Embedded in this answer seems to be the mindset that only buying things will solve problems.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not a consumerist luddite, I use my credit card points like any good and proper citizen -- but when your mindset is "all problems can be solved by buying more shit", well, that's a pretty lonely existence.

Google's gotta make money, and helping people buy useful shit is a fine way of doing it, but just don't fall into the mindset trap that everything solution in life is just a Google Pay away.

Try searching "how valve index works" or "how valve index controllers work". My interpretation of "how it works" is "technical information on how an item operates". Google will interpret this instead as "how well it performs its intended functions" and flood me with both links to purchase the Valve Index as well as endless reviews. Results on Google are not tailored toward retrieval of factual information anymore. They're tailored to ordinary, garden-variety consumers, and obviously designed to sell you a Valve Index.

To this day I still have not found really good information on how the controllers in the Valve Index actually work. All I get are pushes and nudges into getting me to buy something.

e.g. Search for "camera with wifi" versus "camera with wifi reddit". If you're doing any research, you will find the latter more useful. Now I know some will say many people just want to buy the product and will be satisfied with a direct link to purchase, but the thing is a good search engine will mix in different types of results. What you get here is dozens of virtually identical results with any genuine info - e.g. a recent post on a reputable personal blog or a social media post - completely buried.

Do any other engines do it better? Maybe not. But Google itself certainly used to do it better, if only because it didn't have the majority of the internet trying to game its algo.

I am a happy paying customer for GCP, Play Books+Movies, etc., but I think they need to step up the quality of their services for paying YouTube customers.

Thanks for your comment.

When did Google start labeling ads more clearly? See: https://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2016/07...

Today the labeling consists of the letters "Ad" in black next to the result.

source: https://searchengineland.com/search-ad-labeling-history-goog...

No. This is the same HN post as "Facebook is dying, pretty soon all their users will be gone and they'll collapse".

Google would much prefer to be the sole source of your traffic instead of pushing you to other sites. Google's business is advertising. Why would they want to lose that traffic?

Check this article about the Google MUM announcement, which basically says the same thing:

"MUM is part of Google’s long-term shift away from ranked search results and toward the creation of AI algorithms that can answer user questions faster—often without ever clicking a link or leaving Google’s results page. (Think, for example, of the “knowledge panels” that now appear at the top of many search results pages and display an answer from a website so you don’t have to visit the site yourself.) This shift promises to reduce the amount of work it takes to find information through Google. But it’s not clear that this is a problem in need of a solution." [0]

The Google of today is not the Google of 2008. Google in 2008 was a search engine. Today it's an advertising business that would much prefer you not leave Google properties.

[0] https://qz.com/2010802/googles-mum-is-making-search-worse-by...

1. Any remotely commercial search has an entire first page of ads, organic results are pushed way down.

2. Google has made it difference between ads and search results as minimal as possible. I long for the days of the early 00s of big yellow boxes.

3. On many pages the amount of content Google stuffs in at the top before you get to actual search results gets more annoying every year.

Honestly, I wish I had a button that made Google result pages look like they did 15 years ago.

Those are the same thing. If garbage websites can game their way up the search listing then Google is failing.

This is a simple problem of competition. Google doesn't have any, so they don't need to provide a good product. They can optimize for ad placement and revenue instead of search quality because users perceive that they have no real choice but to use Google. If another search engine manages to get some real market share Google results will get much better again.

In this way, Google gets all the value from Internet properties they don't own without having to push any traffic to those sources. So, they get their cake and eat it too. They create a way to regurgitate information from the vast trove of info on the Internet without ever having to share traffic with those sources by moving traffic from their search engines to those sites, like they do now.

They get to sell advertising to those who want to capture eyeballs for search results, without having to share any ad revenue with the content providers that are powering that transformer-based search.

Ain't it grand?

This speaks to ignorance of who Google employs. A ton of the engineers are immigrants there. When I was on Google Photos in MTV, I'd estimate it being about evenly split between native, English-first speakers, vs people who were either non-native English speakers or grew up with two languages simultaneously (children of first gen immigrants in the US).

Silicon Valley has a huge amount of cultural and ethnic diversity, so I don't know why you would make this mistake.

I don't know the people who worked at this project, but you do realise that Google employs swaths of programmers that are not native English speakers?

Here's my guess: Some team under web search trained a large Transformer based model but with some adjustment here but now on a massive dataset from the crawled web pages using tons of TPUs. It made an incremental improvement to the search quality metrics and was shipped to production.

Their models accomplish ridiculously powerful things. Tbh I think it's far _more_ likely the answer is "this is crazy powerful, but the engineers didn't feel like writing a blog post about it, and the marketing team hasn't figured out how to monetize it yet".

Exactly this. There are many controls they could have given us to trivially improve search for end users without needing this AI, but they would have made search less good for their customers, the advertisers.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10248155/climber-livestreams-d...

Indoor climbing is definitely a SF techie thing. Tons of tech people climbed at Mission Cliffs.

This is basically a meme now. We actually have a pretty good understanding of how the models work. In fact that understanding is how you can do things like build chatbots that don't spew hate.

Also the electrical cost of ML training large language models is indeed high (e.g GPT-3 has 175B params and is estimated at 190,000 kWh to train on GPUs). But the folks who pay the cost (Basically OpenAI, Google, MSFT, Facebook, Amazon) are incentivized to make that go down (TPUs are way more efficient than GPUs), and they are incentivized to do it infrequently because it costs $$$.

FWIW Google's datacenters are also technically carbon neutral. I know that's not great because carbon credits don't have the impact that folks think they have, but there is definitely a difference in ecological impact from datacenter electricity and other kinds of energy usage (e.g cars all burning fossil fuels).

Okay also let's compare to bitcoin, which is the real ecological disaster if we want to talk about inefficient software: ~387,096,774 kWh PER DAY. _and_ incentivizing things like cheap coal, and miners are definitely not using their crypto wealth to purchase carbon offset credits :(

There's been a bit of discussion on HN lately about the effectiveness of sophisticated models vs. just good metadata.

But whatever I get it. Make the GPU go brrrr.

Oh, and most of the NLU of IBM Watson is Prolog.