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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#271

Post by devindotcom »

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 disagree. ratfuck is a specific term, not just a general pejorative. and I think class traitor is appropriate here as well. but i get what you're saying. that's the result, pro and con, of the shift away from edited journalism to stuff like ed's newsletter.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#273

Post by dekhn »

kelnos wrote: post #256
sevagh wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The presence of an oath doesn't prevent traditional certified engineers from causing harm. It's just a goofy ritual.

I'm sure it does prevent some harm that would otherwise happen. There are certainly people in the world who would think twice about breaking an oath they've made, regardless of whether or not you think it's goofy. And I think that is really part of the problem. The idea that something like this is "goofy" just makes me feel profoundly sad. Do people just not care about integrity anymore, to the point that asking some…

Perhaps the people who think it's goofy may have actually put some thought behind their statements and have good reasons? For example, I find the oath as written to be effectively impossible to implement- it's very lofty sounding, but depends greatly on the nature of "honesty":

"I shall participate in none but honest enterprises"

Who defines honesty in this context? What if two engineers disagree in their interpretation and come to different conclusions? The statements in this are so vague as to simply not be implementable in any sort of self-consistent way. Signing a vacuous unimplementable statement isn't integrity, it's mindless follower behavior.

Many of us act with integrity without signing oaths of loyalty.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#274

Post by sophacles »

dekhn wrote: post #214
ethbr1 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As context, I offer the engineer oath used by some countries for certified engineers: >> I am an Engineer. In my profession, I take deep pride. To it, I owe solemn obligations. >> As an engineer, I pledge to practice integrity and fair dealing, tolerance and respect, and to uphold devotion to the standards and dignity of my profession. I will always be conscious that my skill carries with it the obligation to serve h…

I woudl not sign that, and would instead call myself a computer programmer. That is an absolutely absurd set of sentences to sign one's name to.

Why?

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#276

Post by dingnuts »

kelnos wrote: post #245
ianbutler wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

this is my experience as well. sometimes I accidentally search Google and I find it extremely annoying and the results to be demonstrably worse most of the time

the example I like to show people is searching "how to fix a leaky faucet"

Kagi shows helpful answers and videos from sites like This Old House.

Google shows ads for plumbers near me. If I had wanted a plumber, I would've searched for that.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#277

Post by kelseyfrog »

neilv wrote: post #115
TechDebtDevin wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was strongly motivated to upvote and share this article. I probably upvote and share 1/500 articles I read on this website. So I disagree, I think his tone helps convey how the bulk of people feel about Google's search product and gives us a name to actually blame. Whereas every other blog writes about the decline of Google with a sad tone underwritten with nostalgia and always fails to provide any sort of root cau…

> and gives us a name to actually blame. Understanding the dynamics is great, and we can learn from that, and apply it to other situations. As for who to blame for something a company does, shouldn't outsiders blame the entire company? That's our interface, and also how we can hold the company accountable for its collective behavior. It's also a defense against scapegoating: it wasn't just one person who made a unila…

> shouldn't outsiders blame the entire company

No, I firmly believe that this level of indirection over-diffuses responsibility in a way that enables the malfeseance we're observing.

It's a social dark pattern that I'm keen to identify and disrupt.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#278

Post by bevekspldnw »

maxerickson wrote: post #187
ChuckMcM wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really glad the article came out though, it fills in some gaps that I was fairly confident about but didn't have anything other than my sense of the players and their actions to back up what I thought was going on. I and a number of other people left in 2010. I went on to work at Blekko which was trying to 'fix' search using a mix of curation and ranking. When I left, this problem of CPC's (the amount Google got…

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

The majority of that revenue comes from violating data protection law and regulators and litigants are slowly racking up a series of wins which will gut ads margins.

There is no Plan B, they are just going to break the law until they can’t and there’s zero clue what happens after that.

They sat back and let OpenAI kick their ass precisely because ghouls like Prabakar call the shots and LLM are not a good display ads fit.

The best parallel for Google is Kodak.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#279

Post by dekhn »

sophacles wrote: post #274
dekhn wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I woudl not sign that, and would instead call myself a computer programmer. That is an absolutely absurd set of sentences to sign one's name to.

Why?

Because it's too vacuous and based on subjective morals to be realistically followed. I also think we need engineers who do jobs that are ugly to preserve our freedom.
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