Comment by hayst4ck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hayst4ck | Hacker News Reader

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AI's main value to companies is to launder bad behavior.

"We fed it into this black box, and this is what we got, we don't know how it works". Of course the training data will probably be a weighted output of who pays google, rather than what will make the user happiest.

It's pretext to violate reviewing systems without looking obviously corrupt.

I just want to see the top 10 most rated things per category, then I want to see the top 10 things over a given threshold of reviews. I don't want googles mangling of the data, I just want to be able to query the review data.

If whatever google displays isn't better than the top 10 results in a given area sorted by number of reviews, it's clear there is a reason why. Whether it's devs creating unnecessary complexity to justify their employment, or a system designed to weight results in favor of who pays google, or the need to inject 'randomness' in order to be able to inject paid advertisements without them being 100% ignored, or to provide a reason to keep scrolling allowing more ads to be displayed, it's all anti-user behavior. This will just be another tool to manipulate a user rather than help them.

>I just want to see the top 10 most rated things per category

That is the problem. You do not want a web search engine that gives you a WEB PAGE for your query. You want an answer AI.

Google can not find a page nobody has written, and if several people write about a topic, there is just no way Google can figure out which one should be the first result correctly.

When Google talks about finding relevant results, they just mean if you type "hacker news" on Google the first result will probably be this website instead of news about hackers who hacked a bank or something. That is what "relevancy" means. When there is a single, canonical, unambiguous web page that matches a query exactly.

Everything else is just expecting more from Google than it can feasibly provide and then getting angry when it tacks AI on everything because it can't do magic.

> You want an answer AI.

As a separate service distinct from web search, sure. But I also want to be able to search the web and get lists of pages.

> That is what "relevancy" means. When there is a single, canonical, unambiguous web page that matches a query exactly.

This is what I don't want in a search engine. Unless that search engine figures out a way to read my mind, anyhow, which would bring up a whole host of other issues. Google trying to guess at what I want rather than just giving me a list of pages that match my query is the main problem that I have with Google search.

Again, it's because you are the use case that is unfeasible.

It's a SEARCH engine, not a BROWSE CATEGORY engine.

And I get it, I get frustrated at this too. Sometimes I try to search for a category of something, like free image editors, and Google just can't give me an answer I'd like.. And it's really not a hard query to answer. It just lists me a bunch of names with zero info about what platform they are for, or what features they have. It's an useless list. It's simply beyond the scope of what it is made to do.

I mean, seriously, I know Google is a blackbox, but Google is really just a single textbox. We're expecting too much from a single textbox.

> it's because you are the use case that is unfeasible.

Not at all, as evidenced by other search engines that are successful at this and the fact that Google used to be successful at this.

> It's a SEARCH engine

Precisely. I want it to search the web and return a list of sites that match my search criteria. I don't want it to to answer a specific question for me, nor to try to guess what I "really" want. That should be done by a different tool.

> We're expecting too much from a single textbox.

I'm not sure what you think that I'm expecting, but what I'm expecting is much simpler than what Google seems to be trying to do.

I suspect that I've failed to adequately explain my use case and we're talking about different things, but I'm not sure where I went wrong so don't know how to clarify.

You are arguing that google is a tool. The other person is arguing that google is more like an opinionated contractor.

"You don't want a tool, you want to remodel your bathroom" is what the other person is arguing. That's kind of true.

We're arguing that we don't want someone tell us how to remodel our bathroom, we just want a tool we can use to remodel our bathroom ourselves.

Google said that providing a tool doesn't make enough money, so they transitioned into being a contractor.

The crux of the issue is the "-" operator. As a tool, it removed any search result with the word after the "-" operator on the page in a very specific way. If you weren't getting the results you wanted, it's because you didn't think of how to use the tool in the right way. As a contractor, they try to interpret what you want to subtract and then give you what they think you want.

The person you are responding to might be too young to remember that google was actually a very good tool at one point.

I don't disagree with the point you're trying to make, but this puts an awful lot of weight and importance on "reviews", which tend to be highly problematic, in my experience at least (cf. Amazon, Yelp)

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