Live data from Hacker News

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

economist.com

271–280 of 550 posts

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

#271

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…

Google stopped being innovative the second their "20% Time" got gutted: > Employees were encouraged to spend up to twenty-percent of their paid work time pursuing personal projects. The objective of the program was to inspire innovation in participating employees and ultimately increase company potential. For Google's part, Gmail and AdSense both arose out of side projects. In 2013, Google discontinued 20 percent tim…

“What has Google released since 2013[0]? Stadia?”

- GCP Suite (a full integrated and consistent suit, answering so many things)

- Google Workspace (trust me when you get to know everything that is possible you will be amazed)

- Tensorflow and other Machine Learning applications

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

#272

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.

You don't seem to be interested in a debate.

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

#273
post #235

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.

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 "g…

in the long history of ML, tensorflow is not that significant. realistically, nearly everything it did was available in other systems before. It was really just a grab for Google to try to get everybody to use their framework. But it wasn't a good framework, and it evolved terribly.

MapReduce was not and isn't something that made ML possible. It made data engineering at scale possible.

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

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dropbox iPad refuses to keep docs synced docs that I have specifically flagged for this. I routinely open the iPad somewhere without a connection and see that the docs are a month out of date.

Not as mission critical as the desktop app, but still pretty frustrating that they can't handle this core functionality after years and millions spent on other bells and whistles.

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

#275
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…

Oh yeah IIRC I used to look at Bing search logs in Microsoft and I wasn't on Bing team. This was 2014. Things probably have changed.

IIRC there was some basic safeguards though, like a query must have had like 10 unique occurrences or something. I also have no idea if you could tie searches to people.

I was just looking at aggregate numbers. That was really cool. It was like Google Trends but with real numbers!

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

#276
post #244

I think that ChatGPT3 does not matter a lot. But a lot of people fed up with Google and will be glad to try something different. It's like when Apple came and eat 15-20% of market of notebooks. Dominance of Microsoft still not ended. Actually I suspect that Yandex search is better - I like how they preview answers for technical questions. Picture search - seems that Google is the worst. Maybe it's time to start searc…

Yandex Search is decent, but over-indexed on Russian content. They’ve also suffered major brain drain since the war began so I don’t expect them to keep up with the AI arms race.

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

#277
If anything kills Google search it's the ads. Search for a product and the first page can entirely be ads or sales links. You have to specifically search to find reviews (many of which are likely paid reviews), and search even harder to find actual real user reports. Typically I add "site:reddit.com" to the end of any search where I want to read people's opinions of a product.

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

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just one data point but it may indicate the commenter is miscalibrated on what ChatGPT answers well and what it doesn't. It reminds me of when Wikipedia was new and we were told repeatedly that we couldn't trust it (by teachers, articles, etc.). It didn't matter if we could point to studies that found Wikipedia had similar accuracy to other encyclopedias. They objected on the grounds that anyone could edit it an…

It seems to be that information that’s on tons of Web pages already is precisely the type of information where search engines are hard to beat.

Agreed. I wouldn't use ChatGPT for this because Google is faster and more reliable. I just thought the example was a bit odd since ChatGPT gets it right, and it's a type of question it generally gets right.

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

#279
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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...

If it's citing all it's sources, it's not ChatGPT, it's a natural language interface around search, which Google has been doing for years including with voice...

Presumably they have bolted on something that cites sources. This doesn't mean that the things ChatGPT says are true, just that you can check some sources that are plausibly relevant.

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

#280

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…

Google stopped being innovative the second their "20% Time" got gutted: > Employees were encouraged to spend up to twenty-percent of their paid work time pursuing personal projects. The objective of the program was to inspire innovation in participating employees and ultimately increase company potential. For Google's part, Gmail and AdSense both arose out of side projects. In 2013, Google discontinued 20 percent tim…

20% being discontinued is not really accurate.
Post reply on HN