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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#261

Post by posix_monad »

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.

LLMs and astro-turfing have ruined that approach. I honestly don't know where to get information from these days.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#262

Post by dvt »

kerkeslager wrote: post #234
dvt wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You seem to be presenting nepotism as if it's a feature when it's obviously a bug. I guess that's where we disagree: in my view, it's definitely a feature. When I have kids, I will 100% be willing to give them opportunities over other (more qualified) people. It's not even really a question in my mind. I am much more likely to invest in a friend's company ("friends and family" rounds are a thing, you know); I am mu…

...which is why society needs safeguards to guard against people like you. Applied systemically, your behavior is one of the most harmful forces in our society. And by the way, at a personal level, I get it. You like your friends and family--everyone does. But if we're going to have any pretense that capitalism works, we need to have a system where good work is rewarded. What you're arguing for isn't a free market, i…

> If someone happens to be your child, you're happy to give them positions they don't deserve even if they're completely incompetent.

Yeah, I'm being a bit contrarian & spicy for the sake of argument (don't hold it against me, my actual position is way more nuanced), but even so: I don't really see how nepotism forges a path to oligarchy. If they are completely incompetent, they'll run the company into the ground and the free market still wins.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#263

Post by its_ethan »

taco_emoji wrote: post #125
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.

this is such a tiresome criticism. "this would be better if it were more boring" yeah okay and 4 people would read it and 2 of them would fall asleep during

And your criticism of him is what? Encourage more sensationalism? Because there's so much evidence of that being such good and healthy way for journalism/news to operate?

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#264

Post by JohnFen »

gregw134 wrote: post #250

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 leas…

> where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning

This better echoes my personal experience with the decline of Google search than TFA: it seems to be connected to the increasing use of ML in that the more of it Google put in, the worse the results I got were.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#265

Post by [deleted] »

readyplayernull wrote: post #220

> But do you know who has? Sundar Pichai, who previously worked at McKinsey — arguably the most morally abhorrent company that has ever existed, having played roles both in the 2008 financial crisis (where it encouraged banks to load up on debt and flawed mortgage-backed securities) and the ongoing opioid crisis, where it effectively advised Purdue Pharma on how to “growth hack” sales of Oxycontin. That helps explain…

[deleted]

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#266

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

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…

That sounds a lot like Kodak.

I remember running into Kodak engineers, at an event in the 1990s, and they were all complaining about the same thing.

They were digital engineers, and they were complaining that film people kept sabotaging their projects.

Kodak invented the digital camera. They should have ruled the roost (at least, until the iPhone came out). Instead, they imploded, almost overnight. The film part was highly profitable.

Until it wasn't. By then, it was too late. They had cooked the goose.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#267

Post by jrflowers »

romanhn wrote: post #190
jrflowers wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people mocked without having full context This is a good point. This 3700 word article titled “The Man Who Killed Google Search” about Prabhakar Raghavan does not contain context for why the author would dislike Prabhakar Raghavan or speak ill of him professionally.

To be clear, I meant the author does not have full context.

That makes sense. It is possible that Google search got better and not worse since it was taken over by the guy that used to run Yahoo search, in which case context would thoroughly vindicate the choice to promote SEO spam sites and make ads and search results nearly indistinguishable.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#268

Post by kelnos »

delduca wrote: post #249
coldpie wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Get it until the Manifesto V3.

There's a simple solution to that: stop using Chrome. It is beyond me why so many people still use a web browser made by a company that wants nothing more than to track you and serve you ads. It's maybe excusable or at least understandable that so many average, non-technical users are still on Chrome, but anyone who knows anything about technology? Shame.

(Yes, I know, some people actually need to use Chrome for whatever reason, but the vast majority of people who use it, do not actually need it, and would be fine using Firefox.)

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#269

Post by szszrk »

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!

This does not fix poor content thrown in disguise of search results.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#270

Post by AlbertCory »

gregw134 wrote: post #250

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 leas…

Amit was definitely against ML, long before "AI" had become a buzzword.
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