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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#761

Post by barfbagginus »

robertlagrant wrote: post #757
barfbagginus wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#762

Post by baryphonic »

raincole wrote: post #698
baryphonic wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you read the article this thread is about? To summarize it: Google reverted an algorithm that detected SEO spams in 2019. (Note that I never work for Google and I don't know whether it's true or not. It's just what this article says.)

I wasn't responding to the article; I was responding to the claim that Google's results are bad because of all the SEO. It's a claim I've heard from Google apologists including some people I know at Google. I think it's nonsense both for the reasons I stated and for the reasons enumerated in the article.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#763

Post by specialist »

greg_V wrote: post #745
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 s…

Exactly.

How much of (online) advertising is legit? Does any one know?

What would a "healthy" ad ecosystem look like? What should the the FTC (and advertisers) be working towards?

Eliminate any potential conflicts of interest? Bust up vertical integration (eg search & ads must remain separate companies)? Independent verification, as best able (eg like Nielsen does for ratings)?

Or maybe we determine (digital) ads based biz models are irredeemable, and we figure something else out.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#764

Post by deepGem »

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…

This explodes for search terms dealing with questions related to bugs or issues or how to dos. Almost all top results are YT videos, each of which will follow the same pattern. First 10 secs garbage followed by request for subscribe and/or sponsorship content then followed by what you want.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#766

Post by karma_pharmer »

bitwize wrote: post #453
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?

ML is somewhere between the new SOAP and the new cryptocurrency.

Dear sir, may I interest you in the initial coin airdrop of WSDLCoin? It is going straight to the moon.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#767

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 »

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?

Yandex is great although it's degrading daily from AI spam (linked-in being the worst culprit).

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#768

Post by makeitdouble »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #749
makeitdouble wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 P…

> if you don't need Windows then why do you need Azure instead of AWS or any of the others?

I don't have enough insight, but there's more to it than Windows/Microsoft services tie up. It's clearly not the ease of use for small customers, it could be the contract making, or something else that makes it better deal for businesses beyond just the cost bundling.

For instance I remember Apple hosting iCloud on Azure. And there's a few other big players going with Microsoft, especially retail chains who can't touch anything Amazon, and don't trust Google.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#770

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #641
binarymax wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Sony did a rather short-lived modular camera phone.

It had a magnetic mount, where you could snap on external lenses.

I'm pretty sure they still have some variant of the concept, except that it's an external camera that uses your phone as a viewfinder.

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