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Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

economist.com

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Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#61

The gaming of SEO has been quietly destroying the utility of search writ large as a mechanism for quite a while. Over the last year, its become palpable. Google has such utility in this regard that in some cases, a hallucinating lie-machine offers better answer than an index of what information is available on the internet. This issue with with Googles failure to respond to the deluge of SEO driven content in their s…

I see this sort of comment a lot, and I honestly don't know what it's talking about. What are people expecting out of Google that it's not delivering? It can only index stuff that's on the Web. Stuff on the Web is, contrary to what is popularly asserted, only a tiny fraction of all human knowledge. I think people are forgetting how bad search was before Google. Google drove Web directories to extinction. Remember Yah…

> What are people expecting out of Google that it's not delivering?

Not optimize for "most documents indexed" but "highest quality of results". One of them encourages adding spam to their index, the other encourages removing spam from their index.

Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#62

How could they have left such a massive gap in their product. They literally have the model and resources to revolutionize search. We all know LLMs will hurt their ad revenue, but regardless they have to have known this was coming. This is so similar to FB getting caught off guard by TikTok. There was a gap in the utility of their product (TikTok enabled grass roots content creation), and they just left it wide open.…

4. Google Search already has lots of useful AI already in it, but Google didn't want to integrate a racist, confabulating chatbot, forgetting that modern users have no preference for truth over lies.

Why are you blaming Google for not being perfect while making the best free search engine, after you spent your whole life refusing to pay for a non-free one?

Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#63

The gaming of SEO has been quietly destroying the utility of search writ large as a mechanism for quite a while. Over the last year, its become palpable. Google has such utility in this regard that in some cases, a hallucinating lie-machine offers better answer than an index of what information is available on the internet. This issue with with Googles failure to respond to the deluge of SEO driven content in their s…

I see this sort of comment a lot, and I honestly don't know what it's talking about. What are people expecting out of Google that it's not delivering? It can only index stuff that's on the Web. Stuff on the Web is, contrary to what is popularly asserted, only a tiny fraction of all human knowledge. I think people are forgetting how bad search was before Google. Google drove Web directories to extinction. Remember Yah…

People don't use Google to search the web. They use Google to find answers.

Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#64

The gaming of SEO has been quietly destroying the utility of search writ large as a mechanism for quite a while. Over the last year, its become palpable. Google has such utility in this regard that in some cases, a hallucinating lie-machine offers better answer than an index of what information is available on the internet. This issue with with Googles failure to respond to the deluge of SEO driven content in their s…

> This issue with with Googles failure to respond to the deluge of SEO driven content in their searches. I’d argue that they even encouraged it.

This is a fair argument to make. Normalizing web site metadata (which is essentially what SEO is) resulted in Google getting crowdsourced work done for them for free.

It has been a self-fulfilling positive feedback loop since then.

Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#65

The gaming of SEO has been quietly destroying the utility of search writ large as a mechanism for quite a while. Over the last year, its become palpable. Google has such utility in this regard that in some cases, a hallucinating lie-machine offers better answer than an index of what information is available on the internet. This issue with with Googles failure to respond to the deluge of SEO driven content in their s…

I see this sort of comment a lot, and I honestly don't know what it's talking about. What are people expecting out of Google that it's not delivering? It can only index stuff that's on the Web. Stuff on the Web is, contrary to what is popularly asserted, only a tiny fraction of all human knowledge. I think people are forgetting how bad search was before Google. Google drove Web directories to extinction. Remember Yah…

What is actually the fraction of human knowledge available on the web? How does the trajectory look like? What is the fraction for knowledge produced the last 5 years?

Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#67
post #8

While Google certainly has its faults and I am frustrated with its trajectory, I would bet money that this is an article pushing the nonsensical notion that AI language models will replace search engines. Edit: based on the subtitle, it seems like I am correct.

How is that nonsensical? Seems quite likely to me, especially if they can ground them better in a factual knowledge base. Most search engine queries are looking for information.

The problem is that this literally does not exist today. ChatGPT is a chatbot, it has no factual knowledge base. It's optimized for dialogue.

That's why it's absolutely nonsensical to see all these articles, because they are talking about a chatbot as if it's trivial to turn it into a search machine. That's an entirely different problem.

Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#69
post #62

How could they have left such a massive gap in their product. They literally have the model and resources to revolutionize search. We all know LLMs will hurt their ad revenue, but regardless they have to have known this was coming. This is so similar to FB getting caught off guard by TikTok. There was a gap in the utility of their product (TikTok enabled grass roots content creation), and they just left it wide open.…

4. Google Search already has lots of useful AI already in it, but Google didn't want to integrate a racist, confabulating chatbot, forgetting that modern users have no preference for truth over lies. Why are you blaming Google for not being perfect while making the best free search engine, after you spent your whole life refusing to pay for a non-free one?

If OpenAI is willing to release it and Microsoft invested 10B, I have a very hard time believing that censoring the model is impossible. Microsoft 100% did their due diligence on the model.

Google is a monopoly, there is nothing anyone can do. Their search engine and business model has structured the internet and thus society. This thing needs to die

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