Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The man who killed Google Search?

wheresyoured.at

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 939 posts

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#441

Post by cbsmith »

axus wrote: post #195

Is Google desktop search dead? It's certainly been "shittier" but it's been adequate. Unlike Bing and Yahoo, there isn't clickbait fake news all over the screen. In a market where competitors are a bookmark away, it should be dead, but the big names seem to all collude on having a bad experience that makes more short-term money. How is success being measured internally for "the man who killed Google Search"? Are prof…

Yeah, the amazing thing is that everyone talks about how Google destroyed search, but fails to acknowledge that nobody with a better search emerged. The amount of money at stake with regards to search is such that the decline of search across the board is far more a reflection of a systemic cause than anything that happened inside any particular company.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#442

Post by notzane »

wepple wrote: post #392
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. But what do you expect when the boss comes from McKinsey? Not only does the place teach a particular skillset, it also selects for very peculiar employees. It would be downright weird if an ex-McKinsey employee were anything like a decent engineer.

Are there known examples of ex-McKinsey employees that are generally considered a force for good in general?

Jørgen Vig Knudstorp saved Lego

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#443

Post by pnathan »

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…

> (whose main skill was mainly to get all the SVPs to stop shivving each other in the quest to grow revenue)

Having once been on an engineering team where we all wound up shivving each other's ideas in a quest to, idk, do good work? be alpha? its been a while - when the company hired a manager who was able to stop the shivving, it was like night and day. I can deeply respect that skill!

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#444

Post by davidgerard »

dang wrote: post #157
taco_emoji wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Linkbait" implies it's hyperbole, but I would argue that the headline is a perfect description of the argument being made here.

Linkbait is about using tricks to grab attention rather than providing neutral information. Hyperbole is only one way to do that. In this case "The man who" is a linkbait trope and "killed" is a sensational attention-grabby word. Composing them into "the man who killed" is linkbait.

The headline makes a promise and the article delivers on it.

At this stage, I think your reading is idiosyncratic and not an actual problem with the headline in relation to the article.

Editorialising it with a question mark that is not present in the article - which makes its case - is particularly inappropriate, as it makes it look like the article is asking a Betteridge question for a headline. This is you misrepresenting the article.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#445

Post by dekhn »

gverrilla wrote: post #411
fuzztester wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

YT Shorts recommendations are a joke. I'm an atheist and very rarely watch anything related to religion, and even so Shorts put me in 3 or 4 live prayers/scams (not sure) the last few months.

Similarly, Google News. The "For You" section shows me articles about astrology because I'm interested in astronomy. I get suggestions for articles about I-80 because I search for I-80 traffic cams to get traffic cam info for Tahoe, but it shows me I-80 news all the way across the country, suggestions about MOuntain View because I worked there (for google!) over 3 years ago, commanders being fired from the Navy (because I read a couple articles once), it goes on and on. From what I can tell, there are no News Quality people actually paying attention to their recommendations (and "Show Fewer" doesn't actually work. I filed a bug and was told that while the desktop version of the site shows Show Fewer for Google News, it doesn't actually have an effect).

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#446

Post by barfbagginus »

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've used the duck duck Go for over 90% of my searches for The last 5 years, as a part of a boycott against Google. I estimate I have withheld about 75,000 searches from Google in that time, or about $8,000 in revenue.

I fall back on Google only when absolutely necessary. And these days I almost never have to fall back on Google (When I do fall back, the results are invariably crap. Quality has degraded so much that it almost never gives me a better result than duck duck go did. Often when doctor go fails I don't bother with Google at all.

Even GPT4 driven Bing queries will give better results than Google now - mainly because GPT4 can filter spam, and has gotten a lot better about hallucinations.

I absolutely love to see it.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#447

Post by gorbachev »

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.

About that...

https://www.404media.co/ai-is-poisoning-reddit-to-promote-pr...

Just saw this article on my news feed.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#448

Post by barfbagginus »

deepakarora3 wrote: post #366
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 have been using Google search for many years now and for the past few years have been wondering if the search has really gone bad or is it just me. I remember the days when searching for something used to bring up a few sponsored links separately and I could go page after page with different results on each page allowing me to access a wealth of information and extending my reach deep into the internet. Now, it is…

The alternative is using tool enabled LLMs. GPT4 can drive Bing and filter results better than I can, and it hallucinates less than I do when pile driving through spam.

If you haven't read up on modern prompting strategies and still feel LLMs are stochastic parrots, you should read the foundational prompting papers (chain of thought, react, reflexion, toolformer, etc) and update your views about llms. They're very close to being the kind of autonomous search agents that the characters in classic cyberpunk novels would unleash on the real world to compile results.

It's actually made me excited about information retrieval again, for the first time in a decade. And the cool part is that autonomous search agents might become free and open source before the corporations manage to enshittify the experience.

Very fun times ahead!

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#449

Post by eutropia »

devindotcom wrote: post #271
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.

indeed. “ratfucker sam” is someone employed by billionaire Logan Roy in the hbo show succession:

> Tom (to Greg): “You're asking about the moral character of a guy named Rat-Fucker Sam? He's a fucking piece of fucking shit!”

He’s a suit with a laptop sitting in Logan’s private jet.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#450

Post by dekhn »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #347
iamthirsty wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was also way more pessimistic, figuring that they would be having company wide layoffs by 2015 to 2017 but they pushed that out by 5 years. Well in 2011 Google had just over 30k employees, and now they're doing "layoffs" with 180k+ in 2024. I don't think the layoffs mean much.

Did I mention I was more pessimistic? :-) I expect that today they could layoff 150k, keep the 30K that are involved with search and enough ads that are making business and that husk would do okay for a long time. I don't suppose you watched SGI die, that happened to them, kind of spiraled into a core that has some money making business and then lived on that. One of my observations between "early" Google and "late"…

Are you suggesting that Google fire all the engineers who work on Cloud? That would... be a very interesting business decision, likely closing any door for them working with enterprise in the future.

Here's a few more realistic changes that Alphabet could make: - shut down X - shut down Verily - sell calico or shut it down if no buyers - sell Fiber or shut it down if no buyers - shut down Intrinsic, Wing, and all the other X spinoffs - make Cloud be its own Alphabet company with Kurian as an actual CEO

That would show Wall Street that GOogle is really serious about not wasting money on crazy ideas. That would boost the price (along with reducing costs) giving them some runway. I think it would be a shame if Waymo was shut down but it has a long, long way to being highly profitable.

It looks like Alphabet wants to sell Verily or spin it out of the Alphabet family entirely (after decoupling Verily's infrastructure from Google's) but nobody wants to buy it.

Post reply on HN