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US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

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Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is now a basic utility. Unless you don't believe in basic public goods, allowing equitable access to the utility benefits everyone, especially businesses.

Public goods is an economics term with an actual meaning, and it has nothing to do with public utilities. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/public-good.asp

> it has nothing to do with public utilities.

This doesn't follow from the linked article. Taxes can be levied in various ways, oftentimes related to usage. Involving a private entity doesn't suddenly change the nature of the thing. There's a marked difference between a sack of flour and my electric meter.

We as a society decide to make certain things into public goods. This is frequently the choice for natural monopolies.

Critiquing the article you linked - when taken literally non-rivalrous applies to approximately nothing. Non-excludability is simply a matter of law, which is a matter of what the voting public wants.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why do we see all of these alt search engines and SEO services building out independent indexes? Why don't the competitors cooperate in this fashion already?

Because everyone worships Thiel's "competition is for losers" and dreams of being a monopoly. Monopolies being the logical outcome of a deregulated environment, for which these companies lobby.

Throughout history there are very few monopolies and they don't normally last that long; that is unless they get are granted special privileges by the government.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hosting costs are so minimal today that I don't think crawling is a natural monopoly. How much would it really cost a site to be crawled by 100 search engines?

A potentially shocking amount depending on the desired freshness if the bot isn’t custom tailored per site. I worked at a job posting site and Googlebot would nearly take down our search infrastructure because it crawled jobs via searching rather than the index. Bots are typically tuned to work with generic sites over crawling efficiently.

Where is the cost coming from? Wouldn't a crawler mostly just accessing cached static assets served by CDN?

And what do you mean by your search infrastructure? Are you talking about elasticsearch or some equivalent?

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#395

The real killer is that Google perfected the ad-paid model, and launched an entire ecosystem on top of it Paid competitors cannot compete because people won't pay. People want the death of Google because people hate ads and tracking. Ultimately it is an everyone loses situation. No one is going to fly in a replace Google without either 1.) Charging a monthly sub or 2.) Invasive (yet most profitable) ad tracking. This…

Google doesn't own all of ads though, only search ads. Facebook nets $70 billion per year with an ad system that prints golden bricks. No-one cares how it works due to it makes so much money. 80% of shares are held by institutions.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#396
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public goods is an economics term with an actual meaning, and it has nothing to do with public utilities. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/public-good.asp

Interesting distinction! Utilities and infrastructure can be considered public goods insofar as they have the characteristics of non-rivalry and non-excludability, meaning that one person's use of them does not diminish another person's ability to use them and it is difficult to prevent others from using them even if they have not contributed to their provision. However, utilities are typically excludable (service ca…

Fair, definitionally they are entirely distinct. In the real world, the concepts interact. The number one in distinct from the number two, but they relate and interact in a vast number of ways.

As it relates to Google search, I think it is very difficult to construct an argument that search is a natural monopoly. There's no limitations on parallel processes the way there are with roads or railroads or electric infrastructure. In fact, people have access to a long list of competitors at all times.

You can make it much better case that they are engaging in monopolistic practices, which is a claim very different from a natural constraint

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#398
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But when AT&T had a monopoly it funded Bell Labs which was responsible for much innovation. Then AT&T was shut down and Bell Labs went away. If we take your argument seriously then AT&T shouldn’t have been dismantled. But it was a good thing AT&T was dismantled. It helped lead to the modern internet. By your logic all Rockefeller had to do in the early 20th century was set up a lab to do basic research and then Stand…

“Monopolies should be broken up” doesn’t imply we should disincentivize research though, does it?

No. And?

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#399
post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you used Kagi or Google recently? Kagi works way better.

Then why do they want Google's search index?

Crawling the web is costly. I assume it's cheaper to use the results from someone else's crawling. I don't know what Kagi is using to argue that they should have access to Google's indexes, but I'd guess it's some form of anti trust.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be you $1 that in five to ten years there will be zero "AI" players replacing search. But that's a different topic than this one.

Google themselves are trying to figure this out, with the first (top placement) of search results showing their Gemini AI Response, at least for me. I read this as an attempt to keep users on Google instead of asking Chat GPT or other some other AI. What's your take on that?

Every AI chatbot to date suffers from the "Film expert" effect. That is when a script writer presents data from an "expert" in a movie or show to the audience in response to some information need on the part of the other characters. Writers are really good at making it sound credible. When an audience member experiences this interchange, generally they have one of two experiences. Either they know nothing about the subject (or the subject is made up like warp drive nacelle engineering) and they nod along at the response and factor it into their understanding of the story being told. Or, they do know a lot about the subject and the glaring inaccuracies jolt them out of the story temporarily as the suspension of disbelief is damaged.

LLMs write in an authoritative way because that is how the material they have been trained on writes. Because there is no "there" there, an LLM has no way of evaluating the accuracy of the answer it just generated. People who "search" using an LLM in order to get information about a topic have a better than even chance of getting something that is completely false, and if they don't have the foundation to recognize its false may incorporate that false information into their world view. That becomes a major embarrassment later when they regurgitate that information, or act on that information in some way, that comes back to bite them.

Gemini has many examples of things it has presented authoritatively that are stochastic noise. The current fun game is to ask "Why do people say ..." and create some stupid thing like "Too many cats spoil the soup." That generates an authoritative sounding answer from Gemini that is just stupid. Gemini can't say "I don't know, I've never seen anything that says people say that."

As companies push these things out into more and places, more and more people will get the experience of believing something false because some LLM told them it was true. And like that friend of yours who always has an answer for every question you ask, but you keep finding out a bunch of them are just bullshit, you will rely on that information less and less. And eventually, like your buddy with all the answers, you stop asking them questions you actually want the answer too.

I'm not down on "LLMs" per se, but I do not believe there is any evidence that they can be relied on for anything. The only thing I have seen, so far, that they can do well is help someone struggling with a blank page get started. That's because more people than not struggle with starting from a blank page but have no trouble correcting something that is wrong, or re-writing it into something.

"Search" is multifaceted. Blekko found a great use case for reference librarians. They would have paid Blekko to provide them an index of primary sources that they could use. The other great use is shopping if you can pair it with your social network. (Something Blekko suggested to Facebook but Zuck was really blind to that one) Blekko had a demo where you could say, "Audi car dealer" and it would give you the results ranked by your friend's ratings on their service. I spent a lot of time at Blekko denying access to the index by criminals who were searching for vulnerable WordPress plugins or e-commerce shopping carts. Chat GPT is never going to give you a list of all sites on the Internet running a vulnerable version of Wordpress :-).

So my take is the LLM isn't a replacement for search and efforts to make it so will stagnate and die leaving "Search Classic" to take up the slack.

If you trained a model on a well vetted corpus and gave it the tools to say it didn't know, I could see it as being a better "textbook" then a physical textbook. But it still needs to know what it doesn't know.

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