Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2021 March 24

= March 24 =

What happened to Google?
I remember that years ago Google promised to create a database with ALL answers to ALL question. Now I cannot get any answer to any question. It brings up so many options most of which have nothing to do with the problem at hand that it's almost useless now. What happened? AboutFace 22 (talk) 15:22, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Evil is as evil does. I agree, a long time ago you could find almost anything, but Google's AI has changed considerably over the years, and you have to try considerably harder these days. Some things have been lost for ever. Perhaps your google syntax needs updating. Try googling (lol) for . Or give us a concrete of example of what you are failing to find. >MinorProphet (talk) 18:42, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
 * First, I don't think Google is evil, at least no more or less evil than any large corporation. I know a few people who worked or currently work there and the quality of their technical people is the best I've seen from any organization. I know a few organizations that are as good but none better. They also really reward technical skills. Many places you can't progress past a certain point if you want to stay technical, you've got to be a manager or sales person but tech people can get excellent compensation there (of course the pressure is intense). Plus, more so than the other big companies like Apple or Microsoft they still are really pushing the envelope in terms of technologies such as AI IMO. Anyway, back to the question. I think what you are talking about is the Google Knowledge Vault. When you enter something into Google like "who was the first US president" you get a little box at the top which attempts to answer the question. My understanding is that is from their knowledge vault which is a knowledge graph. I think they use W3C standards like RDFS and OWL but I'm not sure. There is more on the Knowledge Vault in this article: Google_Knowledge_Graph --MadScientistX11 (talk) 19:03, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
 * I think you're putting too much thought into this. It isn't in Google's financial interest to push the envelope in this department and they're not doing it. Evidence: The advanced search today is third-world crap compared to their advanced search in early 2000s when they still had competition in the search department. There are better products by which to judge Google's AI developments. 93.136.7.84 (talk) 16:51, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Just to be clear, I'm not saying Google is some wonderful force for good in the world. They are a corporation and like virtually all corporations their one and only goal is to make as much money as they can. However, I do think they are clearly on the cutting edge of research and I'm kind of amazed anyone could question that. Even though I don't always agree with some of their research agendas (e.g., I think Kurzweil was or still is one of the leaders of their R&D and I think he is fundamentally wrong on some important issues). True, some of their most innovative ideas come from DeepMind which they purchased they are still doing leading edge work in areas like NLP, quantum computing, and neural networks and they value research enough to shell out the $$ to buy DeepMind. Not because they want to increase our understanding of the world but because they see such research as critical to their long term growth and dominance of their markets. Also, regarding their competition they have many more avenues of revenue than just search such as licensing Android to smart phone and other vendors. And I think that is one of the reasons they view R&D as so critical, because they don't want to be just a Search company but rather they want to compete with vendors like Microsoft, Apple, and IBM. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 19:43, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Google still has competition. I always use DuckDuckGo, in the main because they mind their own business, not mine. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 16:58, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

The trouble came to my attention when I tried to get an answer to the question: "Passover 2021?" to send greeting to my Jewish friends. It was a nightmare. Google gave me a run around. After looking page after page and getting back to where I started, I finally found an answer in a foreign language Wikipedia. I clearly saw, Google is sick. @MadScientist, your paragraph has nothing to do with my question. I don't care how bright the Google people are, I know the software used to work for me, now it doesn't. I suspect @MinorProget is correct. They tried to develop an AI platform and screwed it up.AboutFace 22 (talk) 01:16, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
 * I read an answer about it in a newspaper column a while ago. It was along the lines of, the longer people take to browse Google search results, the more ads they're served. Clearly if the answer is instantaneous, that's bad news for ad impressions. See Eichmann in Jerusalem for philosophical implications. 93.136.7.84 (talk) 12:26, 25 March 2021 (UTC)


 * I typed passover 2021 into Google and it simply told me that "Passover 2021 will begin in the evening of Saturday, March 27 and ends in the evening of Sunday, April 4" Matt Deres (talk) 14:14, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
 * I typed passover 2021 into DuckDuckGo and got: paid ad links to Amazon and eBay, but then you always get those (and they're flagged), a paid link to a Christian website and then lots of links to Jewish and news websites giving exacly the required information. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 16:58, 25 March 2021 (UTC)