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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#401

Post by mike_hearn »

dekhn wrote: post #227
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pichai must be Grima Wormtongue tier bamboozler

No Vic Gundotra was Grima to Larry's Theoden. There was a TGIF where prominent Search leaders (highest level of engineer, not management) openly asked Larry why we were being asked to compromise the quality of Google search to grow Google+ when GOogle+ was such a crappy and unpopular product. Larry just sort of lamely asked "can't you all get along" and then shortly afterwards, abdicated to Pichai (whose main skill w…

I don't think it was Vic who convinced Larry or Sergey of that. It was Mark Zuckerberg. Google was in a frenzy about the sudden explosion of social for a few years before Google+ came along. Facebook's growth and rampant poaching of Google employees had left upper management despondent and fearful. It appeared (though in hindsight we know this was wrong) that social graph integration was so powerful that adding social to any app would automatically make it win. A commonly cited example was that Google had bought Picasa and worked on it for years only to see it be smoked by Facebook Photos, a product with way fewer features. Then Facebook Messages started taking away all the personal email communication from Gmail, and they got into ads and so on.

So you can see why Eric, Larry and Sergey were afraid. They were worried that Facebook might ultimately do a search engine that somehow integrated social recommendations, and that'd be the end of Google. That fear was shared by other top execs like Hoelzle and Alan Eustace iirc. No wormtonguing was required. They convinced themselves of that thesis all by themselves.

In that environment lots of teams were trying to sprinkle social magic onto their product, often in hamfisted ways. The GMail team launched an ill-fated social network called Buzz that immediately upset lots of users who clicked through the consent popup without reading it and discovered that their address books were suddenly public. Maps was adding their own social features. Orkut was an actual social network popular in Brazil. But, none of these products integrated with each other in any way. They mostly even had their own separate user profiles! Like, there wasn't even one place to set a profile picture for your Google account. It was pretty disastrous.

Given that, some attempt at a unifying social layer was inevitable. Gundotra gets unfairly demonized in my view. Google+ was probably the best that Google could have done to compete with Facebook. It wasn't enough because it was a me-too product driven by corporate fear, and such products are rarely compelling. But it also wasn't terrible. Some users really liked it.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#402

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#403

Post by barfbagginus »

banish-m4 wrote: post #362
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…

Thanks for writing this insightful piece. The pathologies of big companies that fail to break themselves up into smaller non-siloed entities like Virgin Group does. Maintaining the successful growing startup ways and fighting against politics, bureaucracy, fiefdoms, and burgeoning codebases is difficult but is a better way than chasing short-term profits, massive codebases, institutional inertia, dealing with corpora…

I formed a worker co-op - but it's just me! And I do CAD reverse engineering, nothing really life-giving.

I would love to join a co-op producing real human survival values in an open source way. Where would you suggest that I look for leads on that kind of organization?

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#404

Post by RoyalHenOil »

etempleton wrote: post #308
sailfast wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed - I can appreciate the sentiment and the history, but the ad hominem is not really necessary to prove the point and undermines the credibility of the post. I still use Google, but man has it become difficult to get to what I want.

I agree, but all of the alternatives are no better. Bing and Duck Duck Go are okay sometimes, but truly terrible other times. Google is consistently worse than it once was, but still better than the competition. I know search is hard to do well, but if Google is truly floundering where is the startup that for it better and not just better for a very specific niche area, but truly better across the board?

I like Kagi. It's not great for images or videos at this stage, but it is good for general search because you can personalize the rankings of the results. And they are introducing improvements all the time.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#405

Post by robryk »

dekhn wrote: post #279
sophacles wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't see why subjective morals cannot be realistically followed. Do you mean that it will mean sufficiently different things for different people that they any promise of this shape will not communicate much to strangers, or something else?

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#406

Post by 998244353 »

fuzztester wrote: post #346
JohnFen wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Same here with YouTube, assuming they use ML, which is likely. They routinely give me brain-dead suggestions such as to watch a video I just watched today or yesterday, among other absurdities.

For what it's worth, I do not remember a time when YouTube's suggestions or search results were good. Absurdities like that happened 10 and 15 years ago as well.

These days my biggest gripe is that they put unrelated ragebait or clickbait videos in search results that I very clearly did not search for - often about American politics.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#407

Post by rhelz »

Raghavan's story is an inspiration. He learned the hard way that you are either growing or you are dying, and if revenue declines, you need to turn it around prontissimo, or hope you find the next profit center in time. It's the comeback story of the generation.

Don't forget, the purpose of corporations is to make money for their owners. It does no good to say that delighting customers or providing the best product will make the most money in the long run--clearly, that is not the case.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#408

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Eisenstein wrote: post #315
Certhas wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any examples of this actually playing out with a company as established as Google? You can read comments like this on many companies... Microsoft (70B$ income), Meta (40B$), Oracle (8.5B$), IBM(7.5B$), SAP (6B$), yet none of them seem to ever actually enter the predicted death spiral. And the internet isn't new anymore. There is no vast landscape of unexplored new technological possibilities, and no garage start up w…

AT&T, GE, AOL, Yahoo, Sony technology (they are a media company now, but they did used to make things that weren't a game console), Time Warner, SGI, Compaq, 3DFx, DEC...

Not only that, most of the other examples are just not at the end of their death spiral yet. Take a look at Windows market share, it's down 20% over the last 10 years:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...

And that's just desktop. Microsoft ceded the entire mobile market, which in turn now represents the majority of devices. The majority of the company's profits no longer come from selling Windows and Office. If they hadn't pivoted into a new line of business (Azure) they'd be on a trajectory to impact with the ground.

IBM has been bleeding customers -- and business units -- for decades. Their stock is flat, not even keeping up with inflation, compared to +300% over the last decade for the overall market. And they have no obvious path to redemption.

Oracle is kind of an outlier because of the nature of their business. Their product has an extraordinarily high transition cost, so once you're locked in, they can fleece you pretty hard and still not have it cost more than the cost of paying database admins high hourly rates for many hours to transition to a different database. Then they focus their efforts on getting naive MBAs to make a one-time mistake with a long-term cost. Or just literal bribery:

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/27/sec-fines-oracle-23-million-...

And even with that, their database market share has been declining and they're only making up the revenue in the same way as Microsoft through cloud services.

Meta isn't a great example because people just don't hate them that much. Facebook sucks but in mostly the same ways as their major competitors, they're still run by the founder and they do things people like, like releasing LLaMA for free.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#409

Post by layer8 »

fuzztester wrote: post #346
JohnFen wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Same here with YouTube, assuming they use ML, which is likely. They routinely give me brain-dead suggestions such as to watch a video I just watched today or yesterday, among other absurdities.

This is happening to me to, but from the kind of videos it's suggested for I suspect that people actually do tend to rewatch those particular videos, hence the recommendation.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#410

Post by 3abiton »

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 am dreading the day when reddit becomes full of hot posts. I don't know what filter will I use then. I guess HN? But even I don't think we'll be safe from the GPTs here either.
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