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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#721

Post by phonon »

jeffbee wrote: post #317
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…

The just-so story about Kodak is one of those things that bugs me. Kodak did own the digital camera market, stem to stern, for years. They did not ignore it. They did, however, invent all that stuff a little early, before the semiconductor manufacturing technology had matured to the point where it could be a consumer good. The company imploded because it spent all of its time, attention, and capital trying to become…

Well, NYSE: EMN is worth $12 B.....

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#722

Post by StefanBatory »

etempleton wrote: post #308
sailfast wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Duck Duck Go is for example terrible for me when it comes to looking up things in my native language.

Bing is.. fine I think nowadays

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#723

Post by TrackerFF »

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…

I didn't really get the same message from this article.

What I got was: Raghavan is/was a world-class computer scientist in his field, but actively pursued the management track and business strategy.

And for that, well, who's the blame him? If your main goal is to make an established company make more money - making wildly unpopular decisions (as far as the customer experience goes) can be tempting and easy.

The main problem here is that Google at that point was, and still is, a monopolistic behemoth. And frankly, why would they give a shit about what the customer thinks? 99% of google users are casual users that will neve scroll past the first page of search results, and will click on whatever top links google returns.

As far as enshitifacation goes, google is one of the worst offenders - so clearly anti user-friendly strategy is being rewarded.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#724

Post by jajko »

haspok wrote: post #672
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…

I don't know, but Youtube seems to have a more solid algorithm. I'm typically not subscribed to any channel, yet the content I want to watch does find me reasonably well. Of course, heavily promoted material also, but I just click "not interested in channel" and it disappears for a while. And I still get some meaningful recommendations if I watch a video in a certain topic. Youtube has its problems, of course, but in…

I don't think youtube is trying that hard to desperately sell stuff to you via home screen recommendation algorithm. And I agree its bearable and what you describe works cca well, albeit ie I am still trying to get rid of anything related to Jordan Peterson whom I liked before and detest now after his drug addiction / mental breakdown, it just keeps popping back from various sources, literal whack-a-mole.

I wish there was some way to tell "please ignore all videos that contain these strings, and I don't mean only for next 2 weeks".

Youtube gets their ads revenue from before/during video, so they can be nicer to users.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#725

Post by AtNightWeCode »

Wow, that was a red pill. Everything suddenly makes sense. I always thought it only was machine learning that messed it up.

How to replace Google as default search in your browsers (tested on Windows).

Firefox -> Hamburger menu -> Settings -> Search

Chrome -> Kebab menu -> Hamburger menu -> Search engine

Edge -> Meatballs menu -> Privacy, search and services -> Services | Address bar and search

It says something about the state of UX in 2024 when the three major browsers have different icons for the app menu.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#726

Post by rvba »

stefan_ wrote: post #323
skilled wrote: post #7

Google is doing something similar now[0], both from a searchers and a site owners perspective. Barry Schwartz regularly posts Google updates on his site[1], for over a decade no less. Since August 2023, those updates have been reaching the 500 mean comment range with many updates reaching 700-900 comment range. And this has been happening for 8 straight months! People have been robbed of their livelihoods and many ha…

Ok, but the likelihood is 99.9% that I would rather read posts on Reddit than any LLM autogenerated ad laden malware garbage from SEO spammers.

Spammers are smart enough to post their spam on reddit too. Then upvote it with bots.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#727

Post by jubalfh »

dang wrote: post #101

Anybody have a better title? 'Better' here means (1) less baity; (2) more accurate and neutral; and (3) preferably a representative phrase from the article itself. "The man who killed Google Search" is too baity. See the 'unless' in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html : " Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait " Edit (since there are objections): I'm not taking a position for…

those who can, write. those who cannot, change the meaning of titles.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#728

Post by Ambolia »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #611
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…

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…

For me what killed search was 2016, after that year if some search term is "hot news" it becomes impossible to learn anything about it that wasn't published in the last week and you just get the same headline repeated 20 times in slightly different wording about it.

After that I only use search for technical problems, and mouth to mouth or specific authors for everything else.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#729

Post by swiftcoder »

mrguyorama wrote: post #313
supportengineer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can one learn to do this?

Get born into a wealthier family

Yeah, this is pretty much it. Though I have met a few poor kids who got a scholarship to an Ivy League and leveraged friendships with rich kids to vault into this sort of sphere

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#730

Post by mrkeen »

datadeft wrote: post #704
mrkeen wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 least contain it as much as possible, so that ranking stays debuggable and understandable by human search engineers. There's a lot of ML hate here, and I simply don't see the alternative. To rank documents, you need to score them. Google uses hundreds of scoring factor…

You do not need to. Counting how many links are pointing to each document is sufficient if you know how long that link existed (spammers link creation time distribution is widely differnt to natural link creation times, and many other details that you can use to filter out spammers)

> You do not need to.

Ranking means deciding which document (A or B) is better to return to the user when queried.

Not writing a traditional forward-algorithm to rank these documents implies one of the following:

- You write a "backward" algorithm (ML, regression, statistics, whatever you want to call it).

- You don't use algorithms to solve it. An army of humans chooses the rankings in real time.

- You don't rank documents at all.

> Counting how many links are pointing to each document is sufficient if you know how long that link existed

- Link-counting (e.g. PageRank) is query-independent evidence. If that's sufficient for you, you'll always return the same set of documents to each user, regardless of what they typed into the search box.

At best you've just added two more ranking factors to the mix:

  - document A
    qie:
        length: 2Kb
        misspellings: 14
        age: 18 months
      + in-links: 4
      + in-link-spamminess: 2.31E4
    qde:
        matches 2 of your keywords exactly
        matches a synonym of another of your keywords

  - document B
    qie:
        length: 3Kb
        misspellings: 7
        age: 5 months
      + in-links: 2
      + in-link-spamminess: 2.54E3
    qde:
        matches 1 of your keywords exactly
        matches 2 keywords by synonym
So I ask again:

- Which document matches your query better, A or B?

- How did you decide that, such that not only can you program a non-ML algorithm to perform the scoring, but you're certain enough of your decision that you can fix the algorithm when it disagrees with you ( >> debuggable and understandable by human search engineers )

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