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> I do recall one question [...] along the lines of “So, what do you think about the idea that people can’t find things on Google Search,” to which I recall jok

by nix0n 3y ago

> I do recall one question [...] along the lines of “So, what do you think about the idea that people can’t find things on Google Search,” to which I recall joking something like, “Yes, clearly no one finds things any more.” I really, actually, do not find things on Google anymore. The rate of success has gotten quite bad, under 50%, when it used to be closer to 95%. Sullivan says in his article that his role is "part of the search quality team", but he thinks this decline in quality is a laughing matter. It's not going to get better.

whstl 3y ago
I'm using ChatGPT for 90% of documentation search work, hallucinations and all, simply because Google has become THAT worse for development IMO. I can't find shit anymore. Sometimes when I have to use a specific library, I just download the documentation and search using VSCode or something.
- pastamania 3y ago
  I'm largely mystified at a lot of the 'Google is rubbish now' takes, but dev documentation is one of the areas that I genuinely find Google was better at a few years ago. I actually do tend to get answers to my questions, but a lot of them are desperately outdated and no longer relevant. My take on what happened is that Google has a metric in their algorithms called 'Query deserves freshness' - basically, identifying a search where the user isn't going to want old information, and artifically promoting more recent pages over better linked to but older documents. If someone wants to see the weather, they probably aren't looking for the weather on an extremely weird day 4 years ago just because a lot of people linked to it back then. They seem to have reduced that down, I suspect to reduce search being flooded with misinformation during the pandemic when all information was recent and the more controversial takes sometimes got more coverage. As an unexpected result, if I'm searching a dev query, it ends up surfacing a ton of results from years ago. Yeah, those pages may have more links and history and probably seem to an algorithm to be more trustworthy, but if it's for a library 20 versions old that long since stopped working the way the stackoverflow answer from 2011 says it did, that's pretty useless. Still, as a trade off, probably better me having to use the time filter dropdown to limit results to recent one's than someone necking bleach and horse de-wormer when they get Covid. And while I'm not quite as onboard with GPT being the death of search as some, dev documentation is one of those areas where generative AI is genuinely a better tool than web search ever was.
dannysullivan 3y ago
I absolutely don't think it's a laughing matter. I made a joke in the interview with the reporter as a kind of icebreaker (which clearly didn't seem to go well). But as I also explained after doing that, "I’m pretty sure, went into what I thought was a more serious and thoughtful discussion, at least from my perspective." I don't think making a joke about something is the same as someone then thinking an entire matter isn't serious. But I can appreciate you disagree.

by nix0n 3y ago

whstl 3y ago

I'm using ChatGPT for 90% of documentation search work, hallucinations and all, simply because Google has become THAT worse for development IMO. I can't find shit anymore. Sometimes when I have to use a specific library, I just download the documentation and search using VSCode or something.

pastamania 3y ago
I'm largely mystified at a lot of the 'Google is rubbish now' takes, but dev documentation is one of the areas that I genuinely find Google was better at a few years ago. I actually do tend to get answers to my questions, but a lot of them are desperately outdated and no longer relevant. My take on what happened is that Google has a metric in their algorithms called 'Query deserves freshness' - basically, identifying a search where the user isn't going to want old information, and artifically promoting more recent pages over better linked to but older documents. If someone wants to see the weather, they probably aren't looking for the weather on an extremely weird day 4 years ago just because a lot of people linked to it back then. They seem to have reduced that down, I suspect to reduce search being flooded with misinformation during the pandemic when all information was recent and the more controversial takes sometimes got more coverage. As an unexpected result, if I'm searching a dev query, it ends up surfacing a ton of results from years ago. Yeah, those pages may have more links and history and probably seem to an algorithm to be more trustworthy, but if it's for a library 20 versions old that long since stopped working the way the stackoverflow answer from 2011 says it did, that's pretty useless. Still, as a trade off, probably better me having to use the time filter dropdown to limit results to recent one's than someone necking bleach and horse de-wormer when they get Covid. And while I'm not quite as onboard with GPT being the death of search as some, dev documentation is one of those areas where generative AI is genuinely a better tool than web search ever was.

dannysullivan 3y ago

I absolutely don't think it's a laughing matter. I made a joke in the interview with the reporter as a kind of icebreaker (which clearly didn't seem to go well). But as I also explained after doing that, "I’m pretty sure, went into what I thought was a more serious and thoughtful discussion, at least from my perspective." I don't think making a joke about something is the same as someone then thinking an entire matter isn't serious. But I can appreciate you disagree.