Comment by adamnemecek
8 hours ago
The change happened on or around Jan 21. Overnight the results went from pretty good to absolute trash.
Here are two screenshots taken on Jan 20 and Jan 23 https://bsky.app/profile/adamnemecek.bsky.social/post/3mdbup...
They don't do full text search anymore esp for copyrighted books. I wonder if this is not a regression but an intent to give them a let up in the AI race.
Yup, it's for AI.
Similarly, a year ago or so ChatGPT could summarize YouTube videos. Google put a stop to that so now only Gemini can summarize YouTube videos.
The YT transcripts are linked to on the YT page itself. If they remove that, it is trivial to use a local STT model to transcribe the video. If they make it impossible to download a video, you could just have a microphone record all of the sound, and so on. Once you have the transcription of anything, summarizing is trivial. I have a local script that does this and I use it all of the time. Also produce diagrams for YT summaries. Hours saved, per day.
It isn't obvious why the left results are preferred over the right results.
The left results are contemporary, the right are decades old. That includes editions of the same book --- surely the newer edition is going to be preferred by most readers.
I guess. That's not immediately clear to me. However, browsing around on Google Books suggests to me that it is the corpus which changed, not the algorithms.
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> surely the newer edition is going to be preferred by most readers.
Why? Where different editions exist, the reader will want to know which one they're getting, but they're unlikely to systematically prefer newer editions.
But also, Google Books isn't aimed at "readers". You're not supposed to read books through it. It's aimed at searchers. Searchers are even less likely to prefer newer editions.
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