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Google search's death by a thousand cuts

matt-rickard.com

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Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#151

Post by llamaLord »

jnurmine wrote: post #95
pupppet wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man can you imagine Yahoo, playing the long game, brings back their user-managed indexes and becomes the dominant search engine again.

I might pay like max. 3 EUR a year for this to get a search engine that gives the good results without ads, SEO spam and bogus clone sites. That amount of money is probably more than Google now makes from my online presence because I adblock, block 3rd party cookies, tend to click "block" to everything including the idiotic "legitimate concern" and never ever click on ads.

Can't remember exactly where I saw it, but last number I saw said that Google makes ~$12 a year per user. Which begs the question... why have they not atleast tried a "Google Premium".

Fuck it, I'd pay $15 a year to have a Google search that puts as much effort into finding me the shit I actually want as Google does today in serving me BS ads I never pay attention to.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#152

Post by Grimblewald »

dash2 wrote: post #137
noizejoy wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the history of humanity, intellectual property is a relatively recent phenomenon. A lot of technology and culture was built without such “protection”. I sometimes wonder how recent history would have played out without copyrights and patents.

Yes, but in the history of humanity, economic growth of above 0.1% a year is also relatively recent. One of the things that C18 radicals insisted upon was a decent system of IP.

Id argue we're likely relating economic growth (which is measured by contended metrics) to the boom in quality of life we've seen. The problem with this is that the improvements in materials chemistry that have allowed for all these magical things was on the cusp of happening with or without IP. The drive for developing an IP system was more out of necessity in order to capitalize on the coming boom than it was to help that boom occur.

Case in point: look how far LLM's have come since llama hit the public sphere vs. how far organisations like google managed to get, with more time and more resources at their disposal.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#153

Post by explodingwaffle »

dash2 wrote: post #137
noizejoy wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the history of humanity, intellectual property is a relatively recent phenomenon. A lot of technology and culture was built without such “protection”. I sometimes wonder how recent history would have played out without copyrights and patents.

Yes, but in the history of humanity, economic growth of above 0.1% a year is also relatively recent. One of the things that C18 radicals insisted upon was a decent system of IP.

C18 radicals?

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#154

Post by Llamamoe »

Semaphor wrote: post #87
superasn wrote: post #14

The funny thing is the site which should have been removed like the of Stackoverflow spam clones, or sites like Canva and Pinterest that make thousands of similar looking pages with slightly different heading are still allowed and rank on Google. Also hate the top 10 pages whenever you search the best something, like best domain name registrar. I don't want to read a spam blog post with affiliate links, I wish google…

> Pinterest Kagi recently released a leaderboard for per-domain customization: https://i.imgur.com/ViLamx7.png They are 2nd for "lowered" and first for "blocked".

Kagi is amazing but the costs are very non-negligible. :F

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#155

Post by AlecSchueler »

wpietri wrote: post #42
Quekid5 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, same for me. It really seems high-quality search is fundamentally in opposition to serving ads, alas. (At least once every page in existence probably serves ads via the search operator's network.)

Totally. Advertising is fundamentally about distracting someone so you can put money in your pocket without regard to the impact on that someone. I have a lot of complaints about, say, McDonald's, but they make their money through giving people something of value to them. Advertising legitimizes the making of money in a way unrelated to value delivery. (The same is true about a lot of finance.) When you combine that…

Aren't McDonald's one of the biggest advertisers in the world? They sell poor quality food on the basis of brand recognition.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#156

Post by llamaLord »

jkukul wrote: post #104
wodenokoto wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think they removed the results from index, but I believe they started searching for vectors instead of text matches. Your ids are nowhere in vector space.

Shouldn't it be possible to work around this by wrapping the query in double quotes? Google promises to do an exact match search when wrapping in quotes. So I'd imagine the OP's query should work when the image id is wrapped in double quotes. Otherwise, it'd mean that it's not in the index anymore.

Except Google lies.

It's like trying to write a Gmail filter with the "=" and then a word wrapped in quotes. You would THINK that would be a strict X = Y... but it's not.

At some point a few years ago the Gmail team made the "=" operator a "fuzzy equals", so for example it matches on parts of a word, even if you explicitly say you want to filter a word with a space at the end because it's "close enough".

Drives me fucking mental - I have an email filter that instantly archives every email from Jira except those that have my user name in the body of the notification (meaning someone has tagged me).

In Outlook I simple filter for "my_username " (with a space at the end), and it's able to tell the difference between that and my email address. In Gmail, "my_username " somehow matches both "my_username" and "my_username@email.com"... meaning EVERY FUCKING EMAIL I GET MATCHES THE CRITERIA.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#157

Post by Llamamoe »

tjpnz wrote: post #147
d--b wrote: post #109

What changed? Just an asumption here. But could it be the fault of the web rather than Google's? Could it be that the web itself is being so flooded with SEO-ed crap content that even Google can't sort through it all?

It's quite common for some queries to return a few pages when they might've previously yielded dozens. I'm not sure when it happened but couldn't have been more than 1-2 years ago. There's also less balance (ultimately results) for topics some might deem political, I may be on the left but I'm not blind. Here's something to try: think of a really obscure TV show you watched when you were young, even better a specific…

They implemented embedding-based search instead of keyword matching.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#159

Post by atlantic »

cout wrote: post #50
atlantic wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the applications I used to use on a daily was Google Reader. Then one day, they just shut it down for no apparent reason, and that was that. They don't seem to be focused on customer satisfaction. Hard to understand.

I think you meant to say user satisfaction? Or did you pay for google reader?

I tend to equate the two. Especially in the case of Google, where you had to register, so they were in effect letting you use the product in exchange for personal data.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#160

Post by mrazomor »

hsjqllzlfkf wrote: post #148

This is Google's inability to innovate. Google stated goal was the "organize the world's information". Nevertheless, they didn't come up with Wikipedia, the highest quality curated human-readable information repository. They also didn't come up with ChatGPT, arguably the first LLM good enough that can perform non trivial tasks of data recall and organization. Google had early success with search. Then decided to ceme…

Google had LLMs before OpenAI. It also produced the core techniques for making it happen.

My take is that it was taken by its own weight. The government fines & incorporation that started to fear those fines slowed down the progress. How difficult is to launch a change in that environment? Same for the baseline -- people react to changes. You consider the baseline to be the Golden standard. How difficult is to launch a radical change considering that?

IMO, the only way out is to shrink the product. Split, shard, whatever. Be small enough compared to the rest so you are not the default target (Coca Cola, Procter & Gamble, etc. do it right).

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