Google search's death by a thousand cuts • Hacker News Board

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#171

Post by agentgumshoe » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 11:37 AM UTC

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's money is in ads, not search.

I'm still curious how they're going to properly monetise ChatGPT at scale. I can't wait for the AI ads...

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#172

Post by areyousure » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 11:37 AM UTC

explodingwaffle wrote: post #153

dash2 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_18 is my best guess.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#173

Post by hooby » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 11:39 AM UTC

I feel that Google search has been slowly dying for many years now.

Where in the past I could find documentation, forum-posts, wikis - concise information - these days I find SEO-optimised marketing fluff, link-farms, clickbait, long-form articles with thousands of words that ultimately say nothing, political tirades that don't make sense for any non-U.S.-citizen, and ads - tons and tons of ads.

It would seem that it was Google ads and Google search's own algorithm - which directly led to this state of affairs.

And that's the main reason why asking some LLM for answers is so much more attractive than using search: the AI cuts through all that crap, and extracts the actual information. If it's not hallucinating, that is.

The web is no longer for humans or for finding information. It's for bots, crawlers, for the Google algorithm and for marketing.

Humans simply can no longer digest it - we need AI to generate something more concise, more to the point, more digestible. Without the marketing, fluff and bait and filler.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#174

Post by halflings » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 11:41 AM UTC

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…

> 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.

Not only did Google make the main breakthroughs that all LLMs still rely on today (mainly attention architecture, and large scale training of DNNs), but they had a chatbot similar to ChatGPT (Meena [1]) way before ChatGPT was a thing.

Granted: they didn't release it to the public, so there is a failure of innovation there, just not on the technical/machine learning side.

[1] https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/01/towards-conversational-age...

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#175

Post by solaris152000 » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 11:42 AM UTC

agentgumshoe wrote: post #171

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's money is in ads, not search. I'm still curious how they're going to properly monetise ChatGPT at scale. I can't wait for the AI ads...

And the vast majority of their ad money, comes from ads that show on searches. So if they lose search, they lose the ads too. So their money is in search.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#176

Post by kalleboo » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 11:46 AM UTC

llamaLord wrote: post #151

jnurmine wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Which begs the question... why have they not atleast tried a "Google Premium"

They announced "Google Contributor" at one point but it never went anywhere

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#177

Post by wslh » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 11:47 AM UTC

halflings wrote: post #174

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…

> 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. Not only did Google make the main breakthroughs that all LLMs still rely on today (mainly attention architecture, and large scale training of DNNs), but they had a chatbot similar to ChatGPT (Meena [1]) way before ChatGPT was a thing. Granted: they didn't release it to the pu…

Xerox Parc also invented the laser printer, the transistor was invented in Bell Labs yet Intel (et al) take advantage of it. Google seems more like history now regarding search. Also, it doesn't seem good that the company founders are not there anymore. The last auccessful companies were run by the founders until a more mature point.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#178

Post by joelanman » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 11:48 AM UTC

hooby wrote: post #173

I feel that Google search has been slowly dying for many years now. Where in the past I could find documentation, forum-posts, wikis - concise information - these days I find SEO-optimised marketing fluff, link-farms, clickbait, long-form articles with thousands of words that ultimately say nothing, political tirades that don't make sense for any non-U.S.-citizen, and ads - tons and tons of ads. It would seem that it…

They very much killed the golden goose. It's a real failure to think in terms of systems. Google relies on a healthy open web, yet as arguably the biggest single influencer of the web it has completely failed to maintain that let alone improve it.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#179

Post by rvnx » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 11:51 AM UTC

halflings wrote: post #174

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…

> 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. Not only did Google make the main breakthroughs that all LLMs still rely on today (mainly attention architecture, and large scale training of DNNs), but they had a chatbot similar to ChatGPT (Meena [1]) way before ChatGPT was a thing. Granted: they didn't release it to the pu…

Innovating is "easy", getting it in production is though. If the Google models are so genius and perfect, and nobody can use or see them, it's like if they don't exist.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#180

Post by DeathArrow » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 11:52 AM UTC

>Large models are trained on public data scraped via API. Content-heavy sites are most likely to be disrupted (why post on StackOverflow?) by models trained on their own data. Naturally, they want to restrict access and either (1) sell the data or (2) train their own models. This restriction prevents (or complicates) Google’ automatic scraping of the data for Search (and probably for training models, too).

I've seen the other side of the coin, far too frequently. Many websites allow Googlebot to index for free, but once a person clicks on Google serach results, they ask for money.