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

nytimes.com

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

#301

Post by acdha »

darepublic wrote: post #136
iLoveOncall wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> combined with the fact that search in general has plummeted in quality Every time this comes up I am baffled. I have not noticed a single drop in the quality of results. Every time someone said that and shared their search methodology, it became very apparent that the problem was not with Google.

My example of lower quality is: Programming question searches recently dominated by sites with bot generated content aggregation taken from sources like stack overflow, instead of sources like stack overflow

That’s mine as well: it’s not a million spam sites but the same few for many years. I know it’s an arms race with spammers but they could pay a single person ¼ time to make some big improvements in user experience.

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

#302

Post by [deleted] »

sdrinf wrote: post #187
epolanski wrote: post #184

I think the OpenAI argument is overblown. While I do agree that AI is going to bring a huge shake up to the search market, I still believe that Google is in the best position to fight this battle. Realistically, given how fast the AI field improves month after month, do we think it will take long for Google to replicate a product similar to ChatGPT? I don't think so. And then they are the company that's best suited t…

This iteration of shake-up is not strictly about tech superiority, though. Google probably already has a repro of ChatGPT running in their datacenters. Fundamentally, it's about product, and expectation shift. I am presently routinely having conversations, and for the first time in the history of the Internet, getting straight answers to moderately complex questions, and their follow-ups , in real time, from ChatGPT.…

[deleted]

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

#303

Post by therealdrag0 »

franze wrote: post #150

Long long time ago at a conference I did hold a talk (about something that is now common knowledge) that SEO is not a product, it's a channel. And an ad based revenue model does not work based on SEO. As as soon as the revenue (which is coupled with traffic) goes down you are inclined to just ad more ads or make ads more agressive, which counteracts good UX which will lead to further traffic loss, which leads to more…

Ad free results is not always the best experience for everybody, or at least not in todays context. I remember hearing a commentator on a podcast (I forget if they worked for goog or not) who pointed out that so much of online activity is economic so that ads (pay for placement) is a powerful relevance indicator.

I think the example they gave was if someone searches for “Taylor swift tickets” then they are more likely to be interested in the paid results from someone who wants to sell tickets than in the million forum posts discussing tickets (even tho they have the same keyword match). And their data proves this. Maybe there are ways to be “smart enough” to avoid this indicator, but a lot of “relevance” is a guess on user intention so seems like a damned if you do damned if you don’t.

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

#304

Post by tinus_hn »

dekhn wrote: post #253
tinus_hn wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually Google got a patent for the concept of Pagerank, number US9165040B1.

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

#305

Post by acdha »

agumonkey wrote: post #15
hdhrufjdi wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at their messaging service that they marketed for years as E2EE while it was closed source and uploaded the chat messages readable by Apple to the cloud

weak encryption or clear format ?

Encrypted with shared keys. This wasn’t accurately described in the comment you’re replying to: iMessage is fully E2E but the offload feature which allows you to save space on your phone wasn’t. That helps in the lost phone scenario but not if you’re worried about subpoenas under a hostile government.

Prior to the recent advanced protection program, you could avoid that by not enabling backup for messages. Now you can choose whether data recovery is more important than E2E to you.

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

#306

Post by AlbertCory »

fragmede wrote: post #261
AlbertCory wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former Googler here. 20% Time is a myth and always was. Yes, occasionally someone would talk about "their 20% time" but it was rare, and usually just meant "spending a few hours on something else." Admittedly, once in a while someone really did spend 20% of their time on something else, and management was not allowed to complain. Once, in about 2006-07, I was at a table with about 8 software engineers and asked for a…

By your own story, it's not a myth. Not everyone has one, and your boss had to be supportive of you working on it, but there are a bunch of internal systems that are supported by 20% time. It might be more appropriate to frame that 20% as giving 120% (aka working on it on Saturday instead of Friday) for some of the things, but it's a real thing that exists. Just because not everybody has such a project doesn't make i…

The "myth" is that everyone has a 20% project. We could find lots of people and stories in the press who really believe that.

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

#307

Post by AlbertCory »

steveBK123 wrote: post #289
AlbertCory wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not ALL scattershot. GMail and Docs for enterprises are a pretty sustained effort. Cloud is pretty sustained. YouTube is unkillable. But in general you're right.

GSuite is either underpriced or underfeatured. Most real enterprise still happens on Office, and lots of consumers happy give Apple $100/year for iCloud. Cloud services - aren't they basically 3rd behind AMZN/MSFT now, by A LOT? They are basically competing for 3rd against IBM/Oracle/etc, and some quarters they are #4.

No arguments there. They're still trying; just not hard enough.

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

#308

Post by twelve40 »

scarface74 wrote: post #152
mrtksn wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social was able to achieve everything it was expected from it, most of the content on internet went behind walls unreachable by Google. Google missed out on that but didn't lose it's ground much or its losses were compensated by their success in mobile. The difference this time is, the new shiny thing goes directly into Google territory.

Google didn’t “succeed” in mobile financially. Android historical doesn’t bring that much of a profit in mobile compared to its popularity (that came out in the Oracle trial) and has to pay Apple close to $20 billion a year to be the default search engine on iOS devices. Google Play Services is not that much of a money maker and it sells about as many phones in a year as Apple sells in a couple of weeks

yeah but imagine if they didn't support Android, they would have been at complete mercy of apple! but currently Apple can't touch 70% of the phones, and it's an enormous financial incentive.

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

#309

Post by irq-1 »

archagon wrote: post #188
datavirtue wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before it got choked off I had started using chatGPT for all of my searches. For code examples it blows google out of the water. For learning esoteric things (like congressional procedures etc.) quickly, it is without peer. I think Google's founders offered their take years ago...no one listened then.

ChatGPT is only "truthy", however. The algorithm will happily give you information that sounds true, but is actually wrong. And if it's wrong even 1% of time, you will still need some way to verify its claims.

This sounds like experts criticizing Wikipedia, before it dominated. Mostly true and mostly accurate information is useful beyond what we normally think.

Remember how people use to criticize the newspapers? They'd say they read an article on a subject they new something about and were shocked at how bad it was. Then they'd conclude that the rest of the news was just as bad. What wasn't acknowledged was the utility of having imperfect information.

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

#310

Post by imoverclocked »

namdnay wrote: post #23
tacker2000 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on, Apple has had numerous privacy issues as well. What about uploading every photo to their server to check for child porn? What about uploading every binary you run to their server to check if its “approved”? People really need to put down their “sheeple” glasses. Apple is a huge public company like all the others, beholden to profit their shareholders and thats it. All that virtue signalling that they do i…

The child porn check is to please the government, not shareholders

This. Apple did this against its own interests as a privacy first company as a way to reduce a real world problem. Personal privacy has always been at odds with law enforcement and Apple is one company that has taken real steps to restrict the unimpeded flow of personal information into governments. The way the CSAM database and checking was implemented was still in a privacy preserving way that made every effort to restrict that same flow while not enabling child sexual exploitation.
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