6 ms·

I'm wondering if rackless Ruth, Google's bean-counter-in-chief, is behind all these. At Bing, bean counters often had calculated that if you cut down index to h

I'm wondering if rackless Ruth, Google's bean-counter-in-chief, is behind all these. At Bing, bean counters often had calculated that if you cut down index to half (after certain size), you reduce half of the cost but don't lose half of the revenues. So there is a sweet spot where you can maximize revenue if you are willing to let go few demanding customers. When quarterly results needs a little push, everything is a fair game. I bet Sundar Pitchai doesn't want to look bad as "CEO" who can't meet analyst expectations. I definitely miss old days of Google. After Amit Singhal left, things haven't been same at all. He had resisted unexplainable AI getting in to search features. But as he left, RankBrain had Ai-driven feature that is 3rd most significant. That feature is the reason why you often see pages even if they don't contain keywords and even a phrase you had specified. Those old guard knew that trading explainibility and little bit of revenue with slight decrease in customer sat wasn't worth it.

m12k 9y ago
Did you really intend to call her "rackless Ruth" or was the slur an accidental misspelling of reckless? Because pointless and crude name-calling like that really detracts from any valid points you might have brought up.
- cshenton 9y ago
  Not OP, but I'd assumed it was referring to removal of literal data centre racks.
- batushka2 9y ago
  Snowflake alert! Just stop harassing vivid language, please.
- shangxiao 9y ago
  According to Merriam-Webster [1] "rackless" is a variant of "reckless". [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rackless https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rackless
  - m12k 9y ago
    Do you consider it likely that the poster I replied to routinely uses the dialectal variant rackless over the common spelling reckless?
    - smoyer 9y ago
      You should also consider which areas of the world use "rack" as a slang for "breasts". (I'm not disagreeing with you - as a native English speaker I didn't know that rackless and reckless were synonyms).
- cup-of-tea 9y ago
  It didn't detract anything for me. I'm able to read, comprehend, and digest any wisdom even if it's written with language which I wouldn't use myself. I think it's a really useful skill because you'll find most people do use different language to you.
  - m12k 9y ago
    My problem with the comment was not the dirty words (I love me some George Carlin and Louis Black), but the act of name-calling. The very first sentence of the hacker news guidelines for comments is "Be civil" [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - cup-of-tea 9y ago
      That kind of "name calling" is pretty common in many areas. Watch some debates in British parliament, for example. Do you really think the Chief Financial Officer of one of the biggest companies in the world is unable to handle it? All you will do if you pursue this sterilisation of language is drive away the really intelligent, if idiosyncratic, people and help build an echo chamber.
      - m12k 9y ago
        I sincerely doubt that the Chief Financial Officer of one of the biggest companies in the world has time to read random comments on HN, so whether they 'can handle it' is moot. There is certainly a place for cursing and maybe even name-calling (though I'm surprised you'd bring up the British parliament as an example worthy of imitation) but Hacker News is not it, cf. why I quoted its guidelines. Indeed, sometimes cursing is the only way to properly convey a meaning. But this was not such a case - the slur was entirely drive-by and only served to distract from the rest of the comment (whose merit I cannot comment on since I had never heard of the person being commented on before today). So my intention is not to sterilize language or build an echo chamber, but to hopefully make one of these 'intelligent, if idiosyncratic' people aware that their way of communicating was preventing their message from reaching a wider audience.
userbinator 9y ago
I bet Sundar Pitchai doesn't want to look bad as "CEO" who can't meet analyst expectations. Whenever I see horrible search results, I often wonder if those people who work at Google, and surely use their own search engine as much as anyone else, have noticed the degradation and what they think of it --- especially those who are in charge of or even working on the search engine themselves. Does Sundar search, get horrible results, and think "Why is my search engine half-broken? This is my company's most prominent product, and it's not working as well as it used to." No doubt it affects all their engineers too, the ones who will tend to be looking for the most obscure things. I think your point about metrics and revenue is very true --- they are numbers that can be easily compared, while the quality of search results is not (and also subject to a lot of different conditions); being a "data driven" company, they obviously place much emphasis on the former, ignoring the negative but not easily quantifiable effect on search quality. As the catchy saying goes, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts." Unfortunately a lot of Google's management don't seem to believe in it.
- zyndaras 9y ago
  At his level (any C-Exec really) I'd say he probably doesn't notice because it'll be his assistant (or assistants) doing most of the searching...
dragonwriter 9y ago
I suspect more that Google's focus on being the best general purpose search engine for the general public and its focus on personalization, predicitive search, etc., is behind it. It takes a different design of index and algorithms to do what Google has openly had as a goal since well before Porat came on board than it does to be the kind of highly literal search engine Google started as. There's a market for both, and the market for a well-designed, comprehensive, highly literal engine probably pays a lot more per user than the kind Google is focussed on. But it also is much narrower if there is a Google around. (It's also not clear that the web is the highest-value corpus for such an engine; the really commercially successful ones are more specialized and have large, human curated and annotated datasets is specialized domains, notably law.)
pigglebox 9y ago
Interesting to note that even this post apparently is not indexed in Google: Do the search "site:https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com "rackless ruth"" and find 0.
- j2kun 9y ago
  Indexing the entire web isn't instantaneous, you know.

m12k 9y ago

Did you really intend to call her "rackless Ruth" or was the slur an accidental misspelling of reckless? Because pointless and crude name-calling like that really detracts from any valid points you might have brought up.

cshenton 9y ago
Not OP, but I'd assumed it was referring to removal of literal data centre racks.
batushka2 9y ago
Snowflake alert! Just stop harassing vivid language, please.
shangxiao 9y ago
According to Merriam-Webster [1] "rackless" is a variant of "reckless". [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rackless https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rackless
- m12k 9y ago
  Do you consider it likely that the poster I replied to routinely uses the dialectal variant rackless over the common spelling reckless?
  - smoyer 9y ago
    You should also consider which areas of the world use "rack" as a slang for "breasts". (I'm not disagreeing with you - as a native English speaker I didn't know that rackless and reckless were synonyms).
cup-of-tea 9y ago
It didn't detract anything for me. I'm able to read, comprehend, and digest any wisdom even if it's written with language which I wouldn't use myself. I think it's a really useful skill because you'll find most people do use different language to you.
- m12k 9y ago
  My problem with the comment was not the dirty words (I love me some George Carlin and Louis Black), but the act of name-calling. The very first sentence of the hacker news guidelines for comments is "Be civil" [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - cup-of-tea 9y ago
    That kind of "name calling" is pretty common in many areas. Watch some debates in British parliament, for example. Do you really think the Chief Financial Officer of one of the biggest companies in the world is unable to handle it? All you will do if you pursue this sterilisation of language is drive away the really intelligent, if idiosyncratic, people and help build an echo chamber.
    - m12k 9y ago
      I sincerely doubt that the Chief Financial Officer of one of the biggest companies in the world has time to read random comments on HN, so whether they 'can handle it' is moot. There is certainly a place for cursing and maybe even name-calling (though I'm surprised you'd bring up the British parliament as an example worthy of imitation) but Hacker News is not it, cf. why I quoted its guidelines. Indeed, sometimes cursing is the only way to properly convey a meaning. But this was not such a case - the slur was entirely drive-by and only served to distract from the rest of the comment (whose merit I cannot comment on since I had never heard of the person being commented on before today). So my intention is not to sterilize language or build an echo chamber, but to hopefully make one of these 'intelligent, if idiosyncratic' people aware that their way of communicating was preventing their message from reaching a wider audience.

userbinator 9y ago

I bet Sundar Pitchai doesn't want to look bad as "CEO" who can't meet analyst expectations. Whenever I see horrible search results, I often wonder if those people who work at Google, and surely use their own search engine as much as anyone else, have noticed the degradation and what they think of it --- especially those who are in charge of or even working on the search engine themselves. Does Sundar search, get horrible results, and think "Why is my search engine half-broken? This is my company's most prominent product, and it's not working as well as it used to." No doubt it affects all their engineers too, the ones who will tend to be looking for the most obscure things. I think your point about metrics and revenue is very true --- they are numbers that can be easily compared, while the quality of search results is not (and also subject to a lot of different conditions); being a "data driven" company, they obviously place much emphasis on the former, ignoring the negative but not easily quantifiable effect on search quality. As the catchy saying goes, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts." Unfortunately a lot of Google's management don't seem to believe in it.

zyndaras 9y ago
At his level (any C-Exec really) I'd say he probably doesn't notice because it'll be his assistant (or assistants) doing most of the searching...

dragonwriter 9y ago

I suspect more that Google's focus on being the best general purpose search engine for the general public and its focus on personalization, predicitive search, etc., is behind it. It takes a different design of index and algorithms to do what Google has openly had as a goal since well before Porat came on board than it does to be the kind of highly literal search engine Google started as. There's a market for both, and the market for a well-designed, comprehensive, highly literal engine probably pays a lot more per user than the kind Google is focussed on. But it also is much narrower if there is a Google around. (It's also not clear that the web is the highest-value corpus for such an engine; the really commercially successful ones are more specialized and have large, human curated and annotated datasets is specialized domains, notably law.)

pigglebox 9y ago

Interesting to note that even this post apparently is not indexed in Google: Do the search "site:https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com "rackless ruth"" and find 0.

j2kun 9y ago
Indexing the entire web isn't instantaneous, you know.