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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#871

Post by exodust »

CatWChainsaw wrote: post #858
dpkirchner wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On the bright side, he got away with it because he managed to sell a court on the idea that it was just an endearing nickname, so now we can call also Musk a pedo guy without fear of legal reprisal.

The court saw it for what it was. An immature spat between two grown men who should have known better. If your takeaway is that YOU can now use that slur against others, it doesn't say much about your position, which I presume is anchored to "MuskBadMan".

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#872

Post by friendzis »

krick wrote: post #867
chrisallenlane wrote: post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Feels a bit silly to ask such an anecdotal question to somebody I don't know, but is it really better than Google? If you don't consider all the privacy yadda-yadda issues. I mean more like the size of the index, how quickly it updates things, how good is it at actual searching (like finding an almost exact quote which happens to exist on only one obscure site on the internet), stuff like that. I could also mention s…

> Also, Google is immensely better at knowing local shops and finding products.

Tangential, but this is precisely the "problem" with Google search. Whatever the internal decision-making process was, Google search at some point embraced race to the bottom incentivizing outspending others, either by paying for ads or showing ads. This race is ultimately won by content scrapers/generators slapping ads on top and businesses selling stuff.

Anecdotally, there is a pet supply store near me. It's nearly impossible to find on Google maps. If I zoom over the shopping mall this particular store does not appear, if I search for "pet store" it does not appear. Only if I do search for "petstore inc." it appears in results and map. So Google knows about the store, but actively tries to hide it, presumably because Google does not make money off it.

> I have to switch to Google, because it is seriously better at updating the index

On one hand yes, Google is in some cases really quick at updating the index with new entries. However, at the same time it is equally good at updating the index with removals making old content very hard to find.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#873

Post by friendzis »

underdeserver wrote: post #696
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…

I've heard this argument again and again, but I never see any explanation as to why SEO is suddenly in the lead in this cat-and-mouse game. They were trying ever since Google got 90%+ market share. I think it's more likely that Google stopped really caring.

Well, it's in the name. SEO is a fancy name for trying to game whatever heuristics Google employs to form their SERPs. It's just that at some point those heuristics shifted from rewarding "quality content" as defined by the disgruntled towards enshitification.

There are various kinds of SEO - internal: technical, on-page and external. A long time ago Google had an epiphany that instead of trying to make sense out of sites themselves they could offload that effort to website administrators and started ranking pages how well they implement technical elements helping Google index the web. For a very long time that was synonymous with white-hat SEO. Since Google search was in part based on web-of-links, various shady tactics to inflate number of indexed backlinks and boost rankings. That was black-hat SEO.

These days Google search puts tremendous focus on on-page SEO. So much that as long as the internal structure of a site is indexable (no dead links, internal backlinks, meta info) it is typically better to hire copywriters spitting out LLM-like robotic mumblings than to try and optimize further.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#874

Post by friendzis »

Terr_ wrote: post #501
ytdytvhxgydvhh wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t help but read that and think of Tesla’s Autopilot and “Full Self Driving”. For some comparisons they claim to be safer per mile than human drivers … just don’t think too much about the error modes where the occasional stationary object isn’t detected and you plow into it at highway speed.

Or in some cases, the Tesla slows down, then changes its mind and starts accelerating again to run over child-like obstructions. Ex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URpTJ1Xpjuk&t=293s

Tesla's driver assist since the very beginning to now seems to not posses object/decision permanence.

Here you can see it detected an obstacle (as evidenced by info on screen), made a decision to stop, however it failed to detect existence of the object right in front of the car, promptly forgot about the object and decision to stop and happily accelerated over the obstacle. When tackling a more complex intersection it can happily change its mind with regards to exit lane multiple times, e.g. it will plan to exit on one side of a divider, replan to exit onto upcoming traffic, replan again.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#875

Post by Certhas »

makeitdouble wrote: post #778
Certhas wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think many of us are underestimating Microsoft because of how crappy Windows is and keeps being. But as a business entity they've been ferocious from the start, and succeeded through sheer perseverance where Google gave up after some tepid tries. Xbox would have been killed by Google in the first year. Exchange would have stayed in beta for a decade, and Office365 would have had no support if it was in GSuite. If G…

I think that's a valid point. Maybe Google culturally will not be able to turn around. Not because crappy product, but because of lack of focus.

That said, Google is still printing money and increasing profits and revenues. Nothing like falling profits (or even losses) to create some pressure to focus. DEC would be the example of a company that failed to do so.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#876

Post by barfbagginus »

dekhn wrote: post #859
barfbagginus wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait so because different people have different concepts of honesty you reject the concept of honesty wholesale? Like surely you have some concept of honesty that you strive for... Unless you're like a sociopath? I'm not saying it would be wrong to be a sociopath or to genuinely have no concept of an honest enterprise. I'm just trying to understand if you are truly amoral here, and that's why you can't formulate the…

I stopped reading at "I have asked GPT4". Write your own words.

For your benefit the following text was handwritten:

All the words you saw previously were written with my permission and vetted by me. I took pains to make sure that every ethical concept was good. And I told you that I was using AI. I encourage you to read the principles and benefit from them.

But if that's not good enough for you, I invite you to go kick rocks. It's your choice and your life.

Personally I judge writing on its own merits, or I am making the genetic fallacy.

If I cannot critically analyze text regardless of source, I will lose opportunities to learn and benefit from knowledge. We are entering a time where both good and bad text will be written by AI. We will need to be able to know the difference.

Good luck and have a good day.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#877

Post by Karolis_K »

> [...] the damage they’ve done to society. Because Google is the ultimate essential piece of online infrastructure, just like power lines and water mains are in the physical realm.

Just use Kagi search (or also probably there are some other alternatives) and at the end it will end up as a good thing for society.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#878

Post by barfbagginus »

joenot443 wrote: post #866
barfbagginus wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You shouldn't use LLMs to generate huge walls of text like this. It's super bad taste.

Your concern about the long form or simplistic style of AI text is valid, but I feel that it was warranted here. The conflation between marxian theory and failed communist states requires some subtlety to unpack, and without AI help, I would struggle to find the effort to do it justice. The text is intentionally a little simpler and expanded to make it easy to read.

As it stands, the text is comprehensive, truthful, informative, and attacks the issue at hand in a fair way.

I am happy with it.

I propose AI walls of text are bad form when they contain hallucinations and bad arguments, and are needlessly long and bungling. I hear your criticism that it was too verbose, but again, I feel that was necessary.

I propose that it's good enough.

Good day and good luck scaling artificial walls of text.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#879

Post by Eisenstein »

Certhas wrote: post #850
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...

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 g…

Are you really doing this?

AT&T: today is not AT&T. The name was bought. It used to be Cingular.

GE: so your point is that it is a good example.

AOL/Yahoo: A 'mature market'? Are you making up rules so you can disqualify them?

Sony today only innovates in image sensors. They are a financial and entertainment company. Who cares if they sell the most 'premium TVs', this is the company created (off the top of my head) Betamax, CDs, DVDs, Minidiscs, Trinitrons, and made the best consumer tech in the world -- consistently.

3Dfx was the leader of an industry that is now lead by nVidia. That industry wasn't as big then, but everyone knew it would be and it was theirs to lose.

Compaq was the market leader in PC sales in the 90s.

DEC: so, it is a good example.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#880

Post by hongsy »

mrkeen wrote: post #730
datadeft wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do not need to. Counting how many links are pointing to each document is sufficient if you know how long that link existed (spammers link creation time distribution is widely differnt to natural link creation times, and many other details that you can use to filter out spammers)

> You do not need to. Ranking means deciding which document (A or B) is better to return to the user when queried. Not writing a traditional forward-algorithm to rank these documents implies one of the following: - You write a "backward" algorithm (ML, regression, statistics, whatever you want to call it). - You don't use algorithms to solve it. An army of humans chooses the rankings in real time. - You don't rank do…

What's qie and qde?
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