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The change happened on or around Jan 21. Overnight the results went from pretty good to absolute trash. Here are two screenshots taken on Jan 20 and Jan 23 ht

The change happened on or around Jan 21. Overnight the results went from pretty good to absolute trash. Here are two screenshots taken on Jan 20 and Jan 23 https://bsky.app/profile/adamnemecek.bsky.social/post/3mdbup5axds2o https://bsky.app/profile/adamnemecek.bsky.social/post/3mdbup... They don't do full text search anymore esp for copyrighted books. I wonder if this is not a regression but an intent to give them a let up in the AI race.

jeffbee 9mo ago
It isn't obvious why the left results are preferred over the right results.
- advisedwang 9mo ago
  The left results are contemporary, the right are decades old. That includes editions of the same book --- surely the newer edition is going to be preferred by most readers.
  - jeffbee 9mo ago
    I guess. That's not immediately clear to me. However, browsing around on Google Books suggests to me that it is the corpus which changed, not the algorithms.
    - adamnemecek 9mo ago
      The corpus is still the same, like searching the name of the book will find it, but the full text search.
  - thaumasiotes 9mo ago
    > surely the newer edition is going to be preferred by most readers. Why? Where different editions exist, the reader will want to know which one they're getting, but they're unlikely to systematically prefer newer editions. But also, Google Books isn't aimed at "readers". You're not supposed to read books through it. It's aimed at searchers. Searchers are even less likely to prefer newer editions.
    - gjm11 9mo ago
      > they're unlikely to systematically prefer newer editions That seems wrong to me. Generally when a new edition of something is put out it's (at least nominally) because they've made improvements. ("At least nominally" because it may happen that a publisher puts out different editions regularly simply because by doing so they can get people to keep buying them -- e.g., if some university course uses edition E of book B then students may feel that they have to get that specific edition, and the university may feel that they have to ask for the latest edition rather than an earlier one so that students can reliably get hold of it, so if the publisher puts out a new edition every year that's just different for the sake of being different then that may net them a lot of sales. But I don't think it's true for most books with multiple editions that later ones aren't systematically better than earlier ones.)
      - thaumasiotes 9mo ago
        > But I don't think it's true for most books with multiple editions that later ones aren't systematically better than earlier ones. Most books with multiple editions are books that have been translated multiple times. It is definitely true that later translations aren't systematically better than earlier ones.
toephu2 9mo ago
Yup, it's for AI. Similarly, a year ago or so ChatGPT could summarize YouTube videos. Google put a stop to that so now only Gemini can summarize YouTube videos.
- AJ007 9mo ago
  The YT transcripts are linked to on the YT page itself. If they remove that, it is trivial to use a local STT model to transcribe the video. If they make it impossible to download a video, you could just have a microphone record all of the sound, and so on. Once you have the transcription of anything, summarizing is trivial. I have a local script that does this and I use it all of the time. Also produce diagrams for YT summaries. Hours saved, per day.

jeffbee 9mo ago

It isn't obvious why the left results are preferred over the right results.

advisedwang 9mo ago
The left results are contemporary, the right are decades old. That includes editions of the same book --- surely the newer edition is going to be preferred by most readers.
- jeffbee 9mo ago
  I guess. That's not immediately clear to me. However, browsing around on Google Books suggests to me that it is the corpus which changed, not the algorithms.
  - adamnemecek 9mo ago
    The corpus is still the same, like searching the name of the book will find it, but the full text search.
- thaumasiotes 9mo ago
  > surely the newer edition is going to be preferred by most readers. Why? Where different editions exist, the reader will want to know which one they're getting, but they're unlikely to systematically prefer newer editions. But also, Google Books isn't aimed at "readers". You're not supposed to read books through it. It's aimed at searchers. Searchers are even less likely to prefer newer editions.
  - gjm11 9mo ago
    > they're unlikely to systematically prefer newer editions That seems wrong to me. Generally when a new edition of something is put out it's (at least nominally) because they've made improvements. ("At least nominally" because it may happen that a publisher puts out different editions regularly simply because by doing so they can get people to keep buying them -- e.g., if some university course uses edition E of book B then students may feel that they have to get that specific edition, and the university may feel that they have to ask for the latest edition rather than an earlier one so that students can reliably get hold of it, so if the publisher puts out a new edition every year that's just different for the sake of being different then that may net them a lot of sales. But I don't think it's true for most books with multiple editions that later ones aren't systematically better than earlier ones.)
    - thaumasiotes 9mo ago
      > But I don't think it's true for most books with multiple editions that later ones aren't systematically better than earlier ones. Most books with multiple editions are books that have been translated multiple times. It is definitely true that later translations aren't systematically better than earlier ones.

toephu2 9mo ago

Yup, it's for AI. Similarly, a year ago or so ChatGPT could summarize YouTube videos. Google put a stop to that so now only Gemini can summarize YouTube videos.

AJ007 9mo ago
The YT transcripts are linked to on the YT page itself. If they remove that, it is trivial to use a local STT model to transcribe the video. If they make it impossible to download a video, you could just have a microphone record all of the sound, and so on. Once you have the transcription of anything, summarizing is trivial. I have a local script that does this and I use it all of the time. Also produce diagrams for YT summaries. Hours saved, per day.