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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#781

Post by someguydave »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #674
someguydave wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

relevant to the grandparent’s point: I am demoing FSD in my Tesla and what I find really annoying is that the old Autopilot allowed you to select a maximum speed that the car will drive. Well, on “FSD” apparently you have no choice but to hand full longitudinal control over to the model. I am probably the 0.01% of Tesla drivers who have the computer chime when I exceed the speed limit by some offset. Very regularly,…

I have no experience with Tesla and their self-driving features. When you wrote "chill" mode, I assume it means the lowest level of aggressiveness. Did you contact Tesla to complain the car is still too aggressive? There should be a mode that tries to drive exactly the speed limit, where reasonable -- not over or under.

Yes there is a “chill” mode that refers to maximum allowed acceleration and “chill mode” that refers to the level if aggressiveness with autopilot. With both turned on the car still exceeds the speed limit by quite a bit. I am sure Tesla is aware.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#782

Post by sumedh »

istillwritecode wrote: post #585

I know Prabhakar. He was my manager at Google Research and he tried to recruit me to Yahoo in 2005, but I went to Google instead. This article stinks of hatred and misunderstanding about how Google works. It's possible that Prabhakar bears some responsibility for the decline of search experience, but it sounds over the top to assign all blame to him as a manager.

> assign all blame to him as a manager.

Can you share who are the others we can blame?

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#783

Post by gverrilla »

alovelace wrote: post #673
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.

Just because you're an atheist doesn't mean you won't engage with religious content though. YT rewards all kinds of engagement not just positive ones. I.e. if you leave a snide remark or just a dislike on a religious short that still counts as engagement.

Yes I know, not the case, and before you ask, I also don't engage with atheist videos. But that's only one example: the recommendations are really bad in a lot of ways for me.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#784

Post by DanielHB »

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…

> So blaming Raghavan for what happened at Yahoo! is just stupid.

He joined yahoo in 2005, if my memory serves correctly yahoo was already pretty much IBM-dead by then.

The downfall of yahoo was due to the hard push of popup ads in the late 90s and very early 2000s. Much like the google history of today though, maximising metrics at the cost of user experience. But it all happened in yahoo way before he joined.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#785

Post by dpkirchner »

mining wrote: post #500
dingnuts wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is my experience as well. sometimes I accidentally search Google and I find it extremely annoying and the results to be demonstrably worse most of the time the example I like to show people is searching "how to fix a leaky faucet" Kagi shows helpful answers and videos from sites like This Old House. Google shows ads for plumbers near me. If I had wanted a plumber, I would've searched for that.

Searching "how to fix a leaky faucet" on Google turned up the page from "This Old House" immediately (top 3 results, top 2 were wikiHow and a YouTube video that seemed OK at a glance). I'm not sure why my personal results are often so much better than posts like this one whenever I do the experiment - maybe it's based on location?

Do you use an ad blocker? I can confirm the results: plumber ads that extend below the fold, followed by one useful article from Home Depot, then a useless "people also ask" blob of links, some videos (likely useful, faucets aren't complex), and another useless "people also" blob.

I am in the US, if that matters.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#786

Post by dpkirchner »

exodust wrote: post #700
Willish42 wrote: post #536

> And in my next newsletter, I'm going to walk you through how a very specific kind of managerial mindset has poisoned Silicon Valley, making career failures unfathomably rich while your favorite tech products decay. I look forward to this one as somebody with a personally vested interest! More seriously, Ed Zitron's podcast Better Offline is great for those who enjoyed this article. I love his opinionated perspectiv…

A glowing endorsement, but deserved? Under "more like this" we find multiple hit-pieces by Zitron, hating on one man. You guessed it, Musk Bad Man. Never heard of Zitron, but I won't be back. His bitterness is on verge of unhealthy obsession. Oddly word-stuffed rants, sounds like he spent ages constructing different ways to criticise Musk. > " He has spent $44 billion in an attempt to make people love him only to be…

Musk is objectively a bad man, though. Remember when he called someone a "pedo guy" because that someone dares to disagree with his proposal for saving trapped people? Inexcusable.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#787

Post by DanielHB »

TrackerFF wrote: post #718
lupire wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite thing about McKinsey is that they are hated for 2 reasons: 1. Allegedly ruining companies with mismanagement. 2. Making companies people don't like too successful. That's more an indictment of the business skills of the critics than McKinsey.

Just a side note The main criticisms of McKinsey (and strategy/management consulting firms in general) are: 1) They can (and have/will) consult both sides, even though there's a massive conflict of interest. It's like having the same law firm represent both plaintiff and defendant. This is the most egregious of the bunch. 2) They have deep ties with governments and the private sector, and leverage this bridge to reac…

[dead]

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#788

Post by DanielHB »

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?

Google is still really good with image search (while duck duck go is awful at it), I guess the ads team don't really care about image search that much to try to min-max it to death.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#789

Post by jesuslop »

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…

Much agreed, and this is prompting me to experiment with other search engines to see if they cut off also the interesting humans sites. With todays google I feel herded.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#790

Post by foobarian »

antihipocrat wrote: post #580
foobarian wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search engines worked a lot better when the internet had a higher SNR in the link graph. Nowadays it's an ocean of SEO sewage and no search engine can do a good job. It's not that Google ruined search by showing ads; it has genuinely become a harder problem. There is not much that can be done except set up a federated darknet where any commercial activity is banned; otherwise, the incentives are all wrong.

The SEO spam domains could be blocked or de-prioritized by google. However, these SEO links generate significant income for Google via advertising. When OKRs are tied to revenue, no executive is going to sign off on a change that reduces it

Even worse, besides spam domains there are countless legit enterprises that like to be at the top of results that create bad incentives.

Imagine the community manages to set up a walled off non-commercial web that gains enough popularity to be interesting to advertisers. Who would be in charge of such a thing? And what would they do when Coca Cola showed up at the front door with ten million dollars in a briefcase? Federated would not be much better, they just need to pay the most influential nodes.

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