6 ms·

Searching for teaching materials or activities for children is so bad that developing the materials yourself is usually far less work! I doubt the declining qu

by II2II 6y ago

Searching for teaching materials or activities for children is so bad that developing the materials yourself is usually far less work! I doubt the declining quality of search results is a product of Google's own advertising business, as the article would have us believe, and is mostly a product of third-party SEO spam. This outcome also wholly predictable. Part of the appeal of Google to early adopters was the lack of the SEO spam that destroyed the utility of earlier search engines. I recall conversations at the time when Google was so new they eschewed graphical ads that foresaw this outcome, though our predictions may have been a bit on the pessimistic side (i.e. Google held up against SEO longer than we thought it would).

londons_explore 6y ago
In today's world of powerful neural networks, one would think training a network to identify sites which try to get the user to pay for something wouldn't be that hard. I think this is instead an active choice on the part of Google. When the options are "show someone's personal blog as the top result" or "show some company as the top result", they always choose the latter because a company is somehow believed to be more trustworthy.
- piokoch 6y ago
  I wish I could see that powerful AI in action. Think of something easy like, for instance, AI powered point of sale in the supermarket. Right now many shops introduce "automatic" POS, and the automation means that instead of shop assistant I need to scan every product. Those badass AI should be able to use their image recognition power and be able to recognize products I put on the counter and calculate the price. It seems this is still beyond capabilities AI has (apparently playing chess or go is way easier than working in the grocery store).
  - viraptor 6y ago
    > It seems this is still beyond capabilities AI has Really? Classification of images on a known static background should work very well. Or at least well enough that you can request a manual scan it every 10th item and still get a large speed increase. The bag weight works as a double-check anyway.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    This is more or less how Amazon Go stores work.
  - ElFitz 6y ago
    See Amazon Go No need to even put things on a counter
- chrismarlow9 6y ago
  Google will return different types of results depending on your query. For example shopping style queries produce Pinterest like sites. Questions produce Yahoo answers, Quora, and other faq style sites. It's much more nuance than just "show a company". Also the AI you speak of can equally be used to produce content that looks real but is not. It's even possible to produce articles that are impossible to determine if a human wrote it. This is a cat and mouse game that won't end. There's too much money on the line.
fock 6y ago
Given that we have AGI around the corner cough, building a model which discriminates SEO-spam from original content might be viable, don't you think so? Or for every new domain in the index you check whether it's legit or not by human intervention, then repeat each year and build a blacklist, similar to how blacklisting IPs works for Email (how do these sites even get listed? There should be networks apparent!). One could also put a button: "report abuse" and make a process to unblacklist legit sites (the same process for email works very well with most providers... except Google.) My theory, why this is not happening: I guess that most of these SEO-spam sites are actually including Google-funneled ads, so this means there's something wrong there too...
- yetihehe 6y ago
  Then you have hundreds of SEO companies putting their own AGI to beat google one.
  - hliyan 6y ago
    What if the SEO companies keep improving their AGIs with the aim of beating Google's AGI and in the process inadvertently start producing high quality content? Will SEO companies morph into knowledge mining and organizing companies (the business Google is supposed to be in)?
    - snewman 6y ago
      Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - TheRealSteel 6y ago
    I mean, can we really call it an intelligence if it wants to work in marketing?
    - 6y ago
foobarian 6y ago
I have a more pessimistic theory. Google's search based on PageRank used to work well at the start because the "SNR" in the underlying graph was really high. Lots of people wrote personal web pages, linked to other interesting content, etc. Contrast with today, majority of web pages are automated social media fronts with content optimized for engagement and SEO. The thing that made PageRank work is mostly gone.
- brownbat 6y ago
  Arguably PageRank cannibalized itself, it created incentives to make the web itself worse.
cblconfederate 6y ago
Google and publishers are connected in a feedback loop. Google subsidizes content -> content makes google useful. Google has always had the upper hand in this relationship and set the price tag for content makers. Ad prices have gone down the drain the past 10 years so naturally you 'll only get SEO spam because there is no motive for quality content. If google wants that to change , they have to start subsidizing publishers again. They don't seem interested in that so perhaps they're betting on AI that will de-SEO the content.

by II2II 6y ago

londons_explore 6y ago

In today's world of powerful neural networks, one would think training a network to identify sites which try to get the user to pay for something wouldn't be that hard. I think this is instead an active choice on the part of Google. When the options are "show someone's personal blog as the top result" or "show some company as the top result", they always choose the latter because a company is somehow believed to be more trustworthy.

piokoch 6y ago
I wish I could see that powerful AI in action. Think of something easy like, for instance, AI powered point of sale in the supermarket. Right now many shops introduce "automatic" POS, and the automation means that instead of shop assistant I need to scan every product. Those badass AI should be able to use their image recognition power and be able to recognize products I put on the counter and calculate the price. It seems this is still beyond capabilities AI has (apparently playing chess or go is way easier than working in the grocery store).
- viraptor 6y ago
  > It seems this is still beyond capabilities AI has Really? Classification of images on a known static background should work very well. Or at least well enough that you can request a manual scan it every 10th item and still get a large speed increase. The bag weight works as a double-check anyway.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  This is more or less how Amazon Go stores work.
- ElFitz 6y ago
  See Amazon Go No need to even put things on a counter
chrismarlow9 6y ago
Google will return different types of results depending on your query. For example shopping style queries produce Pinterest like sites. Questions produce Yahoo answers, Quora, and other faq style sites. It's much more nuance than just "show a company". Also the AI you speak of can equally be used to produce content that looks real but is not. It's even possible to produce articles that are impossible to determine if a human wrote it. This is a cat and mouse game that won't end. There's too much money on the line.

fock 6y ago

Given that we have AGI around the corner cough, building a model which discriminates SEO-spam from original content might be viable, don't you think so? Or for every new domain in the index you check whether it's legit or not by human intervention, then repeat each year and build a blacklist, similar to how blacklisting IPs works for Email (how do these sites even get listed? There should be networks apparent!). One could also put a button: "report abuse" and make a process to unblacklist legit sites (the same process for email works very well with most providers... except Google.) My theory, why this is not happening: I guess that most of these SEO-spam sites are actually including Google-funneled ads, so this means there's something wrong there too...

yetihehe 6y ago
Then you have hundreds of SEO companies putting their own AGI to beat google one.
- hliyan 6y ago
  What if the SEO companies keep improving their AGIs with the aim of beating Google's AGI and in the process inadvertently start producing high quality content? Will SEO companies morph into knowledge mining and organizing companies (the business Google is supposed to be in)?
  - snewman 6y ago
    Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- TheRealSteel 6y ago
  I mean, can we really call it an intelligence if it wants to work in marketing?
  - 6y ago

foobarian 6y ago

I have a more pessimistic theory. Google's search based on PageRank used to work well at the start because the "SNR" in the underlying graph was really high. Lots of people wrote personal web pages, linked to other interesting content, etc. Contrast with today, majority of web pages are automated social media fronts with content optimized for engagement and SEO. The thing that made PageRank work is mostly gone.

brownbat 6y ago
Arguably PageRank cannibalized itself, it created incentives to make the web itself worse.

cblconfederate 6y ago

Google and publishers are connected in a feedback loop. Google subsidizes content -> content makes google useful. Google has always had the upper hand in this relationship and set the price tag for content makers. Ad prices have gone down the drain the past 10 years so naturally you 'll only get SEO spam because there is no motive for quality content. If google wants that to change , they have to start subsidizing publishers again. They don't seem interested in that so perhaps they're betting on AI that will de-SEO the content.