Google Memory Loss • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Memory Loss

#171

Post by Baeocystin » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 3:40 AM UTC

pgrote wrote: post #84

beamatronic wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or there is a time bound or other resource bound that they are willing to expend under the current circumstances ( are you a free user? Paid user? Internal user? Mobile? Web? Etc )

Which isn't a bad thing as long as it is communicated. If Google is limiting functionality somehow, let me know if there is a pay to play to enable everything.

I like how Wolfram Alpha does it. You get a certain amount of compute time for free, and if you've got a paid subscription, you get a known amount more. It works well, and I don't mind paying a little to get a more reliable service.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#172

Post by damonsauve » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 3:40 AM UTC

astura wrote: post #57

ins0 wrote: post #46

I'm confused, did i do something wrong or why can i find the referred article just fine on google, just by searching the keywords? https://imgur.com/a/szBcB

You can find it now because it's getting traffic again due to TFA. It's no longer "stale."

Yeah, doesn't Google have multiple crawlers running with different missions? Ie, deep content crawlers and "fresh" content crawlers?

Re: Google Memory Loss

#173

Post by peterwwillis » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 3:40 AM UTC

It's going to be a little sad when Google Maps goes away. It will be much more sad when Google Flights goes away. But I can't think of anything else Google provides that I couldn't get from a bunch of competitors. Well... maybe Google Translate.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#174

Post by fixermark » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 3:40 AM UTC

sincerely wrote: post #169

fixermark wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just described human society in the large, and the answer appears to be "We muddle on."

I think this phenomenon has become a lot more important in the last few decades...I think it was fully possible for one person to understand how a car worked, how household appliances worked, etc, until quite recently

Probably depends on how you slice the question / define "fully understand." "How it works" in terms of being able to tell yourself a story that makes sense? Sure. Car burns gas, gas makes engine go, engine turns wheels. But what about the details you'd need to actually make a car (which include but are not limited to thermodynamics and metallurgy)? Probably not.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#175

Post by ReverseCold » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 3:41 AM UTC

Mystrl wrote: post #119

philipov wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't help that it seems every other project out there is trying to name itself after common words in the lexicon. I dare you to try finding information on the Box library.

https://ccse.lbl.gov/BoxLib/ Is it this thing at the very top of the search results?

Fwiw my first page had nothing to do with anything computer related, except for the last result, which was how to make dialog boxes in Windows.

First result: https://littlefreelibrary.org

Search: Box library

Re: Google Memory Loss

#176

Post by fixermark » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 3:41 AM UTC

trendia wrote: post #149

fixermark wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why can't webmasters spider everything Google returns? I'm sure you could start client-side caching every search you ever do to Google. But if you're searching enough to eat up Google's bandwidth, they're paying for that data and they're under no obligation to keep serving you as a client (much as any server is under no particular obligation to serve a search spider).

> But if you're searching enough to eat up Google's bandwidth, they're paying for that data and they're under no obligation to keep serving you as a client Do you not see the irony?

No, I don't. Can you help clarify it for me?

Search engines crawling millions of sites each with---on average---a few MB of data distributes cost globally.

Extracting terabytes of index data from a single search engine's repository consolidates the cost on the back of that repository's bandwidth provision.

These are not symmetrical cost structures.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#177

Post by fixermark » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 3:42 AM UTC

dingo_bat wrote: post #148

fixermark wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if what you're seeing is a result of the Internet growing, not specifically Google degrading. Which is to say, as the indexable dataset grows, you'd expect the individual indices to turn up more and more heterogeneous results over time.

The fact that other engines are able to offer up results tells me this is a Google thing, not the size of the internet.

... unless there's something Google offers up reliably that those other engines miss. Then what you're observing is heterogeneity of returned results due to the dataset being too large for any one index to cover it fully.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#178

Post by cleeus » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 3:44 AM UTC

> My mental model of the Web is as a permanent, long-lived store of humanity’s intellectual heritage.

My mental model of the Web is a human brain with all kinds of weird mechanisms - one that forgets things, makes things up, mixes memories. Google is like an "association cortex" - take it away and all the memories are still there but access to them is much harder and needs to go through more indirections (links).

Re: Google Memory Loss

#179

Post by dannyw » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 3:48 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #167

dannyw wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Using the Google of 10-years-ago on the Internet of 10-years-ago, or using the Google of 10-years-ago on the Internet of today? Because I imagine doing the latter would just result in an endless wasteland of SEO-optimized content leadgen pages.

The good thing is SEO optimized content is relatively trivial to distinguish from the snippet, and other search engines like DuckDuckGo feel far more reliable and consistent without being overrun by SEO junk.

You do have a point however.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#180

Post by jjoonathan » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 3:50 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #164

colordrops wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This same AI effect can be seen in the Android keyboard, where _properly_ spelled words will be replaced after typing another word or two because it's been determined to be more likely what you want. It's infuriating.

I don't know; I'm pretty happy that I don't have to type apostrophes any more. I can just go on typing words like "ill" and "wed" and it'll figure out after a few more words that those should be "I'll" and "we'd".

If I type "its" and "it's" correctly, they are regularly changed to the incorrect spelling. If I don't bother, they are not corrected. The only way to get correct "its" and "it's" is to go back and fix them after auto-correct has screwed them up.