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Shirt Without Stripes

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Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#341

Post by svieira »

hiram112 wrote: post #317
floatingatoll wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google was good at launch because it was harvesting data from webrings and directories to provide it "high quality" link ranking data. However, they didn't thank or credit or share any of their revenue with the sites whose human curation helped their results become so impressive. Seeing that Google search was effective, most human curators stopped curating directories and webrings. The SEO industry picked up the slac…

> Google has not yet discovered how to automate "is this a quality link?" Google has so much more data than just the keywords and searches people make, it seems like this should be a problem they could solve. Through tracking cookies (e.g. Google Analytics) they should be able to follow a single user's session from start to finish, and they also should be able to 'rank' users in some vague way where they'd learn whic…

Nope, all they could do there would be to group people together based on their "search behavior graph". The problem of finding BS sites is in itself a "shirt without stripes"-level hard problem. That's why being able to rely on user curation is (was?) so important for Google. People didn't curate the internet at first for money, they did it because they were interested in the subject for which they were curating their web ring.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#342

Post by joshspankit »

DenisM wrote: post #197

This problem is known as "attribution" - you have a "no" or "without" in the sentence, but you don't know where it belongs. One could (and one does) argue that the problem cannot be solved with statistical methods (ML), especially not in any domain where accuracy is required, such as medical recored analysis: "no evidence of cancer" and "evidence of no cancer" are very different things. Zooming out, the language fiel…

Yes, you have points, but they break down here:

“Shirt -stripes” is unambiguous to a system, yet the first result on Amazon(.ca) is a striped shirt, and the 3rd is sweatpants.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#343

Post by tmathmeyer »

nikanj wrote: post #305
seiferteric wrote: post #137

I have noticed in the past few years google results have become noticeable worse for similar reasons. Google used to _surprise_ me with how good it was able to understand what I was really looking for even when I put in vague terms. I remember being shocked on several occasions when putting in half remembered sentences, lyrics, expressions from something I had heard years ago and it being the first! result. I almost…

Your search for "skiing Norway" mostly returns results for skiing in the French Alps, because those pages have much higher visit rates. Google is a dumbass nowadays, and regularly ignores half your search terms to present you with absolutely irrelevant results, that have gotten lots of visits in the past.

Is that actually true for you? I just tried it (logged out, and with adblock) and everything on the page seems relevant.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#344

Post by _kst_ »

dhimes wrote: post #267
_kst_ wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A former coworker had the last name "Person". They once received a letter (snail mail) addressed to "TheirFirstName Human". I never figured out what kind of mistake could have led to that.

Maybe a veterinarian's customer database? They would have to distinguish pet names from humans, but keep a record of all.

Yeah, that's one plausible explanation. (I don't remember the nature of the letter.)

Relatedly, one time I picked up a prescription for a cat. The cat's name was listed as CatFirstName MyLastName. They had another (human) client with that same first and name. It turned out that on my previous visit they had "corrected" that client's record to indicate that he was a cat.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#346

Post by albertzeyer »

animalCrax0rz wrote: post #259
albertzeyer wrote: post #243

Why should it not be possible to solve this with statistical methods? The model just needs to be able to understand the important meaning of "no" in here, in the context of the whole sentence. I would guess that most modern NNs from the NLP area (Transformer or LSTM) would be able to correctly differentiate the meaning. The problem is, I think there is no fancy NN (yet) behind Google search, and the other web searche…

"there is no evidence of cancer" and "there is evidence of no cancer" are two different statements with different meaning, so it's more complex a task than just understanding the importance of "no" in a sentence. It's involves semantic analysis of the sentence. The paper I linked to below describes a technique they call "deep parsing." Check it out for more context.

Yes, sure, exactly. It's a complex task. I'm just saying that there is no reason why a statistical model should not be able to solve the task. And you seem to agree on that. You even linked such a method.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#347

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

Nextgrid wrote: post #204
fastball wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was when people built websites to deliver content. Now people build websites to get highly ranked in Google. No matter how good google's algos are, they can't win when the underlying content is just SEO'd garbage.

SEO'd garbage often contains ads, including Google ads. There's no incentive for Google to fix this problem. Google's job is not to give you great search results, it's to keep you clicking on ads. Ideally it would be the ads on the search results page directly, but if that doesn't work then a blogspam website with Google ads is the next best thing. If Google was a paid service this problem would be solved the next da…

> If Google was a paid service this problem would be solved the next day.

Nope. Cable television was introduced with the promise of no ads. That didn't last long.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#348

Post by TomJansen »

Nextgrid wrote: post #204
fastball wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was when people built websites to deliver content. Now people build websites to get highly ranked in Google. No matter how good google's algos are, they can't win when the underlying content is just SEO'd garbage.

SEO'd garbage often contains ads, including Google ads. There's no incentive for Google to fix this problem. Google's job is not to give you great search results, it's to keep you clicking on ads. Ideally it would be the ads on the search results page directly, but if that doesn't work then a blogspam website with Google ads is the next best thing. If Google was a paid service this problem would be solved the next da…

I would gladly pay 7.50 euros a month for a search engine which would serve me good results without the SEO blogspam. Sadly, I think that no new pages are written without SEO bullcrap. The next best thing I think is to use the search functionality of sites themselves (like Stackoverflow, Reddit, HackerNews etc.)

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#350

Post by nailer »

Aardwolf wrote: post #306
DenisM wrote: post #197

This problem is known as "attribution" - you have a "no" or "without" in the sentence, but you don't know where it belongs. One could (and one does) argue that the problem cannot be solved with statistical methods (ML), especially not in any domain where accuracy is required, such as medical recored analysis: "no evidence of cancer" and "evidence of no cancer" are very different things. Zooming out, the language fiel…

> but you don't know where it belongs Yes, the English grammatical rules make it unambiguous where it belongs. This is solvable.

A shirt is an item of clothing. Items of clothing are made from material. Some materials have patterns. One type of pattern is stripes.

Seems like a matter for logical inference. At which point it becomes fairly easy to find shirts made from material where that materials pattern is not stripes.

But yes, no AI I have seen works reliably on even basic queries like this.

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