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There are often comments on HN about how Google search doesn't work as well as it used to. It's worth noting that this is probably because this audience wants
by danjc 3y ago
There are often comments on HN about how Google search doesn't work as well as it used to.
It's worth noting that this is probably because this audience wants keyword matching rather than semantic search which Google switched to years back [1].
Curious to know whether embeddings have been a subsequent step in this transition.
1. https://blog.google/products/search/search-language-understanding-bert/amp/ https://blog.google/products/search/search-language-understa...
- esafak 3y agoEmbeddings are the linchpin of semantic search. The embeddings are designed to encode semantic similarity, so the response is formed by retrieving the nearest neighbors of the query, and there are data structures that allow this to be done efficiently.
- spion 3y agoGoogle is pretty bad at semantic understanding too. Try searching for "implementing stackoverflow in typescript". You will get "implementing in typescript" results that come from "stackoverflow". (Then for a good measure try the same in ChatGPT)
- superfish 3y ago[flagged]
- marginalia_nu 3y agoMy hunch is the problem is they are essentially doing both in the same input field. One of the hardest design problems with search is that the affordances of a search field is largely a mystery. Mixing paradigms does not help.
- behnamoh 3y agoYeah, Google uses BERT nowadays.