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"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes." "Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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The man who killed Google Search?
561–570 of 939 posts
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#562I guess 2024, revenue is still prioritized over search quality? Anyone found better alternative to Google Search, even paid?
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah he only co-authored 2 highly influential CS textbooks when he wasn't failing upward
That doesn't mean his insights are correct, that he's a good leader, or that his efforts have been good for us users. It's hard to find a bigger name in AI than Minsky, and he wrote one of the most influential books in Computer Science, which put a huge damper on all neutral network progress for decades... Arguably, that was a bad thing.
Neural networks put a huge damper on themselves by being so compute hungry.
They've always been there, it was just an inefficient way to do machine learning before around 2011 when GPUs started being good enough
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#564Full Disclosure: Prabhakar Raghavan was my skip-level manager at Yahoo! and I'd known of him well before that, from my days at IBM Research. The author says very few people knew who Raghavan was. Clearly he isn't a computer scientist. It is more an indication of the ignorance of the writer than anything else. Raghavan's contributions to Computer Science and, Search in particular, which were made long before he joined…
The author called Sundar a McKinsey consultant, not Raghavan. >A quick note: I used “management consultant” there as a pejorative. While he exhibits all the same bean-counting, morally-unguided behaviors of a management consultant, from what I can tell Raghavan has never actually worked in that particular sector of the economy. It also seems like a stretch to say that Yahoo's former "Chief Strategy Officer" had no in…
So why needlessly call him a management consultant?
Yes it is a stretch to say he had much influence. There reason is very simple. Yahoo! was in its death throes. The core products were not bringing in revenue, and it was in the middle of multiple hostile takeover attacks by various private equity players. First it was a hostile offer from Microsoft, a hostile take over effort by Carl Icahn, and then a finally yet another, hostile take over (I forget the name of the last raider)
When there is so much uncertainty, and the fight is for mere survival, strategy has no meaning. You don't strategize, when someone is shooting you in the head.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#565Timeline of 2019 matches the trend for "why is search so bad" on Google trends, I had forgotten when I felt search had been enshittified
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#566Even 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 append GitHub:) and then I switch back to chatgpt
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#567I guess 2024, revenue is still prioritized over search quality? Anyone found better alternative to Google Search, even paid?
ChatGPT is much better…
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was suggesting that they fire all the engineers that work on things that don't make money. It was only last quarter that Cloud actually made a profit. That said, I think you make a reasonable restructuring case; Now you just have to figure out how to get leadership to buy in and execute on that plan. In my experience two things work against that. 1) If it isn't their idea that don't believe it will do any good and…
But Google seems to be doing decently well compared to blekko and Watson?
That it is, but a more apt comparison would be Duck Duck Go which was a contemporary of Blekko and definitely out performed relative to Blekko's success. DDG still going strong and even buying TV ads, so yeah.
That said, how Blekko and Watson ended up squandering good technology in search of something else is also an interesting learning experience/tale.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#569Even 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.
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.
Calling someone a name is only an ad hominem fallacy if you try to use it as an argument. Here it's just used for style. Since the author has plenty of valid arguments, the name calling - which is not an argument - can be dismissed without weakening the actual argument.
In any case, it is not sound reasoning to reject the entirety of an argument just because one of the subclaims is not a valid argument. Doing so is the fallacy fallacy.
In this case, it's true that name calling weakens the credibility of the post for a general audience. But I contend that we might not need need to care. It only weakens the credibility of the post for members of the audience who make the fallacy fallacy, and refuse to evaluate the other claims on their own merits.
Convincing or not convincing such an audience might not be a concern to an author focused on truth, since such an audience is persuaded by fallacies.
Another thing is that if a person is actually a bad person, calling them bad names describing how they are a bad person is actually a true statement and not an argument "to the man". In this case the actual claim that is being argued is the fact of the person's moral insufficiency. Calling them the bad name is just the conclusion of an argument.
The main snafu of calling someone names as a stylistic or concluding aspect of an argument is that it lacks the decorum. If the debate forum requires respectful decorum then an argument can be disqualified on these grounds.
However in this case the forum is the author's own blog. The author has clearly chosen to speak to an audience that can evaluate arguments without being set back by insults - presumably an audience who is already very upset at Google and wants to know which person they should be upset at specifically. In this role, I found the insults were actually rather enjoyable and funny!
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don’t find it to be succinct? It’s certainly pejorative, but in four words it explains quite nicely how the author feels about Raghaven in a way most engineers can probably relate to. If he’d said “engineer who no longer builds but leverages their past technical background to instead succeed in a management role, often to the detriment of their past engineering peers” it would roughly get the same idea across, it…
Anyone who talks about class traitors, or almost any sort of traitor, outside of a real war, is deeply misguided on this point.
"class traitor" has a specific meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_traitor