We all know how AI has made things worse, but here’s some context on how it’s outright backwards.
Early search engines had a context problem. To use an example from “Halt and Catch Fire”, if you search for “Texas Cowboy”, do you mean the guys on horseback driving a herd of cows, or do you mean the football team? If you search for “Dallas Cowboys”, should that bias the results towards a different answer? Early, naive search engines gave bad results for cases like that. Spat out whatever keywords happen to hit the most.
Sometimes, it was really bad. In high school, I was showing a history teacher how to use search engines, and he searched for “China golden age”. All results were asian porn. I think we were using Yahoo.
AltaVista largely solved the context problem. We joke about its bad results now, but it was one of the better search engines before Google PageRank.
We all know how AI has made things worse, but here’s some context on how it’s outright backwards.
Early search engines had a context problem. To use an example from “Halt and Catch Fire”, if you search for “Texas Cowboy”, do you mean the guys on horseback driving a herd of cows, or do you mean the football team? If you search for “Dallas Cowboys”, should that bias the results towards a different answer? Early, naive search engines gave bad results for cases like that. Spat out whatever keywords happen to hit the most.
Sometimes, it was really bad. In high school, I was showing a history teacher how to use search engines, and he searched for “China golden age”. All results were asian porn. I think we were using Yahoo.
AltaVista largely solved the context problem. We joke about its bad results now, but it was one of the better search engines before Google PageRank.
Now we have AI unsolving the problem.
I was okay with keyword results. If you knew what you were dealing with in the search engine, you could usually find what you were looking for.