The man who killed Google Search? • Hacker News Board

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#241

Post by abtinf » Tue, Apr 23, 2024, 8:08 PM UTC

wayne-li2 wrote: post #222

Even though I agree with what the author is saying, the tone of this article is off putting to me. There are ways to call out people for being bad at their job without resorting to “class traitor” and “ratfucker”. That being said, Google search is 100% dead. I append “reddit” to every Google query to get actual results from people, and I don’t see it on Reddit, I give up on my query.

> There are ways to call out people for being bad at their job

That is not at all what the article is doing. The article is saying the person is doing a very good job doing bad things.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#242

Post by JohnMakin » Tue, Apr 23, 2024, 8:09 PM UTC

What a turn from all the “Google search is good, actually” stuff that was popping up around here a ~year ago. I don’t think anyone can still say that with a straight face - it’s nearly an unusable product unless you are searching for a product you want to buy, and even then, not that great.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#243

Post by programjames » Tue, Apr 23, 2024, 8:09 PM UTC

sidcool wrote: post #24

Wow. This man seems to have a personal grudge against Raghavan. I knew people hate Pichai, but this brutal.

I don't think you need to have a personal grudge to call someone out like in this article. Ensh*tifiers need to be punished (in the game theory sense) or everything will go to sh*.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#244

Post by __loam » Tue, Apr 23, 2024, 8:09 PM UTC

wayne-li2 wrote: post #222

Even though I agree with what the author is saying, the tone of this article is off putting to me. There are ways to call out people for being bad at their job without resorting to “class traitor” and “ratfucker”. That being said, Google search is 100% dead. I append “reddit” to every Google query to get actual results from people, and I don’t see it on Reddit, I give up on my query.

I think the tone is warranted given the scale of the problem. I don't think we should mollify complaints about products that literal billions of people depend on just because they're not nice.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#245

Post by kelnos » Tue, Apr 23, 2024, 8:10 PM UTC

ianbutler wrote: post #185

imzadi wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just recently switched to Kagi. It's worth paying a few bucks to get decent results.

I find myself seeing nothing useful on Kagi, going to Google, seeing nothing useful, then asking ChatGPT and sometimes seeing something useful and othertimes being led on a wild goose chase. The general state of information retrieval seems bleak. Reddit is usually the solution for me, even on technical matters now.

Strange, I rarely don't find what I need on Kagi, and when I do and fall back to Google, the results there are no more helpful.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#246

Post by fudged71 » Tue, Apr 23, 2024, 8:11 PM UTC

flakiness wrote: post #184

Prabhakar Raghavan is an author of "Introduction to Information Retrieval", the definitive textbook on search at that time. This fact metaphorically depicts how sad this story is. https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Information-Retrieval-Ch...

I recently saved this book as it’s been recommended by a few people lately. Interesting

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#247

Post by kelnos » Tue, Apr 23, 2024, 8:11 PM UTC

neilv wrote: post #35

I think this article would work better if it were written entirely like textbook traditional investigative journalism. And less like the modern TV opinion personality, or the random strong-opinion Web comments in which many of the rest of us (including myself) indulge.

I thought it was written very well, and was engaging. I could easily imagine it being dry and boring, otherwise, something that wouldn't hold my attention long enough to read through it to the end.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#248

Post by samch » Tue, Apr 23, 2024, 8:12 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #216

maxerickson wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is definition of dead? 15 years later they have huge majority of traffic share and lots of revenue.

Companies this size die several years before the body hits the floor. They're dead when everyone starts to hate them and someone says "no, look how much money they're making, they're fine." That's the fatal blow, because they think they're fine, and keep doing the things that make everyone hate them. At that point you're just waiting for someone else to offer an alternative. Then people prefer the alternative because…

I know they aren’t the same scale as Google, but what you wrote really describes Atlassian for me.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#249

Post by delduca » Tue, Apr 23, 2024, 8:14 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #131

lo_fye wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently tried Kagi search (kagi.com) just to see what it was all about, and was instantly shocked at how different it felt, and that difference was mostly due to the complete absence of ads. It made me want to subscribe immediately.

Friend! Get thee to https://ublockorigin.com/ ! You can thank me later!

Get it until the Manifesto V3.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#250

Post by gregw134 » Tue, Apr 23, 2024, 8:15 PM UTC

Ex-Google search engineer here (2019-2023). I know a lot of the veteran engineers were upset when Ben Gomes got shunted off. Probably the bigger change, from what I've heard, was losing Amit Singhal who led Search until 2016. Amit fought against creeping complexity. There is a semi-famous internal document he wrote where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning, or at least contain it as much as possible, so that ranking stays debuggable and understandable by human search engineers. My impression is that since he left complexity exploded, with every team launching as many deep learning projects as they can (just like every other large tech company has).

The problem though, is the older systems had obvious problems, while the newer systems have hidden bugs and conceptual issues which often don't show up in the metrics, and which compound over time as more complexity is layered on. For example: I found an off by 1 error deep in a formula from an old launch that has been reordering top results for 15% of queries since 2015. I handed it off when I left but have no idea whether anyone actually fixed it or not.

I wrote up all of the search bugs I was aware of in an internal document called "second page navboost", so if anyone working on search at Google reads this and needs a launch go check it out.