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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?

#471

Post by sofixa »

tormeh wrote: post #337
mc32 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be extraordinarily surprised if this is the case, but I do not expect it to be as lax as you suggest and given how it's presented to us it reads like someone trying to get people to not look at something. If you have things you can present as evidence that would carry water for your argument, otherwise it's random inflammatory claim on in the internet. And I agree, Google does take security more seriously…

Of the major three cloud providers, Azure is by far the one whose security bugs I hear most about. Not that this necessarily has much relevance to search, but it doesn't inspire confidence in their culture.

> Azure is by far the one whose security bugs I hear most about.

Only* about. GCP and AWS haven't had cross-tenant security bugs, meanwhile Azure have had multiple, and trivial ones to boot. If a multitenant service can have such poor security, it's doubtful internal only stuff is any better.

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

#472

Post by sofixa »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #380
erklik wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Real Question: What is wrong with Netflix? (The "N" in FAANG, right?) The only thing I can think of: Work life balance does not sound good. It sounds like you need to be "pro-athlete" level and are constantly at risk of being laid-off or replaced by someone better. That said, they pay silly good money. But are they evil to their customers? I don't see that.

People sometimes fault them for removing content (not their fault, everyone saw Netflix works and made a streaming service of their own) and cancelling series too quickly and erratically (true). Also people have a problem with the average quality, but seem to misunderstand Netflix's business - they need to have lots of content, one very good series per year isn't going to keep subscribers on the service. They have great quality stuff, and meh filler that some enjoy.

So all in all, disagreements with direction, but nothing wrong/evil on the level of any of the FAAN.

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

#473

Post by sofixa »

pkulak wrote: post #414
iamgopal wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GCP is definitely much better if not best cloud offering.

But it’s not innovative.

It was when it came out in the form of App Engine. It was when it released managed Kubernetes and then managed containers within Kubernetes (Cloud Run using Knative behind the scenes).

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

#474

Post by epups »

autoexec wrote: post #384
victor106 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Microso…

Yes, exactly, I already swallowed the poisoned pill when I installed Windows. Although arguably some ChatGPT queries are far more personal than even having access to your entire filesystem.

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

#475

Post by ranting-moth »

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'm not sure who'd want probabilistic bullshit. I said people wanted answers and Google was crap at giving it to them.

At the moment ChatGPT is like having an personal assistant that used to be an world leading expert, but has been sniffing glue for the last 5 years. He knows a lot of shit but you can't trust it. But he can help you get started and he's fun to be around.

Except ChatGPT isn't fun to be around. It's been castrated of humor and dominated by extreme political correctness. I think GPT is the catalyst for a change, but in Microsoft's hands it'll just be a glorified Clippy.

As for training data scraped from the internet, it will be split like steel was with "pre-war steel", due to atomic bombs rendering steel unfit to use in geiger counters. We'll have pre-gpt data.

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

#476

Post by Cipater »

pffft8888 wrote: post #441
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…

"sitting around like sheep discussing whether a new butcher is about to get sharper knive" Speaking of that, I might as well provide some supprting evidence from a different part of the tech industry. Most people don't know that right now Blackrock and Coinbase are attempting a coup on the US dollar by seeking access to central bank liability for their stable coin? The Coinbase CEO even said it out loud that this yea…

Citation needed.

Yes, Blackrock and Coinbase have partnered up to provide crypto trading access to Blackrock clients but how are they attempting a coup on the US dollar?

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

#477

Post by dpkirchner »

juve1996 wrote: post #344
ilc wrote: post #90

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. Google, has all three. The real question is can they not shoot themselves in the foot while doing it. Also SEO will always target the market leader. As far as Bing's results: I keep thinking Google is trashy. Then I use Bing…

Google is without a doubt worse for me than ever. But is it really google? Or is it just the absolute cesspool of SEO-optimized ad driven garbage that represents a growing portion of it? The other searches are worse. I too have tried. But in general I'm frustrated with Google now more than I've ever been.

This is really the core of my disappointment in Google: their poor handling of malicious SEO. Having humans go over shared site blocklists that people use to improve results, hand verify each entry, and remove those sites from Google results would go a long, long way.

I'm talking about lists like these: https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter/blob/mai...

It wouldn't take a small team more than a few weeks to get through these lists -- most of the work has already been done.

Alternatively, they could just let us add these lists to a first-party interface so we don't have to use plugins to achieve the same results.

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

#479

Post by hardware2win »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #380
erklik wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Real Question: What is wrong with Netflix? (The "N" in FAANG, right?) The only thing I can think of: Work life balance does not sound good. It sounds like you need to be "pro-athlete" level and are constantly at risk of being laid-off or replaced by someone better. That said, they pay silly good money. But are they evil to their customers? I don't see that.

>What is wrong with Netflix? (The "N" in FAANG, right?)

They are not like the other. I wouldnt include big entertainment company among technology behemoths

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

#480

Post by [deleted] »

graphe wrote: post #463
PostOnce wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where are they now? Yahoo was good before google, but google did change everything. It's as if you brought up the first Motorola phone or blackberry and compared it to the iPhone saying it was just ok.

[deleted]
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