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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#751

Post by faeriechangling »

re5i5tor wrote: post #639
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…

Hard disagree. As another reply mentions, just compare the alternatives such as Kagi that aren’t breaking search by pursuing ad growth.

Kagi isn't amazing, it's just not bad and it really makes plain how badly Google has degraded into an ad engine. All it takes to beat Google is giving okay quality search results.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#752

Post by otikik »

ytdytvhxgydvhh wrote: post #477
potatolicious wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a good lesson for the new AI cycle we're in now. Often inserting ML subsystems into your broader system just makes it go from "deterministically but fixably bad" to "mysteriously and unfixably bad".

I think that’ll define the industry for the coming decades. I used to work in machine translation and it was the same. The older rules-based engines that were carefully crafted by humans worked well on the test suite and if a new case was found, a human could fix it. When machine learning came on the scene, more “impressive” models that were built quicker came out - but when a translation was bad no one knew how to f…

Perhaps using a ML to craft the deterministic rules and then have a human go over them is the sweet spot.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#753

Post by rugina »

ytdytvhxgydvhh wrote: post #477
potatolicious wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a good lesson for the new AI cycle we're in now. Often inserting ML subsystems into your broader system just makes it go from "deterministically but fixably bad" to "mysteriously and unfixably bad".

I think that’ll define the industry for the coming decades. I used to work in machine translation and it was the same. The older rules-based engines that were carefully crafted by humans worked well on the test suite and if a new case was found, a human could fix it. When machine learning came on the scene, more “impressive” models that were built quicker came out - but when a translation was bad no one knew how to f…

I think NM translation was broken all along. Not in the neural network part but in choosing the right answer. https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.398.pdf

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#754

Post by fuzztester »

nox101 wrote: post #716
Aerroon wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The relations between human interests are too esoteric for current ML classifiers to understand. I would go further and say that it is impossible . Human interests are contextual and change over time, sometimes in the span of minutes. Imagine that all the videos on the internet would be on one big video website. You would watch car videos, movie trailers, listen to music, and watch porn in one place. Could the algo…

I think there are things they could do and that ML could maybe help? * They could let me directly enter my interests instead of guessing * They could classify videos by expertise (tags or ML) and stop recommending beginner videos to someone who expresses an interest in expert videos. * They could let me opt out of recommending videos I've already watched * They could separate sites into larger categories and stop rec…

Those are some good suggestions, particularly the first one:

>let me directly enter my interests

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#755

Post by blippage »

The problem is, sites like DuckDuckGo and Gibiru are not much better.

There's loads and loads of paywall sites appearing near the top, which is pretty useless to me. There must surely be a market out there for a search engine that skips over this nonsense.

One feature that would be useful is a site filter; a link you can click to remove future results from the site.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#756

Post by faeriechangling »

freediver wrote: post #583
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I definitely noticed and it's a huge improvement. Shame google doesn't make any money from these sites so they won't ever bother promoting them.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#757

Post by robertlagrant »

barfbagginus wrote: post #742
robertlagrant wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I agree with the theory in the sense that I agree with the statement "Wouldn't it be nice if you had a genie that grants you wishes?"

I disagree with I think every implementation and its death toll, and with the general idea that we should be forming groups to violently gang up on other groups. Whether it's national socialism killing the citizens of other countries and taking their stuff to give to the government to apportion, or regular communism killing the citizens of other classes (classes defined by the communists) and taking their stuff to give to the government to apportion. Centralised economic control can easily get bad in small organisations, but at least the blast radius is limited. When it's in the hands of the government, who also have all the other powers, it never seems to work out well.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#758

Post by reverius42 »

dbingham wrote: post #579
banish-m4 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The hard part about starting worker owned co-ops is financing. We need good financing systems for them. People/firms who are willing to give loans for a reasonable interest, but on the scale of equity investment in tech start ups.

The problem is risk —- most new businesses will go under. Who’s going to take on that unreasonable risk without commensurate reward (high interest loan rate, if any, or equity).

Co-ops could go the angel/VC route for funding if they don’t give up a controlling share.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#759

Post by robertlagrant »

jrflowers wrote: post #539
etc-hosts wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zitron spends paragraphs trying to convince the reader that Google Search sucks now mostly because of the efforts of one person. I don't understand the correlation isn't causation argument in this context. If no one ever tried to convince others of their thesis, with numerous arguments, what's the point of writing?

Robert’s thesis is that there are smart people (like Lisa and himself) that agree that outcomes — no matter how specific or documented — should never be used to criticize managers, and hopelessly stupid people (like Homer) that do not take that position by default. He could have said “perhaps there is a disconnection here” but rather opted to volunteer that he is in fact Very Smart and others are Very Dumb. With a po…

> Robert’s thesis is that there are smart people (like Lisa and himself) that agree that outcomes — no matter how specific or documented — should never be used to criticize managers, and hopelessly stupid people (like Homer) that do not take that position by default.

None of the statements in this is the case, other than that there are smart people.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#760

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Certhas wrote: post #747
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…

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 e…

> All of the companies I cited are hugely profitable.

You cited them because they are hugely profitable, ignoring the ones that are already defunct. And the entire premise is that a company can simultaneously be posting profits while doing the thing that will ultimately destroy them.

> 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!

Platforms have a network effect. They're doing so poorly that the network effect from having 90% market share isn't enough to prevent them from losing market share. But now they only have the network effect from 70% market share, which makes it even easier for customers to switch. That's how you get a death spiral.

> Also, please ignore that they successfully diversified their revenue streams to other markets (Cloud).

Which are in turn dependent on customers using Windows so they need Active Directory etc. See also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40142351

> 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.

It is unquestionably the case that Microsoft lost the mobile market, which is the larger market. Android has the most worldwide market share, but Android is free to use and generates revenue for Google only to the extent that people want their services. If people stop wanting their services and switch to e.g. another search engine, how does it save Google from this even if they're using Android?

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