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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?

#321

Post by dilippkumar »

danShumway wrote: post #178

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 summa…

There seem to be two different directions for innovation here.

The first is a little more mundane: LLM embeddings. OpenAI currently offers an API that turns sentences into coordinates for a point in some 1536-dimensional conceptual space such that two points are close together if they are conceptually close together. This is insanely powerful. For example, you can generate captions for a bunch of images and store the embeddings for them. Then, you can look for a "picture of a rabbit eating a carrot" by turning that phrase into a 1536-dimensional point and looking for the nearest points around it. Basically, it blows open search technology for everyone. You no longer have to deal with synonyms, idiomatic phrases that mean similar things, misspellings etc - the problems you'd run into when trying to implement simple text search using traditional techniques. It all gets simplified to generating coordinates in some hyperspace and looking for nearest neighbors. This is a total game changer.

The second direction is ChatGPT. Sure, if you want to read a detailed analysis of the demographic situation in China, you'd prefer an article written by an expert. You would still use a search engine, pick a search result and do things the way you do them today. However, there's an entire collection of things that can be answered directly by ChatGPT. For example "how many mins should I hard boil an egg" or "Can I take NyQuil when I'm stoned" or anything else where you really just want a single sentence answer. Today, you launch a browser, search for what you want, skip past the first 10 advertisements, look for a site that seems reasonably reputable, click through all the GDPR warnings, scroll past the banner ads and the SEO optimizing bullshit text to find that one sentence that you wanted all along. Or, you could ask ChatGPT and get an answer instantly. (assuming chatGPT is good enough eventually).

It's hard to predict which of these two technologies will disrupt the current status quo in search. Neither might. But we haven't ever been this close to a level playing field in search since the 1990s. The excitement is hard to resist.

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

#322

Post by snake_doc »

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…

Looking P/E without sector context is a bit strange. The entire comm services sector is down, it’s not just GOOGL…

Since I can’t paste screenshots from my terminal, you can see the sector P/Es on page 6:

https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/performance-repo...

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

#323

Post by postingawayonhn »

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 tend to agree with this take.

That said, ChatGPT does a very good job of understanding what I am looking for. If Microsoft could just insert this understanding into its regular search algorithms it would seem likely to significantly improve the quality of search results.

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

#325

Post by bee_rider »

mertd wrote: post #40
silisili wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stadia wasn't really that innovative, how many times has cloud/streaming gaming been done before? I can think of at least 3. Also, it's already dead.

Which three? Did they actually work with reasonable input latency?

The discussion was about innovative products. An already explored idea, but executed properly, only counts as innovative if Apple does it. And even then, it only ran for a couple years, so even if we want to give points for taking an idea and making it work, they don’t pass there either.

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

#326

Post by bee_rider »

foobiekr wrote: post #301
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…

Shoreline is kind of hilly even if the hills are landfill.

A shore is kind of like a hill, just wet.

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

#327

Post by aworks »

likeabbas wrote: post #196
awad wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What happened to the Waymo hype? If Waymo manages to break through and become a sufficient AI taxi, then car ownership becomes optional for a majority of Americans (unlike today).

Google is an ad-driven company and they haven't yet figured out to generate ad revenue from Waymo... (Having said that, it's cool that the Mountain View office building I used to go to is now occupied by Waymo).

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

#328

Post by registeredcorn »

Someone1234 wrote: post #259
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…

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…

>I also have a uBlock configuration that removes 280 domains from Google Results because they're all auto-generated spam of Stackoverflow answers.

Can you describe exactly what you mean? If there is a way to hide specific domains from showing in search results, it would be an incredible boon for me.

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

#329

Post by vrosas »

Someone1234 wrote: post #285
s-xyz wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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

Google Workspaces originally released in 2006 (inc. Sheets, Docs, Drive was 2012, Calendar was 2009, etc), it was rebranded "G Suite" in 2016 then rebranded "Google Workspaces" in 2020. Rebranding an existing product isn't innovation. Google Cloud is a worse clone of AWS, is that innovative? Redmond-style photocopying? I'll give you TensorFlow, but we're talking about that being their death knell, so congratulations…

> Google Cloud is a worse clone of AWS

This certainly hasn’t been my experience. I’ve found GCP products to be much better/easier to deal with than their AWS counterparts.

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

#330

Post by kazinator »

friend_and_foe wrote: post #307
kazinator wrote: post #234

> 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 querie…

But google (nor bing) return the pages you're looking for even close to as reliably now as they did before. If Microsoft can somehow work out the issues with factual accuracy in the gpt interface (and salvage the bing brand) they're going to have a winning product on their hands.

Users sometimes want a factual answer. Usually they want to go to a page. Pages are not just sources of information. People interact with pages to do real stuff connected with off-line activities. E.g. chatty paragraph won't connect me with the government/medical/banking/restaurant/shopping/whatever page I'm too lazy to search for through its own URL and portal.

At best, you can have this: if it looks like the user is typing a question into the search box, an AI-generated side bar can complement the answers.

The web search side of it cannot go away, otherwise you just have a sophisticated Eliza.

If I'm going to see a factual answer, I want external references for those facts before I trust it. I'm likely not a subject matter expert, if I'm asking about something; I can't tell when the AI is bullshitting.

Now if the AI-powered search engine had an intelligent index of all the texts of all the crawled web pages such it could do some basic reasoning about it to serve up those pages based on sophisticated questions (and not simply serve up original prose based on those texts), that could be a game changer.

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