7 ms·

> my Google-fu is strong The thing is, this doesn't matter anymore. You have very little control as Google tries to be smart. It's very hard if not impossible

by rplnt 4y ago

> my Google-fu is strong The thing is, this doesn't matter anymore. You have very little control as Google tries to be smart. It's very hard if not impossible to find something older, obscure, things from other regions, languages, etc...

joshstrange 4y ago
I think "Google-fu" just refers to being able to bend the search engine to your will. In the early days it was with operators and special keywords (inurl, etc) but today most of those are not as useful or actively harmful and so "Google-fu" has progressed. It's knowing which terms to drop from the error you are searching for, it's knowing how to phrase things correctly, it's knowing how to skim the results and separate the wheat from the chaff. Or at least that's what it means to me and how I use it.
- nvrspyx 4y ago
  I don't think they misunderstood and I think their point still stands. The irrelevance of Google's search results are becoming ever more unyielding to the user's intent. The portion of results that are SEO spam for every query is increasing. The amount of your query being dropped and ignored in your search is increasing. Google results are becoming increasingly irrelevant and is on a trajectory to a point of completely ignoring your query where the results are strictly a combination of spam and a random pick of websites. "Google-fu" is not progressing. It's struggling to hang on by the decreasing number of threads before it's utterly ineffective.
  - Swizec 4y ago
    Google-fu is prompt engineering. Where we used to say “rome fall why”, you’d now write “why did the roman empire fall”. Because the AI likes that phrasing and produces better results. Soon you’ll write a 300 word description of what exactly you’re looking for, like you would when asking a trusted expert, and Google will figure something out. The days of keyword searching are long gone.
    - extr 4y ago
      Not to pick on your quick example, but actually testing it, these two terms [1] [2] have nearly identical results. Top result in both cases is history.com, followed by wikipedia, and the next 4-6 results are the same but in slightly different order. I think this is actually an example of the benefit of their AI. Despite the big difference in the "style" of phrasing (simple english vs more formally naming the subject noun), both seem to map to a very similar representation in their embedding space. I've run into frustrations with this myself, but for basic questions like this it seems like the search works Pretty Good. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=why+rome+fall&oq=why+rome+fall https://www.google.com/search?q=why+rome+fall&oq=why+rome+fa... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=why+did+the+roman+empire+fall&oq=why+did+the+roman+empire+fall https://www.google.com/search?q=why+did+the+roman+empire+fal...
      - nerdponx 4y ago
        Consider that "Why did the Roman Empire fall?" consists of 1 word that describes the type of question being asked ("why"), 2 useless junk words ("did the"), and 3 "key words" ("Roman Empire Fall"), of which 2 should really be treated as a single word referring to a single concept/entity ("Roman Empire", for which "Rome" is a synonym in some cases). Humans instinctively know this, so we are able to construct queries like "why rome fall". But that "why rome fall" query, which we think of as a purely mechanical keyword search, already requires quite a bit of sophisticated processing in the search engine. The system has to recognize that "fall" is synonymous for "collapse" or "wane in power" and not synonymous for "autumn". It also has to recognize that "rome" means "the (Western) Roman Empire" and not the modern city of Rome in Italy or "the Holy Roman Empire" or the city of Rome, NY, USA. It furthermore needs to interpret "why" in such a way that it emphasizes results with "reasons" or "explanations", rather than something like a "timeline" or "summary". Personally I find it really weird that Google is interested in pushing users more to interact with its digital librarian / AI assistant, instead of continuing to improve keyword search. I have a few guesses as to why they are going this way: 1. It makes the user interface simpler from an engineering perspective (fewer user-facing buttons and options to implement and test). 2. There is strategic benefit to making search more of a black box. Maybe they are specifically trying to "educate" users to expect and be comfortable with such black boxes. Maybe the plan is to get people so accustomed to "AI assistant" search that they see keyword search as outdated, and thereby secure a competitive advantage for the next several years over other search engines, by having the biggest and best AI models. 3. They are trying to increase the amount of rich "natural language" user search inputs in their data. Making keyword search worse will encourage people to use queries that more closely resemble natural language. I assume that this has strategic benefit related to Guess 2 above.
  - munk-a 4y ago
    I had a good laugh yesterday. I was setting up a password vault for my mother and had to get the login pages for various services and a few did like Etsy does - search for "Etsy Login" and you'll notice their SEO has managed to put /search?q=login above /signin in google's results. It amuses me whenever SEO is taken to such an extreme that it actually makes the results from your company less useful for people actually looking for your company.
    - chronogram 4y ago
      It's different for me, but the second result is quite funny: https://i.ibb.co/fqSF7rd/Screenshot-20220929-093644-Chrome.png https://i.ibb.co/fqSF7rd/Screenshot-20220929-093644-Chrome.p...
- skybrian 4y ago
  These days you need -youtube to get rid of the video results.
- int_19h 4y ago
  It's the opposite now - you increasingly have to use "Google-fu" to make sure that your query is not creatively reinterpreted in ways that are virtually guaranteed to yield irrelevant results (but more of them) - e.g. substituting words with "synonyms" (which aren't), or removing the most important keyword from the query altogether.

by rplnt 4y ago

joshstrange 4y ago

I think "Google-fu" just refers to being able to bend the search engine to your will. In the early days it was with operators and special keywords (inurl, etc) but today most of those are not as useful or actively harmful and so "Google-fu" has progressed. It's knowing which terms to drop from the error you are searching for, it's knowing how to phrase things correctly, it's knowing how to skim the results and separate the wheat from the chaff. Or at least that's what it means to me and how I use it.

nvrspyx 4y ago
I don't think they misunderstood and I think their point still stands. The irrelevance of Google's search results are becoming ever more unyielding to the user's intent. The portion of results that are SEO spam for every query is increasing. The amount of your query being dropped and ignored in your search is increasing. Google results are becoming increasingly irrelevant and is on a trajectory to a point of completely ignoring your query where the results are strictly a combination of spam and a random pick of websites. "Google-fu" is not progressing. It's struggling to hang on by the decreasing number of threads before it's utterly ineffective.
- Swizec 4y ago
  Google-fu is prompt engineering. Where we used to say “rome fall why”, you’d now write “why did the roman empire fall”. Because the AI likes that phrasing and produces better results. Soon you’ll write a 300 word description of what exactly you’re looking for, like you would when asking a trusted expert, and Google will figure something out. The days of keyword searching are long gone.
  - extr 4y ago
    Not to pick on your quick example, but actually testing it, these two terms [1] [2] have nearly identical results. Top result in both cases is history.com, followed by wikipedia, and the next 4-6 results are the same but in slightly different order. I think this is actually an example of the benefit of their AI. Despite the big difference in the "style" of phrasing (simple english vs more formally naming the subject noun), both seem to map to a very similar representation in their embedding space. I've run into frustrations with this myself, but for basic questions like this it seems like the search works Pretty Good. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=why+rome+fall&oq=why+rome+fall https://www.google.com/search?q=why+rome+fall&oq=why+rome+fa... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=why+did+the+roman+empire+fall&oq=why+did+the+roman+empire+fall https://www.google.com/search?q=why+did+the+roman+empire+fal...
    - nerdponx 4y ago
      Consider that "Why did the Roman Empire fall?" consists of 1 word that describes the type of question being asked ("why"), 2 useless junk words ("did the"), and 3 "key words" ("Roman Empire Fall"), of which 2 should really be treated as a single word referring to a single concept/entity ("Roman Empire", for which "Rome" is a synonym in some cases). Humans instinctively know this, so we are able to construct queries like "why rome fall". But that "why rome fall" query, which we think of as a purely mechanical keyword search, already requires quite a bit of sophisticated processing in the search engine. The system has to recognize that "fall" is synonymous for "collapse" or "wane in power" and not synonymous for "autumn". It also has to recognize that "rome" means "the (Western) Roman Empire" and not the modern city of Rome in Italy or "the Holy Roman Empire" or the city of Rome, NY, USA. It furthermore needs to interpret "why" in such a way that it emphasizes results with "reasons" or "explanations", rather than something like a "timeline" or "summary". Personally I find it really weird that Google is interested in pushing users more to interact with its digital librarian / AI assistant, instead of continuing to improve keyword search. I have a few guesses as to why they are going this way: 1. It makes the user interface simpler from an engineering perspective (fewer user-facing buttons and options to implement and test). 2. There is strategic benefit to making search more of a black box. Maybe they are specifically trying to "educate" users to expect and be comfortable with such black boxes. Maybe the plan is to get people so accustomed to "AI assistant" search that they see keyword search as outdated, and thereby secure a competitive advantage for the next several years over other search engines, by having the biggest and best AI models. 3. They are trying to increase the amount of rich "natural language" user search inputs in their data. Making keyword search worse will encourage people to use queries that more closely resemble natural language. I assume that this has strategic benefit related to Guess 2 above.
- munk-a 4y ago
  I had a good laugh yesterday. I was setting up a password vault for my mother and had to get the login pages for various services and a few did like Etsy does - search for "Etsy Login" and you'll notice their SEO has managed to put /search?q=login above /signin in google's results. It amuses me whenever SEO is taken to such an extreme that it actually makes the results from your company less useful for people actually looking for your company.
  - chronogram 4y ago
    It's different for me, but the second result is quite funny: https://i.ibb.co/fqSF7rd/Screenshot-20220929-093644-Chrome.png https://i.ibb.co/fqSF7rd/Screenshot-20220929-093644-Chrome.p...
skybrian 4y ago
These days you need -youtube to get rid of the video results.
int_19h 4y ago
It's the opposite now - you increasingly have to use "Google-fu" to make sure that your query is not creatively reinterpreted in ways that are virtually guaranteed to yield irrelevant results (but more of them) - e.g. substituting words with "synonyms" (which aren't), or removing the most important keyword from the query altogether.