5 ms·

Seems to me that Google is turning on a lot of deep learning models in production which aren't production ready. Search has gone to shit recently. Image searc

Seems to me that Google is turning on a lot of deep learning models in production which aren't production ready. Search has gone to shit recently. Image search is hot garbage for anything but images with well known people / places / things. You can't reliably filter or sort news results by date. YouTube is filtering pro LGBT content but allowing weird Eastern European pedo videos. The play store is apparently moderated by bots and doesn't have rules or policies in place about giving devs time to respond. Something has changed dramatically at the company in the last 5 years. Would be interesting to zero in on it.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
maehwasu 7y ago
This sounds like exactly what you'd expect from a company that is bleeding talent and morale. Note: I do not have any information that that is what is happening in Google; I'm just saying what my guess would be if I were presented the situation as "these are the symptoms at Company X. What is the problem?"
- huffmsa 7y ago
  And you're likely not far off. It's a pretty well tested principle that massive familial wealth usually disappears by the 3rd or 4th generation (because the descendents regress to the norm in terms of ability) and it looks like we're seeing the same at Google. They've got too little "real" work for the number of hands they need to keep busy, so unqualified people are going back and "improving" the work of the 1st and 2nd generation. But because of the company's size, it can't hire high risk shoot from the hip revolutionaries (not that they'd want to work at a buttoned up Corp anyway), so it's staffed with safe employees who don't really resemble the cowboys of the 1st and 2nd generations, and hence can't improve the systems any further. Happens to most companies beyond a certain size.
  - theandrewbailey 7y ago
    That doesn't line up with the fact that Google kills existing apps all the time, and look at this new Google communications platform.
    - huffmsa 7y ago
      Doesn't it line up exactly? They release a new chat app every year and put the previous years app on a 5 year sunset. So you get to put a bunch of developers on the roof every year. It's Keynes "break things to put people to work fixing them" at its finest.
gargravarr 7y ago
I searched for an error message yesterday and Search removed 18 of the 20 keywords (they are all scratched out as 'missing'). The only remaining keywords were for the platform I had the error on. Thousands of results that were all completely irrelevant. I was completely stunned how something I rely on could suddenly do that. What is the point? Google's monopoly has gotten to the point where they do not care how their products perform, just so long as the money continues to rain in.
- huffmsa 7y ago
  Happens to me all the time now too. Even when I put the phrase in quotes it still omits words or says "search for X, do your really want to search for Y" But maybe our use cases are the outliers, and the new search is what works for most people.
  - Majromax 7y ago
    > But maybe our use cases are the outliers, and the new search is what works for most people. I think it's a probability problem more often expressed in terms of medical tests / false positives. If a million people search for <word> but 1% of those make a typo and search for <wrod> instead, whereas a thousand people deliberately search for <wrod>, Google's observation of a search for <wrod> is 90% likely to be a typo. However well-intentioned, this can undermine one of the core, original features of a good search engine like Google: deriving value from the "long tail" of esoteric (and often very technical) quests for information.
    - eitland 7y ago
      The real problem here is that Google does this even when we use double quotes and the verbatim option :-/ I switched to DDG a while ago, -it is about as good as Google now, much thanks to Googles own effort ower the last decade to nerf its own search engine. Since they are now about equal I use the one that doesn't track me and doesn't support Google.
      - 7y ago
touristtam 7y ago
Funny cause I have just started to notice that as well, BUT I am mainly a DDG user that resort to using Google search in case I cannot find something satisfactory on my preferred search engine. Speaking about YouTube, I think it might be recommending through other videos that you might have watched/liked that are not related to either, but somehow other users have watched/liked as well. So instead of having a relation A-B, it is now a relation A-C <-> D-B, you and the other users have watched/liked C and D, therefore you might want to watch B.
- huffmsa 7y ago
  Yeah YouTube's recommendations don't really strike me as being based on comparison of the content or themes of the videos, but based pretty heavily on what other users have watched. To be fair, codifying video into clusterable features is a lot harder than audio. But when you have Google levels of money I'd expect a bit more progress.
dangxiaopin 7y ago
> Something has changed dramatically at the company in the last 5 years Founders effectively retired. Google has a new CEO

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

maehwasu 7y ago

This sounds like exactly what you'd expect from a company that is bleeding talent and morale. Note: I do not have any information that that is what is happening in Google; I'm just saying what my guess would be if I were presented the situation as "these are the symptoms at Company X. What is the problem?"

huffmsa 7y ago
And you're likely not far off. It's a pretty well tested principle that massive familial wealth usually disappears by the 3rd or 4th generation (because the descendents regress to the norm in terms of ability) and it looks like we're seeing the same at Google. They've got too little "real" work for the number of hands they need to keep busy, so unqualified people are going back and "improving" the work of the 1st and 2nd generation. But because of the company's size, it can't hire high risk shoot from the hip revolutionaries (not that they'd want to work at a buttoned up Corp anyway), so it's staffed with safe employees who don't really resemble the cowboys of the 1st and 2nd generations, and hence can't improve the systems any further. Happens to most companies beyond a certain size.
- theandrewbailey 7y ago
  That doesn't line up with the fact that Google kills existing apps all the time, and look at this new Google communications platform.
  - huffmsa 7y ago
    Doesn't it line up exactly? They release a new chat app every year and put the previous years app on a 5 year sunset. So you get to put a bunch of developers on the roof every year. It's Keynes "break things to put people to work fixing them" at its finest.

gargravarr 7y ago

I searched for an error message yesterday and Search removed 18 of the 20 keywords (they are all scratched out as 'missing'). The only remaining keywords were for the platform I had the error on. Thousands of results that were all completely irrelevant. I was completely stunned how something I rely on could suddenly do that. What is the point? Google's monopoly has gotten to the point where they do not care how their products perform, just so long as the money continues to rain in.

huffmsa 7y ago
Happens to me all the time now too. Even when I put the phrase in quotes it still omits words or says "search for X, do your really want to search for Y" But maybe our use cases are the outliers, and the new search is what works for most people.
- Majromax 7y ago
  > But maybe our use cases are the outliers, and the new search is what works for most people. I think it's a probability problem more often expressed in terms of medical tests / false positives. If a million people search for <word> but 1% of those make a typo and search for <wrod> instead, whereas a thousand people deliberately search for <wrod>, Google's observation of a search for <wrod> is 90% likely to be a typo. However well-intentioned, this can undermine one of the core, original features of a good search engine like Google: deriving value from the "long tail" of esoteric (and often very technical) quests for information.
  - eitland 7y ago
    The real problem here is that Google does this even when we use double quotes and the verbatim option :-/ I switched to DDG a while ago, -it is about as good as Google now, much thanks to Googles own effort ower the last decade to nerf its own search engine. Since they are now about equal I use the one that doesn't track me and doesn't support Google.
    - 7y ago

touristtam 7y ago

Funny cause I have just started to notice that as well, BUT I am mainly a DDG user that resort to using Google search in case I cannot find something satisfactory on my preferred search engine. Speaking about YouTube, I think it might be recommending through other videos that you might have watched/liked that are not related to either, but somehow other users have watched/liked as well. So instead of having a relation A-B, it is now a relation A-C <-> D-B, you and the other users have watched/liked C and D, therefore you might want to watch B.

huffmsa 7y ago
Yeah YouTube's recommendations don't really strike me as being based on comparison of the content or themes of the videos, but based pretty heavily on what other users have watched. To be fair, codifying video into clusterable features is a lot harder than audio. But when you have Google levels of money I'd expect a bit more progress.

dangxiaopin 7y ago

> Something has changed dramatically at the company in the last 5 years Founders effectively retired. Google has a new CEO