7 ms·

Excellent, I like how it weaves my girlfriend looking for the perfect bra through my research on collision search strategies in physics engines. Would Google i

by tinco 10y ago

Excellent, I like how it weaves my girlfriend looking for the perfect bra through my research on collision search strategies in physics engines. Would Google in any way discern between those two sessions? Me sitting at the desk doing some hobby coding performing a query like "DBVTBroadPhase", her on the couch on my laptop looking for inspiration performing queries like "michelle branch instagram". To a human it doesn't take much to jump to the conclusion that two totally different persons are using the same account at the same time. But maybe that isn't even of interest to google. Me and my GF are basically one entity to them. We frequent HN and skinnycurvy.com, we like Michelle Branch and Steve Klabnik (;)), we do pilates at the gym while at the same time play underwaterhockey at the sports centre. Any ads Google shows us might have a 50% chance of being shown to the right person, and that's probably good enough. Maybe they get lucky and I'll mention some womans brand I saw in an advert to my gf sometime.

agildehaus 10y ago
Chrome has user profiles you could use to separate things, but it would take conscious effort to switch between them each time.
- softawre 10y ago
  Only works if there's a carrot. Netflix does this too, and we always use it because (1) it always asks you up front and (2) if we use the wrong user we'll destroy our recommendations.
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    And if I have to see another frame of Jake and the Neverland Pirates there is a very real risk of a self inflicted injury. Their multiple accounts thing is great.
  - fenomas 10y ago
    Not sure what you mean, the benefits of separate browser profiles are huge and obvious - separate tracking for logins, sessions, etc. Before profiles came along my wife and I just used different browsers - otherwise we'd have spent all our time logging out of and back into facebook and twitter and so on. Profiles fixes that. You can even make desktop shortcuts to launch Chrome with a given profile, so in practice it's like having two different apps. I guess you could launch one instance and swap users but we don't bother.
gberger 10y ago
So Engineers can't possibly be searching for bras, because they're all male, uh?
- sheri 10y ago
  I don't know why you got downvoted, but you're right. The author seems to claim that Google should know someone searching for collision strategies shouldn't search for bra's or for Michelle Branch on Instagram. Or even suggest that its not possible for one person (male or female) to be interested in both topics.
  - 1123581321 10y ago
    The post was downvoted (not by me) for its sarcastic tone and for not taking into account that in the OP's real scenario, the queries were being performed by two different people. If Google assumes the same person can't search for two topics like that in one account, obviously they would be making a crude mistake, but Google has preferred data-driven, sociologically agnostic methods long enough that it's common knowledge on HN. For example, the same behavioral research they're doing with their captcha and behavioral-based authentication should help them lock on to different rates of typing, clicking, etc that two people on the same account might display.
    - tlrobinson 10y ago
      > for not taking into account that in the OP's real scenario, the queries were being performed by two different people gberger's comment was pointing out that the original comment did not take into account that these particular queries could have been performed by the same people. That said, it could have been phrased more productively.
      - iak8god 10y ago
        I definitely came away from Tinco's original comment with the icky feeling that a) Tinco's a little too thrilled with how super interesting and intellectual he is, and b) Tinco doesn't have much respect for his girlfriend's interests, and c) Tinco takes it for granted that Google should know that a single person couldn't possibly be interested in the union of those interests, probably because it should know that all the physics and programming and philosophy stuff is "boy stuff" and the rest is "girl stuff". gberger seems to be reacting (in a slightly less than constructive way) to that same uncomfortable sense.
nostrademons 10y ago
Dunno what's made it into production or what has changed in the 2 years since I left Google, but when I was working on search algorithms this "entangled session" problem was very much a known issue and a subject of active research. You don't even need two people for it to become a problem: if you're searching for [camping sites near silicon valley] and [rust http libraries] and then try to compute a similarity metric that includes both of those lines of querying, you'll get wildly different results than if you separate them out and then compute similar sites.
- gregmac 10y ago
  > if you're searching for [camping sites near silicon valley] and [rust http libraries] and then try to compute a similarity metric that includes both of those lines of querying, you'll get wildly different results than if you separate them out and then compute similar sites. Wow, never thought about how complex of a problem that can really be. To hijack your example: searching for [rust http library] and [clean rust from metal bookshelf] should be completely separate lines of querying but without understanding the full context, appear to have many false similarities (rust, library/bookshelf, 'clean' is a word associated with compiling software, and 'metal' can cause confusing with projects/articles on [bare metal programming with rust])
  - nostrademons 10y ago
    Yeah, disambiguation is a huge problem in search as well. I remember that when I joined (2009), I kept saying we need better disambiguation algorithms, because I was working on UI stuff and getting nonsensical results when I hooked up other teams' backends to the search result page. A bunch of teams were formed and I think the problem was largely solved by 2012 or so - there're some clever tricks you can pull when you have the amount of data and computing power that Google does.
    - Declanomous 10y ago
      Google drives me absolutely nuts because of it's 'intelligence', if you will. With dumber search engines it is trivial to ban words you would only expect to see on pages unrelated to your search phrase, using '-' or something similar. Similarly, if there is a word I know is associated with another topic, but is unlikely to appear in another topic, it's easy enough to force it to appear using '+'. Google's methods for detecting clustering, or whatever they are using, are so 'clever' I feel like I'm unable to communicate what I want. I feel like I'm arguing with a particularly intelligent and malicious toddler sometimes. Say I was to ask a toddler to bring me a beer, and they brought me a root beer. I'd be like, "no, bring me a beer, -root." A normal child would bring me a normal beer, cause that's the only thing in the fridge that has beer in the title without root. The Google child would bring me some sassafras, because sassafras is a root beer, which is a beer, but it doesn't have root in the name. Annoyed, I turn off safe search, and I say "Bring me a beer, -root -sassafras -sarsaparilla -ginger -cider." The Google child comes back and says "I couldn't find what you were looking for." I get up off the couch, look in the fridge, and lo and behold it's completely full of beer.
havetocharge 10y ago
You might have bigger problems than misplaced ads if you let other people use your accounts.
- lostlogin 10y ago
  Salting the data. If they get past the blocker they can have some bad data.
- gberger 10y ago
  Not all that uncommon to let your partner use your iPad or whatever.
  - havetocharge 10y ago
    Common sense isn't common.
SilasX 10y ago
Would it be worth the effort to set up some kind of "mixer" service, where your requests will be routed through random other people's accounts? The goal is to destroy the information value of your search history: "Yeah, I searched for horse costumes, but so did everyone else in the pool!" Probably would be easier just to use an anonymous account for every search, but is it easy to destroy all the patterns associated with the searches that would indicate it's the same person. (The concept is similar to those proxy services out there that pay people to let them use their "good" IP address to e.g. scrape sites that will otherwise automatically block "obvious" server farms. Also Bitcoin mixing pools.)
- schoen 10y ago
  I believe this is what https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/googlesharing/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/googlesharing... does.
- unicornporn 10y ago
  Check out Seeks https://beniz.github.io/seeks/ https://beniz.github.io/seeks/
- robrenaud 10y ago
  You can just regularly delete your search history.
- looserof7 10y ago
  Check out Google plus settings, and others you can opt-out for everything. When I checked my activity with above link, my activity is absolutely nil. But I'm using that account for very long time. Opt-out every possible thing.
  - SilasX 10y ago
    I think I'd have to trust google to respect that. :-P
    - whyagaindavid 10y ago
melipone 10y ago
Those kind of comments are so sexist makes me want to throw up.
- BhavdeepSethi 10y ago
  He is sharing his personal experience. Why are you generalizing it?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- tinco 10y ago
  Hi, some persons seem a bit offended by my comment. Could you perhaps explain what part of my comment you interpret as sexist? I most certainly don't want to make you throw up.
  - keypusher 10y ago
    I think the issue people are having is that you assume it should be clear to anyone that searching for "collision search strategies" would not also be searching for a bra, or like this female singer. This implies difficult physics and programming problems are not for women. There is no reason the same person could not be making all of those queries.
    - tinco 10y ago
      Ok to clarify, what I meant was that these sessions were happening at the same time, and on different devices and had vastly different topics.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- krisdol 10y ago
  Aren't you sexist by assuming only a male would be interested in Steve Klabnik and having a girlfriend? Nothing in tinco's comment indicated that tinco was male.
kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
> Excellent, I like how it weaves my girlfriend looking for the perfect bra through my research on collision search strategies in physics engines. Sounds like an Ignobel worthy paper in the making.
- qbrass 10y ago
  Sounds like someone doing research to implement jiggle physics in a game engine.
  - taneq 10y ago
    Dead or Alive bounces to mind.

by tinco 10y ago

agildehaus 10y ago

Chrome has user profiles you could use to separate things, but it would take conscious effort to switch between them each time.

softawre 10y ago
Only works if there's a carrot. Netflix does this too, and we always use it because (1) it always asks you up front and (2) if we use the wrong user we'll destroy our recommendations.
- lostlogin 10y ago
  And if I have to see another frame of Jake and the Neverland Pirates there is a very real risk of a self inflicted injury. Their multiple accounts thing is great.
- fenomas 10y ago
  Not sure what you mean, the benefits of separate browser profiles are huge and obvious - separate tracking for logins, sessions, etc. Before profiles came along my wife and I just used different browsers - otherwise we'd have spent all our time logging out of and back into facebook and twitter and so on. Profiles fixes that. You can even make desktop shortcuts to launch Chrome with a given profile, so in practice it's like having two different apps. I guess you could launch one instance and swap users but we don't bother.

gberger 10y ago

So Engineers can't possibly be searching for bras, because they're all male, uh?

sheri 10y ago
I don't know why you got downvoted, but you're right. The author seems to claim that Google should know someone searching for collision strategies shouldn't search for bra's or for Michelle Branch on Instagram. Or even suggest that its not possible for one person (male or female) to be interested in both topics.
- 1123581321 10y ago
  The post was downvoted (not by me) for its sarcastic tone and for not taking into account that in the OP's real scenario, the queries were being performed by two different people. If Google assumes the same person can't search for two topics like that in one account, obviously they would be making a crude mistake, but Google has preferred data-driven, sociologically agnostic methods long enough that it's common knowledge on HN. For example, the same behavioral research they're doing with their captcha and behavioral-based authentication should help them lock on to different rates of typing, clicking, etc that two people on the same account might display.
  - tlrobinson 10y ago
    > for not taking into account that in the OP's real scenario, the queries were being performed by two different people gberger's comment was pointing out that the original comment did not take into account that these particular queries could have been performed by the same people. That said, it could have been phrased more productively.
    - iak8god 10y ago
      I definitely came away from Tinco's original comment with the icky feeling that a) Tinco's a little too thrilled with how super interesting and intellectual he is, and b) Tinco doesn't have much respect for his girlfriend's interests, and c) Tinco takes it for granted that Google should know that a single person couldn't possibly be interested in the union of those interests, probably because it should know that all the physics and programming and philosophy stuff is "boy stuff" and the rest is "girl stuff". gberger seems to be reacting (in a slightly less than constructive way) to that same uncomfortable sense.

nostrademons 10y ago

Dunno what's made it into production or what has changed in the 2 years since I left Google, but when I was working on search algorithms this "entangled session" problem was very much a known issue and a subject of active research. You don't even need two people for it to become a problem: if you're searching for [camping sites near silicon valley] and [rust http libraries] and then try to compute a similarity metric that includes both of those lines of querying, you'll get wildly different results than if you separate them out and then compute similar sites.

gregmac 10y ago
> if you're searching for [camping sites near silicon valley] and [rust http libraries] and then try to compute a similarity metric that includes both of those lines of querying, you'll get wildly different results than if you separate them out and then compute similar sites. Wow, never thought about how complex of a problem that can really be. To hijack your example: searching for [rust http library] and [clean rust from metal bookshelf] should be completely separate lines of querying but without understanding the full context, appear to have many false similarities (rust, library/bookshelf, 'clean' is a word associated with compiling software, and 'metal' can cause confusing with projects/articles on [bare metal programming with rust])
- nostrademons 10y ago
  Yeah, disambiguation is a huge problem in search as well. I remember that when I joined (2009), I kept saying we need better disambiguation algorithms, because I was working on UI stuff and getting nonsensical results when I hooked up other teams' backends to the search result page. A bunch of teams were formed and I think the problem was largely solved by 2012 or so - there're some clever tricks you can pull when you have the amount of data and computing power that Google does.
  - Declanomous 10y ago
    Google drives me absolutely nuts because of it's 'intelligence', if you will. With dumber search engines it is trivial to ban words you would only expect to see on pages unrelated to your search phrase, using '-' or something similar. Similarly, if there is a word I know is associated with another topic, but is unlikely to appear in another topic, it's easy enough to force it to appear using '+'. Google's methods for detecting clustering, or whatever they are using, are so 'clever' I feel like I'm unable to communicate what I want. I feel like I'm arguing with a particularly intelligent and malicious toddler sometimes. Say I was to ask a toddler to bring me a beer, and they brought me a root beer. I'd be like, "no, bring me a beer, -root." A normal child would bring me a normal beer, cause that's the only thing in the fridge that has beer in the title without root. The Google child would bring me some sassafras, because sassafras is a root beer, which is a beer, but it doesn't have root in the name. Annoyed, I turn off safe search, and I say "Bring me a beer, -root -sassafras -sarsaparilla -ginger -cider." The Google child comes back and says "I couldn't find what you were looking for." I get up off the couch, look in the fridge, and lo and behold it's completely full of beer.

havetocharge 10y ago

You might have bigger problems than misplaced ads if you let other people use your accounts.

lostlogin 10y ago
Salting the data. If they get past the blocker they can have some bad data.
gberger 10y ago
Not all that uncommon to let your partner use your iPad or whatever.
- havetocharge 10y ago
  Common sense isn't common.

SilasX 10y ago

Would it be worth the effort to set up some kind of "mixer" service, where your requests will be routed through random other people's accounts? The goal is to destroy the information value of your search history: "Yeah, I searched for horse costumes, but so did everyone else in the pool!" Probably would be easier just to use an anonymous account for every search, but is it easy to destroy all the patterns associated with the searches that would indicate it's the same person. (The concept is similar to those proxy services out there that pay people to let them use their "good" IP address to e.g. scrape sites that will otherwise automatically block "obvious" server farms. Also Bitcoin mixing pools.)

schoen 10y ago
I believe this is what https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/googlesharing/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/googlesharing... does.
unicornporn 10y ago
Check out Seeks https://beniz.github.io/seeks/ https://beniz.github.io/seeks/
robrenaud 10y ago
You can just regularly delete your search history.
looserof7 10y ago
Check out Google plus settings, and others you can opt-out for everything. When I checked my activity with above link, my activity is absolutely nil. But I'm using that account for very long time. Opt-out every possible thing.
- SilasX 10y ago
  I think I'd have to trust google to respect that. :-P
  - whyagaindavid 10y ago

melipone 10y ago

Those kind of comments are so sexist makes me want to throw up.

BhavdeepSethi 10y ago
He is sharing his personal experience. Why are you generalizing it?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
tinco 10y ago
Hi, some persons seem a bit offended by my comment. Could you perhaps explain what part of my comment you interpret as sexist? I most certainly don't want to make you throw up.
- keypusher 10y ago
  I think the issue people are having is that you assume it should be clear to anyone that searching for "collision search strategies" would not also be searching for a bra, or like this female singer. This implies difficult physics and programming problems are not for women. There is no reason the same person could not be making all of those queries.
  - tinco 10y ago
    Ok to clarify, what I meant was that these sessions were happening at the same time, and on different devices and had vastly different topics.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
krisdol 10y ago
Aren't you sexist by assuming only a male would be interested in Steve Klabnik and having a girlfriend? Nothing in tinco's comment indicated that tinco was male.

kevin_thibedeau 10y ago

> Excellent, I like how it weaves my girlfriend looking for the perfect bra through my research on collision search strategies in physics engines. Sounds like an Ignobel worthy paper in the making.

qbrass 10y ago
Sounds like someone doing research to implement jiggle physics in a game engine.
- taneq 10y ago
  Dead or Alive bounces to mind.