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The deterioration of Google: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/the-deterioration-of-google/, via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42277673
We've all experienced the proliferation of bad search results from Google and seen stories pointing it out and blaming the internal conflict between search and ads at Google. This piece has a different theory: they switched to a machine learning system for ranking search results and now don't have any idea how to control what it does.
@11011110 I don't think that's true because they had been using ML for ranking for years before the Prabhakar saga unfolded.
@11011110 and I don't think it is all that complicated. You have a weighted ensemble and a mechanism for adding new components to the ensemble and evaluating how that fares vs the baseline. Add ML signals to taste (and they did). I think it's more likely the metrics for evaluation changes with the switch to optimizing for ads.