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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#711

Post by [deleted] »

tflol wrote: post #663
sn41 wrote: post #610

Great article. But the author can't be serious about no one knowing who Prabhakar Raghavan is. He is, for instance, the co-author of the definitive text on randomized algorithms [Motwani and Raghavan]. He has also been a well-respected database researcher for many years. In a previous avatar, Raghavan was a pure theoretical computer scientist. As a student, he won the best student paper in FOCS, the Machtey award, wh…

i love this person google scholar, it is important to this employee resume that the moment i click on this link i immediately see compact list of articles with brief introductions in plaintext. very easy to see everything and access exactly what i'm interested in almost immediately with a swift skim. it sadly ironic how google search used to look like this, now it looks like bloated shit, this dude pushed ruining it,…

[deleted]

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#713

Post by arromatic »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #408
Eisenstein wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AT&T, GE, AOL, Yahoo, Sony technology (they are a media company now, but they did used to make things that weren't a game console), Time Warner, SGI, Compaq, 3DFx, DEC...

Not only that, most of the other examples are just not at the end of their death spiral yet. Take a look at Windows market share, it's down 20% over the last 10 years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha... And that's just desktop. Microsoft ceded the entire mobile market, which in turn now represents the majority of devices. The majority of the company's profits no longer come from selling W…

statista is locked behind paywall

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#714

Post by arromatic »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #219
arromatic wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did the slashtag feature worked and what did it do ? It seems like a interesting concept but sadly the site is dead . What happened to it ?

People would add sites for a particular topic (aka slashtag) to their list. That would build a virtual custom search engine within the search engine. And topic specific searches thrown at it would consistently out perform Bing and Google in terms of search quality. The meta "spam" slash tag (everyone got their own) would let you tell the engine sites you never wanted to see in your search results so if you were tired…

Why did it shut down ?

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#715

Post by rvba »

willvarfar wrote: post #708
barbariangrunge wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine learning or not, seo spam sort of killed search. It’s more or less impossible to find real sites by interesting humans these days. Almost all results are Reddit, YouTube, content marketing, or seo spam. And google’s failure here killed the old school blogosphere (medium and substack only slightly count), personal websites, and forums Same is happening to YouTube as well. Feels like it’s nothing but promoters…

I think a case can be made that the spam problem can be traced all the way back to Google buying Doubleclick. Its really easy to spot the crap websites that are scaping content-creating websites ... because they monetize by adding ads. If Google was _only_ selling ads on the search results page, then it could promote websites that are sans ads. Instead, it is incentivised to push users to websites that contain ads, b…

They hired people who introduce Jack Welch methods.

This is like in that Steve Jobs video about product people being kicked out and exchanged by ones who dont care about product:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4

They will not make good search. That is not their priority.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#716

Post by nox101 »

Aerroon wrote: post #626
FullstakBlogger wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

15 years ago, I used to keep many tabs of youtube videos open just because the "related" section was full of interesting videos. Then each of those videos had interesting relations. There was so much to explore before hitting a dead-end and starting somewhere else. Now the "related" section is gone in favor of "recommended" samey clickbait garbage. The relations between human interests are too esoteric for current ML…

> The relations between human interests are too esoteric for current ML classifiers to understand. I would go further and say that it is impossible . Human interests are contextual and change over time, sometimes in the span of minutes. Imagine that all the videos on the internet would be on one big video website. You would watch car videos, movie trailers, listen to music, and watch porn in one place. Could the algo…

I think there are things they could do and that ML could maybe help?

* They could let me directly enter my interests instead of guessing

* They could classify videos by expertise (tags or ML) and stop recommending beginner videos to someone who expresses an interest in expert videos.

* They could let me opt out of recommending videos I've already watched

* They could separate sites into larger categories and stop recommending things not in that category. For me personally, when I got to youtube.com I don't want music but 30-70% of the recommendations are for music. If the split into 2 categories (videos.youtube.com - no music) and (music.youtube.com - only music) they'd end up recommending far more to me that I'm actually interested in at the time. They could add other broad categories like (gaming.youtube.com, documentaries.youtube.com, science.youtube.com, cooking.youtube.com, ...., as deep as they want). Classifying a video could be ML or creator decided. If you're only allowed one category they would be incentive to not mis-classify. If they need more incentive they could dis-recommend your videos if you mis-classify too many/too often).

* They could let me mark videos as watched and actually track that the same as read/unread email. As it is, if you click "not interested -> already watched" they don't mark the video as visibly watched (the red bar under the video). Further, if you start watching again you lose the red-bar (it gets reset to your current position). I get that tracking where you are in a video is something that's different for email vs video but at the same time (1) if I made it to 90% of the way through then for me at least, that's "watched" - same as "read" for email and I'd like it "archived" (don't recommend this to me again) even if I start watching it again (same as reading an email marked as "read)

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#717

Post by yen223 »

tensor wrote: post #649
ajross wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... obviously SOAP was dumb[1], and lots of people saw that at the time. But SOAP was dumb in obvious ways, and it failed for obvious reasons, and really no one was surprised at all. ML isn't like that. It's new. It's different. It may not succeed in the ways we expect; it may even look dumb in hindsight. But it absolutely represents a genuinely new paradigm for computing and is worth studying and understanding on…

ML has already succeeded to the point that it is ubiquitous and taken for granted. OCR, voice recognition, spam filters, and many other now boring technologies are all based on ML. Anyone claiming it’s some sort of snake oil shouldn’t be taken seriously. Certainly the current hype around it has given rise to many inappropriate applications, but it’s a wildly successful and ubiquitous technology class that has no repl…

Thank you for this.

Reading these comments I thought I stepped into some alternate timeline when we don't already have widespread ML all over the place.

Like, nobody does rules-based image recognition for a decade now already!

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#718

Post by TrackerFF »

lupire wrote: post #545
sumanthvepa wrote: post #537

Full Disclosure: Prabhakar Raghavan was my skip-level manager at Yahoo! and I'd known of him well before that, from my days at IBM Research. The author says very few people knew who Raghavan was. Clearly he isn't a computer scientist. It is more an indication of the ignorance of the writer than anything else. Raghavan's contributions to Computer Science and, Search in particular, which were made long before he joined…

My favorite thing about McKinsey is that they are hated for 2 reasons: 1. Allegedly ruining companies with mismanagement. 2. Making companies people don't like too successful. That's more an indictment of the business skills of the critics than McKinsey.

Just a side note

The main criticisms of McKinsey (and strategy/management consulting firms in general) are:

1) They can (and have/will) consult both sides, even though there's a massive conflict of interest. It's like having the same law firm represent both plaintiff and defendant. This is the most egregious of the bunch.

2) They have deep ties with governments and the private sector, and leverage this bridge to reach their goals. Their alumni network is what keep propelling the firm.

3) They optimize for profits and recurring business (which any business does, so you can't really blame them for that...but:), and will not shy away from giving their clients morally or ethically questionable advices. This one ties back to (1).

Imagine if McKinsey is consulting Google on how to increase revenues related to customer data, while also consulting government regulators on how to deal with customer data privacy - with their own (McK) motives being maximum future revenue and extending their influence.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#719

Post by rvba »

FullstakBlogger wrote: post #526
998244353 wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, I do not remember a time when YouTube's suggestions or search results were good. Absurdities like that happened 10 and 15 years ago as well. These days my biggest gripe is that they put unrelated ragebait or clickbait videos in search results that I very clearly did not search for - often about American politics.

15 years ago, I used to keep many tabs of youtube videos open just because the "related" section was full of interesting videos. Then each of those videos had interesting relations. There was so much to explore before hitting a dead-end and starting somewhere else. Now the "related" section is gone in favor of "recommended" samey clickbait garbage. The relations between human interests are too esoteric for current ML…

They probably optimize your engagement NOW - with clickbaity videos. So their KPIs show big increases. But in long term you realize that what you watch is garbage and stop watching alltogether.

Someone probably changed the engine that shows videos for you - exactly as with search.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#720

Post by stavros »

barfbagginus wrote: post #418
bbor wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree on the overall prognosis of Google - I am (also?) one of said engineers! Here’s a recent update from a tiny corner of the company: the rank and file is still incredibly smart and generally well-intentioned, but are following hollow simulacrums of the original culture - all-hands, dogfooding, internal feedback, and ground-up engineering priorities are all maintained in form, but they are now rendered com…

Drop your good intentions - towards Google, that is. Work to sabotage and collapse the organization - do that for the good of humanity. Thank you for your work, and good luck getting out without harm or reprisal Hit em hard.

Why would Google's collapse be for the good of humanity? When was a power vacuum ever beneficial?

"Build a better search engine for the good of humanity", I can understand. "Kill a search engine for the good of humanity" is a reductive, childish take.

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