471–480 of 939 posts
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I don't think so. At one of the Sun Reunion events a bunch of us sat around and talked about it. I suggested someone should write a companion volume to "Sunrise: The first 10 years of Sun" called "Sunset: The last 10 years of Sun." But as far as I know nobody followed up (if they did they didn't reach out to me for my take)
Quit teasing. Give us a taste, then. [:)]
:-)
ChatGPT is my default now basically.. almost anything I search for is technical in nature and it gives me the proper result almost all the time. Even if it's setting up a dedicated server for a game etc
LLMs are the future.
Making your search engine worse to squeeze profits now is not as big a deal as it would have been 5 years ago. Still sad, but I honestly care less and less about what Google search does now that we have ChatGPT, Claude, etc.
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.
This is going to sound crazy, but do you know what the web really needs right now in 2024? A new, searchable directory. Like the old Yahoo! Directory or DMOZ. Just a carefully curated list of trusted sites that are made and managed by humans and for humans. Reddit is usually very bad, because it's heavily astroturfed and trivially easy for marketing firms to game. Something else is required.
...and looking at it today, it may not have changed much.
Thank fark for Fark.com and I guess refdesk.com. Classic Intertubes.
reddit has become nearly unreadable. If it isn't puns, bots, bots reposting puns, it's some awful "no shit" relationship advice thread, etc. (no, I don't have an account so yes, I do look at /r/all).
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> This fact metaphorically depicts how sad this story is. It also highlights how selective the information & context provided in the story is.
His authorship is mentioned in the story.
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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…
1) If it isn't their idea that don't believe it will do any good and could not possibly be the "right" thing to do.
2) If they don't have a job after it happens, they will work behind the scenes to sabotage attempts to make it happen.
You can work around those, but you need "existential risk" level energy to create that sort of change in a company.
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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?
While DDG, Brave, Kagi etc are working generously to replace Google search. The other areas that I think get less attention and needs to be targeted to successfully dismantle them and their predatory practices are Google maps and Google docs.
Maps are hard because it requires a lot of resources and money and whatever but replacing docs should be relatively easier.
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> 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.
It's also a good lesson for the new AI cycle we're in now. Often inserting ML subsystems into your broader system just makes it go from "deterministically but fixably bad" to "mysteriously and unfixably bad".
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…
simplicity is always the recipe for success, unfortunately, most engineers are drawn to complexity like moth to fire if they were unable to do some AB testing between a ML search and a non-ML search, they deserve their failure 100% there are not enough engineers blowing the whistle against ML
It would have been a worse outcome for Google if they had stuck to their no ML stance and then had Bing take over search because they were a generation behind in technology.
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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.
>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.
JFC.
This illustrates one of my biggest complaints about current Google (which has been the case for sometime):
They make their software behave as though they know what I (you) want, better than I do (you do).
So they give you the results they think you need, rather than those you really want.
Infuriating squared.
And idiots cubed.
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> 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.
It's also a good lesson for the new AI cycle we're in now. Often inserting ML subsystems into your broader system just makes it go from "deterministically but fixably bad" to "mysteriously and unfixably bad".