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Ten years ago I complained on a random forum about Google's seeming refusal to give me information about running Skyrim under Linux with the Wine emulator. I t

Ten years ago I complained on a random forum about Google's seeming refusal to give me information about running Skyrim under Linux with the Wine emulator. I tried various search combinations and all I could easily get was information about wine manufacturers and locations in the Skyrim world. Didn't matter if I used "emulation" or "wine emulator" or similar terms, even in quotes, or if I used the '+' character, or otherwise tried to harness Google's literal search functions. Was I searching wrong? Didn't seem so to me at the time, but I don't remember the exact queries. Those in the forum thread thought I just didn't know how to use a search engine. I still think it was Google telling me what it thought I really wanted, instead of what I was literally asking for. I still see results that don't include words that I search for in quotes, often.

visarga 5y ago
I found that it confuses subject with object: do you want A for B or B for A. It's all the same. Maybe Google doesn't really use neural nets in ranking, or they are a joke. Desktop web search is trending down, voice and mobile interfaces up. They should be focusing hard on direct question answering based on retrieved web pages. A recent paper by Deep Mind shows how it can be done, not that it matters, they won't jump on it. Web search should be just as smart as Codex, adapting and combining knowledge for the user. https://deepmind.com/research/publications/2021/improving-language-models-by-retrieving-from-trillions-of-tokens https://deepmind.com/research/publications/2021/improving-la...