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

531–540 of 550 posts

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

#531

Post by nerpderp82 »

Someone1234 wrote: post #285
s-xyz wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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

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…

PyTorch has 3-5x the use of TensorFlow in academia.

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

#532

Post by nerpderp82 »

nr2x wrote: post #514
rybosome wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google has over 165B in cash on hand. Nothing is that dire.

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

#533

Post by nerpderp82 »

PostOnce wrote: post #454
dietr1ch wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is already back to that. I use scholar.google.com, semanticscholar, reddit search, chatgpt, public data sets, as well as all the search engines everyday. No one has everything indexed properly.

The GPT LLMs just raise the bar for information retrieval. And so it goes.

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

#534

Post by nr2x »

nerpderp82 wrote: post #532
nr2x wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google has over 165B in cash on hand. Nothing is that dire.

Nobody got fired for choosing IBM either.

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

#535

Post by CatWChainsaw »

DrSiemer wrote: post #177
mywittyname wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the future is far more bleak. At least with "search results", users can scroll down past the SEO content to something more relevant. Once these new chatgpt models take over, it's winner-take-all for search results. Everyone is going to be throwing money at getting their message seen, since it will be the final word. How much do you think companies are willing to spend to be the answer to, "what is the most…

Obviously those are not questions that you can trust an AI language model with. You have social media or real life connections to discuss that. In theory it is possible that sponsored content will creep in, but that does not invalidate the incredible benefits a well trained language model will have, even despite the occasional for-profit bias.

>You have social media or real life connections to discuss that.

You mean all your Replika "friends" that spit out answers from Bard's mouth? :)

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

#536

Post by midoridensha »

trilobyte wrote: post #520
midoridensha wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Decades ago, it used to good and normal for big companies to simply stay the same size, make a steady profit, and return dividends to their shareholders. That's how you get a stable society, not with constant boom-bust cycles.

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

#537

Post by dahdum »

RugnirViking wrote: post #493
dahdum wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's buried near the bottom of the page, but here's your huckleberry: https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-best-chocolate-chip... Lots of trash out there but Serious Eats is good quality.

that site has over six thousand words and maybe 20 screen heights worths of scrolling before you reach the recipie. Its incredible, like some kind of work of art parodying recipie websites I use BBC good food, almost always straight to the point

Yes, because he's explaining all the different aspects of a "perfect" cookie and giving you options to dial in your personal version. He did 100 tests and 1,536 cookies for the article.

I get not everyone is a foodie that cares about the details and wants to tweak it, but I appreciate them.

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

#538

Post by CatWChainsaw »

ElectricSpoon wrote: post #240

My fear is that more AI will hinder our ability to literally search for stuff. The future I dread includes more profiling, a stronger search bubble, all of which will just make it the death of the objective search engine. As fascinating as AI can be, I don't think it's what search engines are missing. That is certainly not what I need. Even today, engines rank your results by geoip, trying to be smarter than you ask…

You have more common sense than the majority of this salivating crowd.

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

#539

Post by Sebguer »

alto22 wrote: post #426
Sebguer wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, OnLive did it back in 2003!

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

Ugh, the google smartbox pulled '2003' from somewhere. You're right, it was 2009.

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

#540

Post by hansvm »

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…

Dunno if it was incompetence or malice, but the straw that finally broke me over to Linux permanently was a privacy setting in Windows that appeared to work until you re-entered the menu and it wouldn't persist. In my time at YouTube though, privacy issues were an immediately fireable offense, and even when my role required data, use was gated and then still logged, and misuse was handled. That's an n=1 apples-to-oranges data point, but I personally trust Google a bit more than MS with my data.
Post reply on HN