Hacker News Reader

Comment by cma | Hacker News Reader

In the TPUv4 paper it sounded like Google search moved over to some really crude AI embedding vector stuff. If you search "book of master system" it gives only results for "book of genesis" because it mixes up the biblical book of Genesis with the Sega Master System.

Searching any programming terms, like camel-case variable names from a system library without exact quotes, just gives random results about Katy Perry and stuff now.

View on HN

Google search results are driven by clicks. There are much more non-programmers than programmers, so they pop non-programming topics to top of the list. Average user don't care about programming languages. Google is a general search engine, not a specialized one. There was attempt to spy on users and split them into different buckets, but it's dangerous to population, because a government can just ask Google for the list of «wrong-thinkers».

I looked for “book of master system” and it gave me results about the SEGA book.

Granted, vectorization could be one of the issues plaguing search, but it isn’t the primary issue.

I get results for the Bible book when I search for "book of megadrive". Genesis and Megadrive are different names for the same SEGA console. Master System is a different console altogether.

What would you say is the primary issue? Personally I see vectorization and similar fuzzy techniques as the things that have most affected search results in the last <10 years, both positively and negatively. On one hand it allows me to search really dumb queries and still get sort of relevant results, on the other it makes well thought query tuning for more specific results seem futile. I don't know what goes on internally, but it's as if Google just discards as noise most of the words in the search query. "Verbatim" mode seems to tune that down somewhat.

Yeah it was book of megadrive that gave the biblical genesis results, not master system, I misremembered. It was going around on Twitter a few weeks back.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com