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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#841

Post by KetoManx64 »

octopusRex wrote: post #777
willvarfar wrote: post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a case can be made that the spam problem can be traced all the way back to Google buying Doubleclick. Its really easy to spot the crap websites that are scaping content-creating websites ... because they monetize by adding ads. If Google was _only_ selling ads on the search results page, then it could promote websites that are sans ads. Instead, it is incentivised to push users to websites that contain ads, b…

We need a Reverse Google search that will weed out the garbage.

https://kagi.com/ de-prioritizes SEO ad sites and also lets you blacklist sites from your search reaults. Never going back to google after trying it

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#842

Post by cynicalsecurity »

arromatic wrote: post #22

Question : Why larry and brin not caring about it ? They built one of world's best and biggest company and it's dying . Even if they did not care about that , their money is still tied to google stock right ? That should raise some concern from them.

Maybe they know that the AI is going to destroy Google anyway, same as any other search engine, so why bother.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#843

Post by slingnow »

sn41 wrote: post #610

Great article. But the author can't be serious about no one knowing who Prabhakar Raghavan is. He is, for instance, the co-author of the definitive text on randomized algorithms [Motwani and Raghavan]. He has also been a well-respected database researcher for many years. In a previous avatar, Raghavan was a pure theoretical computer scientist. As a student, he won the best student paper in FOCS, the Machtey award, wh…

> But the author can't be serious about no one knowing who Prabhakar Raghavan is. He is, for instance, the co-author of the definitive text on randomized algorithms [Motwani and Raghavan]. He has also been a well-respected database researcher for many years.

Surely YOU can't be serious. The author was very clearly comparing this guy to much more famous and heavily derided figures like Musk, Zuckerberg, etc. I don't think co-authoring a text on randomized algorithms gets you the same notoriety as being the head of Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter...

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#844

Post by AnthonyMouse »

makeitdouble wrote: post #768
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's the ease of use for medium customers. Large customers have Linux servers with full-time staff to write custom code and do whatever they want because they have their own resources; Facebook doesn't use Azure. Small customers buy a Macbook or Chromebook or tablet and have a gmail address and host their website on WordPress or one of those awful (but easy to use) web host proprietary site builders.

Medium businesses are big enough to want to have their own email domain but not big enough to want to implement their own spam filter, so they turn to the likes of Amazon and Google and Microsoft. Then Microsoft's advantage is they can manage and integrate with your Windows devices. Otherwise they're just doing price competition with every other hosting company. People who aren't even using Active Directory start to wonder why they should pay extra for SQL Server instead of using Mariadb on Linux, and in turn why they shouldn't put that VM on AWS unless Microsoft cuts them a better deal. (Which is presumably what happened with Apple, but offering long-term discounts is not how you make a lot of money.)

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#845

Post by mulmen »

ikrenji wrote: post #648
mulmen wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, no, it isn’t. Nobody wanted a plane that suddenly turns into a lawn dart or falls apart in the air. The MAX was short term thinking on Boeing’s part. A foolish mistake in the aerospace industry. Boeing was a few years behind Airbus. Now they are a decade behind and tarnished their reputation.

wasn't max a record selling plane? nothing wrong with modernising a 737 variant. plenty wrong with putting MCAS in it which goes haywire when its sole sensor fails

What’s wrong with modernizing a 737 is exactly what happened. The design has already been modified to the limit. There is nowhere to go from here. Boeing spent the money to develop the MAX but they still have to develop a new plane to replace it. In the long term it will cost more than just building the plane they actually needed.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#846

Post by chrisallenlane »

KetoManx64 wrote: post #841
octopusRex wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a Reverse Google search that will weed out the garbage.

https://kagi.com/ de-prioritizes SEO ad sites and also lets you blacklist sites from your search reaults. Never going back to google after trying it

I've also been using (and paying for) Kagi for a few months now. It's fantastic.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#847

Post by sailfast »

juped wrote: post #376
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.

Using a pejorative is not an "ad hominem".

Good point. Replacing with pejorative would likely have been better wording potentially to get my point across but simply having held a role in the past as a person does not automatically associate you with all the sins of anyone ever in that role, so I see it as a personal attack unrelated to the point of the article.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#848

Post by verzali »

Ambolia wrote: post #728
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…

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.

Yes, this is a thing I find really frustrating about Google. Especially as I often search for old news stories to find out what people were saying on a topic a few years ago in order to give some context to more recent stories.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#849

Post by verzali »

atif089 wrote: post #476
barfbagginus wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I formed a worker co-op - but it's just me! And I do CAD reverse engineering, nothing really life-giving. I would love to join a co-op producing real human survival values in an open source way. Where would you suggest that I look for leads on that kind of organization?

Let's start with replacing Google. Count me in. While DDG, Brave, Kagi etc are working generously to replace Google search. The other areas that I think get less attention and needs to be targeted to successfully dismantle them and their predatory practices are Google maps and Google docs. Maps are hard because it requires a lot of resources and money and whatever but replacing docs should be relatively easier.

OpenStreetMaps is pretty decent, and I find it better than Google Maps in most cases.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#850

Post by Certhas »

Eisenstein wrote: post #315
Certhas wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any examples of this actually playing out with a company as established as Google? You can read comments like this on many companies... Microsoft (70B$ income), Meta (40B$), Oracle (8.5B$), IBM(7.5B$), SAP (6B$), yet none of them seem to ever actually enter the predicted death spiral. And the internet isn't new anymore. There is no vast landscape of unexplored new technological possibilities, and no garage start up w…

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...

AT&T: 15B$ net income, world largest telecom company. #13.0n Fortune 500.

GE, while a reasonable example of a company that declined severely from its peak, was still generating 9B$ in income on 2023 before being split in better focused and profitable successors.

AOL/Yahoo were never dominant in a mature market. They were early to the Internet, but this was an uncharacteristically volatile time with an exponentially growing market.

Sony is also a leading manufacturer in several tech sectors (second largest camera, largest premium TVs). 6B$ net income and rising.

3DFx was never dominant in a mature field but, again, early in a nascent one. They collapsed quickly, not through some highly profitable extended death spiral.

Compaq was never dominant in a highly profitable field. Their market share peaked at 14%.

DEC might be a genuine example, they were never the top of the field, but they did not manage to adapt and turn things around when the world moved in a different direction. Compare to IBM who _were_ in a dominant position in the same field, and have leveraged that position into a sustainable and steady, if smaller and less groundbreaking, business.

Google might be in trouble (relatively speaking) if LLMs disrupt search, but they are not close to being in trouble from being outcompeted in search itself.

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