Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end? • Hacker News Board

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

#381

Post by Hamuko » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 5:18 AM UTC

beamgirl wrote: post #164

adamrezich wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the tinfoil take is that everyone in charge is fully aware of this eventual problem such that when it occurs, a solution will be presented: ubiquitous verifiable digital ID technology that's required to use popular social media services, such that everything that a Real Person posts will be signed with said digital ID, thus bringing about the end of online anonymity, and the death of the Internet as we presently know…

Entirely possible, but the amount of people who moved to Mastodon after Twitter got lit on fire gives me hope that people might explore options if things go a step too far

My Mastodon is a ghost town while my Twitter feed keeps having hundreds upon hundreds of posts per day.

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

#382

Post by trilobyte » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 5:20 AM UTC

midoridensha wrote: post #356

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…

>It has been many years since Google has launched an innovative new product. I can say the exact same thing about countless other large companies: Facebook, Intel, Microsoft, Boeing, AMD, AT&T, I could go on and on. At some point, launching innovative new products isn't really that important for a company, when many people on the services that company provides.

It is if you don't want to wind up like IBM, i.e. - a company that could have been so much more, knew it had to change at the leadership level, and yet still couldn't get out of their own way. Apple's renaissance came because they started releasing innovative products and cannibalizing their own business.

Disrupt yourself before someone else does.

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

#383

Post by kevin_thibedeau » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 5:23 AM UTC

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).

> becomes optional for a majority of Americans

No it won't. It will be an option for those who can depend on a car service due to proximity to a city.

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

#384

Post by autoexec » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 5:29 AM UTC

victor106 wrote: post #341

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 da…

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

I'd agree they are both evil in that they both seek to leverage your personal data against you for their own gain, but it sounds like Google does it while being more protective of what they've taken from you while MS also leaves you vulnerable in new ways through carelessness.

I'm not too worried about Bing though. That's nothing compared to Microsoft's access to your computer at the OS level. We know anything we do online will be seen by others, but being able to snoop on our personal files and log our keystrokes is a whole lot worse than knowing what we type into a search engine.

However improved/more popular Bing becomes, eventually Bing will end up in the same position Google is in now where they'll have to make their web search worse in order to constantly shove ads in your face instead of returning results that are useful, and slowly SEO spam will adapt to pollute Bing's results further. Google may not even mind if Bing starts gaining users. At this point Google can collect so much data from android devices that I doubt they need google search to peer into our lives like they used to anyway.

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

#385

Post by singularity2001 » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 5:50 AM UTC

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…

That anecdote reflects the data protection part, everyone dealing with Windows trying to disable tracking experienced their horrible data collection attitude

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

#386

Post by charlie0 » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 5:52 AM UTC

ilc wrote: post #218

amelius wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. MS has them all three too. And since, as you say, the algorithm part is not the most difficult part, others may enter the playing field soon (we already have DDG and Kagi, for example, with Kagi now experimenting with LLMs…

The compute side needs to be solved with money. That may be a hurdle for DDG/Kagi. MS has the money. Data is by far and away the hardest part, and DDG's own privacy policies etc will hurt it here, alas. Personally, I think it is Google's race to win. But they have to DO it. If I start getting better results off DDG or Bing, I'll switch. I'm fickle, and own no loyality to Google. I just want my StackExchange answers f…

I think enough people will get sick enough of the ads that they will be willing to pay a few bucks a month to avoid it.

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

#387

Post by antoniuschan99 » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 5:54 AM UTC

awad wrote: post #169

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…

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.

It’s definitely because Susan Wojcicki is at the helm. Interestingly, Google started in her (parents?) garage.

Here’s a tour of the recreation https://maps.app.goo.gl/syHHp9GWmaGA5Woz7

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

#388

Post by ximi » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 5:54 AM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #383

likeabbas wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> becomes optional for a majority of Americans No it won't. It will be an option for those who can depend on a car service due to proximity to a city.

Data from the 2010 Census: 80.7%: Percent of the U.S. population is urban (living in Urbanized area or Urban Cluster).

Sounds like a majority to me.

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

#389

Post by dilippkumar » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 5:58 AM UTC

karpierz wrote: post #355

dilippkumar wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The first is a little more mundane: LLM embeddings. You know Google has been doing this for years now? > 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. Google has been doing this for years via search cards, which…

> You know Google has been doing this for years now?

Of course.

What’s changed is that before now, they were the only ones who could do it, vs now, everyone can do it. So this technology only got deployed where someone could get a promo out of it whereas now, every to-do list app, dating app, and even a reasonably sophisticated nigerian prince can find a place to deploy it.

Think of what gcc did to software tool chains, Apache to servers, Linux to operating systems and to a lesser degree, blockchains to distributed databases.

> Google has been doing this for years via search cards, which are AI generated summaries of website information.

Yes. But now, someone else can do it too. And if that someone else does a good job, Google just lost the opportunity to show advertisements to all of those “searches”.

Doesn’t mean that anyone is about to beat Google in terms of sheer talent and experience with this stuff. But a very hungry and determined community of entrepreneurs just got hands on something that’s about as good as Google’s secret sauce and they’re about to run wild.

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

#390

Post by charlie0 » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 5:59 AM UTC

guyzero wrote: post #44

Considering people still go to Bing just to type "Google" I think the answer is no.

I wonder if MS can query and see the pain of people just searching for the Google Chrome download link, downloading it, closing Edge and never opening it ever again.