Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The man who killed Google Search?

wheresyoured.at

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 939 posts

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#641

Post by BlueTemplar »

binarymax wrote: post #305
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds a lot like Kodak. I remember running into Kodak engineers, at an event in the 1990s, and they were all complaining about the same thing. They were digital engineers, and they were complaining that film people kept sabotaging their projects. Kodak invented the digital camera. They should have ruled the roost (at least, until the iPhone came out). Instead, they imploded, almost overnight. The film part was…

If they owned the digital camera space like they should have, who’s to say they wouldn’t have eventually released a smartphone. It probably would have been an absolutely incredible camera first, and some mobile internet and phone features second. One can really dream up a fascinating alternate timeline of iKodak if they didnt shoot themselves in the foot.

Note that Nokia was already "great camera, first smartphones".

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#642

Post by ddfs123 »

polyphaser wrote: post #630
barfbagginus wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

this comment is a wonderful exercise in logic.

it sounds like they used gpt to wrote that

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#643

Post by skydhash »

barfbagginus wrote: post #446
etempleton wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but all of the alternatives are no better. Bing and Duck Duck Go are okay sometimes, but truly terrible other times. Google is consistently worse than it once was, but still better than the competition. I know search is hard to do well, but if Google is truly floundering where is the startup that for it better and not just better for a very specific niche area, but truly better across the board?

I've used the duck duck Go for over 90% of my searches for The last 5 years, as a part of a boycott against Google. I estimate I have withheld about 75,000 searches from Google in that time, or about $8,000 in revenue. I fall back on Google only when absolutely necessary. And these days I almost never have to fall back on Google ( When I do fall back, the results are invariably crap. Quality has degraded so much that…

Maybe because when I started fiddling with computers (around 2009), I only got like 1 or 2 hours of internet connection (cybercafes), so I had to find books and other types of offline information, I’ve never relied on Google Search or others that much. Even today, I treat them more like a bookmark database. If I can’t remember some specific terms to get to the page I need, I don’t even bother searching for it.

I’ve also started to hoard a stash of links and pdfs. And I have Dash for languages and framework documentation. Too many SEO farms for Python and HTML/CSS/JS.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#645

Post by yannickt »

baryphonic wrote: post #619
barbariangrunge wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine learning or not, seo spam sort of killed search. It’s more or less impossible to find real sites by interesting humans these days. Almost all results are Reddit, YouTube, content marketing, or seo spam. And google’s failure here killed the old school blogosphere (medium and substack only slightly count), personal websites, and forums Same is happening to YouTube as well. Feels like it’s nothing but promoters…

What I don't understand about this explanation is that Google's results are abysmal compared to e.g. DuckDuckGo or even Brave search. (I haven't tried Kagi, but people here rave about it as well.) Sure, all the SEO is targeting googlebot, but Google has by far more resources to mitigate SEO spam than just about anyone else. If this is the full explanation, couldn't Google just copy the strategies the (much) smaller r…

I've been using Kagi for a while, and I find that it delivers better results in a cleaner presentation.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#646

Post by kmeisthax »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #488
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.

YT Shorts itself is kind of a mystery to me. It's an objective degradation of the interface; why on earth would I want to use it? It doesn't even allow adjustment of the playback speed or scrubbing!

So, there's a few ways to explain it. From a business strategy level, TikTok exists, and is a threat to YouTube, so we need to compete with it.

From a user perspective, Shorts highlights a specific format of YouTube that happened to have been around for a lot longer than people realize. TikTok isn't anything new, Vine was doing exactly the same thing TikTok was a decade prior. It was shut down for what I can only assume was really dumb reasons. A lot of Viners moved to YouTube, but they had to change their creative process to fit what the YouTube algorithm valued at the time: longer videos.

Pre-Shorts, there really wasn't a good place on YouTube for short videos. Animators were getting screwed by the algorithm because you really can't do daily uploads of animation[0] and whatever you upload is going to be a few minutes max. A video essayist can rack up hundreds of thousands of hours of watch time while you get maybe a thousand.

(Fun fact: YouTube Shorts status was applied retroactively to old short videos, so there's actually Shorts that are decades old. AFAIK, some of the Petscop creator's old videos are Shorts now.)

But that's why users or creators would want to use Shorts. A lot of the UX problems with Shorts boils down to YouTube building TikTok inside of YouTube out of sheer corporate envy. To be clear, they could have used the existing player and added short-video features on top (e.g. swipe-to-skip). In fact, any Short can be opened in the standard player by just changing the URL! There's literally no difference other than a worse UI because SOMEONE wanted "launched a new YouTube vertical" on their promo packet!

FWIW the Shorts player is gradually getting its missing features back but it's still got several pain points for me. One in particular that I think exemplifies Shorts: if I watch Shorts on a portrait 1080p monitor - i.e. the perfect thing to watch vertical video on - you can't see comments. When you open the comments drawer it doesn't move over enough and the comments get cut off. The desktop experience is also really bad; occasionally scrolling just stops working, or it skips two videos per mousewheel event, or one video will just never play no matter how much I scroll back and forth.

[0] Vtubers don't count

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#647

Post by jatins »

I think the HN crowd loves the attack on management consultant types.

However, this reads like an over exaggerated Fox news story, trying to create a hero vs villain narrative, written solely for the purpose of personal attack on a person

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#648

Post by ikrenji »

mulmen wrote: post #433
senderista wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MAX was exactly what their customers wanted.

Well, no, it isn’t. Nobody wanted a plane that suddenly turns into a lawn dart or falls apart in the air. The MAX was short term thinking on Boeing’s part. A foolish mistake in the aerospace industry. Boeing was a few years behind Airbus. Now they are a decade behind and tarnished their reputation.

wasn't max a record selling plane? nothing wrong with modernising a 737 variant. plenty wrong with putting MCAS in it which goes haywire when its sole sensor fails

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#649

Post by tensor »

ajross wrote: post #524
oblio wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is ML the new SOAP? Looks like a silver bullet and 5 years later you're drowning in complexity for no discernible reason?

So... obviously SOAP was dumb[1], and lots of people saw that at the time. But SOAP was dumb in obvious ways, and it failed for obvious reasons, and really no one was surprised at all. ML isn't like that. It's new. It's different. It may not succeed in the ways we expect; it may even look dumb in hindsight. But it absolutely represents a genuinely new paradigm for computing and is worth studying and understanding on…

ML has already succeeded to the point that it is ubiquitous and taken for granted. OCR, voice recognition, spam filters, and many other now boring technologies are all based on ML.

Anyone claiming it’s some sort of snake oil shouldn’t be taken seriously. Certainly the current hype around it has given rise to many inappropriate applications, but it’s a wildly successful and ubiquitous technology class that has no replacement.

Post reply on HN