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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?

#421

Post by DangitBobby »

vrosas wrote: post #329
Someone1234 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed. I can actually just figure out how to do simple things in GCP console by clicking around the UI, including setting up networks, doing IAM, and getting stuff talking to each other, most of it without ever leaving the web browser or even peeking at documentation. Good luck doing that with AWS.

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

#422

Post by hLineVsLineH »

netheril96 wrote: post #373
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…

From my point of view the only usage of LLM is generation. Such as writing peer reviews, self reviews, OKRs, when I already know the truth and can edit out any errors. I will never trust a LLM's answer to something I don't already know.

Or creative writing, where factual inaccuracies are often a feature, not a bug.

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

#423

Post by sagarm »

superkuh wrote: post #391
TheCoelacanth wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the people who want more than 400 results and the people that want ChatGPT to summarize the results are a disjoint set.

I also suspect the first set is very very small...

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

#424

Post by oblio »

rybosome wrote: post #397
nr2x wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We're in a recession. It's quite likely cloud falls into a race to the bottom.

The "at most a few years from profitability" after a period of what, 15 boom years?, doesn't sound that great as the 3rd place contender.

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

#425

Post by college_physics »

It is depressing that people dont recognize that Google has invented and perfected a parasitic business model that has destroyed the internet (and much of tech with it) and this episode feels like just another turn of the downward spiral.

The article aims to offer a preliminary analysis of whether Microsoft can become a better parasite: Grabbing the content people generate online, paying nothing, and using it deftly to serve advertisement on the basis of private behavioral traits that are gleaned by prying open and subverting the use of all pieces of IT people use.

It is not too difficult by now to imagine alternate tech universes (Philip K Dick style) that have nothing to do with this nightmare, where more or less the same technologies empower individuals and companies and organizations rather than squeezing them dry. The combination of oligopoly status, moral laxity and political dysfunction means we are simply sitting around like sheep discussing whether a new butcher is about to get sharper knives.

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

#426

Post by alto22 »

Sebguer wrote: post #39
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.

Yeah, OnLive did it back in 2003!

Wikipedia says the company was founded in 2009. I remember trying it in 2010 too.

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

#427

Post by oblio »

jeremyjh wrote: post #336
scarmig wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo has always been just a year or two from breaking through. Google's gotten through the first 95% of the work, but the remaining 95% is gonna take awhile.

Dude they are running an open public taxi in Phoenix, it has the run of the whole city.

Isn't Phoenix:

1. Car infested ergo perfect venue area for testing autonomous cars, since the infrastructure is through and through car oriented at the detriment of every other form of mobility (walking, cycling, buses, trams, trains, etc)?

2. Super hot and sunny, ergo no fog, no rain, no sleet, no ice, no special weather conditions to handle.

3. Flat like a pancake, making terrain management, coupled with the nice, wide roads from point #1, so super easy mode.

Let's see them scale Waymo to at least 3 out of the following: San Francisco, NYC, Bucharest, Istanbul, Mumbai, St. Petersburg, etc.

That could be at least a decade away.

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

#428

Post by hcks »

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…

That’s because these models are not grounded in the physical world, they’re just bullshit machines trained on text

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

#429

Post by bilekas »

As an aside I guess, I have noticed recently how much worse the search actually is. I'm not even referring to the adds, simple things around library documentation for example, where I would always find the best results up top to close to, now I get quite unrelated results, not even containing the phrase/function name I'm searching.

This is not because the info is not indexed or is behind a walled garden though, I now have to find the source website and go directly to their docuemtation myself, or their github. It's not an 'issue' but defeats the purpose of google search itself.

In a strange change for me particularly, for news/general info I actually will search through sites like reddit or twitter to get some actual targeted results.

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