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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?

#391

Post by superkuh »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #115
mattwad wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone else said, the problem is ChatGPT lies straight to your face, whereas at least Google's answers are based on structured data by someone. It's traceable, whereas I would not trust ChatGPT ever to tell me the correct temperature to cook a steak.

ChatGPT lies to your face, while Google just finds other peoples lies and shows you a list of the best ones.

Specifically just the 400 best/recent ones. Google will never return more than 400 results for a query despite reporting ~80,000,000 results. If you click next enough it will run out after showing you ~38 pages of 10 results or almost 4 pages of 100 results.

This is the intended behavior. It kind of ruins serendipitious web surfing via search. I look through 4 pages of 100 results in less than a minute and the web as google search presents it just feels so shallow now.

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

#392

Post by lmm »

uxcolumbo wrote: post #282
system16 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads aside, the UI of Youtube and Maps is atrocious. There is so much room for improvement here, but it will never happen from Google. It's just not in their DNA. Unfortunately, they have such a huge moat here I doubt we'll see anything better for a long time.

What things about maps and YouTube’s UI annoy you? I find YouTube quite easy to use, esp the shortcut keys. Recommendation system is another story.

The most infuriating thing with Maps is that if you're looking at directions and have got the viewport where you want it and want to do something there (e.g. look at the description of a restaurant that's near the station you're changing at, or get directions to somewhere along your route), you can't. There's no way to escape from "directions mode" except hitting the back button, which resets your viewport. So you have to memorize the name of the place you're interested in, exit directions, and then hope that searching finds the place you were looking at a second ago (which, maybe in English it does, but searching for a Japanese place by name works maybe 1/3 of the time).

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

#393

Post by ahmetnoid »

I remember Peter Thiel once said that investing in google is investing against innovation, that the company had no competition for a very long time, and that they see no reason to why they needed to reinvent themselves. As long as there's no threat to the company, they can just maintain the current tech and harvest the green from it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q26XIKtwXQ

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

#394

Post by Dalewyn »

belval wrote: post #296
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".

Journalists writing bullshit straight out of their asses is certainly nothing new in this day and age.

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

#395

Post by kilgnad »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #364
blarghyblarg wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both are driven by a profit motive, but Google takes some forms of privacy more seriously. Lets not use emotionally driven, ambiguous terms like 'evil' to describe these kinds of things. Google is not, for instance, conspiring to commit genocides, nor is Microsoft planning a coup in an Eastern European nation with the goal of colonizing them to use as indentured technical support.

> Both are driven by a profit motive What do you want a corporation/company/business (of any size) to be driven by?

I'd prefer if it was driven by reputation, honor and status achieved by helping humanity.

The primary driver for humans is status. Status in the military is achieved through leadership and honor. Status in academia is achieved through capability. These sectors provably show that people can be driven by things other than money.

The sad thing here is that there are tradeoffs. Nothing is as efficient or as effective of a motivator as money. But money is the driving force that is most detached from ethics.

The media likes to make a big deal out of privacy but mostly people only give a shit up to a point... so it doesn't effect googles bottom line and therefore google also doesn't give a shit.

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

#396

Post by Dalewyn »

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…

I hate Big Data(tm) as the next guy in line, but if I have to choose between Google and Microsoft nomming my data I'll happily pick Microsoft every time.

Why?

For one, I've had a Microsoft account for over 20 years now (anyone remember Hotmail?). It's long past due for me to be complaining, and Microsoft hasn't wronged me in that time anyway. By comparison, my oldest Google account only goes back just over 10 years, and horror stories abound even if I've been fortunate so far. I keep all my truly important correspondance and login tie-ins with Microsoft (read: my Hotmail).

For another, Microsoft nurtured over 30 years' worth of good will from me with Windows and Office; even though I hate many things about Windows from 8 and up, among other things, I will ultimately be a friend to Microsoft simply because they were a significant and positive part of my childhood and now my adult life.

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

#397

Post by rybosome »

nr2x wrote: post #372
somethoughts wrote: post #185

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…

Google makes fuck all revenue from Drive, it never mattered. EVERYTHING at Google, most notably the cash fire that is Cloud, is funded by Search. This is the first time that is in danger and over 25 years they never came up with a fallback plan. This is an unmitigated disaster and purely the result of mismanagement.

Cloud operating losses have dropped substantially YoY, and revenue has risen steadily. It is at most a few years from profitability.

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

#399

Post by dilippkumar »

danShumway wrote: post #357
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…

So LLM embedding are an actual useful thing that could actually improve search. Categorization is a real problem that AI could help solve (particularly with search queries). But that's not a new category of search, it's just a question of whether the current LLMs would be better than whatever Google is currently using to make the same inferences. And the direction Bard and Bing seem to be going with these giant model…

There are three groups of people here.

First, you have people who don’t have any idea about how any of this works and are generally far removed from the tech communities. They did not see this coming. To this community, ChatGPT is a fascinating toy. It’s not perfect, but at this point everyone is conditioned to believe that thinks will somehow get better. This group is excited.

Second, you have the tech community who is skeptical. This group of people sees everything that’s wrong with ChatGPT and see the magnitude of work needed for anything to even start approaching Google as a credible threat. This group is generally confused by the excitement going around because it doesn’t seem warranted, and worse, the excitement is being seen in people who should know better. There’s a range of responses from being dismissive to feeling like they’re being gaslighted.

Third, you have the people who are filling up the YC summer 23 applications. They’re all looking for big unsaturated markets to build a pitch deck around. ChatGPT looks like a very promising sign post that says “look for ideas here” to this group. They are excited. Most of them will fail. But if anyone survives and manages to thrive, where will they be 10 years from now? How about FDA approved chatbots integrated with a blood pressure monitor and thermometer that can take a first pass at routine prescription refills at 1/100th the cost of an equivalent doctors appointment? How about live translation of television events synthesized back to the original speaker’s voice? How about video game engines that can synthesize music loops dynamically to keep up with the gaming pace of that particular gaming session?

Sure you might say, but none of that “dethrones google”. My response to that is - what role does a text based internet play in daily life 10 years from now? Everything on the internet today went something along this path: primary research -> classrooms -> textbooks -> niche blogs/forums -> mainstream websites.

10 years from now, would you bet against primary research -> ChatGPT ingress -> widely deployed ChatGPT model? What role do ad driven websites play in this chain? What role does a search engine play in this chain?

Sure, it doesn’t make the internet nor search engines obsolete. But it changes how we do things. Potentially in a very big way.

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

#400

Post by tigershark »

no_carrier wrote: post #353
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

Also: - Kubernetes has been incredibly transformative and adopted by all other cloud providers - Golang - the language of choice for a lot of cloud native tools - Flutter - it may not be the incumbent choice but it makes cross platform development a breeze - Google Photos - no other photo platform comes close to it

Go is from 2009, so well before 2013. Google photos was launched 4 years after Apple photos on iCloud, so I wouldn’t call it innovative.
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