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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#891

Post by Certhas »

Eisenstein wrote: post #879
Certhas wrote: post #850

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) B…

I used the term "as established as google". In my mind this certainly meant the market has to be established. As long as an industry is brand new and rapidly developing, things are obviously different. Many early market leaders didn't make it in the internet. But in the last ten years, market leaders haven't been failing in the same way.

So no, not changing the rules, but maybe clarifying the point. Situations such as the rise of the internet in the late 90s and early 2000s are the anomaly, not the rule.

Operating Systems and Internet search are roughly the same they were ten years ago. 3d accelerator cards changed immensely in the years when 3dfx failed. Microsoft and Google are not in businesses where younger agile companies that read the changing tides better can quickly supplant them.

And that's why they get a thousand chances to turn things around while printing money with their "death spiralling" business.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#892

Post by Eisenstein »

Certhas wrote: post #891
Eisenstein wrote: post #879

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) B…

I used the term "as established as google". In my mind this certainly meant the market has to be established. As long as an industry is brand new and rapidly developing, things are obviously different. Many early market leaders didn't make it in the internet. But in the last ten years, market leaders haven't been failing in the same way. So no, not changing the rules, but maybe clarifying the point. Situations such a…

Your question is effectively answerable as 'no' if you want to limit it to exactly google like market positions, because they haven't existed before. I was answering with examples of market leaders that fell due to bad top-down decisions.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#893

Post by betageek »

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…

This isn't an article for computer scientists, and I think he covers this pretty well:

"While Levy calls him a “world-class computer scientist who has authored definitive texts in the field,” he also describes Raghavan as “choosing a management track,” which definitely tracks with everything I’ve found about him."

"Despite his history as a true computer scientist with actual academic credentials, Raghavan chose to bulldoze actual workers and replace them with toadies that would make Google more profitable and less useful to the world at large."

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#894

Post by beej71 »

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…

I'm a paying subscriber.

It's not "that much" better for some definitions of "that much".

But they're working on making the best search engine for their customers, and it does have a lot of features for helping make your search better and less ad-driven.

I was trying to find the age of an obscure local lava flow. Google was useless for it. Kagi had it on the third hit. So sometimes it's brilliantly better.

But what I like the most is that their incentives are aligned with mine (because I'm paying them to be).

Google is going to maximize revenue which means making it as shitty as possible without you leaving. How many ads can I cram down their throats before they split? Kagi is also maximizing revenue, but they want to make it as great as possible so you don't leave.

Are the results worth it? It's up to you, really. Try it for free--if you don't miss it after you run out of free searches, then it's not for you.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#895

Post by atif089 »

jaynate wrote: post #599
atif089 wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Using OSS to commoditize complements plays a big role in breaking up big advantages. There is big tech open source consortium working on maps now to commoditize it: https://siliconangle.com/2022/12/15/aws-microsoft-meta-tomto... Not sure it'll work. I think half the advantage comes from the integration across all these tools (maps, search, etc). Have you ever tried to use duckduckgo? It surprised me what I take for g…

I wholeheatedly agree with you. The GMaps experience is vastly superior. Additionally, when I'm referring to Gmaps, I think one of the critical features that I would love to replace with Open Source is Places. With due respect, I find both Google and Yelp a*holes in this area. While OpenStreetMap is really good for mapping, I'm still looking to find(or create) somethign that can supplement OSM with Places/Business data.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#896

Post by CatWChainsaw »

exodust wrote: post #871
CatWChainsaw wrote: post #858

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

If you can't tell what either humor or snark is, you should get off the internet, baby doll.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#897

Post by barfbagginus »

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.

What does a zero cost / zero IP / cooperative model of a Google killer look like?

It can't have ads, and it can't hide any knowledge that exists which could help the user.. even if the knowledge is proprietary.

It must repeal copyright laws by force. It must drain all silos and know all things. And it must utilize the entirety of the library Genesis.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#898

Post by banish-m4 »

godelski wrote: post #490
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…

What's odd to me is how everything is so metricized. Clearly over metricization is the downfall of any system that looks meritocratic. Due to the limitations of metrics and how they are often far easier to game than to reach through the intended means. An example of this I see is how new leaders come in and hit hard to cut costs. But the previous leader did this (and the one before them) so the system/group/company i…

Oh god. The blind faith in reductive, objectivist, rationalist meritocracy that somehow "everything can be measured perfectly" and "whatever happens is completely unbiased as proscribed by a black-and-white, mechanical formula". No, sorry, that's insufficiently holistic in accounting for intangibles and supportive effort, and more of a throwback ideology that should've died in the 1920's. Some degree of discretion is needed because there is no shortcut to "measuring" performance.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#899

Post by banish-m4 »

jaynate wrote: post #591
godelski wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's odd to me is how everything is so metricized. Clearly over metricization is the downfall of any system that looks meritocratic. Due to the limitations of metrics and how they are often far easier to game than to reach through the intended means. An example of this I see is how new leaders come in and hit hard to cut costs. But the previous leader did this (and the one before them) so the system/group/company i…

Agree you have to mix qualitative with the quantitative, but the best metrics systems don't just measure one quantity metric. They should be paired with a quality metric. Example: User Growth & Customer Engagement Have to have user growth and retention. If you looked at just one or the other, you'd be missing half the equation.

Absurdity, unfairness, and failure often result from selective blindness to reality, whether willful or unintentional. Hyperlogical people sometimes lack empathy or an ability to conceive of, to understand, or prefer to trivialize ambiguous situations, politics, biases, human factors, or nonfunctional requirements. Always keep looking for one's own and organizational blind spots.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#900

Post by nebula8804 »

acdha wrote: post #440
munk-a wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think - I hope, rather - that technically minded people who are advocating for the use of ML understand the short comings and hallucinations... but we need to be frank about the fact that the business layer above us (with a few rare exceptions) absolutely does not understand the limitations of AI and views it as a magic box where they type in "Write me a story about a bunny" and get twelve paragraphs of text out. A…

I’m not optimistic on that point: the executive class is very openly salivating at the prospect of mass layoffs, and that means a lot of technical staff aren’t quick to inject some reality – if Gartner is saying it’s rainbows and unicorns, saying they’re exaggerating can be taken as volunteering to be laid off first even if you’re right.

Yeah but what comes after the mass layoffs? Getting hired to clean up the mess that AI eventually creates? Depending on the business it could end up becoming more expensive than if they had never adopted GenAI at all. Think about how many companies hopped on the Big Data Bandwagon when they had nothing even coming close to what "Big Data" actually meant. That wasn't as catastrophic as what AI would do but it still was throwing money in the wrong direction.
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