Google search has gotten so bad I’m genuinely considering trying bing
Brave search is ok. Google, Bing and Duckduckgo have terrible results.
Google cites 'durable cost savings' as CEO Sundar Pichai warns of more layoffs
81–90 of 123 posts
Re: Google cites 'durable cost savings' as CEO Sundar Pichai warns of more layoffs
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not working for me. And, I'd like to add, "Hey Google" has also effectively stopped working, despite me having a Pixel phone (I used to use it to dial hands-free. That's no longer possible). And it's literally every feature, even the "hey, Google" recognition has become a crapshoot.
I have seen a similar degradation with my AirPods Pro. However I was thinking that to be an artifact of them aging and the mics to just be degraded…
Weird as I have been noticing all my HomePods (older and newer models) are also less responsive to “Hey Siri”. Used to be I could walk through a room and turn lights on as I went. Now they do nothing. I have to talk directly to them.
I have gotten the feeling they tweaked it to ignore voice if audio fidelity does not hit thresholds that suggest the speaker is being talked to directly. Perhaps it limits false positives, reduces poor translation.
To make users speak directly at it with clear diction would make for “smaller model” to translate which seems en vogue with AI now.
I say old a new because it makes me doubt mic degradation (a couple in the house were brand new Xmas gifts).
Re: Google cites 'durable cost savings' as CEO Sundar Pichai warns of more layoffs
#83Google has been standing on their laurels for the last decade but these days they have bigger competition for their Ad market and also landscape changed:
1) Apple new permission for tracking affected probably not only Facebook but Google as well
2) Web turned into bigger junk and SEO game and Google Search is not that useful anymore
3) Some (small fraction) still moved to DuckDuckGo / Bing or other search engines
4) Apple competing with google map with their own product
5) Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat/TikTok/Twitter eating a bigger chunk of their Ads cake
6) They tried to dominate Facebook with Google+ and failed
7) They tried to dominate Whatsapp / Messenger with google meetup / hangout ( / whatever) and failed
8) Amazon also eating some of Google Ads profits with their Ads inside amazon.com (they failed with Google Shopping)
9) Now ChatGPT and friends also ganging up for google search
10) Lots of regulatory obstacles in EU and elsewhere.
They focused too much on cloning competitors rather than innovating something new:
Google+ after Facebook
Google Shopping after Amazon
Google Cloud after AWS / Azure
Google Meetup after Whatsapp / Messenger
Youtube Shorts after Tiktok / Instagram
Re: Google cites 'durable cost savings' as CEO Sundar Pichai warns of more layoffs
#84Google is still a juggernaut BUT... I don't think anyone here would claim competitor's "AI" isn't going to take a chunk of their search market, would they? Search quality was diminishing for the past few years as it is, but there was no real alternative. Now I'm using ChatGPT as much (or more) than Google. Almost everything about Google Search is mediocre.
Search quality is diminishing because "the web" as a graph of hyperlinked text documents where any domain name is a priori equally likely to contain a gem of information you're looking for, doesn't really exist anymore.
It does, Google just heavily penalizes non-top-website pages for some inexplicable reason, sometimes outright de-indexing them. I guess you could argue this is a consequence of stopping spam - better to just ignore all small sites rather than risk catching blogspam. But somehow there's still plenty of blogspam.
Re: Google cites 'durable cost savings' as CEO Sundar Pichai warns of more layoffs
#85Sundar should have been let go years ago, but I guess the pandemic money explosion made it easy for him to show big returns. But look between the margins and it's clear google is rotting on the inside. Search sucks. Gemini a year behind (despite google inventing transformers). Canceling products left and right leaving no consumer faith in new offerings. Cloud platform being an absolute terrible experience, even if yo…
> Search sucks. Subjective, but rings true. > Canceling products left and right leaving no consumer faith in new offerings. I don't think vast majority of Google users see it this way. The canceled products might be popular in HN, but have comparatively few actual users. > Cloud platform being an absolute terrible experience, even if you have a rep inside too. This seems to be consensus, yes. > Internal power groups…
> Canceling products left and right leaving no consumer faith in new offerings.
> I don't think vast majority of Google users see it this way
This has indeed become a very common take. "I'm not getting involved in another Google product. They'll just cancel it."
Re: Google cites 'durable cost savings' as CEO Sundar Pichai warns of more layoffs
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, google has been coasting way to long on past successes - they are ripe for smaller/nimbler/newer companies to start chipping away at their revenues.
Microsoft is financing OpenAI.
correct, now they are - but OpenAI got a pretty good head start and foothold before Microsoft made an investment, and inarguably, were smaller and nimbler than google at the time - but I am not talking just about openAI, google has many, many products and services - they need to defend them all from lots of different startups and smaller players simultaneously who only need to be good at that one thing to start making dents in googles armour.
Re: Google cites 'durable cost savings' as CEO Sundar Pichai warns of more layoffs
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait a minute! Hire thousands of half genius from the best Universities in the World.Torture them with algorithmic party tricks, give them infinite budget and time for years... And....When they are unable to create competitive products outside of the usual cash cow, blame the CEO?
You’re showing very little understanding for how the world works with this reply. Do you think developers have free rein in big companies?
Product Managers and Division Managers and Staff Engineers and Research Scientists do, and there are thousands of each of these at Google.
Maybe the problem is deeper and stem from culture and hiring practices that privilege academia, instead of real world industry and engineering experience?
Re: Google cites 'durable cost savings' as CEO Sundar Pichai warns of more layoffs
#88Can anyone name one thing of value this dude has actually done in his time in charge. Feel in a few years he's gonna have a worse reputation than Ballmer in terms of squandering potential.
Stock went up ~18% per year since Oct 2015. Does anything else matter to Pichai's bosses (board & shareholders)?
Stock was juiced by cheap money, cultural zeitgeist for magical mobile phone tech. Macro economic trends have nothing to do with Sundar.
Google is >20 years old and lacks history of diverse innovation and generational buy in of a company like IBM (I don’t feel IBM is relevant to tech anymore, but for many nostalgia seems to lead them to believe it is central to big tech economics).
Google may very well be entering a protracted death spiral. Without diversifying I doubt it will ever endear itself on people for 80+ more years the way IBM was able to[1].
IMO generational churn and new technologies are going to wipe out a whole lot of 2000s technology software-dev specific companies. Facebook and Google are my picks for biggest brands whose success is coupled to 2000s tech fetish explosion that may not exist in 10-15 years. Everything about tech corp is just straitjacketed “line go up” memes.
[1] (given the lack of competition IBM faced; government up and donated transistor technology to IBM to move them off vacuum tubes; IBMs history of success is a propaganda fueled mirage. It’s been propped up many times to serve the state)
Re: Google cites 'durable cost savings' as CEO Sundar Pichai warns of more layoffs
#89Re: Google cites 'durable cost savings' as CEO Sundar Pichai warns of more layoffs
#90Google search has gotten so bad I’m genuinely considering trying bing
I will frame this comment as a sign of the times. I feel like at the end of an era :-)