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0 pointsanimalCrax0rz6y ago0 comments

Google is in the business of producing quick results to sell ads while keeping the cost low. If anyone does better, they will likely do it using a costlier algorithm, and if there is more margin in reselling tangible products than ads then Amazon is incentivized to use costlier algorithms that are more accurate. But I think the margin in both cases does not justify the use of algorithms that may be more accurate in some small percentage of cases but a lot more costly.

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larl6y ago

animalCrax0rx is in the business of producing quick pithy posts to earn more karma while keeping understanding low and making claims that are not evidence based...

See how that works? That's not really what's going on. Sure, G. is incentivized to include pages quickly, but they are also incentivized to produce them accurately, and as the above poster indicates, this is quite a hard problem to solve generally.

A is also incentivized to sell items.

In many cases different algorithms will lead to quantifiably different results. The algorithm changes that work better for the measurement set will be kept and those changes which dont will be discarded. And both A and G do that within different constraints.

dEnigma6y ago

My cursor was hovering over the downvote arrow while reading your first sentence, before I realized what was going on in your post. Thank you for pleasantly surprising me!

animalCrax0rzOP6y ago

Google is aware of this problem in their search approach. It's a business problem, not a technical one. You're saying the same thing in suggesting they base their decisions on some measurement set. If solving the problem adds complexity, which it certainly will, and there is not enough improvement in accuracy for the majority of cases in their measurement set, why bother? You sound like the kind of person that attacks people for their opinion. So weird, dude.

nailer6y ago

Your ad hominem on the other poster is unnecessary, violates the HN guidelines and not an apt comparison.

Pointing out the obvious: Google is an advertising company. If the cost of producing an accurate result outweighs the advertising income on a given term, there is no incentive for Google to produce better results.

jefftk6y ago

This would predict that a query that has no advertising income will return no results, which is clearly not the case.

Having a search engine that people go to whenever they want to search for things is incredibly valuable, because they will come to you when they want to buy things and you can sell ads. But unless you consistently give the best results for all queries, people will go whenever does. It's worth investing strongly in all queries, not just highly monetizable ones.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

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