You Will Not Understand This • Hacker News Board

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#171

Post by zerd » Wed, Nov 08, 2017, 1:41 PM UTC

Zarel wrote: post #119

hzay wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

...I'm quite happy that Google stops my world view from expanding to include Chicago restaurants when I'm looking for food in Seattle. I'm also happy it doesn't include information about swifts the animal when I search for Swift the programming language. Even when it's about political stuff - I'm rather happy I don't get anti-vax information when I'm searching for health information. I'm also happy Google doesn't sho…

But personalization can also work against you. If for instance Google wants to favour one political candidate over another they could "personalize" your search results by boosting positive sentiment articles and filter out those with negative sentiment towards that candidate. And since Google search is still viewed as fairly objective it could have massive impact, and since it's personalized it's very hard to detect.

https://www.wired.com/2015/08/googles-search-algorithm-steal...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2017-39938599

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#172

Post by marcosdumay » Wed, Nov 08, 2017, 1:44 PM UTC

rtpg wrote: post #91

nludd wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

As someone doing a lot of language switching in my Google searches: should I preface every search with the language as well? I search for some error message. Now I get answers in English. What if the person is actually German? Is everyone now going to be stuck with English websites? What's the point of a search engine if you have to be super precise? Part of Google's magic is that it can figure you out even in imprec…

My first language is Portuguese. Google failing to give me English results for software related queries was the one main reason I switched my browser search to DDG.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#173

Post by Tyr42 » Wed, Nov 08, 2017, 1:54 PM UTC

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #128

Zarel wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...I'm quite happy that Google stops my world view from expanding to include Chicago restaurants when I'm looking for food in Seattle. I'm also happy it doesn't include information about swifts the animal when I search for Swift the programming language. Even when it's about political stuff - I'm rather happy I don't get anti-vax information when I'm searching for health information. I'm also happy Google doesn't sho…

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…

>Obviously restaurants should be personalized. But no one was saying they shouldn't.

>>I'd much rather type "takeaway pizza chicago" than have google mind-read where I want the pizza delivered.

Some people are saying that restaurants shouldn't be personalized.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#174

Post by moultano » Wed, Nov 08, 2017, 1:55 PM UTC

pdpi wrote: post #137

Zarel wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...I'm quite happy that Google stops my world view from expanding to include Chicago restaurants when I'm looking for food in Seattle. I'm also happy it doesn't include information about swifts the animal when I search for Swift the programming language. Even when it's about political stuff - I'm rather happy I don't get anti-vax information when I'm searching for health information. I'm also happy Google doesn't sho…

> Even when it's about political stuff - I'm rather happy I don't get anti-vax information when I'm searching for health information. The tradeoff being that it won't give the anti-vaxxers information that refutes their claims. Is that _really_ what you want?

Ironically, this sort of pigeon-holing is mostly a problem with treating query text literally (or syntactically.) Language is full of shibboleths, and people indicate their worldview by the words they choose to use. The more naively a search engine treats the query, the more likely they are to find pages that only agree with them.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#175

Post by marcosdumay » Wed, Nov 08, 2017, 1:58 PM UTC

speedplane wrote: post #135

Klathmon wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't there a large lawsuit that stopped that one?

Nope, Google won.

That's the most unsettling part. They got a monopoly on online book previews, and abandoned it.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#176

Post by jon_richards » Wed, Nov 08, 2017, 1:58 PM UTC

busterarm wrote: post #4

13of40 wrote: post #2

"Fuck you forever for breaking e-mail for everyone in the world." Did, uh, anyone else understand that bit?

Gmail doesn't play well with plain text emails. Even if you manually select Plain Text to send, it still reflows lines at 78 characters by manually inserting linebreaks and adds its own special characters where it feels like. It also doesn't follow a handful of RFCs specific to email. There is no workaround for the forced hard-wrapping of lines in Plain Text. It will not let you use format=flowed either. Plain Text m…

I get furious that it threads conversations automatically instead of with the "reply-to" built into the email protocol.

It usually just threads emails with the same subject, but...

It sometimes doesn't thread emails with the same subject, but after someone else has replied to the first one. You have to put "Re:" in the second email, since the reply automatically added "Re:" and I guess that's too different for gmail to accept, yet...

If you try to separate your emails by environment, a completely keyword in the subject often isn't enough to stop the emails from threading.

Even if you filter and label your email by the subject lines, emails that get threaded together get all labels.

You can't even give gmail feedback like "This email does not belong in this thread". The only options are to accept their threading or turn off threading entirely.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#177

Post by rtpg » Wed, Nov 08, 2017, 1:59 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #172

rtpg wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone doing a lot of language switching in my Google searches: should I preface every search with the language as well? I search for some error message. Now I get answers in English. What if the person is actually German? Is everyone now going to be stuck with English websites? What's the point of a search engine if you have to be super precise? Part of Google's magic is that it can figure you out even in imprec…

My first language is Portuguese. Google failing to give me English results for software related queries was the one main reason I switched my browser search to DDG.

Yeah I have this issue too, DDG's explicitness on this is nice.

the trick with Google, when its "language detection" isn't play well, is to add `hl=en` as a query param to the URL. This works on basically all Google properties as ewll.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#178

Post by BucketSort » Wed, Nov 08, 2017, 2:03 PM UTC

I disagree with mostly everything here, which surprises me since I'm usually in line with most highly voted opinion pieces on here. I'd like to say something in particular about Facebook. I maintain a strict rule of only being friends with people I care about. It allows me to keep up with my family and friends, discuss local community events and news, and keep up with the local music scene. My belief is that a lot of people hate Facebook because they don't really like the people in their life. It makes me happy seeing updates from my community and family on a daily basis. Yes, Facebook is a tech company with the intention of making money off its users, but that's the nature of the game, I don't feel this is implicitly evil. It seems like people obsess about the negative of everything these days. I choose to focus on the positive and refuse to harbor such negative feelings as the author of this post does. The world is both a horror and dream, your experience and perspective collapses that duality. Be positive. Focus on the love, not hate. Bias the collapse towards a dream.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#179

Post by endorphone » Wed, Nov 08, 2017, 2:03 PM UTC

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…

How does this sophistry get a pass? Google's search is dominant because it provides the most meaningful, useful results to most people. If you think this is chairs to the moon or a child's imitation, surely there is a market for you to exploit. Otherwise your argument sounds ridiculous, with sentences that together become ridiculously meaningless beyond smearing Google.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#180

Post by marcosdumay » Wed, Nov 08, 2017, 2:04 PM UTC

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.

Besides, that is in reply to a comment that is just trying to make people aware that is a bad part of town.

The replies you got are borderline insane.