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Samsung considers moving to Bing as default search engine

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Re: Samsung considers moving to Bing as default search engine

#521
This may be a Myspace moment for Google. The competition is now better.

There's another huge issue. Google is an ad business. That meshes well with search, and not so well with question answering system on mobile. What's ChatGPT supposed to say? "But first, this word from our sponsor?".

A big change in the ecosystem is coming. These next generation systems are being set up as walled gardens. Bing FAQ: "You’ll need to use the Microsoft Edge browser and sign in with your Microsoft account to access all the capabilities of the new Bing." Google is talking about limiting the number of users of their chat system, which implies they are tying usage to login.

This is a huge change to the business model. It's going to be about owning the customer relationship, not serving ads.

Re: Samsung considers moving to Bing as default search engine

#522

Google constant failure astonish me. How a company with so much money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine? I kept reading news about Google's AI programs, how the hell was Microsoft with OpenAI that came up with the biggest hit in AI? Also, how does Google want people to use their new services if they keep closing them down after their "failure" (a.k.a Google com…

> I kept reading news about Google's AI programs

Technology is not a product. A product that uses technology to solve a number of clearly defined real problems is a product. When Google was saying AI this AI that, I had yet to see any product.

Re: Samsung considers moving to Bing as default search engine

#523

I always thought that Google made a big blunder by not encroaching upon Microsoft's turf more aggressively. They should have tried to make a better desktop OS (just buy Canonical or something) and then eat into Microsoft Office market share by releasing Google Office for Desktop. Wait for an opportunity to emerge and then pounce. This is precisely what Microsoft did to Google. They had Bing running in the background…

> ...Google Office for Desktop

They did one better and made Chrome so good that its the OS for most, for all intents and purposes, now.

Re: Samsung considers moving to Bing as default search engine

#524
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DeepMind's stuff has all been impressive.

1) where can I use it? Compare this to what’s come out of OpenAI in the last two years. It’s like science fair vs. a company making actual tools. 2) how is it helping Alphabet’s bottom line? I haven’t seen it helping here either.

Alphafold is open and seems fundamentally transformative in the science space. GPT is nice but it’s a smart meme-generator at the moment. I don’t disagree with the impact on G’s bottom line, though.

Re: Samsung considers moving to Bing as default search engine

#525

I always thought that Google made a big blunder by not encroaching upon Microsoft's turf more aggressively. They should have tried to make a better desktop OS (just buy Canonical or something) and then eat into Microsoft Office market share by releasing Google Office for Desktop. Wait for an opportunity to emerge and then pounce. This is precisely what Microsoft did to Google. They had Bing running in the background…

What would a Google office for desktop do that the current Google docs doesn't?

Even MS is moving office to being cloud based, so it's not clear business users value local document availability that much - rather the opposite, I've worked in places that like cloud services because locking out their data from a disgruntled or departed employee is one button away.

Re: Samsung considers moving to Bing as default search engine

#526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was not at all surprised, to be honest. ChatGPT took over about 90-95% of my what I would previously resort to Google. Since Microsoft was dealing cards at OpenAI, it was just a matter of time...

How do you manage the hallucination problems, or do you not seem to be having them? I’m blown away by the competence of the language model but its willingness to make up facts makes me leary.

Is this really a problem?

What could be more 2020s than a post-truth search engine?

Re: Samsung considers moving to Bing as default search engine

#527
post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is Google is also pretty crummy. Ai is in a golden age without poisoned data right now. But wait until Bing gets popular and blackhat seo types start poisoning chatgpt. It will stop being useful, and I suspect in a way that will be unfixable since these language models are so hard to wrangle.

There's another side to that medal: At the moment nobody takes any issue with OpenAI doing filtering and curation in deciding what is part of their training data set, aside from perhaps the anti-bias crowd. "AI neutrality" is not yet a topic. Yet.

I've already seen that several times with image generation. Most recently was an article commenting on how the American smile was polluting generated photos. People can't decide what they want. Do they want licensed, curated commercial photos in the database or do they want search engine style neutrality? You really can't have both.

Re: Samsung considers moving to Bing as default search engine

#528
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also on a total sidenote, if you told me 5 years ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google I would have a laughed. If you had told me 3 months ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google, I still would have laughed. That's how much impact the ChatGPT integration had for Bing -- overnight.

People are acting like Bing has created some big market success and Samsung is running to them because the tech is better. But the alternative explanation is simple: vendors are always looking for reasons to (threaten to) put mediocre non-Google search as default on their products, so they can extract more money from search engine providers. Samsung sees the current hype around Bing/Google/AI as a convenient negotiat…

Your tone subs like you're contradicting a point, but your actual comment is completely in like with the idea that Google has been caught by surprise that Bing is good enough (as measured by market sentiment) to be a credible threat.

Re: Samsung considers moving to Bing as default search engine

#529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They kinda did that with ChromeOS + Google Docs with offline mode. The problem for Google is that while it was a solid investment for MS to persue cloud services to compete with Google, I don't think it would have been a good investment the other way around. Chrome is really the only desktop product that makes sense for Google because it pushes people into their ecosystem online. Creating something like a standalone…

Even though I have invested heavily in Apple's sandbox world, I am very impressed by ChromeOS and inexpensive Chromebooks by 3rd parties. I have close to the cost of a car invested in Apple gear, yet, if I had to I could do all of my writing and coding on the very inexpensive Lenovo Duet Chromebook I bought a year ago. The Linux container support is OK, and I usually use remote servers anyway. For search, Bing + Chat…

> I usually use remote servers anyway

Sorry for the OT question - do you use slime-tramp? And if so, do you have a way to use M-. (slime-edit-definition) without having to re-compile files using the remote paths?

Re: Samsung considers moving to Bing as default search engine

#530
post #3

What's Sundar's goal for Google? They seem to be aimless since he took the helm.

Not sure. The real question is what the Google founders and board want and expect. Sundar is just looking after things for them. The reason he got the job is that he was never going to do more than that. But you might legitimately ask at this point if that's enough. And he's been there long enough that he could be replaced without anyone losing too much face. Surround it with some corporate euphemisms and get some fresh blood in and move on. I would not be surprised if they are already looking around.

It worked for Microsoft obviously. This is quite a coup for Satya Nadella. And he got that one on merit. MS has no stake in Android (they declined to get into that after killing Windows Phone). Also, he hit the ground running after Steve Ballmer was retired. Not that hard of course after Ballmer but he did a few decisive things early on that all seem to have mostly worked out. The Linkedin acquisition; fixing .Net, re-establishing MS as a bonafide OSS player with the Github acquisition and VS-Code. And then making a smart investment in OpenAI which they are now riding to success. All great moves.

I'd say, Google is in the same boat right now. Lots of obvious potential, an extended period of a bit rudderless performance, missed boats, and no clear direction or vision. Fix that and it could go somewhere else again. Doing more of the same isn't going to be anywhere near good enough. They seem to be stuck playing a game of whack-a-mole in terms of strategy and ever responding to what others are doing and never quite catching up with that instead of initiating things themselves and leading.

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