<story><title>Google Memory Loss</title><url>https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/01/15/Google-is-losing-its-memory</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>colordrops</author><text>This same AI effect can be seen in the Android keyboard, where _properly_ spelled words will be replaced after typing another word or two because it&amp;#x27;s been determined to be more likely what you want.  It&amp;#x27;s infuriating.</text></item><item><author>Declanomous</author><text>&amp;gt; has seemingly degraded into an approximation of a search engine that has knowledge of only very superficial information, will try to rewrite your queries and omit words (including the very word that makes all the difference...)&lt;p&gt;I think the biggest irony is that the web allows for more adoption of long-tail movements than ever before, and Google has gotten significantly worse at turning these up. I &lt;i&gt;assume&lt;/i&gt; this has something to do with the fact that information from the long tail is substantially less searched for than stuff within the normal bounds.&lt;p&gt;This is a nightmare if you have any hobbies that share a common phrase with a vastly more popular hobby, and is especially common when it comes to tech-related activities. I use Linux at home, and I program VBA at work. At home Linux is crossed out of most of the first few pages, and I just get a ton of results about Windows, and at work VBA is crossed off and I get results about VB6 and .NET.&lt;p&gt;Completely. Useless.&lt;p&gt;I can only imagine this has something to do with their increasing reliance on AI, and the fact that the AI is probably incentivized to give a correct response to as many people&amp;#x27;above the fold&amp;#x27; as is possible. If 95% of people are served by dropping the specifically-chosen search term, then the AI probably thinks it&amp;#x27;s doing a great job.&lt;p&gt;It seems like the web is being optimized for casual users, and using the internet is no longer as skill you can improve to create a path towards a more meaningful web experience.</text></item><item><author>userbinator</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve noticed this many times too, particularly recently, and I call it &amp;quot;Google Alzheimer&amp;#x27;s&amp;quot; --- what was once a very powerful search engine that could give you thousands (yes, I&amp;#x27;ve tried exhausting its result pages many times, and used to have much success finding the perfect site many dozens of pages deep in the results) of pages containing nothing but the exact words and phrase you search for has seemingly degraded into an approximation of a search engine that has knowledge of only very superficial information, will try to rewrite your queries and omit words (including &lt;i&gt;the very word that makes all the difference&lt;/i&gt; --- I didn&amp;#x27;t put it in the search query for nothing!), and in general is becoming increasingly useless for finding the sort of detailed, specific information that search engines were once ideal for.&lt;p&gt;To add insult to injury, if you do try to make complex and slightly varying queries and exhaust its result pages in an effort to find something &lt;i&gt;you know exists&lt;/i&gt;, very often it will think you&amp;#x27;re a robot and present you with a CAPTCHA, or just ban you completely (solving the CAPTCHA just gives you another, and no matter how many you solve it keeps refusing to search; but they probably benefit from all the AI help you just gave them, what bastards...) for a few hours.&lt;p&gt;Google had the biggest most comprehensive index for many years, which is why it was my sole search engine. Now I&amp;#x27;m often finding better results with Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and even Yandex, but part of me is very worried that large and extremely valuable parts of the Web are, despite still being accessible, simply &amp;quot;falling off the radar&amp;quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nkoren</author><text>It actually does this with such consistency that I think it&amp;#x27;s a very specific mistake. For example, I frequently swipe &amp;quot;See you soon.&amp;quot; It always, &lt;i&gt;always&lt;/i&gt; renders as &amp;quot;See you son&amp;quot;, which I then have to manually retype. Sometimes twice. I don&amp;#x27;t have a son, and I&amp;#x27;m not a blind old cowboy who jocularly refers to any random person as &amp;quot;son&amp;quot;. I honestly just want to type &amp;quot;soon&amp;quot;, for the love of... anyhow, this is an ongoing, totally inane battle of wills with my phone.&lt;p&gt;I think what&amp;#x27;s happening here is that there&amp;#x27;s a very impressive and sophisticated heuristic for predicting the probability of what you &lt;i&gt;want&lt;/i&gt; to type by looking at the frequency of what you &lt;i&gt;have&lt;/i&gt; typed in similar contexts. It uses its state-of-the-art AI to evaluate the context and build an array of candidate words, along with their respective probabilities. I suspect it is &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; accurate as it does this. Then it sorts the array by probability and pops the top element into the predictive text input.&lt;p&gt;Alas -- per my pet theory anyways -- it sorts like this:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  candidateWords.sort((a,b) =&amp;gt; a.probability - b.probability);
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Rather than:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  candidateWords.sort((a,b) =&amp;gt; b.probability - a.probability);
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
...which is how a two-character diff can turn a brilliantly helpful AI into an ultimately annoying damnit-I-need-to-smash-something antagonist.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google Memory Loss</title><url>https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/01/15/Google-is-losing-its-memory</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>colordrops</author><text>This same AI effect can be seen in the Android keyboard, where _properly_ spelled words will be replaced after typing another word or two because it&amp;#x27;s been determined to be more likely what you want.  It&amp;#x27;s infuriating.</text></item><item><author>Declanomous</author><text>&amp;gt; has seemingly degraded into an approximation of a search engine that has knowledge of only very superficial information, will try to rewrite your queries and omit words (including the very word that makes all the difference...)&lt;p&gt;I think the biggest irony is that the web allows for more adoption of long-tail movements than ever before, and Google has gotten significantly worse at turning these up. I &lt;i&gt;assume&lt;/i&gt; this has something to do with the fact that information from the long tail is substantially less searched for than stuff within the normal bounds.&lt;p&gt;This is a nightmare if you have any hobbies that share a common phrase with a vastly more popular hobby, and is especially common when it comes to tech-related activities. I use Linux at home, and I program VBA at work. At home Linux is crossed out of most of the first few pages, and I just get a ton of results about Windows, and at work VBA is crossed off and I get results about VB6 and .NET.&lt;p&gt;Completely. Useless.&lt;p&gt;I can only imagine this has something to do with their increasing reliance on AI, and the fact that the AI is probably incentivized to give a correct response to as many people&amp;#x27;above the fold&amp;#x27; as is possible. If 95% of people are served by dropping the specifically-chosen search term, then the AI probably thinks it&amp;#x27;s doing a great job.&lt;p&gt;It seems like the web is being optimized for casual users, and using the internet is no longer as skill you can improve to create a path towards a more meaningful web experience.</text></item><item><author>userbinator</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve noticed this many times too, particularly recently, and I call it &amp;quot;Google Alzheimer&amp;#x27;s&amp;quot; --- what was once a very powerful search engine that could give you thousands (yes, I&amp;#x27;ve tried exhausting its result pages many times, and used to have much success finding the perfect site many dozens of pages deep in the results) of pages containing nothing but the exact words and phrase you search for has seemingly degraded into an approximation of a search engine that has knowledge of only very superficial information, will try to rewrite your queries and omit words (including &lt;i&gt;the very word that makes all the difference&lt;/i&gt; --- I didn&amp;#x27;t put it in the search query for nothing!), and in general is becoming increasingly useless for finding the sort of detailed, specific information that search engines were once ideal for.&lt;p&gt;To add insult to injury, if you do try to make complex and slightly varying queries and exhaust its result pages in an effort to find something &lt;i&gt;you know exists&lt;/i&gt;, very often it will think you&amp;#x27;re a robot and present you with a CAPTCHA, or just ban you completely (solving the CAPTCHA just gives you another, and no matter how many you solve it keeps refusing to search; but they probably benefit from all the AI help you just gave them, what bastards...) for a few hours.&lt;p&gt;Google had the biggest most comprehensive index for many years, which is why it was my sole search engine. Now I&amp;#x27;m often finding better results with Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and even Yandex, but part of me is very worried that large and extremely valuable parts of the Web are, despite still being accessible, simply &amp;quot;falling off the radar&amp;quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gonvaled</author><text>Try switching between languages. I work in English, my wife is Italian, my colleagues are french speaking, I am Spanish and have Catalan friends, and I live in Germany. I gave up on predictive keyboards long ago.</text></comment>