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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#571

Post by barfbagginus »

posix_monad wrote: post #261
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.

LLMs and astro-turfing have ruined that approach. I honestly don't know where to get information from these days.

Get information from llms after learning how to prompt them so that they won't hallucinate. Get information from searches by using llms to filter through the crap results. Get information from scientific papers on Google scholar and the arxiv. Get information from textbooks on the library Genesis. Get information from audiobooks on the audiobook Bay. Get information from peers trained in specific domains. Get information by reading code and documentation belonging to open source projects. Get information by performing experiments and trials. Get information by compiling reports and essays.

There are still many sources for information. And it's okay to work hard for it.

Good luck and Happy knowledge work.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#572

Post by oldkinglog »

romanhn wrote: post #495
phyzome wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Class traitor" isn't a juvenile insult. It has a fairly well-defined meaning and describes a set of problematic behaviors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_traitor Are you saying that it's an incorrect description, or are you just generally against accusing people of things?

It's a ridiculous term that promotes polarization and dumbs down the level of discourse. I have the same reaction to it as when I see "bootlicker" as applied to anyone who takes the company's side (or is in management in general). There's too much adversarial name-calling these days, and not enough seeking understanding.

If you also take a wage, then you're also a class traitor by any reasonable definition, because denying the existence of class struggle only benefits capitalists - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_conflict

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#573

Post by ninjaa »

disqard wrote: post #486
atif089 wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's start with replacing Google. Count me in. 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.

(paid user of Kagi here) FWIW, Kagi is built on top of Google search, so yes it's "replacing" (for you and me) a dependence on Google search, but it is categorically not a from-the-ground-up replacement for Google search.

Oh that's pretty smart

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#574

Post by xarope »

fragmede wrote: post #519
munificent wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope, rather - that technically minded people who are advocating for the use of ML understand the short comings and hallucinations. The people I see who are most excited about ML are business types who just see it as a black boxes that makes stock valuation go vroom. The people that deeply love building things, really enjoy the process of making itself, are profoundly sceptical. I look at generative AI as sort of…

We get it, you're skeptical of the current hype bubble. But that's one helluva no true Scotsman you've got going on there. Because a true builder, one that deeply loves building things wouldn't want to use text to create an image. Anyone who does is a business type or an executive producer. A true builder wouldn't think about what they want to do in such nasty thing as words. Creation comes from the soul, which we al…

using English has been tried many times in the history computing; Cobol, SQL, just to name a very few.

Still needed domain experts back then, and, IMHO, in years/decades to come

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#575

Post by barfbagginus »

resource_waste wrote: post #321
nbittich wrote: post #102

Everytime I need to make a search on Google, I start to feel anxious, already convinced I'm not going to find anything useful about the problem I'm trying to solve. This often means I already tried everything else. It's a sad situation.a product shouldn't make you feel anxious.

I'm like this with Microsoft products. Anytime I need to buy one, I'm so worried I'm going to buy the wrong one. Once I have it, I'm worried its attached to the wrong account. Once I run it, I'm worried it wont start and I'll need to install it through some weird microsoft store. Then when its working, I'm worried my OS is going to slow down because of telemetry reporting. And I really hope microsoft team screen shar…

I would like to report that this emotion and experience completely disappeared after I ported my business workstation over to Ubuntu budgie. Not only does my computer crash a whopping 80% less, but it also uses 30% less memory on average.

The main challenge was that I have to run my CAD software in a Windows VM. Ironically though the solution is more stable than running the CAD software on bare metal!

I can definitively say that being free of Microsoft anxiety is very sweet, and worth far more than any effort I had to spend to do the porting. It has radically improved my computing quality of life.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#576

Post by strunz »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #167
arromatic wrote: post #22

Question : Why larry and brin not caring about it ? They built one of world's best and biggest company and it's dying . Even if they did not care about that , their money is still tied to google stock right ? That should raise some concern from them.

You get older, you lose the willpower and energy to fight the machine They have enormous power, but they are now also up against vast armies of lawyers and executives and lobbyists who will whisper and whine in their ears all day Do I, Larry Page, really want to deal with all of that with my failing health and depleting energy?

Page is only 50 and doesn't have any health issues that I know aside from his vocal cord thing 10 years ago

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#577

Post by barfbagginus »

yifanl wrote: post #224

I think the blogpost spend a lot of time focusing on the uninteresting part. If it wasn't Raghavan, it'd just be someone else, Google (the corporation) wanted more search query metrics and Google is large enough to enforce its will, I doubt 2024 Google Search would be dramatically better if anyone else was promoted to Gomes' position (obviously, Gomes would have been kicked off regardless, because KPIs)

If it had been another person then it would have been appropriate to hold that person responsible. Individuals don't get free passes to do unethical acts just because corporations exist to take their liabilities. It's still beneficial to make examples of them.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#578

Post by andrewflnr »

lupire wrote: post #545
sumanthvepa wrote: post #537

Full 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…

My favorite thing about McKinsey is that they are hated for 2 reasons: 1. Allegedly ruining companies with mismanagement. 2. Making companies people don't like too successful. That's more an indictment of the business skills of the critics than McKinsey.

That is not a contradiction. There are lots of ways to "ruin" a company, making all the people who interact with it more miserable, while still making that company "successful".

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#579

Post by dbingham »

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…

The hard part about starting worker owned co-ops is financing. We need good financing systems for them. People/firms who are willing to give loans for a reasonable interest, but on the scale of equity investment in tech start ups.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#580

Post by antihipocrat »

foobarian wrote: post #322
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.

Search engines worked a lot better when the internet had a higher SNR in the link graph. Nowadays it's an ocean of SEO sewage and no search engine can do a good job. It's not that Google ruined search by showing ads; it has genuinely become a harder problem. There is not much that can be done except set up a federated darknet where any commercial activity is banned; otherwise, the incentives are all wrong.

The SEO spam domains could be blocked or de-prioritized by google. However, these SEO links generate significant income for Google via advertising.

When OKRs are tied to revenue, no executive is going to sign off on a change that reduces it

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