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Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

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Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#251

Post by Turing_Machine »

dmcgee wrote: post #210
Turing_Machine wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, the same is also true of Google results. The web is chock full of incorrect stuff, both unintentional and deliberately deceptive.

From a user experience perspective it's interesting that it may be a worse experience to get a set of links and have to pick from them and use cognitive effort to discern which sources are reliable, than to simply use ChatGPT and get an answer. But this step is precisely where verification happens.

I think you are vastly overestimating the amount of cognitive effort most people apply to Google search results.

It's more like "First one on the list? Well, that one's right -- unless it disagrees with my personal biases, then maybe I'll look for another one."

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#252

Post by dragonwriter »

JPLeRouzic wrote: post #199
dragonwriter wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At Voila, a subsidiary of France Telecom, a study around 2005 found that their search engine offered nearly the same answers as Google, while not in exactly the same order. Order is a pretty big part of tbe value prop of a search engine, so ”nearly the same” results but “not in exactly the same order” is not as much similarity as you seem to be implying.

Come on, there's no absolute correctness for a result in being in Google's first versus second answer. The actual order depends a lot on the user's context. Even Google doesn't change the order of answers based on the user's context. Otherwise it wouldn't say in Google Web Console " your site appears in nth position "

> Come on, there’s no absolute correctness for a result in being in Google’s first versus second answer.

“Absolute correctness” is an irrelevant standard. Order can affect satisfaction without "absolute correctness" being a thing that can even be assessed meaningfully.

> Even Google doesn’t change the order of answers based on the user’s context.

Yes, it does. [0]

> Otherwise it wouldn’t say in Google Web Console “your site appears in nth position”

I think that reflects the experience of a no-context user (e.g., not logged in or otherwise tied to a history to provide context.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contextual_searching#Automatic...

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#253

Post by dekhn »

tinus_hn wrote: post #137
atombender wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google beat their original competitors — Altavista, Excite, Yahoo!, and so on — with an incremental improvement, not a new model. At the time (2000-2003), their search was better and faster, certainly, but not several orders of magnitude better. In fact, Google was something of a reactionary model at the time, by rejecting the push for bloated, captive "web portals" and going back to the simpler, stripped-down user e…

Pagerank (TM) was a Google innovation and the reason Google had much better results than the others and it took many years for the SEO spammers to catch up. That revolution, combined with the philosophy of the speedy, focused homepage and the elimination of irrelevant results by always using the ‘AND’ operator was why their popularity exploded.

Other people invented pagerank and used it for pageranking before Google. It's just a centrality metric.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#255

Post by dekhn »

ignoramous wrote: post #100
chazeon wrote: post #85

I kind of feel they should be. I cannot remember what their last major customer-facing AI product launch after Google Assistant. Sure there is AI in photo tuning and many interesting features for the Pixel phone, and there is Gmail autocomplete but I remember I used to really following every Google product launch when I was a kid: there is Google Reader, Google Drive launch in those days. That excitement was kind of…

> I love their JAX For those out of loop: https://github.com/google/jax See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29682507

Interesting that the Jax page still says it's not an official google product (a recent Research publication said it was).

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#257

Post by tzs »

blippitybleep wrote: post #117
clumsysmurf wrote: post #24

> Google announced it’s laying off more than 12,000 employees and focusing on AI as a domain of primary importance. I have had an Android phone since Froyo. I liked it when the functionality was simple and didn't try to inject too much suggestions / AI. Now, Google Photos app is trying to suggest things to print, the Settings app is trying to predict when and how to charge my battery (I just want it 80%, all the time…

I moved off Spotify to escape AI. It was good at first, but I started to feel like I was being pushed into a rut with music, that I’d lost all autonomy when it came to finding new music for myself. I wonder if the novelty of a lot of consumer AI will wear off for others in the long run.

Spotify certainly does sometimes give unexpected results. A few months ago some random train of through made me think of the song "I Don't Like Mondays" by the Boomtown Rats and I decided to listen to it.

I went to Spotify's search and typed "i dont like' and hit enter, figuring what I was looking for would probably be near the top of the results. It was indeed the first result.

But man...the rest of the results were something else [1]. I've never done anything on Spotify that would suggest I might like most of those songs, or in many cases that I would even be interested in their genre.

Eventually curiosity got the better of me and I did listen to some of those to see if they were as bad as their titles suggested. They were.

But now I think Spotify has decided I like that kind of music.

If I do the same search now it has many of those still but now adds songs called "Sex Offender Shuffle", "Niggas in My Butthole", "3 BIG BALLS", "Alabama Nigga - Original Version", and "I Don't Like Beaners" to the top 15 or so.

There are plenty of songs with "I Don't Like" in the title or something close to which are about things like relationship problems or self esteem that are in the search results, so it is not like they only had songs about disliking certain races or songs about people's genitals to choose from.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/zks8UoQ

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#258

Post by jbverschoor »

steveBK123 wrote: post #155
trentnix wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should be freaking out. Google is overwhelmingly dependent on a single revenue stream and AI like ChatGPT is a serious threat to their dominant position. Not to mention, Google has spent a decade using their defacto monopoly as leverage and optimizing for ads and clicks, often exploiting their own users in the process. The bar for better was lower than it should have been, and the market is hungry for an alterna…

Yes this is the most insane thing about GOOG to me. Yes, search is basically monopoly moat of recurring growing revenue. On the other hand, they've spent not a decade, but about 25 years betting this would remain the case! I've met a lot of people who work at GOOG, and yet none of them could explain to me how the thing they work on makes any money for GOOG. In fact, most went out of their way to volunteer to me that…

ChatGPT would probably be a better search engine than google. ChatGPT and Reddit cover most of your info.

What remains is shopping, but Amazon and even Instagram are better at that.

Lastly, Google has no audience for creating awareness like fb / ig / tt

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#259

Post by steveBK123 »

AlbertCory wrote: post #219
steveBK123 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this is the most insane thing about GOOG to me. Yes, search is basically monopoly moat of recurring growing revenue. On the other hand, they've spent not a decade, but about 25 years betting this would remain the case! I've met a lot of people who work at GOOG, and yet none of them could explain to me how the thing they work on makes any money for GOOG. In fact, most went out of their way to volunteer to me that…

> not bother to find some other ways to make money. Oh, they definitely tried, and still try. The problem is the same as many large companies: they want a new trick as lucrative as the old trick, and there aren't any.

did they try though? it seemed all scattershot, unfocussed, repetitive (how many chat/video apps) and quickly taken out back and shot.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#260

Post by steveBK123 »

eastbound wrote: post #183
steveBK123 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this is the most insane thing about GOOG to me. Yes, search is basically monopoly moat of recurring growing revenue. On the other hand, they've spent not a decade, but about 25 years betting this would remain the case! I've met a lot of people who work at GOOG, and yet none of them could explain to me how the thing they work on makes any money for GOOG. In fact, most went out of their way to volunteer to me that…

It’s not the people, it’s the management that decided which traits they would reward, both at hiring and during the career.

Thankfully when I was graduating they had some strict school & GPA filters that someone as lowly as me wasn't even dignified a response.

Wall Street tech DGAF about that though.

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