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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?

#171

Post by Aeolun »

ranting-moth wrote: post #88
saudade97 wrote: post #42

I don't get the HN hate of Google as a search tool. Yes, SEO has made searching more difficult, but Google is still by far the best search engine provided that your searches are focused and you use search tools (e.g., excluding terms, focusing on certain sites, etc.). I've tried other search engines (e.g., DDG, Bing) and they just aren't as good as Google.

Many of the HN crowd remember when Google came into existence and how wonderful it was. If it existed on the internet, Google would find it for you and it was usually the top resault. It was amazing. Today, it's a shadow of its former self. You regularly have to search, wade through the ads that are written like informative articles, adjust your query slightly and repeat the process. It's rubbish.

I mean, Google still often gives me the result, but it’s such a chore now. And they can’t even seem to deal with what I consider extremely obvious blogspam.

Content that is just literally directly copied from other domains often.

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

#172

Post by bergie »

wcoenen wrote: post #94
mattwad wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone else said, the problem is ChatGPT lies straight to your face, whereas at least Google's answers are based on structured data by someone. It's traceable, whereas I would not trust ChatGPT ever to tell me the correct temperature to cook a steak.

"The new Bing also cites all its sources". That's a quote from the microsoft announcement. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/02/07/reinventing-sear...

And users of the New Bing will certainly verify that the sources say what ChatGPT claims they do?

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

#173

Post by ignite »

humanizersequel wrote: post #29
marricks wrote: post #7

I think it’s interesting to consider why touchscreen mobile phones won out over their predecessors. Touchscreens are the worst interface option. The feedback of feeling a button, or anything made for the job, is better than typing without specific feedback onto a screen. It won out because of you don’t have a set interface it’s bettor. Now for search, chat gpt will likely always be less reliable than a list of result…

>Touchscreens are worse than buttons Hottest take I've seen on here for a while. In a very specific, very limited set of mobile usecases, buttons may offer a more pleasant experience than a touchscreen. I only say that because there's usually exceptions to any statement, but I can't actually think of one. Touchscreens didn't win because of some lazy sheep-like consumerism, they won because the product is superior. If…

Buttons are much better than touchscreens, if you have a fixed interface that fits in the space available.

Touchscreens win when you need multiple interfaces in the same amount of space.

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

#174

Post by hnuser847 »

zug_zug wrote: post #82
massysett wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For one, when I search a recipe, I want less than a 30 page document. I've wanted this for 20 years, and so has everybody else.

I feel your pain and switched to high quality, physical cookbooks instead. Recipes on the web are generally garbage unless they come from an author that you’ve already vetted.

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

#175

Post by dyno12345 »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #115
mattwad wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone else said, the problem is ChatGPT lies straight to your face, whereas at least Google's answers are based on structured data by someone. It's traceable, whereas I would not trust ChatGPT ever to tell me the correct temperature to cook a steak.

ChatGPT lies to your face, while Google just finds other peoples lies and shows you a list of the best ones.

and by "best" we mean interspersed within 12 pages of heavily ad laden blogspam

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

#176

Post by pixl97 »

adamrezich wrote: post #92
beamgirl wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually expecting AI training data to turn into a snake eating its tail. I've been spending the last month not sleeping so I could try to get up to speed on deep learning, and my understanding is that AI trained on AI generated output becomes crap surprisingly quickly, and AI generated content is already starting to proliferate. I have no idea the extent to which this will hinder new models being generated, but…

the tinfoil take is that everyone in charge is fully aware of this eventual problem such that when it occurs, a solution will be presented: ubiquitous verifiable digital ID technology that's required to use popular social media services, such that everything that a Real Person posts will be signed with said digital ID, thus bringing about the end of online anonymity, and the death of the Internet as we presently know…

Also think of how many people will sell their digital persona to sell AI generated spam for a little cash in return. Ain't nuthin safe from spam.

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

#177

Post by DrSiemer »

mywittyname wrote: post #97
RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #12

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 suspect the future is far more bleak. At least with "search results", users can scroll down past the SEO content to something more relevant. Once these new chatgpt models take over, it's winner-take-all for search results. Everyone is going to be throwing money at getting their message seen, since it will be the final word. How much do you think companies are willing to spend to be the answer to, "what is the most…

Obviously those are not questions that you can trust an AI language model with. You have social media or real life connections to discuss that.

In theory it is possible that sponsored content will creep in, but that does not invalidate the incredible benefits a well trained language model will have, even despite the occasional for-profit bias.

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

#178

Post by danShumway »

I don't understand this hype and I feel like I'm looking at different products than everyone else is. There are very few complaints I have about Google that I think this technology helps solve, and for most of my complaints, getting summaries of searches makes the situation worse, not better. To be completely clear: even if the AI was perfect, I don't know that I want even an actual human being to sit down and summarize an answer to my question rather than show me a list of search results.

The problem with search is not that our answers aren't summarized well, it's that the quality of information returned for those searches is getting increasingly worse, and we are getting increasingly worse at categorizing or filtering that information in any useful way. And LLMs pulling information in and summarizing it for me is... not helpful? It's summarizing the same garbage, except now sometimes it also summarizes it wrong.

But it's not even an issue with the quality (although the quality of information from LLMs is also pretty over-hyped I think). Conceptually, I don't know that this is a product that I would ever want. I can't think of any time where I've sat down to do a search on Google or DuckDuckgo and thought, "You know what I want? I want these results presented to me in a less structured format using natural language and with less granular knowledge about where each specific statement is coming from."

At least Bing seems to be trying to do inline citations in some of its answers, which is a step up over Google's AI announcement, I guess?

Maybe I'm just in the minority on that. Users seem to like this a lot. But my ideal version of the Internet is one that decreases the number of abstractions and layers and summaries between myself and primary data rather than increasing them. My ideal Internet is a tool that makes it easier for me to actually find things, not a tool that increases the layers between me and the raw source/information that I'm looking for. I already have enough trouble needing to double-check news summaries of debates, events, and research. Getting another summary of the summaries doesn't seem helpful to me?

I can think of some ways where I might use an LLM in search, even really exciting ways where maybe it could help with categorization or grouping, but it doesn't seem like Google/Bing are interested in pursuing any of that. I look at both the Bing and Google announcements and just think, "why are you making it worse?" But who knows, maybe the actual products will sell me on the concept more.

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

#179

Post by basch »

bbor wrote: post #142
basch wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their giant teams are an organizational failure then. Product reviews alone, whether it is enterprise software or sports clothing should be something that they can easily comb through by hand, as humans, and uprank sites that are putting out more than affiliate link assemblies.

Why wouldn’t they do this, if it’s scalable and profitable? Is your theory just “incompetence”? I can’t prove that’s wrong, but I feel the simpler answer is more convincing; that handing off page rank to an army of minimum wage call center workers (for every country & language in the world…) wouldn’t be more effective than the existing algorithms at filtering out spam.

Some form of paralysis. They dont have a single leader who has taken responsibility for it and corrected it. CEO/SVP has too many pots on the stove.

Im legitimately asking, who is responsible for Search at Google? Prabhakar Raghavan is SVP, Search, Assistant & Ads, and I click under him, he has 8 product groups reporting to him, and none of the people are responsible for Search. Yossi Matias is responsible for Search Engineering.

https://theorg.com/org/google

It may at first come off as a laughable answer, but Google Search has been in a directionless spiral since Marissa Mayer left. Her Yahoo tenure was not well received, but at Google she cared about the end quality of the product. Her title was Search Products and User Experience. Notice how we have gone from User Experience to Search Engineering, forgetting about the people who actually use the product.

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

#180

Post by candiodari »

phailhaus wrote: post #67
rileyphone wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ChatGPT is pretty much the definition of a troll. It's only mission in life is to keep you talking to it. To do that it has no problem with lying, confusing, and various other deceitful methods you wouldn't accept from a human.
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