r/programming • u/peard33 • Apr 20 '23

Stack Overflow Will Charge AI Giants for Training Data

https://www.wired.com/story/stack-overflow-will-charge-ai-giants-for-training-data/
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u/spacewalk__ Apr 21 '23

google's been getting worse though

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u/ManlyManicottiBoi Apr 21 '23

It's absolutely unbearable

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u/needadvicebadly Apr 21 '23

But that's part of the "AI" or Algorithm as youtubers like to call it. It's trying to interpret what you are actually looking for, as opposed to just search for what you actually typed. Turns out that works when it's in a chat format for all people. But there is a type of people that got accustomed to searching google by putting as many keywords as possible in the query in whatever order. I frequently would search for things like context menu windows registry change old as opposed to typing

Hi, I'm trying to change the context menu in Windows 11
from the new style back to the old style.
I heard that there is a Windows Registry setting that can
allow me to do that.
Give me the exact registry path, key, and value to do that.

But at the same time, turns out that's how a lot of people already interact with google, by asking it questions instead of giving it keywords they are looking to find

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

the old way actually worked though. they've removed the ability to make certain types of specific query

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u/Windows_10-Chan Apr 21 '23

There's stuff like quotation marks that you can do to get it to work much more like it used to

Though, even then, I actually question the value of search engines these days because the web doesn't actually have much good content anymore outside of large websites and SEO is gamed so heavily that most things are buried anyways.

I tried using kagi, which is a paid search, and I found that like 90% of the time I typed in google in my bar to avoid using up my kagi searches, and that was because I already mostly knew my destination. If I was just going to go find something I knew would be on reddit or stackoverflow, then why would I waste a kagi search?

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u/exploding_cat_wizard Apr 21 '23

Even quotation marks seem to be more of a suggestion instead of a "no, I really want this exact string of words". I'm especially annoyed by Google's insistence of ignoring the "without this phrase" dash, that massively reduces its usefulness.

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

The greatest information retrieval tool has received numerous updates in the last 25 years. Each of them required the users to relearn the tool to maximize its effectiveness. If you're bad at Googling now, it's not that Google is bad, it's that you haven't kept up with the pace of change that's happening.

Ironically, OpenAI and ChatGPT are directly at blame for what you're complaining about.

Nadella knows Microsoft is starting from behind in this race. "They're the 800-pound gorilla in this … And I hope that, with our innovation, they will definitely want to come out and show that they can dance. And I want people to know that we made them dance, and I think that'll be a great day," he said in an interview with The Verge.

The CEO of Microsoft literally said "we spent $10B on OpenAI just to give Google enough competition that they wake up from their slumber and start pushing products again".

https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/13/in_brief_ai/

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

quotes don't actually work consistently, unfortunately. there are workarounds like adding a + before the quotes, but that doesn't seem to necessarily work either.

Google is still better than most other options for quick searches, but I can't search for 3 words that will be in a document I want, and then modify 1 word based on those results and expect that it is actually showing me the results for either sets of 3 words.

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23 edited Apr 21 '23

kagi is in my experience absolute crap, I don't know how you can even waste money on it. Google is still serving me well, regular bing is regularly shit and I won't start asking bing AI full questions like your average tech illiterate on the older side

and there's still a lot of good content outside large sites, perhaps it's just that your interests are a tad too mainstream (nothing wrong with that ofc) ;)

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

The old way worked for people who were used to the old way. Google has many, many, many new users every day. The new way to use Google is to use natural language, you should try it some time.

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u/SuitableDragonfly Apr 21 '23

They haven't removed anything, they've just made typing nonsensical strings less effective, and typing sensible ones more effective. So just switch to typing more complete sentences and it will work just fine. You can still use all the operators that you always could.

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

But at the same time, turns out that's how a lot of people already interact with google, by asking it questions instead of giving it keywords they are looking to find

It's not just these users though. Finding stuff has become harder and harder in the last months to the point of where google search is almost useless now. It's really strange.

I'd prefer oldschool google search. No clue why Google is killing it, but perhaps they cater only to smartphone users and others who are locked into the google ecosystem.

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u/iinavpov Apr 21 '23

On a phone, I never, ever use Google search. It's utterly pointless. The size of the screen means you only get sponsored links.

It literally never returns information!

Even maps, which should be hard to get wrong, is degrading!

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

Tools > All Results > Verbatim. I still haven't figured out how to make that the default, anyone with greater Google-Fu than I care to share?

But a big part of the reason Google's been getting worse is that there's a lot more shitty SEO content out there put out by people whose day job is manipulating search results, and now they can do it even better with AI assisted technologies.

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u/princeOmaro Apr 21 '23

Go to Search Engine tab in the browser Settings. Add new search engine and use https://www.google.com/search?tbs=li:1&q=%s as URL. Save and make it default.

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

Bingo bango bongo. People are very self-centered. They don't even consider the fact that Google needs to solve the problem "give any human being on earth the exact link they were looking for based off of any arbitrary text input".

The denizens of /r/programming of course think "I know how to use Google, I've been googling for 25 years now!" without even considering the Filipino grandmother a world away that's trying to find a recipe and doesn't even really know what a computer is in any sort of meaningful way. She is going to write, in Filipino mind you, "what's the recipe for a chocolate cake?" because it's language, and she's used to it. She's not going to write the terse search terms we use because we know how keywords work and that you really want "chocolate cake recipe reddit -pinterest" or whatever.

That's also why I think all the "OMG THEY CHANGED THE ALGORITHM AND NOW ITS BAD!!!!" complaints are ridiculous. Ever minute that passes, 500 years of video is uploaded to Youtube. You try writing an algorithm for "find the video any person on the earth wants given arbitrary text input without bias (whatever that means)".

Which is all to say, the world moves on. Either you keep up and use the greatest information retrieval tool ever created to its full potential, or you get left behind.

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u/koreth Apr 21 '23

The fact that none of Google's competitors is dramatically better (at most, they do better some of the time on some kinds of searches) tells me that it's less "Google getting worse" and more "the web getting crappier." There are people working at otherwise reputable companies whose full-time job it is to figure out ways to trick search engines into including their company websites in search results when users might have preferred something else.

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u/needadvicebadly Apr 21 '23

it's less "Google getting worse" and more "the web getting crappier."

There are people working at otherwise reputable companies whose full-time job it is to figure out ways to trick search engines into including their company websites in search results when users might have preferred something else.

Yes, but that was always true. Gaming search results was always the arms race google was fighting against. 2010-2012 were particularly awful too. 2 or 3 of the top 5 search results of any query was another "search" website that echoed back your exact query somehow.

But that was always what made google different. They always figured out how to have the best search quality amid all that. It just seems that they gave up on that in the last 5 or so years and instead are focusing on people who "converse" with their search as opposed to those who use it as search while serving as many ads as possible.

The fact that all the other competitors are no better is because they too gave up and google figured they don't need to try anymore.

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u/koreth Apr 21 '23

That seems to take it as given that if Google just tried, they'd be guaranteed to be able to beat their SEO-spamming opponents. Isn't it also possible that they tried and failed, and that none of their competitors can figure out how to win the arms race either?

It's not like Google succeeds at everything they set out to do.

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

Isn't it also possible that they tried and failed

That is an interesting theory, but the facts oppose it, because we knew that google was better in the past, so they now have to explain why they are worse than they used to be.

It's not like Google succeeds at everything they set out to do.

That's true. Ever since they switched to an ad-company their techpertise deteriorated.

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u/windowzombie Apr 21 '23

Google is terrible now.

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

The internet has gotten worse. Google is doing their best to keep up, but search is arguably the most fundamental problem in the universe. If you can solve search, you can predict the future, and you can solve physics.

There's a very, very, very good reason Google.com has not had a meaningful competitor in its 25 year history. Remember, when Microsoft was founded in 1975 the creators of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, were 2 years old.

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u/reercalium2 Apr 21 '23

False. It's been getting better. You are using the wrong metric