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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#581

Post by ninjaa »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #434
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.

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.

GNU has a really concept called the GNS for Gnu Naming System. And what it was was that each human or org would have their own tld directory, and we could navigate the web through other actors, and they could pass trust for zones on to others. So, for example, I could resolve the same page as somepage.ninjaa.site or someotherpage.adept.site. This way you could create a trusted internet by just trusting the published link tld directory of people & institutions you know.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9498 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUnet

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#582

Post by dragonwriter »

ethbr1 wrote: post #525
fragmede wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, instead of C, to get a computer to do something doesn't turn you into a beaurocrat any more than using Python or Javascript instead does. If one uses English in as precise a way as one crafts code, sure. Most people do not (cannot?) use English that precisely. There's little technical difference between using English and using code to create... ... but there is a huge difference on the other side of…

> Most people do not (cannot?) use English that precisely.

No one can, which is why any place human interaction needs anything anywhere close to the determinancy of code, normal natural langauge is abandoned for domain-specific constructed languages built from pieces of natural language with meanings crafted especially for the particular domain as the interface language between the people (and often formalized domain-specific human-to-human communication protocols with specs as detailed as you’d see from the IETF.)

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#583

Post by freediver »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #154
rrrix1 wrote: post #104

It's April 23rd, 2024, and I am still looking for a good, reliable, honest and simple search engine. All I want to do is search. No AI. No ads. No shopping. Please don't "Answer my question." I enjoy doing my own original research, thanks. I'm entirely willing - wanting even - to pay for it. Currently Kagi has my $, but I'm saddened and frustrated that they're not even focused on Search, they're focused on AI[1] and…

I just want a search engine that prioritizes small sites again I just don’t want to see another webmd fluff article when I search for a medical query or some gigantic news site’s affiliate section when I search for a product Half my searches have site:reddit.com appended to them

That is exactly what Kagi does. Kagi Small Web [1] was initiated to surface small personal websites in search engines again.

[1] https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#584

Post by agar »

Certhas wrote: post #300
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies this size die several years before the body hits the floor. They're dead when everyone starts to hate them and someone says "no, look how much money they're making, they're fine." That's the fatal blow, because they think they're fine, and keep doing the things that make everyone hate them. At that point you're just waiting for someone else to offer an alternative. Then people prefer the alternative because…

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…

Symantec comes to mind.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#585

Post by istillwritecode »

I know Prabhakar. He was my manager at Google Research and he tried to recruit me to Yahoo in 2005, but I went to Google instead. This article stinks of hatred and misunderstanding about how Google works. It's possible that Prabhakar bears some responsibility for the decline of search experience, but it sounds over the top to assign all blame to him as a manager.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#586

Post by barfbagginus »

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.

Start learning how to accurately prompt ai's, and have valid and constructive conversations with them. This replaces 80% of the need for search, and gives you a number of valuable things search could never provide including valuable and constructive critiques and analysis. If you think that you can't do this with llms because they are just parrots that means you have not read the latest papers on prompting and meet update your beliefs on the capabilities of llms like gpt4. These things do effective critical reasoning, with increasingly low rates of hallucination.

To reduce the anxiety of search, use AI enhanced search to filter through the dross and find both meaningful search terms and results.

After I did this my search anxiety reduced back to the level it was around 2012-2014, when Google had an effective search product. The quality of life improvement on search alone has been profound. But when you add in the fact that gpt4 can also help with communications issues, conflict resolution, and understanding my own complex and sometimes baffling emotions, the quality of life increase has been far greater than anything Google search ever gave me.

Please consider upskilling with llm assisted search and analysis skills.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#587

Post by jaynate »

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 guess it depends on how much equity you own as to what is better (to your first paragraph), and how large the paycheck is (to the 2nd paragraph.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#588

Post by barfbagginus »

its_ethan wrote: post #263
taco_emoji wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is such a tiresome criticism. "this would be better if it were more boring" yeah okay and 4 people would read it and 2 of them would fall asleep during

And your criticism of him is what? Encourage more sensationalism? Because there's so much evidence of that being such good and healthy way for journalism/news to operate?

It may have been somewhat sensationalist and over the top. But it was also very authentic, and freaking hilarious. Much more entertaining to read than if it hadn't been snarky and catty.

So no don't go for pure sensationalism. Go for authentic voice and humor coupled with hard facts and sound arguments. That's what makes it powerful.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#589

Post by itsdrewmiller »

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.

There are plenty more reasons than that - check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#Controver... for more info.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#590

Post by bane »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #178
ot1138 wrote: post #76

Phenomenal article, very entertaining and aligns with my experience as a prominent search "outsider" (I founded the first search intelligence service back in 2004, which was later acquired by WPP. Do I have some stories). The engineers at Google were wonderful to work with up to 2010. It was like a switch flipped mid-2011 and they became actively hostile to any third party efforts to monitor what they were doing. To…

I'm really glad the article came out though, it fills in some gaps that I was fairly confident about but didn't have anything other than my sense of the players and their actions to back up what I thought was going on. I and a number of other people left in 2010. I went on to work at Blekko which was trying to 'fix' search using a mix of curation and ranking. When I left, this problem of CPC's (the amount Google got…

ChuckMcM, I just wanted to say, I really appreciate the long view you bring to HN discussions. When you've been in tech for a few decades you start to see predictable patterns. History may not repeat, but it often rhymes.
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