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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?

#291

Post by Someone1234 »

tylerhou wrote: post #280
Someone1234 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They added so much red tape and bureaucracy to it that it is a distinction without a difference. Innovation went from a stream to a trickle after 2013.

It went from "spend 20% on whatever project you find interesting!" to "spend UP TO 20% on a project your manager approves of and can defend from their manager, with routine reporting on the status, direction, and potential outcomes."

Employees went from wanting to work at Google for the "20% Time" to not using it because it was a huge hassle that could risk their career advancement, if your 20% time project didn't pan out. It went from a perk to a gamble almost overnight.

The result in the same either way though: Google stopped innovating.

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

#292

Post by erklik »

dekhn wrote: post #273
erklik wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> in the long history of ML, tensorflow is not that significant.

I don't necessarily disagree, but that's only from a technical pov. However, I think the release of it as a open-source library made it so that it's far easier to learn the tech that already existed. Vast majority of university courses use it to teach lots of different concepts that were far more "mathy" before.

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

Yeah. Maybe I worded that wrong. I wasn't saying it made ML possible. Just that it's a huge contribution to the Open-Source tech overall.

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

#293

Post by NayamAmarshe »

Ingaz wrote: 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…

> But a lot of people fed up with Google and will be glad to try something different.

Why would they replace Google with another bloated adware search engine then?

I used to be one of these people, not going to lie, but Bing is worse than Google when it comes to UX. The results are not as high quality, bloated and really messy UI.

I switched to DDG and then Brave Search later on and I can honestly say that Brave Search gets a lot of things right. Mainly the results quality and the clean UI and widgets.

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

#294

Post by danShumway »

emodendroket wrote: post #257
danShumway wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for clarification, do you mean the actual encyclopedia, or Wikipedia? I think that encyclopedias are cool, but I also feel like the Internet was hopefully going to be a slightly better version of that and that it's a little frustrating to be going in the opposite direction. I'm not sure how to articulate that other than that encyclopedias are in some ways a compromise around the fact that we very often don't hav…

CPedia was an attempted pivot by doomed search startup Cuil that would more or less build a Wikipedia-like page out of random text on the Web about whatever you searched for. This article describes it a bit. https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2010/06/09/cpedia-a-spam-blo...

Oh wow. Thanks for the link, first time I've heard of that.

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

#295

Post by erklik »

revskill wrote: post #256
erklik wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't use Phone, nor Maps, nor Youtube, nor Kubernetes, all the things you listed. They're helpful to you, not me.

You literally said "made human life better" ... it doesn't matter if you use them or not.

Also, you don't use a Phone? or Maps? Really? Do you use Chrome? Do you use Firefox, because Google's contributed a massive amount to the web standards that are implemented in both Firefox, and Chrome.

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

#296

Post by belval »

valley_guy_12 wrote: post #228

The article starts, "Nestled in the hills of Mountain View", which is worrisome, because as anyone with even a passing familiarity with Silicon Valley geography knows, Mountain View is mostly flat. And Google's Mountain View offices are located on reclaimed baylands, which are especially flat. I wonder if the article authors were thinking of Xerox PARC's offices in Palo Alto's hills? Or the road named "Sand Hill Road…

The Economist is British so it's possible the person writing this has never been to the Bay Area and just made a wordplay based on "Mountain View".

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

#297

Post by NoPicklez »

notahacker wrote: post #255
wcoenen wrote: 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...

It has both capabilities built in.

"Get answers instead of being overwhelmed by options. Bing looks at search results across the web and summarizes responses to your specific questions and needs."

There's summarised cited searches and then there is the more ChatGPT option which is also available.

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

#298

Post by NayamAmarshe »

scubadude wrote: post #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.

> Typically I add "site:reddit.com" to the end of any search where I want to read people's opinions of a product.

Brave Search natively shows you reddit discussions on every search query. You can give that a try as well.

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

#299

Post by NoPicklez »

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…

"that always shows you exactly what you want."

That's the pipedream, but in reality isn't the case yet even using just ChatGPT.

Bing's implementation is trying to balance raw ChatGPT outputs, with summarised cited responses in search.

I do think they need to speed up the animation for generating the summarised or ChatGPT result though...

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

#300

Post by zerocrates »

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.

As someone else said, I think a surprisingly (overwhelmingly?) large amount of queries are just questions people want answered, or close to them, and not really "search queries" in the traditional sense of text people are looking for on a page somewhere.

Even before this, you've seen the search engines add features to cater to that kind of use, things like Siri handing off questions it didn't understand to a search engine (as well as the other assistants that can do that), indications of this behavior in how companies like Google show themselves being used in ads.

Of course, regardless of the true prevalence of that behavior, it's probably in Google et al.'s favor to encourage that. Regular search sort of inherently cedes some power and control to the pages the results are coming from, where you're sending users away to if their answer isn't right in the snippet. But the "answer box" features, or an LLM that just tells you "the answer to your question" directly on the page keeps you there, treating the search page as your source of information and not somewhere else.

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