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

451–460 of 550 posts

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

#451

Post by somethoughts »

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.

Agreed.

Also the comparison is between Google versus Dropbox (the underdog David that's analogous to OpenAI), not Google versus Amazon or even Google versus Microsoft.

Google is 51% of office productivity software market versus Microsoft. Microsoft is at 47%, Dropbox isn't even listed. [1]

Dropbox has a decent share of the personal cloud storage market but has really failed to expand beyond that vertical or become significantly profitable. [2]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/983299/worldwide-market-...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1328893/global-file-shar...

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

#452

Post by college_physics »

dietr1ch wrote: post #437
college_physics wrote: post #425

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…

I grew up using the internet as a child and when Google came out it was way more a blessing than a parasite. The web was hard to navigate and you relied on webpages "befriending" each other and helping you navigate to similar pages. That was real navigation and it had terrible recall. Once google became the Internet's frontend everything was one or two hops away. It was awesome, and I think that it has evolved in a w…

> Ads came to "save" the internet from this problem. I really hate them and I wish we had a better model, but they seem a necessary evil as people just got used to believe that all digital things are free when they obviously cost something, and that still shows today in the apps stores.

Advertising worked just fine for more than a century, ever since the invention of consumerist society. (How much of that is really necessary in a society that is pushing headlong into unsustainability is another, bigger story.)

The disaster we have now in our hands is of a more immediate and crass nature.

Think about it: there are algorithmic breakthroughs that can help everybody on the planet raise their level of information retrieval and the only discussion is which of the former or the current consumer tech oligopolies will use it best to push ads and how to double down on a bad design.

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

#453

Post by pleb_nz »

erklik wrote: post #235
revskill wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not much about Microsoft. At least it improved human life in serious ways (Typescript, VSCode,...). What did Google bring to my life ? Nothing except for spam stuffs from Ad, Email,... You're responsible for your data, not Google, not Microsoft.

Uh... Maps? Open, Permissive phone OS compared to the alternative? Greatest entertainment/information system, especially one that's democraticsed producing media? In terms dev-related stuff, TensorFlow - literally something that's made today's ML possible, Kubernetes, BigTable, MapReduce, and yknow, that good old thing called Chrome.. I understand hating on Google. They're not that great, but none of the FAANG are "g…

Yeah it would. Where there is a gap someone it something will fill it. It's just a matter of tech maturing and someone rubbing some coins together

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

#454

Post by PostOnce »

dietr1ch wrote: post #437
college_physics wrote: post #425

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…

I grew up using the internet as a child and when Google came out it was way more a blessing than a parasite. The web was hard to navigate and you relied on webpages "befriending" each other and helping you navigate to similar pages. That was real navigation and it had terrible recall. Once google became the Internet's frontend everything was one or two hops away. It was awesome, and I think that it has evolved in a w…

What? Webrings?

Don't tell me you forgot Yahoo, Excite, Altavista, Lycos, and all those other search engines existed! Lycos also had hotbot and tripod.com, back when homepages were your internet presence instead of social media.

Maybe Google had results that were a bit more relevant and won that competition, but they didn't Change Everything.

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

#455

Post by ESMirro »

silisili wrote: post #450
deeviant wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

> who fired AI ethics researchers for their research in AI bias that Google did not like I'm no fan of Google, but this seriously glosses over a rather complex situation. A paper may have been the catalyst, but I'd argue definitely not the reason for the firings. You can't just demand things with the threat of quitting, then act surprised when you're terminated.

I don’t agree with that, it wasn’t even a complex situation, Google just didn’t like the idea that a paper attributed to them could point out all the obvious unethical implications of this technology and shut it down.

The drama afterwards is largely irrelevant and if anything Gebru’s refusal to just meekly accept the company line demonstrates just how valuable she is in this field. The dismissal isn’t the real story, the retraction of the paper is the real problem the OP is referring to when discussing Google’s moral issues.

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

#456

Post by zirgs »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #402
nearbuy wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In many cases Wikipedia's source links are dead. And nobody bothers to update them. Or they cite some random book that I have no way to get and read myself.

Who checks if that book actually exists and is not made up? Especially if it's not a highly politically charged topic.

And then there are circular citations. Someone posts unverified/false info on wikipedia. Then it gets cited by some blog or other media that wikipedia considers trustworthy. And that then gets added to wikipedia as a reliable source.

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

#457

Post by rightbyte »

Invictus0 wrote: post #311
ranting-moth wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People want answers. Google isn't giving them answers. If you ask google a question then an awful lot of the time the majority of top 10 results will be promoting or selling stuff.

So you'd rather have a load of probabilistic bullshit? The training sets are way too huge to be human audited, just wait until the malicious actors start producing propaganda with their own GPT sites and deepfakes. The fucking thing can't even tell a straight fact about a telescope. If you thought searching the internet was fucked before GPT, give it a few years.

I am fine with only historical knowledge in such a tool like GPT of that will be a problem. Most stuff don't change.

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

#458

Post by college_physics »

diceduckmonk wrote: post #440
college_physics wrote: post #425

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…

What do you use since you don't use Google Search?

I use xapian a lot https://xapian.org/

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

#459

Post by kilgnad »

WalterBright wrote: post #409
kilgnad wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Power is a form of status.

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

#460

Post by rightbyte »

luckylion wrote: post #286
bbor wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This discussion is pretty sad and frustrating for me. I think your conclusion (“Google has no motive to encourage spam content that rises to the top using SEO tricks”) is about as convincing as it gets, but it’s completely drowned out by a very vague sense that google is a big company and therefor it’s making search worse on purpose. No amount of well-worded HN posts are gonna sway people, imo… Luckily HN posters don…

Have you looked at Youtube comments recently? It's a mess. There's no organization, half of the replies are censored but are still being counted, so you have plenty of "1 Reply" links but nothing shows up when you toggle. Half of the top level comments are completely useless comments that are only posted to help the creator "beat the algorithm", every successful creator now has a call to action to write a comment. I…

It could very well be that none at Google understands the search engine code anymore due to their high attrition. So it has been surface patched for X years making the problem worse.
Post reply on HN