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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#601

Post by ozr »

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.

The awesome-X lists seem like a community attempt to do something similar.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#602

Post by barfbagginus »

robertlagrant wrote: post #395
joenot443 wrote: post #294

Earlier 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.

Read some marx. There is a whole analysis and theory behind class traitorship, it's causes and effects. You can't be ignorant of something as fundamental as marxian theory in this context, and then act as if it's the author making the faux pas...

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#603

Post by WWLink »

dekhn wrote: post #445
gverrilla wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (beca…

Part of the reason I switched from google to duckduckgo for searching was I didn't WANT "personalization" I want my search results to be deterministic. If I am in Seattle and search for "ducks" I want the exact fucking same search results as if I travel to Rio de Janeiro and search for "ducks".

Honestly, I'd prefer my voice assistant (siri mostly) to be like that as well. It was at first, and I think everyone hated that lol.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#604

Post by BuyMyBitcoins »

gverrilla wrote: post #464
epcoa wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prayers for the unbelievers makes some sense. But I associate YouTube promotions with garbage any how. The few things I might buy like Tide laundry detergent are entirely despite occasional YouTube promotion.

Lmao. I'm very positive that the conversion rate for placing an atheist in a live mass out of the blue is very very very low. Because I never stayed for more than 3 seconds, I'm not sure if it's real religious content or a scam, though - and they don't even let me report live shorts :(

“Conversion rate”. I’m not sure if you intended that pun but it’s pretty good.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#605

Post by barfbagginus »

chasd00 wrote: post #316
akaij wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it was a very good description. The person mentioned is responsible for turning one of the most important pieces of software used by billions, into user-hostile experiences that's better for only a few, including himself, just for profits.

> ..just for profits. well let's be honest, Google was never founded to dig wells or feed starving children. It was only ever for the profits. Also, in their defense, afaik no one's paychecks have ever bounced. I bet many many people would become very interested in profit and its growth if their direct deposit all of a sudden stopped.

Hey since it's all for profits let's invent the version of Google where the computer has a robotic arm that puts a gun to your head and makes you watch ads for crypto currency arbitrage bot scams. If you don't click through it blows your brains out.

It's all for profit everything should be allowed for profit. Even really f*** awful products that hurt people and shouldn't exist... should be allowed for profit right? That's the line you're seemingly arguing.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#606

Post by fragmede »

pbar wrote: post #533
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…

Was it intentional to reply with another no true Scotsman in turn here?

If you have to ask, then you missed it

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#607

Post by bane »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #213
maxerickson wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is definition of dead? 15 years later they have huge majority of traffic share and lots of revenue.

You know how a chess player will say something like "mate in 6" because their experience of all the options left to their opponent are both easily countered and will not prevent them from losing? Companies, and tech companies in my experience, get into death spirals due to a combination of people, culture, and organization. Pulling out of one of those is possible but requires a unique combination of factors and a str…

With Google, I always feel like the side hustles (waymo, X, etc.) Really exist to be sold off in the future to prop up the add/search business and ensure future profitability. Everything not adds/search is on that list, and anything shut down despite being useful isn't seen as future-sellable.

Google today is starting to smell of future financial engineering games, like when a car maker earns more through financing than selling core product.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#608

Post by whizzter »

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…

IBM used to be bigger than MS, it's a 10th of it today.

But most importantly all the above listed companies with the exception of Meta are those that are heavily ingrained in large companies operations. IBM still provides mainframes, MS has Exchange and Windows domains and is successfully transitioning a lot of customers to Azure, Oracle has their databases and other products, SAP their ERP systems.

Once a non-IT company has their internal IT systems and some legacy working they're going to be very very slow in changing them out if it works, companies that provide those and get a critical are going to have very very long runways compared to regular b2c companies if a significant portion of their revenue comes from this.

Google has Chromebooks that are used in schools and some GCP usage but could that save Google long enough if search revenue was cut into a fraction? And GCP is kinda of an also-ran today, people looking at larger options usually look at AWS(nr 1) or Azure (Windows legacy).

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#609

Post by fragmede »

WWLink wrote: post #592
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…

Getting drunk off that AI kool-aid aren't ya

the othering of creators because they use a different paintbrush was bothering me.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#610

Post by sn41 »

Great article. But the author can't be serious about no one knowing who Prabhakar Raghavan is. He is, for instance, the co-author of the definitive text on randomized algorithms [Motwani and Raghavan]. He has also been a well-respected database researcher for many years.

In a previous avatar, Raghavan was a pure theoretical computer scientist. As a student, he won the best student paper in FOCS, the Machtey award, which is kind of a big deal. The work was related to randomized rounding, which is a bread-and-butter technique for LP relaxation approaches to integer optimization, similar to knapsack problems.

This is not to defend any bad decisions he may have made at Google and Yahoo, but to make him an anonymous clueless corporate honcho who is good only at scheming and wrecking companies is bizarre. All this information, moreover, is available on Wikipedia and (cough) Google scholar.

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=FtMADIMAAAAJ&hl=en...

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