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

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

#511

Post by jocaal »

azangru wrote: post #444
fithisux wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is there to put tolls. This is a parasitic model by definition. Search should be democratized by governments. It is central and should be for everybody. No control.

> Search should be democratized by governments. It is central and should be for everybody. No control. I am confused. Are you suggesting that governments should nationalize the search part of Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, etc.? Or that they should build their own high-quality search engines? And what do we do until they have? > No control. Why do you think governments wouldn't control search engines if they were r…

> Or that they should build their own high-quality search engines?

That may already be happening https://openwebsearch.eu/

The role of a government in a capatilistic society is to basically do the stuff that isn't profitable for corporations to do without exploiting the population. For example build roads, because if a corporation did that there would be tolls everywhere and it would be hard for poor people to improve their living standards if they couldn't economically move around. That seems to have happened on the internet. The internet is in the commons and everyone expects it to be free, the problem is that the infrastructure to navigate it was built by corporations and now we have to pay tolls through ads and trackers

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

#512

Post by godshatter »

dilap wrote: post #214
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.

Yes, it's a good point -- in its current form it's a bit hit or miss, since it can completely lie to you. At least one person is working on this: https://twitter.com/hsu_steve/status/1623388682454732801 While something like this would of course be incredible, even just current ChatGPT + the ability to web search for you would be quite amazing. If MS isn't ready to completely replace Bing, then they should've made it…

Even this kind of project only helps so much. ChatGPT has absolutely no understanding of anything, it just regurgitates words and sentences in a way that sounds like it knows something. It's next sentence might be completely, dangerously wrong. You can't even claim that it lies to you. It needs to have an inkling of the truth to be able to lie in the first place. It's basically a well-trained parrot that has learned when to say the right combinations of phrases it's memorized at the right time in the right order to earn a treat. It has no idea what any given word means, let alone what it just said.

If someone built something that parsed sentences, stored facts, learned relationships between them, learned enough language processing to make connections between them in order to be able to say something new about the subject it didn't already know before-hand, then I'd be on that train. Right now I only see misery in our future if we just work on honing ChatGPT and it's ilk to better simulate BS.

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

#513

Post by tanseydavid »

blarghyblarg wrote: post #351
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 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.

>> Lets not use emotionally driven, ambiguous terms like 'evil' to describe these kinds of things

How about "malevolent?"

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

#514

Post by nr2x »

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.

The point is Cloud is still 100% subsidized by Search, and if Search loses even 5% of market share in the next 12 mo it is a disaster as GCP cannot fill the gap as they are still losing money. The velocity at which they are losing money is immaterial to the fact they are not nearly ready to plug a hole if Bing take share.

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

#515

Post by SirZimzim »

dpkirchner wrote: post #477
juve1996 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think this will be a key differentiator, Google has been so obsessed with automation that it's painted itself in a corner when that automation is inadequate. Microsoft doesn't have a problem with doing things that don't scale when needed.

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

#516

Post by danShumway »

dilippkumar wrote: post #399
danShumway wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> what role does a text based internet play in daily life 10 years from now? [...] 10 years from now, would you bet against primary research -> ChatGPT ingress -> widely deployed ChatGPT model?

I suspect I'm a little bit more skeptical about this than other people might be? 10 years out is a long way to predict and I'm hesitant to try, but I might be primed wrong looking at voice assistants/video/etc... where I think the format changes have been a little over-exaggerated in some ways in the past, and where I think people have traditionally underestimated how much staying power traditional models have. There were a lot of things that were supposed to kill a traditional text-based Internet, but the only thing that's come close is video, and that seems to get a lot of blowback; I'm not sure it was an improvement.

But regardless, your comment is a insightful perspective that gives me some alternative ways of looking at this. So I think I agree. I might be just more on the skeptical side of things of how well-suited the current tools are for building the kinds of applications you're describing, but I get the theory.

And generative AI that's separate from AI answering questions is kind of another story; I can absolutely imagine potential creative impacts around stuff like music loop generation, art generation, etc... I similarly am looking at the current state of things and saying, "well... the tech doesn't seem to be as good as people say it is, so I don't want to start using it now before it improves", but I can at least imagine how things might change if the tech does get good. I'm not sure it would be a "revolution" or that it's going to put artists out of business or whatever, but it could potentially lower the barrier of entry for certain applications. And certainly LLMs for general website classification I think would be a really good use that I wish was being pursued more.

At the least though, even if I'm skeptical, I can definitely understand why someone would have that perspective, and your summation of the different groups rings true to me.

I still don't think I want it in my current search box today though :) I don't think that LLMs are useless at all, I'm just not sure searching in specific is a good use for them.

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

#517

Post by josefresco »

lyu07282 wrote: post #108
josefresco wrote: post #22

Let us think about the defaults in our life: Windows: Most use Chrome (Google default), the rest use Edge (Bing default). MacOS: Safari (Google default) and Chrome (Google default) Android: Chrome (Google default) iOS: Safari (Google default) So it looks like the only vulnerability here would be iOS and then possibly PC/MacOS if enough users switch their browser.

you should also consider that Google is/was the best search engine around so it makes sense as a default, sure they pay to be the default and most people never change defaults. But if you are making a phone you might just really actually care about people having a good experience with your phone. (and its not like Microsoft couldn't pay them either anyway)

4-5 years ago I would have agreed. But I've been using DDG for my primary search and only "resort" to using Google maybe 10-15% of the time my search fails on DDG.

I'm not saying DDG is amazing, only that you don't need a "Mercedes" to pick up milk.

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

#518

Post by khmii »

xyzzyz wrote: post #38
marcopicentini wrote: post #15

It's been a while since they stopped innovating. Although Google, Maps, Youtube are of daily use they are monetized exclusively by advertising which is annoying and hated by many. It has been many years since Google has launched an innovative new product. I don't think ChatGPT will gain daily traction after this hype. Anyway we could say that MSFT and AMZN have demostrated more power to innovate with different busine…

They didn’t exactly stop innovating: ChatGPT itself is using tremendous amounts of innovation that was done and published by Google. What they stopped is beating their competition to launching compelling products based on the innovation they do.

IMO this whole narrative reflects a type of human bias and the reality that we didn't evolve to reason about trillion dollar complex business.

I love chatGPT but it clearly has a ton of issues. To declare Google dead that is point is completely absurd.

I can't think of a single transformative technology that actually has a first mover advantage. The first, second and third mover seem to make all the mistakes and setup the forth mover to learn from those mistakes for free and create a monopoly.

Counting out a company that owns Deepmind is just not rational.

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

#519

Post by asteriskUnknown »

thefounder wrote: post #497
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…

I would argue that Google is the worst of the 3 cloud providers.

Why?

I have spent a significant amount of time on each and would suggest it's the only actual cloud. The others are data centers masquerading as a cloud, notice when us-east has issues for AWS, Azure had a spof dependency on a datacenter that didn't even have AZs... GCP is architecturally on another level. The others seem to be unaware of what 'cloud native' means, so if you are attempting cloud native on non clouds, you inherit their lack of foresight.

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

#520

Post by trilobyte »

midoridensha wrote: post #416
trilobyte wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is if you don't want to wind up like IBM, i.e. - a company that could have been so much more, knew it had to change at the leadership level, and yet still couldn't get out of their own way. Apple's renaissance came because they started releasing innovative products and cannibalizing their own business. Disrupt yourself before someone else does.

Most large companies would just destroy themselves if they tried this. IBM is still there, decades later. Why is it not good enough to just continue to exist and generate profits, even if you aren't the highest-market-cap company on the planet?

Because once a company becomes publicly traded, that's not what the expectations are.
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