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The problem is that google created a negative feedback loop with the web. People have a tangible interest to game google, which worsens the quality of their AI

The problem is that google created a negative feedback loop with the web. People have a tangible interest to game google, which worsens the quality of their AI datasets, which makes their AI suggestions terrible. There was the expectation that google's AI suggestions and info boxes would improve over time, but i 've noticed them getting worse and consider them a permanently broken gimmick now. They probably have the same problem in their Ads business which tries to optimize revenues Voice recognition on the other hand keeps getting better because there's no tangible benefit for someone to game it. Perhaps, crawling the web is the worst way to go about creating a thinking AI Incidentally, i think the solution to web search is peer review: websites ranking other websites, and having themselves punished when they mis-rank (which is what pagerank was originally)

xdennis 6y ago
> There was the expectation that google's AI suggestions and info boxes would improve over time, but i 've noticed them getting worse and consider them a permanently broken gimmick now. A funny example I saw recently is searching for "can men get pregnant".
Siira 6y ago
I think they have gotten better over time, and DuckDuckGo is noticeably worse for me. (I notice this because I have some scripts that use DuckDuckGo as a fallback when Google bans my scripts.)
tjr225 6y ago
> Voice recognition on the other hand keeps getting better because there's no tangible benefit for someone to game it. Knock on wood! It is creepy to imagine a world where computers have the upper hand on vocal inputs but I already sometimes feel this way with text and autocorrect...
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  > but I already sometimes feel this way with text and autocorrect... Just disable autocorrect. The amount of times where people communicate and a typo is a critical problem is aproximateley 0, you can manually correct them at those times.
  - twodave 6y ago
    I hate auto-correct because it doesn't stay in its lane. It tends to expect me to use the most common 10,000 or so words in English and will actually auto-bork totally valid words because it thinks it knows better than me. I get whenever I'm using shorthand or weird acronyms or technical jargon that it might get confused, but when a word I type is both a) a real word and b) something I would use in every-day speech just leave it alone!
    - _dibly 6y ago
      Even better, you accidentally click on the incorrectly typed word and add it to your dictionary.
jacobolus 6y ago
> google created a negative feedback loop with the web Friendly note: this may be a "negative" (i.e. bad) effect, but it is not a negative feedback loop. A negative feedback loop is a part of a system that self-corrects back toward a stable position. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_feedback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_feedback
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  the negative feedback is that any attempt to create quality, non-seo content is punished by being ranked low and so we revert to average/low quality of over-SEOed but low signal content. Like other users have noticed, publishing a good recipe is not enough, you have to fill it up with useless fluff. and you have to make pretty URLs . And add meta the tags This happens for tech advice too, like linux solutions etc
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - gowld 6y ago
    SEO content is a positive feedback loop.
    - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
      That would imply there isn't an equilibrium.
      - pushrax 6y ago
        And in this case, the equilibrium is some amount of AI-bait fluff. There's a limit, beyond which continuing to add more fluff does not produce higher results.
zpeti 6y ago
Sometimes I have this scary thought that paid search results are actually inherently better than organic ones, because when you spend money you do need to be relevant to the query and serve up a decent result. When it comes to organic, everything is free, so you try whatever hacks the algorithms, from keyword stuffed content to link spam etc. So as time goes on organic search results will actually get worse and worse, and paid will get better/stay the same. It might not actually be google who is preferring paid search results, it's just inevitable from how the system is set up.
- h2odragon 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law
- zinok 6y ago
  This sounds good but doesn't work in practice. If you Google the name of a UK car insurer with some likely keyword like 'claim' or 'accident', you get paid listing from people offering two 'services'. a) 'call connection', which means that you call their premium-rate number and they just put the call through to the right company's phone line while charging you per-minute. b) 'claim management', you fill out a form on their website, they submit it to the actual company's website, and take a percentage of your claim. Neither of these are illegal, Google has promised to not take ad money from the first type, but in practice don't remove ads fast enough to make it unviable. Consumer-facing companies now, ludicrously, have to do their own SEO to make sure they appear top of search results for their own name, and some even pay Google for ads to themselves. But clicks are more valuable to scammers than to legit businesses, so the former can always outbid the latter.
bildung 6y ago
I've noticed something similar (garbage in, garbage out, essentially) with translation services by google and co. People use these services to translate their sites, which then get fed into these models. There are a bunch of translation errors of terms of trade that are endemic in the german/english translations and apparently originate from these wrongly-trained models, which are then used to build new translations.
- bombcar 6y ago
  And then people learn to speak the language from that, and the errors become part of the language.
  - shkkmo 6y ago
    Translation errors have a long history of getting incorporated into language, but now we can do it at scale!
dorgo 6y ago
> websites ranking other websites I can imagine how competitors are going to rank each other. Everything is about reputation and trust. If reputation is solved then many other problems become easy.
loosetypes 6y ago
> Voice recognition on the other hand keeps getting better They might be getting better but I don’t think they’re anywhere near good enough to warrant how common they’ve become. At times I feel like they’re among the most inhumane technology that we suffer through because it can save their deployer a buck. I see zero reason Apple can’t afford to have a person answer the phone.
autokad 6y ago
> "Incidentally, i think the solution to web search is peer review: websites ranking other websites, and having themselves punished when they mis-rank (which is what pagerank was originally)" This is interesting because I had a class were we all had to write a paper. I received a grade for the paper but it was never graded by the professor. We all had to rank 5 papers from best to worst, and our grade was determined by our paper ranking and how well our ranking matched others. It was pretty reliable
jacquesm 6y ago
Anything you measure gets destroyed at scale.
- shkkmo 6y ago
  Anything your measure for the purposes of providing a benefit...
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
    What is measured that is never used is effectively never measured at all...
    - shkkmo 6y ago
      Not all use is equal

xdennis 6y ago

> There was the expectation that google's AI suggestions and info boxes would improve over time, but i 've noticed them getting worse and consider them a permanently broken gimmick now. A funny example I saw recently is searching for "can men get pregnant".

Siira 6y ago

I think they have gotten better over time, and DuckDuckGo is noticeably worse for me. (I notice this because I have some scripts that use DuckDuckGo as a fallback when Google bans my scripts.)

tjr225 6y ago

> Voice recognition on the other hand keeps getting better because there's no tangible benefit for someone to game it. Knock on wood! It is creepy to imagine a world where computers have the upper hand on vocal inputs but I already sometimes feel this way with text and autocorrect...

marcosdumay 6y ago
> but I already sometimes feel this way with text and autocorrect... Just disable autocorrect. The amount of times where people communicate and a typo is a critical problem is aproximateley 0, you can manually correct them at those times.
- twodave 6y ago
  I hate auto-correct because it doesn't stay in its lane. It tends to expect me to use the most common 10,000 or so words in English and will actually auto-bork totally valid words because it thinks it knows better than me. I get whenever I'm using shorthand or weird acronyms or technical jargon that it might get confused, but when a word I type is both a) a real word and b) something I would use in every-day speech just leave it alone!
  - _dibly 6y ago
    Even better, you accidentally click on the incorrectly typed word and add it to your dictionary.

jacobolus 6y ago

> google created a negative feedback loop with the web Friendly note: this may be a "negative" (i.e. bad) effect, but it is not a negative feedback loop. A negative feedback loop is a part of a system that self-corrects back toward a stable position. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_feedback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_feedback

cblconfederate 6y ago
the negative feedback is that any attempt to create quality, non-seo content is punished by being ranked low and so we revert to average/low quality of over-SEOed but low signal content. Like other users have noticed, publishing a good recipe is not enough, you have to fill it up with useless fluff. and you have to make pretty URLs . And add meta the tags This happens for tech advice too, like linux solutions etc
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- gowld 6y ago
  SEO content is a positive feedback loop.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
    That would imply there isn't an equilibrium.
    - pushrax 6y ago
      And in this case, the equilibrium is some amount of AI-bait fluff. There's a limit, beyond which continuing to add more fluff does not produce higher results.

zpeti 6y ago

Sometimes I have this scary thought that paid search results are actually inherently better than organic ones, because when you spend money you do need to be relevant to the query and serve up a decent result. When it comes to organic, everything is free, so you try whatever hacks the algorithms, from keyword stuffed content to link spam etc. So as time goes on organic search results will actually get worse and worse, and paid will get better/stay the same. It might not actually be google who is preferring paid search results, it's just inevitable from how the system is set up.

h2odragon 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law
zinok 6y ago
This sounds good but doesn't work in practice. If you Google the name of a UK car insurer with some likely keyword like 'claim' or 'accident', you get paid listing from people offering two 'services'. a) 'call connection', which means that you call their premium-rate number and they just put the call through to the right company's phone line while charging you per-minute. b) 'claim management', you fill out a form on their website, they submit it to the actual company's website, and take a percentage of your claim. Neither of these are illegal, Google has promised to not take ad money from the first type, but in practice don't remove ads fast enough to make it unviable. Consumer-facing companies now, ludicrously, have to do their own SEO to make sure they appear top of search results for their own name, and some even pay Google for ads to themselves. But clicks are more valuable to scammers than to legit businesses, so the former can always outbid the latter.

bildung 6y ago

I've noticed something similar (garbage in, garbage out, essentially) with translation services by google and co. People use these services to translate their sites, which then get fed into these models. There are a bunch of translation errors of terms of trade that are endemic in the german/english translations and apparently originate from these wrongly-trained models, which are then used to build new translations.

bombcar 6y ago
And then people learn to speak the language from that, and the errors become part of the language.
- shkkmo 6y ago
  Translation errors have a long history of getting incorporated into language, but now we can do it at scale!

dorgo 6y ago

> websites ranking other websites I can imagine how competitors are going to rank each other. Everything is about reputation and trust. If reputation is solved then many other problems become easy.

loosetypes 6y ago

> Voice recognition on the other hand keeps getting better They might be getting better but I don’t think they’re anywhere near good enough to warrant how common they’ve become. At times I feel like they’re among the most inhumane technology that we suffer through because it can save their deployer a buck. I see zero reason Apple can’t afford to have a person answer the phone.

autokad 6y ago

> "Incidentally, i think the solution to web search is peer review: websites ranking other websites, and having themselves punished when they mis-rank (which is what pagerank was originally)" This is interesting because I had a class were we all had to write a paper. I received a grade for the paper but it was never graded by the professor. We all had to rank 5 papers from best to worst, and our grade was determined by our paper ranking and how well our ranking matched others. It was pretty reliable

jacquesm 6y ago

Anything you measure gets destroyed at scale.

shkkmo 6y ago
Anything your measure for the purposes of providing a benefit...
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
  What is measured that is never used is effectively never measured at all...
  - shkkmo 6y ago
    Not all use is equal