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This approach to remove bad search suggestions manually reminded of a different approach Google once took, where they weren’t satisfied with manually tweaking s
by zogrodea 2y ago
This approach to remove bad search suggestions manually reminded of a different approach Google once took, where they weren’t satisfied with manually tweaking search results but rather wanted to tweak the algorithm that produces these results when there were bad results.
'Around 2002, a team was testing a subset of search limited to products, called Froogle. But one problem was so glaring that the team wasn't comfortable releasing Froogle: when the query "running shoes" was typed in, the top result was a garden gnome sculpture that happened to be wearing sneakers. Every day engineers would try to tweak the algorithm so that it would be able to distinguish between lawn art and footwear, but the gnome kept its top position. One day, seemingly miraculously, the gnome disappeared from the results. At a meeting, no one on the team claimed credit. Then an engineer arrived late, holding an elf with running shoes. He had bought the one-of-a kind product from the vendor, and since it was no longer for sale, it was no longer in the index. "The algorithm was now returning the right results," says a Google engineer. "We didn't cheat, we didn't change anything, and we launched."'
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14009245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14009245
- dpflan 2y agoWow. Thank you for digging this up!
- badgersnake 2y agoSounds rather like how Google photos does not identify anything as a Gorilla.
- avar 2y agoIt sounds like the exact opposite of that story. They manually blacklisted gorillas from being identified because they kept conflating black people with gorillas.
- kreyenborgi 2y agoGoogle bought all the gorillas?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- gerdesj 2y agoSpend say £500M (USD/GBP/EUR) on experts, per annum. Imagine typing a search and getting a response: "Give us 30 mins to respond - here's a token, come back at 17:35 with your token" ... and then you get an answer from an expert, which also gets indexed. The clever bit decides when to defer to an expert instead of returning answers from the index. I'll leave the finer details out.
- duskwuff 2y agoGoogle Answers was launched in 2002 and retired in 2006. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Answers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Answers
- gerdesj 2y ago"users would pay someone else to do the search." My notion isn't a rehash of Google Answers. Google pays the "someone else", not you.
- duskwuff 2y agoThat sounds like a way for Google to spend money, not make it.
- fragmede 2y agoHave you seen how much Google spends on their campuses and engineers?
- josefx 2y agoYou assume that a modern day tech giant would hire an army of experts, instead of just outsourcing it to the lowest bidder in the current third world country of choice.
- gerdesj 2y agoI live in hope. I don't think that my notion is too daft - I generally find that quality might be a profit generator. When you are so far up the arse of your financials that you can't see sense ... you are probably profitable for now until ... you are not.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoThe solution is always the same: pay people off and keep it under the radar. What stops the vendor, or other vendors, from creating more gnomes with sneakers. Easy money from customer with billions of dollars to spend on payola, fines, legal settlements, etc. Maybe they made the vendor sign an NDA.
- latexr 2y ago> The solution is always the same: pay people off and keep it under the radar. You’re making this into a conspiracy unnecessarily. They didn’t “pay people off”, they bought an item. Do you “pay off” your grocer when you buy a carrot from them? > What stops the vendor, or other vendors, from creating more gnomes with sneakers. The fact they don’t know their entry was causing this issue to a major corporation? > Maybe they made the vendor sign an NDA. Why would they? Someone had one gnome with sneakers for sale; someone else bought it; end of story.
- onemiketwelve 2y agoreminds me of this time we kept getting bugs in our app from a super old android phone from 2011. we could never reproduce it with any other hardware. There were only 4 users with this phone. We spent weeks trying to fix it but couldn't. I suggested we buy the 4 users a refurb phone from another brand. Would've cost like $300 total. Nope, not allowed. Something about not giving up as engineers. We spent 3 weeks trying to fix it, which equaled $4500 in just my salary. we never ended up figuring it out.
- charleslmunger 2y agoA similar story: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/41088357#comment32 https://issues.chromium.org/issues/41088357#comment32 Years ago I bought some Korean phone with a foot long antenna and TV tuner on eBay because it was crashing at a disproportionate rate. It was just the nature of Android development at the time.
- fragmede 2y agoThat was an amazing read, how'd you come across it?
- charleslmunger 2y agoAt the time I was working on a prototype of what would eventually be open sourced as Cronet, which was Chromium's http stack repackaged to be embedded in Android apps, so I monitored chromium bugs in the network stack component that mentioned android. Cronet is still around, now open source and as far as I know is still the best all-around network stack for Android apps - fast, secure, supports modern protocols.
- ein0p 2y agoGoogle could buy all the wood glue in the world, but probably not all the rocks