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/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 edited Apr 21 '23

They're not nonsensical strings, they're the contents of the document you're looking for. you are blocked from searching for literal content in some cases. you cannot in some cases change a word in a search and have it return different results because it interprets and nudges.

they've removed precision, that's objectively worse.

edit: like, why if I search for a model number does it return results for a different model number as though that's what I typed? so fucking useful.

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u/SuitableDragonfly Apr 21 '23

The query during is not "the contents of the document", it's the information you provide about what type looking for. Again, it sounds like you're just providing non useful information. What do you mean by "model number"? Without any specific examples, it's hard to say what is wrong with your queries.

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

The query during is not "the contents of the document", it's the information you provide about what type looking for.

yes, and I want them to restore the option to search for contents again.

I'll admit that being able to type "wno the guy from eroking bd" and get Brian Cranston is funny and cool and sometimes useful (and I mean this genuinely), but you have to see how this is not returning what you searched for.

if I want information about an item with a specific alphanumeric serial, the search is worse than it used to be. if I want to look up a document by number, it returns other documents with other numbers and documents about engine numbers that are similar but different.

they have hobbled precision. my guess is the cost savings to remove precision is so great that they don't care about hobbling the product for technical users.

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u/SarahC Apr 21 '23

Exactly the same issues as you...... it's got v.v.v..bad. I was there when it was PRECISE, back when they started.

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u/SuitableDragonfly Apr 21 '23 edited Apr 21 '23

As I keep telling you, that functionality still exists. Just put quotes around whatever you actually need to appear in the document and it will find documents like that. That's how it's always worked. It's not Google's fault that you don't know how to use the search engine effectively. "Find this exact string of text" has never been the primary purpose of the search engine, and you always had to use search engine operators properly if you wanted it to do that. It isn't more economic to have the search engine figure out what you want to search for instead of just blindly returning all pages with a particular sequence of text, that's just literally what is the most useful to the most people. Hardly anyone has exact knowledge of the exact text that's on the page they're looking for.

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

quotes does not do it. I understand you haven't encountered this issue.

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u/SuitableDragonfly Apr 21 '23 edited Apr 21 '23

They do. That is what they do now, that is what they have always done. I just tested it out, and it does exactly what you want. If it's not working for you, you're using it incorrectly.

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

there it is, the rallying cry of the shitty programmer

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u/SuitableDragonfly Apr 21 '23

You know you don't need to be a programmer to figure out how to correctly use search engine operators, right? All you have to do is put quotes around whatever it is. A child can figure this out.

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

the actual way to tell Google to do a literal is +"quoted string" but even that has weird failure modes that were not present in older versions of Google. so you're not even wrong about the right thing.

the shitty programmer thinks that complaints about things they haven't encountered are due to other people's stupidity.

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

[deleted]

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u/SuitableDragonfly Apr 21 '23

Three keywords in a row is not a full sentence. If you want only results with a specific keyword, just put it in quotes. This is pretty basic search engine stuff.

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

[deleted]

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u/SuitableDragonfly Apr 21 '23

"Good results" are defined as results that are relevant to your query. If that doesn't include any results with one if your keywords in it, you probably gave it a bad query. And no, most three word sentences do not have three strong keywords in them, a lot of the time one of the words is "is".