Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 550 posts

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

#231

Post by rewgs »

revskill wrote: post #207
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.

What an absurd statement. I don't have especially strong feelings for Google in any direction, but I can't deny that, even if Google had only done search or Maps, that alone would be a massive boon for society.

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

#232

Post by revskill »

amartya916 wrote: post #216
revskill wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While it might be fashionable to hate on Google, the question "What did Google bring to my life" seems really odd. I can't believe I have to say this but search, and more importantly good/fast search, is to Google's credit. Typescript and VSCode all have, and will continue to have alternatives, but for a long time, Google was (some may argue it still is) the bleeding edge of search. Anyway, there might be a generatio…

You're making assumptions. I listed facts.

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

#233

Post by adam_arthur »

scarmig wrote: post #223
adam_arthur wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If search gets usurped, or even a marginal but meaningful reduction in usage due to competition from AIs, then its not surprising at all that Google’s near term prospects could be worse than Coke. Even Google winning the AI wars leaves them worse off as the operating profit potential of querying an AI vs their search index has to be far lower. As to usage, once you start to integrate ChatGPT into your workflows it ca…

If Google ends up winning in the AI war, search and ads will be significantly cannibalized, but it will have tremendous opportunities outside of search, many of them in areas that don't even exist yet. In some ways, it might even be good. It's suffering from a kind of advertising resource curse nowadays, and being forced and able to diversify its economy would be best in the long term.

I'm not sure, it seems many companies have comparable technology at this point, and Google is not known for being great at packaging tech into products.

They had an enormous moat and edge in search, but not seeing it for this next wave of AI. Barrier to entry seems far lower

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

#234

Post by kazinator »

> Once trained on this giant corpus of natural language, the chatbot can, when prompted by users’ instructions, produce a fluently written answer rather than merely serving up a list of links.

A word salad of untrustworthy bullshit instead of the pages you were looking for is not going to upend search.

It's not a replacement for search in any way.

Now if the search engine could find pages which satisfy complex queries in natural language, referencing content and relationships among content, that could be something.

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

#235

Post by erklik »

revskill wrote: post #207
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.

Uh... Maps? Open, Permissive phone OS compared to the alternative? Greatest entertainment/information system, especially one that's democraticsed producing media?

In terms dev-related stuff, TensorFlow - literally something that's made today's ML possible, Kubernetes, BigTable, MapReduce, and yknow, that good old thing called Chrome..

I understand hating on Google. They're not that great, but none of the FAANG are "great".. They all have some terrible bits, some good bits. However, to say that Google has not provided anything except "spam stuffs" is very wrong.

Search alone has changed the entire way that humans consume information. I would say that today's internet landscape, for better or worse, would not exist without Google.

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

#236

Post by cjm42 »

GreedClarifies wrote: post #189
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 correct temperature to sous vide a steak depends on the desired level of doneness. The following temperatures are guidelines for cooking steaks to different levels of doneness: Rare: 120-125°F (49-52°C) Medium-Rare: 130-135°F (54-57°C) Medium: 140-145°F (60-63°C) Medium-Well: 150-155°F (66-68°C) Well-Done: 160°F (71°C) and above It's important to note that cooking steaks at low temperatures for extended periods o…

The problem is that if you don't already know the answer, it's hard to tell the difference between ChatGPT giving you the correct information and ChatGPT authoritatively spouting the wrong information.

Here's a chat I had today with ChatGPT:

Q: Who was the first US president with a last name starting with R?

A: Rutherford B. Hayes was the first US president with a last name starting with "R."

Q: no, a surname starting with R

A: Rutherford B. Hayes was the first U.S. President with a surname starting with "R."

Q: no, Rutherford is his first name

A: The first US president with a surname starting with "R" was Richard Nixon.

Q: no, Richard is his first name

A: The first U.S. President with a surname starting with "R" was James A. Garfield.

Here it's obvious ChatGPT is spouting nonsense, but in other cases it may not be.

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

#237

Post by eclipxe »

kareemsabri wrote: post #229
revskill wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't imagine thinking typescript improved human life more than Google Search

Peak HN.

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

#238

Post by junofan »

ESMirro wrote: post #215
fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is the same Microsoft that had to close down their Twitter AI “Tay” after a single day because it immediately became a “racist asshole” (as per The Verge) in 2016? The same OpenAI ran by Sam Altman, who just last year was part of a crypto biometric scam called “Worldcoin” that attempted to collect biometric data from some of the worlds poorest in exchange for a shitcoin? I’m sure they’ve done their due diligence…

Everyone on the planet can already talk to racists by typing in 4chan.org. In the meantime, I’ve found ChatGPT useful for learning zsh commands.

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

#239

Post by thefurdrake »

revskill wrote: post #232
amartya916 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it might be fashionable to hate on Google, the question "What did Google bring to my life" seems really odd. I can't believe I have to say this but search, and more importantly good/fast search, is to Google's credit. Typescript and VSCode all have, and will continue to have alternatives, but for a long time, Google was (some may argue it still is) the bleeding edge of search. Anyway, there might be a generatio…

You're making assumptions. I listed facts.

Yeah, I'm gonna need to see some citation on how Typescript and VSCode improved life for humanity. Break out some of them facts you're talking about.

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

#240

Post by ElectricSpoon »

My fear is that more AI will hinder our ability to literally search for stuff. The future I dread includes more profiling, a stronger search bubble, all of which will just make it the death of the objective search engine. As fascinating as AI can be, I don't think it's what search engines are missing. That is certainly not what I need.

Even today, engines rank your results by geoip, trying to be smarter than you ask them to be. Two individuals doing the same quoted search will get different results. Perhaps I'm just getting old, but I do miss when searching was a matter of writing a good query, not a matter of what the engine thinks you will want to ask next and what else might interest you.

Post reply on HN