Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Memory Loss

tbray.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 552 posts

Re: Google Memory Loss

#211

Post by copx »

kenning wrote: post #198
copx wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What annoys me the most is that Google seemingly no longer allows searching for phrases at all. In the past I could search for a specific phrase like this.. "It never rains on a Wednesday in Rockshire" ..and Google would return websites containing that exact phrase. That no longer works. Nowadays parentheses are largely ignored as far as I can tell. This is super annoying because quite often I am really looking for a…

Quote marks still work. Google tries to find your phrase, and fails, then tries to give you results with some of your words missing without telling you. If you search for "It never rains on a" with quotes it will only show you pages with that exact phrase. If you search for that without quotes it will show you a messy group of results based on what it thought you meant.

No, they don't but I know what you are referring to.

Most of the time I get the result:

  No results found for [phrase]
  Results for [phrase] (without quotes)
..but the thing is that I know websites containing [phrase] exist. Often many of them and they aren't "dark web" either. Google used to be able to find them but no longer is.

This gets more confusing because sometimes it does work. Namely if you look for phrases which are popular search queries e.g. if you search for..

  "hit me baby one more time"
..it will work amazingly well. But for other phrases it won't work at all and you will get the no results reply instead. It used to work for all phrases independent of their search popularity.

But yes, my original post was wrong. It does work for a lot of phrases.. but not for others.

I guess Google's engine dynamically optimizes things, and only indexes often searched phrases.

EDIT: Okay, this assumption was wrong too. I did some experiments to confirm my theory and the results showed that it is wrong..

Re: Google Memory Loss

#212

Post by pavs »

hyperpallium wrote: post #200

Theory: Because google has local data-centers all over the world (that's why it's much faster than the competition, and google suggest works so well), indexes must be maintained at all of them. Because google has so many, this is a significant expense, and to keep costs down, they reduce the indexes to what is profitable.

Good theory, maybe that's why they push the "personalization" and localization of search engine so aggressively.

I personally don't feel that Google search quality has degraded very much if at all. It's true that I rarely get new sites outsite the echo chamber or few 1000 popular sites, but to me 99% of the time they give me relevant and useful information I am looking for. To be honest Google search results on average is still heads and shoulders ahead of the competition. in almost all aspects.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#213

Post by copx »

red75prime wrote: post #192
copx wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What annoys me the most is that Google seemingly no longer allows searching for phrases at all. In the past I could search for a specific phrase like this.. "It never rains on a Wednesday in Rockshire" ..and Google would return websites containing that exact phrase. That no longer works. Nowadays parentheses are largely ignored as far as I can tell. This is super annoying because quite often I am really looking for a…

> Google would return websites containing that exact phrase. That no longer works. Er, what? No search engine finds "It never rains on a Wednesday in Rockshire". Results for "It never rains on a Wednesday" with exact matches Google - 6 pages Bing - 3 pages Yandex - 0 pages Duck Duck Go - 3 pages

That was just a random example of a phrase. I made it up on the fly.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#214

Post by frik »

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…

> Com­pe­ti­tion · Bing can find it! Duck­Duck­Go can too! Both of them can find Brent’s Lon­don Calling piece, too.

Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu = search engines

Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Startpage, and most other = meta search engine = just display and mix results of one or more third party search engines, because of that they are always slower (high latency) and/or show you cached (=older) results

(Yahoo relies on Bing, DuckDuckGo on Bing and Yandex, etc)

Re: Google Memory Loss

#215

Post by cromwellian »

epistasis wrote: post #204
jsnell wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is this common sense? Because it's in practice impossible to index every page. Index selection has always been a core quality feature in search engines. (Both re: which pages get included, and re: which pages get included in which layer of index in multi-layered index schemes). > Yes we do know. He was using Google to find his own old stuff over the years. Some content he was referring regularly disappeared fro…

People used to say that Google would always be the best search index because it had the biggest index, and nobody could match Google there. Being more selective about what you include seems like a big change from past practice, or at least past narrative.

Yes, but what jsnell is saying it, perhaps if you perform the same experiment with Bing, you'd find pages it didn't index, but that were present in other search engines.

You can't say A is better than B with a few data points. You can say you think B's behavior has changed compared to the past. But that's also erroneous.

It's possible the behavior was always there, you just never tripped over it and rare enough that most people don't, either because the web was too smaller before, or your own content was smaller, or it's recent link and access patterns changed enough to trigger the behavior.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#216

Post by ShabbosGoy »

epistasis wrote: post #190
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.

Oh man, Android does that too? This awful, terrible, no good fake "AI" behavior on iOS was one of the many quality issues with modern iOS that was making Android look more attractive. iOS keyboards have been getting worse with every update, probably as more and more engineers feel the need to make a mark, or are required to fix bugs, and they spoil it. The simple and predictable statistical model of the original iOS…

4 years ago was a very different time. Software quality in general continues to drop. I’m not sure if that’s due to increasing incompetence in the software engineering workforce (unlikely, but possible), malice (more unlikely), or apathy (most likely).

When wages don’t grow over 10 years, what incentive is there to write the best software you can?

Re: Google Memory Loss

#217

Post by cma »

Baeocystin wrote: post #168
colordrops wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still remember the day that stopped working. I decided that was the day Google died.

Is that when the + command was overridden in search to refer to G+ instead of 'this is a mandatory search item'? I am still shocked they ever thought that was a good idea, or that surrounding quotes was an acceptable replacement.

No, when that was changed you could at that time just quote a single word to get the old +word behavior.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#218

Post by pishpash »

fixermark wrote: post #131
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 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.

It could be the internet (content) growing, or it could be the search engine changing, but to me, the most salient change over 20 years is the internet user base changing. At the risk of sounding elitist, the users of the internet have become a lot dumber on average. Search engines therefore grew dumber relative to the one that was tuned to people who were early adopters and used the tool for more productive purposes.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#219

Post by yorwba »

jjoonathan wrote: post #180
derefr wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's probably because the spelling is corrected based on a machine-learned model, whose corpus is likely to contain many instances where "its" and "it's" were swapped.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#220

Post by abecedarius »

tobinfricke wrote: post #32

I just noticed this also, earlier today. I have a blog entry titled "Highest airports in California" that I attempted to find using Google. Even with the double quotes, and restricting the search to the correct site, it doesn't seem to come up in search results. The site's robots.txt seems permissive enough. What's up? link: https://nibot.livejournal.com/1075122.html

I've had the same problem finding my old livejournal posts (which I certainly used to be able to google for).
Post reply on HN