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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?

#201

Post by helf »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #73

I do not understand the appeal or gpt-powered searches. Most of my web searches are for looking up specific things, to find the specific link(s) that contains the information I need. These aren’t searches that are going to be made better or faster by an ML model-they’re not natural language queries, they’re just a bunch of terms.

I think because people want to natural language ask questions to a virtual butler (Jeeves) and get an answer back in digestible natural language form.

I… don’t really get it either.

But I’m also a cranky person who can’t stand every damn thing being a video whether it makes sense for the content or not, etc.

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

#202

Post by xyzelement »

pirate787 wrote: post #129
jeffbee wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What these people are remembering is when the web was small and dorks-only. Now it is huge and full of normies of all kinds, including every shade of commercialism and fraud.

Incorrect, the web was mainstream by 1996, two years before Google even launched.

In 1996, did every traffic attorney publish a thought piece on why you should fight your summons in X county?

No, back then if you searched a topic you were MUCH more likely to find self hosted content from someone who nerded out on an issue and is sharing their insight, not publishing boilerplate because they feel they need to.

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

#203

Post by squiffsquiff »

emodendroket wrote: post #198
squiffsquiff wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was an honest attempt on the crawlers' part and it was a more level playing field. If you didn't find what you wanted on lycos, you could look on Yahoo or Alta Vista or WebCrawler or something instead. For a time there were meta Search engines that allowed you to search other search engine amalgamated results.

Yeah, you had your choice of several awful results and everyone couldn’t shut up about how good Google was when it was available. If people mean “Google used to be better” I’m willing to entertain the idea, but you’re out of your mind if you miss using Altavista and Dogpile.

You're comparing Google how it was then. Not how it is now

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

#204

Post by yunohn »

gcanyon wrote: post #183

I'm old enough that I remember switching between Yahoo, AskJeeves, AltaVista, and others, before abandoning them all for Google. I also remember experimenting with a friend to test the search engines, and I remember the question/query I used to perform the test: I had (at the time) a vague recollection that the level of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans near the Panama Canal is different; that in addition to raising sh…

> difference in sea level between the two oceans

Honestly, the number of times ChatGPT inserts this and variations of fluff is absolutely bordering on insane. Like, that was your question - why include it in every single sentence of the answer…

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

#205

Post by mejutoco »

somethoughts wrote: post #185
marcopicentini wrote: post #15

It's been a while since they stopped innovating. Although Google, Maps, Youtube are of daily use they are monetized exclusively by advertising which is annoying and hated by many. It has been many years since Google has launched an innovative new product. I don't think ChatGPT will gain daily traction after this hype. Anyway we could say that MSFT and AMZN have demostrated more power to innovate with different busine…

Some have postulated that this might be Google's Blackberry moment. On the flip side I wonder if its actually more like its Dropbox moment. The press loves a David and Goliath story; the young disruptor versus the stodgy disrupted.[1] At that time, Dropbox was David, coming out of nowhere in a hurry and had a product that seemingly should be so obvious for Google to launch but hadn't - making Google seem antiquated a…

Last time I tried to sync my computer to gdrive I waited 30 days before giving up on gdrive. Dropbox took less than 2 days, and stayed responsive.

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

#206

Post by rchiang »

snuxoll wrote: post #99
silisili wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought of OnLive, Shadow, and Geforce Now. The only one of those I'd used was Geforce Now, and found it very similar to Stadia wrt latency. Stadia had a much nicer interface, though.

PlayStation Now already existed for years as well.

Which they got through their acquisition of Gaikai (considered a competitor of OnLive).

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

#207

Post by revskill »

Bhilai wrote: post #199

Sorry to break it to you folks but if you hated your data being with Google, you are in for a surprise on how atrociously bad Microsoft is at privacy and security. Multiple close friends who have worked at Microsoft tell me that search history data - who is searching what, is basically sitting in systems with ACLs so bad that 20-30K employees have access through transitive membership of groups. To access a customer's…

It's not much about Microsoft. At least it improved human life in serious ways (Typescript, VSCode,...). What did Google bring to my life ? Nothing except for spam stuffs from Ad, Email,...

You're responsible for your data, not Google, not Microsoft.

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

#208

Post by adam_arthur »

awad wrote: post #169
marcopicentini wrote: post #15

It's been a while since they stopped innovating. Although Google, Maps, Youtube are of daily use they are monetized exclusively by advertising which is annoying and hated by many. It has been many years since Google has launched an innovative new product. I don't think ChatGPT will gain daily traction after this hype. Anyway we could say that MSFT and AMZN have demostrated more power to innovate with different busine…

I think YouTube, which has a paid and ad-free version along with its Live TV offering, somehow manages to still be a sleeper hit within the larger Google portfolio and doesn't get talked about enough.

Agreed that a lot of Google’s bets don’t get enough press/credit re investment potential.

At the same time, a lot of these platforms ran effectively unopposed for many years, and now competition in advertising is spreading quite rapidly

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

#210

Post by antihipocrat »

mattwad wrote: post #52
dilap wrote: post #31

Microsoft's integration of ChatGPT with Bing is really bad. No-one wants a busy search page with a side-bar of ChatGPT; what's the point of that? The correct interface for ChatGPT + search is just...ChatGPT. But it can also show you a list of web search results, when it's appropriate. A super-clean interface, that always shows you exactly what you want. That would be a killer feature and represent a real threat to Go…

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 SEO content served up by Google search nowadays isn't much better, and from what I've seen I don't think a lot of it is being generated by someone either.
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