7 ms·

AI is still oh so much like Clippy. In Google, I keep having to change it from All Results to Verbatim. With Facebook, I keep having to change it from Top Stori

AI is still oh so much like Clippy. In Google, I keep having to change it from All Results to Verbatim. With Facebook, I keep having to change it from Top Stories to Most Recent. Try UI before AI. Purely chronological will suffer the spam of frequent-posting friends. Group their posts, which can be flicked through as a cluster. All in all, am I the only one that thinks that the current fashion in page layout squanders real estate? Make the news feed a huge grid, with each post smaller, like one of those photo walls in a hip restaurant.

TACIXAT 9y ago
I think you just solved a huge grievance I've been having with Google search. I get absolute trash results that are hardly even tangential to what I searched. I'm going to try out this verbatim thing.
- ReverseCold 9y ago
  Woah. I just tried a search (that originally didn't find what I wanted) with "Verbatim" selected and I found what I was looking for. I don't know if it will hold up for other searches, but so far so good.
- ehnto 9y ago
  The issue I have is that if the topic could even remotely sell me something, those selling or reviewing the thing sold in order to sell it will be the only results. The communities actually interested and talking about the things have disappeared from the results.
  - Bjartr 9y ago
    One trick that works for some topics is to limit your search to a custom time range like pre 2005 or so. Specifically this only works for information that would have been available then, but when that is the case you can avoid a ton of modern spam.
- tehwalrus 9y ago
  I've actually stopped trying to search google for things anymore, because it almost always tried to be clever and totally missed the point. Sounds like I should try "verbatim" too!
  - kowdermeister 9y ago
    Can you give some examples you fail to find with Google?
    - tehwalrus 9y ago
      Not right now, I've just done it enough times. It's often when I want to do a search with 6+ words and all of them are important. But because some of them are e.g. "C++ default constructor" google just gives me C++ 101 answers and disregards the rest of my query. The searches had to do with real things as well as programming.
      - TACIXAT 9y ago
        Yea, this one happens a lot. I was getting scope 101 results for something I was searching yesterday. I've basically given up on mobile search, it feels worse there.
    - reitanqild 9y ago
      When a framework you use -has uses a weirdly named something - and Google fuzzes it to something it has a million results for I think this has happened twice, despite of me using both doublequotes and verbatim. I've reported it and they've fixed it shortly afterwards but it is really annoying.
    - Izkata 9y ago
      From this past weekend, I was trying to find a shirt I'd seen another student wear back when I was in highschool (~2004), with what I thought was the phrase "How many plants had to die for your stupid salad?" Just about all the results were for vegan activism, without a hint of it being a joke/phrase. The top result when switching to "verbatim" mode was the joke, standalone, correcting "plants" to "vegetables". (Searching for the correct phrase in either mode got me to a zazzle page with a shirt identical to what I remember, but that's not really relevant to "use verbatim search!")
jimjimjim 9y ago
Yes! How much do I have to pay to not have it automatically switch back to 'top stories' all the time.
- ReverseCold 9y ago
  $0, just delete your account and never go back to Facebook again (This is a serious suggestion. Do you really get anything out of Facebook?)
  - komali2 9y ago
    Weekly reminder of why I left my home town ;)
    - DoreenMichele 9y ago
      Are you so tempted to go back that you require weekly reminders?
      - rainbowmverse 9y ago
        Nostalgia has a way of creeping in without regular inoculations.
        DoreenMichele 9y ago
        I cannot relate. Maybe I could at one time. I don't recall. But I seriously cannot relate. I like the town I am in. I don't wistfully wish I could go back to my hometown in Georgia, not do I wistfully wish I could somehow return to California and make that work. /cranky oldster moment
  - jimjimjim 9y ago
    nah, not really. I log in, check if close friends or family have sent me anything, then log out.
- code_duck 9y ago
shanghaiaway 9y ago
Artificial Intelligence does not exist. What we have is Artificial Stupidity.
- kiostech 9y ago
  I think if we can let user control algorithms themselves, to a certain extends it does really help us to gain higher quality of information. e.g sentimental analysis , fake news filter ...
  - mcny 9y ago
    I know there is a certain sense of hypocrisy in me saying this but maybe we don't need algorithms for everything. Users can self-select. We can always just yell at Timmy who shares too much or outright unfollow him on Facebook if we don't want to see what they share. I suggested that just because someone posts something on their Facebook wall, it doesn't mean I will see it. (This was around 2009). People often looked like I was saying something insulting. I think they'd understand things the other way around but I guess they don't see themselves as noise. There is some user education that the network needs to do. In any case, be it Facebook or SharePoint or 37 signals, there should be zero obligation for anyone to look at things you post. If you are having a baby shower and don't invite me personally and just write on your wall, that means you don't want me there. I still believe in a 100% non-intelligent newsfeed. Ben Evans is wrong and I'd even say malicious for dismissing the idea of a reversed chronological newsfeed. The only reason this is a problem is Facebook desires to inflate the number of connections. Let people cull their newsfeed and they will. Set expectations for posters that their posts may not get to everyone and they will understand as well.
    - kiostech 9y ago
      Will the learning curve of "self-select" too steep to certain users ?
    - stfwn 9y ago
      Hm. Facebook not using algorithmic feeds tuned to your liking is hardly a reason to rule them out entirely. People’s eyeballs keep coming back, so Facebook’s news feed works great for Facebook. It’s an incentive or strategy issue more than a technology issue.
psyc 9y ago
Exactly how I feel about this kind of thing. If UI is "smart" then it is also unpredictable. I don't want my computer to be "smart", like people, who could decide to do any fool thing for their own reasons. At least, I don't want that yet. Don't be smart, just follow simple rules that I can understand.
- trophycase 9y ago
  Exactly. There is a distinction that needs to be made between something that is trying to solve my problem for me, and something that will let me best solve the problem for myself, in my own way. Nothing frustrates me more than when software thinks it knows better than me.
  - sdoering 9y ago
    > There is a distinction that needs to be made between something that is trying to solve my problem for me, and something that will let me best solve the problem for myself, in my own way. Max I borrow that phrase for all future references from UX colleagues regarding smart UI? I really hate smart UI as it changes while I keep expecting other things and constantly have to relearn or search for items/stuff that was there just a moment ago, but cannot be fount after a reload.
    - millstone 9y ago
      This sounds like the classic "tool vs agent" design concern.
    - rainbowmverse 9y ago
      It's always fun backspacing one character at a time to surface the result I wanted, that showed some number of characters ago. Windows 10's search is especially bad about showing things that don't start with the characters I type until I land on (or chisel out) the right characters.
  - ethbro 9y ago
    > Nothing frustrates me more than when software thinks it knows better than me. Would it be fair to rephrase that as "... and fails"? Because that's what we're really talking about, right? Those times when the smart system failed to correctly predict user intent, but lacked a fallback method for the user to clarify? I'm sure there's an uncanny-valley-esque term out there for the difficulty "99% correct" smart systems have when users hit that 1% of incorrectness.
pmlnr 9y ago
> Group their posts, which can be flicked through as a cluster. That's how flickr deals with mass uploaders.
briandear 9y ago
You're clearly a smart person but I'd argue that the people designing this nonsense are also smart -- which leads me to believe that they've made it "terrible" on purpose -- which makes me dislike them more.
- hnuser1234 9y ago
  I've been noticing the same. I seem to get the most obtuse interpretation of my queries instead of the most contextually relevant one, until I add additional terms to get it to "realize" which idea I was going for, instead of showing multiple interpretations at once. I thought we were supposed to be getting better at this, not worse.
- ballenf 9y ago
  Definitely true. "Terrible" here means longer engagement, when what we want is efficient engagement. But efficiency has little time for ads... (Side note, your comment read to me like something Douglas Adams could have written about bureaucrats on a far away planet. That twist at the end that summarizes the entire issue in a few words. Well done!)
evrydayhustling 9y ago
Verbatim, Most Recent, and clustered posts are all better for a mindset when you have a relatively specific query, or at least filter bias, in mind. Consider the following statements: 1) I'm looking for something specific. 2) I'd rather not be surprised right now. 3) I'd like to get through the search/index as fast as possible to get where I'm going. The above are user-voiced versions of principles that drive traditional UI, and are absolutely better met by that optimization process. AI-driven search and feeds were exciting because they were the first method that captured use cases where users wouldn't make those statements: fuzzy queries about general interests, the desire for diversions "curated" by your own social group, and search/feed review as itself as an entertaining experience. Then, it turned out that these unexplored use cases were actually the giant, underwater part of the iceburg of what people wanted from information systems. The growth and attention capture you can drive from meeting those cases is not only massive, it sucks the oxygen out of traditional value propositions by out-competing for the same attention. I think a return to traditional "capture and facilitate intent" UI (or even better a synthesis of the two!) will only be driven by users finding a way to explicitly value their own clarity of attention. We see signs of this in everything from ad blockers to focus-oriented browser plug-ins, but I think we're still missing the FOMO-conquering expression of this value proposition that becomes a competitive product.
amelius 9y ago
Yeah, it's pretty much like the "uncanny valley". Good but not good enough. Self-driving car tech is also showing this lately.
Cthulhu_ 9y ago
I have the same with services like Spotify and Youtube, especially the latter (on the PS) seems to hide new content I haven't seen from me. At the same time it filters the allcaps makeup videos and game streamer/vlogger drama and music videos that seem to plague the homepage.
tambourine_man 9y ago
Even verbatim is too “smart” sometimes. Yesterday, I was trying to find if what I was dealing with was a bug on this particular version of Photoshop. Quoted CC 2018, version number and verbatim still showed Adobe forum posts from 2012. Date range works, but you have to find the public release date. By that time I had finished installing the previous version already. I miss Google’s simpler times, let me just grep the web.
Slansitartop 9y ago
> In Google, I keep having to change it from All Results to Verbatim Just updated my Google bookmark to https://www.google.com/?tbs=li:1 https://www.google.com/?tbs=li:1, which seems to be the parameter to enable Verbatim.

TACIXAT 9y ago

I think you just solved a huge grievance I've been having with Google search. I get absolute trash results that are hardly even tangential to what I searched. I'm going to try out this verbatim thing.

ReverseCold 9y ago
Woah. I just tried a search (that originally didn't find what I wanted) with "Verbatim" selected and I found what I was looking for. I don't know if it will hold up for other searches, but so far so good.
ehnto 9y ago
The issue I have is that if the topic could even remotely sell me something, those selling or reviewing the thing sold in order to sell it will be the only results. The communities actually interested and talking about the things have disappeared from the results.
- Bjartr 9y ago
  One trick that works for some topics is to limit your search to a custom time range like pre 2005 or so. Specifically this only works for information that would have been available then, but when that is the case you can avoid a ton of modern spam.
tehwalrus 9y ago
I've actually stopped trying to search google for things anymore, because it almost always tried to be clever and totally missed the point. Sounds like I should try "verbatim" too!
- kowdermeister 9y ago
  Can you give some examples you fail to find with Google?
  - tehwalrus 9y ago
    Not right now, I've just done it enough times. It's often when I want to do a search with 6+ words and all of them are important. But because some of them are e.g. "C++ default constructor" google just gives me C++ 101 answers and disregards the rest of my query. The searches had to do with real things as well as programming.
    - TACIXAT 9y ago
      Yea, this one happens a lot. I was getting scope 101 results for something I was searching yesterday. I've basically given up on mobile search, it feels worse there.
  - reitanqild 9y ago
    When a framework you use -has uses a weirdly named something - and Google fuzzes it to something it has a million results for I think this has happened twice, despite of me using both doublequotes and verbatim. I've reported it and they've fixed it shortly afterwards but it is really annoying.
  - Izkata 9y ago
    From this past weekend, I was trying to find a shirt I'd seen another student wear back when I was in highschool (~2004), with what I thought was the phrase "How many plants had to die for your stupid salad?" Just about all the results were for vegan activism, without a hint of it being a joke/phrase. The top result when switching to "verbatim" mode was the joke, standalone, correcting "plants" to "vegetables". (Searching for the correct phrase in either mode got me to a zazzle page with a shirt identical to what I remember, but that's not really relevant to "use verbatim search!")

jimjimjim 9y ago

Yes! How much do I have to pay to not have it automatically switch back to 'top stories' all the time.

ReverseCold 9y ago
$0, just delete your account and never go back to Facebook again (This is a serious suggestion. Do you really get anything out of Facebook?)
- komali2 9y ago
  Weekly reminder of why I left my home town ;)
  - DoreenMichele 9y ago
    Are you so tempted to go back that you require weekly reminders?
    - rainbowmverse 9y ago
      Nostalgia has a way of creeping in without regular inoculations.
      - DoreenMichele 9y ago
        I cannot relate. Maybe I could at one time. I don't recall. But I seriously cannot relate. I like the town I am in. I don't wistfully wish I could go back to my hometown in Georgia, not do I wistfully wish I could somehow return to California and make that work. /cranky oldster moment
- jimjimjim 9y ago
  nah, not really. I log in, check if close friends or family have sent me anything, then log out.
code_duck 9y ago

shanghaiaway 9y ago

Artificial Intelligence does not exist. What we have is Artificial Stupidity.

kiostech 9y ago
I think if we can let user control algorithms themselves, to a certain extends it does really help us to gain higher quality of information. e.g sentimental analysis , fake news filter ...
- mcny 9y ago
  I know there is a certain sense of hypocrisy in me saying this but maybe we don't need algorithms for everything. Users can self-select. We can always just yell at Timmy who shares too much or outright unfollow him on Facebook if we don't want to see what they share. I suggested that just because someone posts something on their Facebook wall, it doesn't mean I will see it. (This was around 2009). People often looked like I was saying something insulting. I think they'd understand things the other way around but I guess they don't see themselves as noise. There is some user education that the network needs to do. In any case, be it Facebook or SharePoint or 37 signals, there should be zero obligation for anyone to look at things you post. If you are having a baby shower and don't invite me personally and just write on your wall, that means you don't want me there. I still believe in a 100% non-intelligent newsfeed. Ben Evans is wrong and I'd even say malicious for dismissing the idea of a reversed chronological newsfeed. The only reason this is a problem is Facebook desires to inflate the number of connections. Let people cull their newsfeed and they will. Set expectations for posters that their posts may not get to everyone and they will understand as well.
  - kiostech 9y ago
    Will the learning curve of "self-select" too steep to certain users ?
  - stfwn 9y ago
    Hm. Facebook not using algorithmic feeds tuned to your liking is hardly a reason to rule them out entirely. People’s eyeballs keep coming back, so Facebook’s news feed works great for Facebook. It’s an incentive or strategy issue more than a technology issue.

psyc 9y ago

Exactly how I feel about this kind of thing. If UI is "smart" then it is also unpredictable. I don't want my computer to be "smart", like people, who could decide to do any fool thing for their own reasons. At least, I don't want that yet. Don't be smart, just follow simple rules that I can understand.

trophycase 9y ago
Exactly. There is a distinction that needs to be made between something that is trying to solve my problem for me, and something that will let me best solve the problem for myself, in my own way. Nothing frustrates me more than when software thinks it knows better than me.
- sdoering 9y ago
  > There is a distinction that needs to be made between something that is trying to solve my problem for me, and something that will let me best solve the problem for myself, in my own way. Max I borrow that phrase for all future references from UX colleagues regarding smart UI? I really hate smart UI as it changes while I keep expecting other things and constantly have to relearn or search for items/stuff that was there just a moment ago, but cannot be fount after a reload.
  - millstone 9y ago
    This sounds like the classic "tool vs agent" design concern.
  - rainbowmverse 9y ago
    It's always fun backspacing one character at a time to surface the result I wanted, that showed some number of characters ago. Windows 10's search is especially bad about showing things that don't start with the characters I type until I land on (or chisel out) the right characters.
- ethbro 9y ago
  > Nothing frustrates me more than when software thinks it knows better than me. Would it be fair to rephrase that as "... and fails"? Because that's what we're really talking about, right? Those times when the smart system failed to correctly predict user intent, but lacked a fallback method for the user to clarify? I'm sure there's an uncanny-valley-esque term out there for the difficulty "99% correct" smart systems have when users hit that 1% of incorrectness.

pmlnr 9y ago

> Group their posts, which can be flicked through as a cluster. That's how flickr deals with mass uploaders.

briandear 9y ago

You're clearly a smart person but I'd argue that the people designing this nonsense are also smart -- which leads me to believe that they've made it "terrible" on purpose -- which makes me dislike them more.

hnuser1234 9y ago
I've been noticing the same. I seem to get the most obtuse interpretation of my queries instead of the most contextually relevant one, until I add additional terms to get it to "realize" which idea I was going for, instead of showing multiple interpretations at once. I thought we were supposed to be getting better at this, not worse.
ballenf 9y ago
Definitely true. "Terrible" here means longer engagement, when what we want is efficient engagement. But efficiency has little time for ads... (Side note, your comment read to me like something Douglas Adams could have written about bureaucrats on a far away planet. That twist at the end that summarizes the entire issue in a few words. Well done!)

evrydayhustling 9y ago

Verbatim, Most Recent, and clustered posts are all better for a mindset when you have a relatively specific query, or at least filter bias, in mind. Consider the following statements: 1) I'm looking for something specific. 2) I'd rather not be surprised right now. 3) I'd like to get through the search/index as fast as possible to get where I'm going. The above are user-voiced versions of principles that drive traditional UI, and are absolutely better met by that optimization process. AI-driven search and feeds were exciting because they were the first method that captured use cases where users wouldn't make those statements: fuzzy queries about general interests, the desire for diversions "curated" by your own social group, and search/feed review as itself as an entertaining experience. Then, it turned out that these unexplored use cases were actually the giant, underwater part of the iceburg of what people wanted from information systems. The growth and attention capture you can drive from meeting those cases is not only massive, it sucks the oxygen out of traditional value propositions by out-competing for the same attention. I think a return to traditional "capture and facilitate intent" UI (or even better a synthesis of the two!) will only be driven by users finding a way to explicitly value their own clarity of attention. We see signs of this in everything from ad blockers to focus-oriented browser plug-ins, but I think we're still missing the FOMO-conquering expression of this value proposition that becomes a competitive product.

amelius 9y ago

Yeah, it's pretty much like the "uncanny valley". Good but not good enough. Self-driving car tech is also showing this lately.

Cthulhu_ 9y ago

I have the same with services like Spotify and Youtube, especially the latter (on the PS) seems to hide new content I haven't seen from me. At the same time it filters the allcaps makeup videos and game streamer/vlogger drama and music videos that seem to plague the homepage.

tambourine_man 9y ago

Even verbatim is too “smart” sometimes. Yesterday, I was trying to find if what I was dealing with was a bug on this particular version of Photoshop. Quoted CC 2018, version number and verbatim still showed Adobe forum posts from 2012. Date range works, but you have to find the public release date. By that time I had finished installing the previous version already. I miss Google’s simpler times, let me just grep the web.

Slansitartop 9y ago

> In Google, I keep having to change it from All Results to Verbatim Just updated my Google bookmark to https://www.google.com/?tbs=li:1 https://www.google.com/?tbs=li:1, which seems to be the parameter to enable Verbatim.