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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#741

Post by AnthonyMouse »

arromatic wrote: post #713
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, most of the other examples are just not at the end of their death spiral yet. Take a look at Windows market share, it's down 20% over the last 10 years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha... And that's just desktop. Microsoft ceded the entire mobile market, which in turn now represents the majority of devices. The majority of the company's profits no longer come from selling W…

statista is locked behind paywall

Yeah, it's a pain in the butt. It often shows you the graph and then you try to show the link to someone else and it tries to get them to swipe their card as if anybody is going to do that. Meanwhile it ranks highly in Google search results instead of some other site that contains the same information without the bait and switch, because Google has completely lost the ability to produce quality search results.

Maybe it's time to switch to a competitor.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#742

Post by barfbagginus »

robertlagrant wrote: post #736
barfbagginus wrote: post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is what you said: "Anyone who talks about class traitors, or almost any sort of traitor, outside of a real war, is deeply misguided on this point." This is where you appear to imply you're ignorant of class traitorship. If you truly knew what it was - which you claim elsewhere to know - then you would know it doesn't require a war. Class traitors are non-capitalists who collaborate with capitalists against worke…

> Class traitors are non-capitalists who collaborate with capitalists against workers. They can do that during peace. I think this is deeply misguided.

Oh. You're arguing against the usefulness of the Marxist concept, and your objection has perhaps nothing to do with war traitors.

Do you disagree with communist theory in general?

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#743

Post by emmelaich »

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 feel there's a place for a search engine that doesn't give an f about currency / recent results.

Although sometimes useful, I find my my search results contaminated by popular, recent content.

And it must cost Google a lot to continuously scrape the web.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#744

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Certhas wrote: post #737
makeitdouble wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft and Meta reinvented themselves a few times over. At this point Windows is just an legacy business unit for instance, and Meta literally changed name to mark the turn. Oracle, IBM and SAP have the advantage(?) of being heavily business focused from the start, and I don't see them ever die a natural death in our lifetimes. As long as they have the money to outbribe the competition they'll be there, and it wil…

The point is, if Microsoft managed, why wouldn't Google be able to reinvent itself?

Reinventing yourself because you imploded your primary market is still an own-goal. If you can capture a new market then you could have had both. And what if the primary market collapses first?

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#745

Post by greg_V »

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…

The 2010-2013 timeline was also when the problem of ad fraud exploded. Google even acquired a company (or multiple, if I recon correctly: https://www.ft.com/content/352c7d8e-9acc-11e3-946b-00144feab... ). You had these companies popping up left and right that were snooping on Google and the emerging programmatic advertising environment to see if the websites and the traffic delivered were legit, and there were some scary numbers flying around.

The whole problem kind of got swept under the rug with most advertising ecosystems implementing a checkbox solution for clean traffic, and the web turned mobile user first.

My impression is that ad fraud never disappeared - it just got sanitized and rolled in with the other parts of the ad stack.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#746

Post by seospamsuck »

pkphilip wrote: post #667
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…

[flagged]

This is the correct insight. Google has enough machine learning prowess that they could absolutely offload, with minimal manhours, the creation of a list ranking a bunch of blogspam sites and give them a reverse score by how much they both spam articles or how much they spread the content over the page. Then apply that score to their search result weights.

And I know they could because someone did make that list and posted it here last year.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#747

Post by Certhas »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #408
Eisenstein wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AT&T, GE, AOL, Yahoo, Sony technology (they are a media company now, but they did used to make things that weren't a game console), Time Warner, SGI, Compaq, 3DFx, DEC...

Not only that, most of the other examples are just not at the end of their death spiral yet. Take a look at Windows market share, it's down 20% over the last 10 years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha... And that's just desktop. Microsoft ceded the entire mobile market, which in turn now represents the majority of devices. The majority of the company's profits no longer come from selling W…

All of the companies I cited are hugely profitable. They might not be as large as they once were, or as important, but a business that has non-declining net income in the billions is not in a death spiral. IBM has shrunk a lot, but except for the financial crisis in the 90s, they have been profitable every year, and profits are roughly flat since 2017.

This is certainly a completely different picture than Yahoo for example.

And your argument for Microsoft is that they are in a death spiral because they only have 70% of market share on the desktop, and are shrinking by 2% per year, so in, uh 15 Years they might only have 50% of the market share! Also, please ignore that they successfully diversified their revenue streams to other markets (Cloud).

And your evidence is that they failed to capture the mobile market. While you also argue that Google is in a death spiral when Google is actually the company that won the mobile market.

I think you might be using the term death spiral in an unconventional way here.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#748

Post by raxxorraxor »

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…

Machine learning is probably as much or even more susceptible to SEO spam.

Problem is that the rules of search engines created the dubious field of SEO in the first place. They are not entirely the innocent victim here.

Arcane and intransparent measures get you ahead. So arcane that you instantly see that it does not correspond with quality content at all, which evidently leads to a poor result.

I wish there was an option to hide every commercial news or entertainment outlet completely. Those are of course in on SEO for financial reaesons.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#749

Post by AnthonyMouse »

makeitdouble wrote: post #682
AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one thing that has kept Microsoft afloat is their business oriented part. They are deeply entrenched in any company that needs to use Office and only ever hires Windows admins who won't even look beyond Windows. That is pretty much every non tech small to medium company. When things were shifting to the cloud they were smart enough to make sure it would be their cloud, locking customers even deeper into their own…

To add to this, Microsoft is really really good at understanding businesses, in a way Google will probably never be I think. Having on premise hosting options for Exchange and all their core services is an example of that, even as they're also pushing for 365 in the cloud. I remember them being earlier than GCP to deal with GDPR and the in EU requirements as well but my memory might be failing.

They're starting to lose the thread though.

People use Windows at home and at school and then employers use the same thing because they don't want to retrain people. But the home versions of Windows are becoming so malevolent that they're losing market share. Meanwhile all the things that used to require Windows are becoming web pages and phone apps. You go to a university and it's full of Macbooks and if you see a PC in the CS department there's a good chance it has Linux on it. These are the people who will be choosing what to buy in a few years.

But who cares about the clients anymore, right? They're making money from cloud services. Except their hook is getting people to use Active Directory and Microsoft accounts, which are the things for managing Windows client devices.

It's going to be a while before anybody convinces the accountants to stop using Excel, but for large swathes of employees Windows is no longer relevant, and if you don't need Windows then why do you need Azure instead of AWS or any of the others?

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#750

Post by faeriechangling »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #748
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…

Machine learning is probably as much or even more susceptible to SEO spam. Problem is that the rules of search engines created the dubious field of SEO in the first place. They are not entirely the innocent victim here. Arcane and intransparent measures get you ahead. So arcane that you instantly see that it does not correspond with quality content at all, which evidently leads to a poor result. I wish there was an o…

>I wish there was an option to hide every commercial news or entertainment outlet completely.

There's alway plugins or you can subscribe to Kagi, although I don't think there's any blocklist preconfigured for "all commercial news websites"

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