometime of your untagged photos ("beach", "face," etc.) You'll be creepily surprised on what Google is indexing, even against what they claim they don't (try some sketchier words).

I can one up that: I was living in Dubai a few years ago and have a number of photos of fancy cars I could never even dream of affording. If I search for “Lamborghini” or “Rolls Royce” it gives me the photos of those cars. I’ve never tagged them and I’m not an Android user, so they aren’t reading my messages. https://imgur.com/caz8D2Y I even have four photos I took at night, in burst mode, as a Bughatti Veyron zoomed…

All modern gallery apps have some rudimentary photo recognition, but I haven't found any but Google's that will allow you to search terms like "topless/nude" and find accurate results. I would never store photos like that with Google, but I've confirmed it works, and with how many promotions Google has run offering free photo storage with their latest phones there are undoubtedly thousands and thousands of unwitting users who have sensitive photos not just automatically backed up in some Google server, but categorized. Just imagine if these servers were to be hacked and that information was conveniently pre-arranged for extortion.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#157

Post by dingo_bat »

I've switched completely to bing for a few reasons:

1) Bing is much faster to load

2) Bing doesn't muck up the links. I can right click->copy and get the actual link. With google you get a long incantation that doesn't tell you what site it goes to.

3) Bing handles a few things better, eg, "$500 in ₹" works in bing but not in google.

However, when I need local results, or results about something ongoing, Google is the undisputed king. Nobody else even comes close.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#158

Post by hartator »

visarga wrote: post #134

Google search team, I wouldn't want to be in your place today. My frustration with Google Search is it's degree of protection against bots. If you, Google, can spider everything webmasters post, why can't webmasters spider everything Google returns? In my case, I would like to use Google search to bootstrap a few minor search engine indexes and collect data for NLP projects. But the free version is too limited and th…

It’s exactly what we do: https://serpapi.com

Shoot me an email, I’ll hook you up with 1,000 credits. It’s funny one of my first use was from ML as well, but it end up being used mostly for SEO and web marketing.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#159

Post by AndrewKemendo »

fixermark wrote: post #135
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed the same and if you look across internet and search properties it's trending the same way. I'm not certain yet, but I think it has to do with systems relying more and more on the the system giving a high weighting on popular or frequent searches. In other words, these systems are filtering content by how frequent they are searched and annealing returns which have low frequency. This makes sense from a ma…

I think the interesting question is: if you optimize the design to return rarely-accessed results reliably, what feature that we take for granted does that design sacrifice?

To me it's obviously speed. Reducing the search space or cache or however you want to define it is the best way to increase speed.

When milliseconds count that's important.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#160

Post by knight17 »

lloeki wrote: post #111
amerine wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is basically my exact experience. Once a long time ago I made DDG my default browser and it stuck. I really like using “!g” to switch quickly to google. If my search bar DDG search doesn’t return satisfactory results, I hit my address/search bar key (cmd+l for me), press left arrow/start-of-line key, type “!g “ and hit return. That gives me a google result page quicker than the time it would take to reach the mo…

Tip: while in your case you still have to type something to get rid of the selection, you don't have to put !g at the beginning, anywhere in the query will do. I mostly put it at the end.

Instead of clicking you can use / or h to focus on the search field, press [right] arrow key and your preferred bang (!g) to open in google, no need to add any space to the last word (as you said).

https://duck.co/help/features/keyboard-shortcuts

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