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You Will Not Understand This

stanleylieber.com

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Re: You Will Not Understand This

#161

Post by dhimes »

hzay wrote: post #74
jdietrich wrote: post #36

>Search quality is no longer a core competency of Google, the Internet’s premiere search engine. For example: Two people type the same search string, each receives different results. While I sympathise with the general anti-social-media stance, it's clear from this phrase that OP does not understand the most basic elements of how internet services function at scale. Of course Google serves different results to differ…

Pretty sure OP gets the idea of personalization. Google's personalization is like piling up chairs in order to reach the moon. It's nowhere near its promise of reading the user's mind and helping him. Instead its present implementation simply stops your world view from expanding in any direction, by serving you the same stuff that you knew over and over again. This is not personalization. This is a child's imitation…

hopefully typing

    &pws=0
at the end of the query still turns off the personalization.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#162

Post by psyc »

jdietrich wrote: post #146
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting how this entire thread was spawned and derailed by the original essay being a bit too imprecise. You all are taking this one argument out of context. He wasn't talking about restaurants. But everyone here is. Obviously restaurants should be personalized. But no one was saying they shouldn't. You have to take the argument in the essay and try to think of the most persuasive possible interpretation. Is…

As far as I can tell, your essential complaint is that Google is sometimes providing results that are too relevant . You're OK with Google doing some amount of personalisation, but there's a line that they shouldn't cross. How do you distinguish between "good" and "bad" personalisation at scale? How do their algorithms know what should and shouldn't be personalised? Do humans even agree on where to draw the line? Goo…

Sometimes you just want the top results by PageRank, like in 1998 when Google was miraculous. I don't know how to get that anymore. I want information from out in the world - I generally don't want the contents of my own head reflected back at me.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#163

Post by astura »

nludd wrote: post #53
jdietrich wrote: post #36

>Search quality is no longer a core competency of Google, the Internet’s premiere search engine. For example: Two people type the same search string, each receives different results. While I sympathise with the general anti-social-media stance, it's clear from this phrase that OP does not understand the most basic elements of how internet services function at scale. Of course Google serves different results to differ…

>If I search for "takeaway pizza", I'm going to be pretty annoyed if the results are generated using PageRank alone, with no weighting for local relevance. Google "takeaway pizza [place of residence]". >If an American searches for "cricket", they almost certainly mean the cellular provider or the insect rather than the sport Google "cricket provider" or "cricket insect". >if a British person makes the same search, th…

>Google "takeaway pizza [place of residence]".

This isn't nearly as straightforward as it sounds. It may be the pizza places in all the bordering towns deliver to your location but the pizza places that are located in your town are all on the other side and don't deliver to your location. And you don't even know the names of the border towns. There are places where the pizza place address doesn't match up with the town name because that town doesn't have a post office.

It's usually just not straightforward.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#164

Post by KozmoNau7 »

sametmax wrote: post #126
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A.K.A."It works on my machine". Lucky you. It has worked flawlessly on multiple PCs, multiple operating systems, multiple email clients. It's my primary way of using Gmail and Gcal, through Evolution on Linux Mint. It even worked perfectly on my ancient Sony-Ericsson feature phone's terrible built-in email client, back when I still used that hunk of shit. There are no "obscure values" to change, just a completely o…

That sounds a lot like the people saying "wow, you knew you were going on that part of town with that sexy dress and you got harass. Blames on you.". Errr... no.

The terms and conditions were clearly laid out for you when you signed up. Google was already well-known for being primarily an advertising company. It was well-known that Google implemented scanning of all mails, both for spam filtering and for advertising purposes.

This is not a "could have, would have, should have" type situation. You deliberately and unequivocally agreed to terms and conditions that very specifically lay out what Google does when it comes to the handling of your mail.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#165

Post by musage »

jdietrich wrote: post #146
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting how this entire thread was spawned and derailed by the original essay being a bit too imprecise. You all are taking this one argument out of context. He wasn't talking about restaurants. But everyone here is. Obviously restaurants should be personalized. But no one was saying they shouldn't. You have to take the argument in the essay and try to think of the most persuasive possible interpretation. Is…

As far as I can tell, your essential complaint is that Google is sometimes providing results that are too relevant . You're OK with Google doing some amount of personalisation, but there's a line that they shouldn't cross. How do you distinguish between "good" and "bad" personalisation at scale? How do their algorithms know what should and shouldn't be personalised? Do humans even agree on where to draw the line? Goo…

> As far as I can tell, your essential complaint is that Google is sometimes providing results that are too relevant.

My takeaway is that the whole thread of the first comment should be collapsed, which is usual for HN. Important topics get ignored or derailed.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#166

Post by marcosdumay »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #150
jdietrich wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, your essential complaint is that Google is sometimes providing results that are too relevant . You're OK with Google doing some amount of personalisation, but there's a line that they shouldn't cross. How do you distinguish between "good" and "bad" personalisation at scale? How do their algorithms know what should and shouldn't be personalised? Do humans even agree on where to draw the line? Goo…

pg once joked that Google's philosophy on search is the same as Scientology: What's true is true for you. In our case, I just think it's interesting that my webdev friend was trying to ascertain truth about the world -- "is she associated with the project she worked on?" -- and the answer came up "yes!" for her even though it was "Nope" for the rest of the world. Sure, it's an interesting question of which tradeoffs…

> To be clear, if Google stayed how it currently is, I'd have no problem at all. I'm just worried that google can go from strange to malicious at the flip of a switch.

What evidence do you even have that they didn't go malicious? And how could you gather such evidence if you don't have any?

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#167

Post by marcosdumay »

Daycrawler wrote: post #139
lentil_soup wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with languages. It's incredibly annoying when pages try to guess what language I want by my location, I rather be asked. Same with marrying the language to the country, if I want to buy a flight from Germany, don't change the page to German!

No need to be asked. The browser sends the Accept-Language header depending on the language set in the browser's settings, which defaults to the OS language for the browser installed by default (other browsers will ask at installation). In other words this header is the most reliable piece of information to know what language the user wants. Somehow big tech decided IP geolocation is more reliable.

Asking is more reliable. There is no reason for a site to believe it should translate stuff for me just because my browser's interface is in another language.

Do use the header, but always be open for the user changing the language too.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#168

Post by kome »

zaarn wrote: post #58

I haven't used Facebook in well over a decade and I'm not even 25 years old yet. I don't think I missed out on much. (Though Facebook tried to get me back in not too long ago by claiming somebody was hacking my account which I had deleted... they also demanded a passport)

Perhaps you didn't delete the account, but just deactivated.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#169

Post by chakalakasp »

jdietrich wrote: post #36

>Search quality is no longer a core competency of Google, the Internet’s premiere search engine. For example: Two people type the same search string, each receives different results. While I sympathise with the general anti-social-media stance, it's clear from this phrase that OP does not understand the most basic elements of how internet services function at scale. Of course Google serves different results to differ…

Yep. The way I remember it is Google saved email. Email was great until there was money in gaming it, and it went to hell shortly thereafter. Gmail was the first consumer facing service I ever found that just magically made SPAM go away while retaining all the emails you wanted to see. Everything before that was just a blackholing with a list maintained by a hodgepodge of RBL maintainers hanging out on news.admin.net-abuse.email and shaking your impotent fists at that 20 or so daily SPAMS that snuck through anyway. You literally threw away email addresses because they were on too many SPAM lists and became impossible to use any more.

Google has made some missteps, but they've arguably done more to change the world and society than almost any other company in the last 50 years. They made the internet accessible to the masses.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#170

Post by marcosdumay »

akerro wrote: post #97
jdietrich wrote: post #36

>Search quality is no longer a core competency of Google, the Internet’s premiere search engine. For example: Two people type the same search string, each receives different results. While I sympathise with the general anti-social-media stance, it's clear from this phrase that OP does not understand the most basic elements of how internet services function at scale. Of course Google serves different results to differ…

>Of course Google serves different results to different users, that's why they're the market leader in search. The entire job of a search engine is to return relevant results yea, yea yea... I moved to DDG when Google stopped returning me relevant results. Not because I'm afraid of Google knowing too much, I mostly search for code/configuration problems. DDG proved to me that it has more relevant and more helpful inf…

It used to be that when I don't find something with DDG, I would go into Google and find it. But currently my impression is that any remotely useful page that Google would show is also there in DDG results, the "!g" switch just adds a bunch of spam and unrelated stuff.
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