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

341–350 of 550 posts

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

#341

Post by victor106 »

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…

Both are evil but I agree that Google is less evil than Microsoft.

Just like the OP I have first hand info on how atrocious Microsoft’s internal privacy controls are.

The later versions of Windows are just ad space for Microsoft to advertise.

Azure is the worst of the 3 cloud providers. Horrible developer experience and documentation and reliability.

That said, I would still take Satya’s Microsoft over Balmers any day

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

#342

Post by trieste92 »

Let me guess what this article and thread will have:

> BIG TECH AI CHATBOT GOLDRUSH!!!!!!

> "Google sucks now, I use Kagi/DDG/Searx instead"

> "I have to quote search to get the results I want. Google has seriously gone downhill"

Can we cut the shit for two seconds? It was never all that great to begin with. None of them were.

Also, these news outlets are just fucking lazy and need to go outside and do actual journalism instead of regurgitating the same trash over and over. ChatGPT is less redundant than they are

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

#343

Post by victor106 »

tormeh wrote: post #337
mc32 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be extraordinarily surprised if this is the case, but I do not expect it to be as lax as you suggest and given how it's presented to us it reads like someone trying to get people to not look at something. If you have things you can present as evidence that would carry water for your argument, otherwise it's random inflammatory claim on in the internet. And I agree, Google does take security more seriously…

Of the major three cloud providers, Azure is by far the one whose security bugs I hear most about. Not that this necessarily has much relevance to search, but it doesn't inspire confidence in their culture.

Ditto. I work with all three on a daily basis and Azure is the worst

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

#344

Post by juve1996 »

ilc wrote: post #90

People seem to forget: AI is about data, the ability to process it, and having a few smart folks to do algorithms. The third part is actually the smallest and easiest part of the trilogy for AI. Google, has all three. The real question is can they not shoot themselves in the foot while doing it. Also SEO will always target the market leader. As far as Bing's results: I keep thinking Google is trashy. Then I use Bing…

Google is without a doubt worse for me than ever. But is it really google? Or is it just the absolute cesspool of SEO-optimized ad driven garbage that represents a growing portion of it?

The other searches are worse. I too have tried. But in general I'm frustrated with Google now more than I've ever been.

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

#345

Post by ergonaught »

“Search” relevance seems as secure as they’ll let it be (ie: it’s their own fault if lose that due to self-inflicted distraction).

Their challenge in that particular area is the relevance of “search” itself.

Most of that decline can be attributed to them indirectly via the behaviors they incentivized (and LLMs will now nail that coffin shut), with the social media siloes playing their part.

But they shouldn’t lose an edge here unless they give it away. Never say never.

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

#346

Post by juve1996 »

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…

2016 was 7 years ago. And I completely forgot about that incident. And so did everyone else.

> I’m sure they’ve done their due diligence and aren’t just pushing out a broken product as quickly as possible after it went viral because they saw dollar signs…

Why wouldn't they? If they bet and win, they significantly disrupt the search market and many others. If they don't, people still don't use Bing. The rest of their business will continue on as is.

It's a no brainer.

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

#347

Post by juve1996 »

s-xyz wrote: post #266

Have the feeling that we are in a state of overreacting (news outlets love the headlines). In addition, my gut feeling says that Google does things better than Microsoft. This comes from my experience with working with Google and GCP products vs working with Microsoft Office/Windows and Azure. With Google, everything feels consistent, well documented and well presented: from Meet/Gmail to BigQuery, Tensorflow, Cloud…

I agree in general that Microsoft leaves a lot to be desired.

But Google's product track record has been abysmal lately. Based on their horrible live event today, it seems like things are not so grand behind the scenes there anymore.

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

#348

Post by freediver »

fareesh wrote: post #324

Google has figured out how to scale search to the current number of requests per second Scaling a ChatGPT like product to that level would be challenging I assume - and extremely expensive. Is that correct?

Going rate is about 3 cents per LLM query, so at Google scale of 100k qps, it would be ~$300MM/day. However you probably need to send only about 1/10 of current queries to LLM (as most are still not suitrable for LLM to asnwer) so that would cost only $30MM/day or about $9B/year which is peanuts for Google.

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

#349

Post by fblp »

Someone1234 wrote: post #291
tylerhou wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wor…

thank you for sharing that context!
Post reply on HN