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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?

#401

Post by goldfeld »

s-xyz wrote: post #271
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…

“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

That just expands on the parent's point. Let us divide the number of teams Google has globally by the three fronts you mention.

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

#402

Post by DiscourseFan »

nearbuy wrote: post #241
emodendroket wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“It tells me the right answer” and “I trust it to give me the right answer” are two different propositions.

It's just one data point but it may indicate the commenter is miscalibrated on what ChatGPT answers well and what it doesn't. It reminds me of when Wikipedia was new and we were told repeatedly that we couldn't trust it (by teachers, articles, etc.). It didn't matter if we could point to studies that found Wikipedia had similar accuracy to other encyclopedias. They objected on the grounds that anyone could edit it an…

The difference between ChatGPT and Wikipedia is that Wikipedia actually cites its sources.

Also ChatGPT is only knowledgeable about general things, but even there it makes errors. It's basically a very complex scraping algorithm, the more interesting part is the language generation; even then this stuff seems at least unethical if not illegal since it's using other people's work/research without citation.

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

#403

Post by dreamcompiler »

jessriedel wrote: post #274
mejutoco wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I tried to sync my computer to gdrive I waited 30 days before giving up on gdrive. Dropbox took less than 2 days, and stayed responsive.

Dropbox iPad refuses to keep docs synced docs that I have specifically flagged for this. I routinely open the iPad somewhere without a connection and see that the docs are a month out of date. Not as mission critical as the desktop app, but still pretty frustrating that they can't handle this core functionality after years and millions spent on other bells and whistles.

Apple is forcing Dropbox to cripple itself because they now have to use Apple's own cloud file sync API which is hot garbage. I don't know if this is the cause of your iPad issue, but Dropbox on MacOS is about to get a whole lot shittier.

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

#404

Post by goldfeld »

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…

The scary real threatening and killer thing would be for chatGPT to automanage my tabs. Like a well-meaning shepherd, perhaps create new pages on the web that by a combined virtue can take the place of whole groups of open tabs, being equivalent convenient replacements of the information they once held.

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

#405

Post by hLineVsLineH »

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…

Fully agree, but the problem is not really specific to AI. Most search results today, whether written by humans or machines, tend to be mindless, inaccurate, and unhelpful n-th hand summaries produced with very little effort.

And this doesn't seem unreasonable, given that you get everything for free or at a very low cost. When you pay for high quality books or periodicals, you get in return much better sourced information written by people who know a lot more about the subject they're writing on than the average journalist or AI language model.

Yes, occasionally one might find high quality contents in blogs, forums, wikis, or open-access periodicals, but far more are locked inside proprietary platforms or behind paywalls that do very little to actually compensate the authors.

Search engines and content platforms are supposed to make it easier to find what you want. But the reality is that it's a lose-lose situation for both the writer and the reader. The writer is forced to give up their contents at a very low price and overpay for ads, while the reader is left with low quality contents that aren't relevant to their needs. But neither can escape the monopoly, who alone profits at everyone else's expense.

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

#406

Post by deeviant »

hgsgm wrote: post #62
fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #51

How could they have left such a massive gap in their product. They literally have the model and resources to revolutionize search. We all know LLMs will hurt their ad revenue, but regardless they have to have known this was coming. This is so similar to FB getting caught off guard by TikTok. There was a gap in the utility of their product (TikTok enabled grass roots content creation), and they just left it wide open.…

4. Google Search already has lots of useful AI already in it, but Google didn't want to integrate a racist, confabulating chatbot, forgetting that modern users have no preference for truth over lies. Why are you blaming Google for not being perfect while making the best free search engine, after you spent your whole life refusing to pay for a non-free one?

Let's be clear, the reason Google didn't want to jump into conversation search is because it invalidates large portions of their business model.

At best they want to avoid bad publicity of their tech just being bad enough to throw out racist remarks. But the company who dropped "don't be evil" from their mission statement, and who fired AI ethics researchers for their research in AI bias that Google did not like is not a morale authority on the matter.

Also, Google does not provide an ad-free paid version of google, you statement is a non-sequitur.

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

#407

Post by mvonballmo »

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…

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

Really? I find Microsoft's documentation for Azure (in English) to be quite thorough and helpful. Their tools are well-designed and quite powerful.

Perhaps those of AWS and GCP are even more amazing, but I wouldn't call Azure "horrible" by any stretch of the imagination.

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

#408

Post by dgb23 »

kilgnad wrote: post #395
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The dominant ideology revolves around the profit motive and markets being inherently ethical and the most effective way for progress.

There’s something to it. Ideas and implementations are pressure tested through market competition, so they get refined and adapted.

The issue with advertising specifically is that it’s inherently manipulative and often condescending. On the web it has a infectious nature, making everything a bit worse.

> People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.

> Banksy

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

#409

Post by WalterBright »

kilgnad wrote: post #395
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> But money is the driving force that is most detached from ethics.

Power is. Look at all the powerful dictators in the past, and what they did. Do you think Stalin was motivated by money? Napoleon? Mussolini?

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

#410

Post by emodendroket »

kweingar wrote: post #378

I am really perplexed by people talking about the end of traditional web search. I guess HN users tend to look up lots of facts and whatnot. But generative AI is not a better UX for queries like "LeBron James instagram" or "wordle" or "Avatar 3 release date" or "WSJ" or "Spanish to English" or "cricket news".

I'm not saying that it's not going to settle in to being frequently used for some domains, but I think we're at the "irrational exuberance" point of the curve about what this tech is going to do at the moment. Playing around with it reveals limits pretty quickly.
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