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The Mediocrity of Modern Google

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Re: The Mediocrity of Modern Google

#21

Post by siscia »

jfengel wrote: post #9

"The company remains trapped in its “10 blue links” jail, even as the world moves toward direct, conversational AI interfaces." I don't want conversational AI interfaces. I like search. If I lose that because it's a losing model, then so be it. But I don't see the point in telling Google to follow somebody else's trend. They suck in so many ways, but this doesn't add to it. I find this kind of "what have you done for…

To be fair, beside technical documents, most of the link from Google are not worth reading.

It is mostly SEO spam, written by LLMs anyway. At that point I prefer the summary from Google.

I am not defending the model, but it is just the reality right now.

Re: The Mediocrity of Modern Google

#22

Post by summerlight »

alexpotato wrote: post #3

A couple of things have struck me about Google as an outsider: - Learning that they had 100K+ employees - Seeing resumes from people who had spent 5+ years at Google and had a project list with what I would expect from - Learning about the "I want to just serve 5 Terabytes" video/story [0] - Hiring people away from Google who were, for example, network engineers who turned out to be great SREs with good programming s…

If you have more than 10k employees and still keep the "spark" then you solved almost of all the modern days corporate problems. This is why big corps typically choose to spin off their innovative but not-yet-profitable business. Those C-level people are not stupid; they simply understand that those innovation cannot survive in the entrenched legacies.

Re: The Mediocrity of Modern Google

#23

Post by jeffbee »

cjs_ac wrote: post #18

Google Maps is just a live traffic data set now. I use it during my commute, and its ability to tell me the speed limit of a road segment is deteriorating over time. Google doesn't need any fancy machine learning algorithms to work out what the speed limit of a road is; they just need to work with local governments to get their databases of speed limits. The whole product increasingly reeks of issues that couldn't be…

"Google Maps is not up-to-date enough on the speed limits along the route I drive 10 times per week" is among the dumber complaints I've read. Google of course does what they can to update speed limits. Coverage varies[1]. Some content on Google Maps is provided by government content partners[2].

1: https://developers.google.com/maps/coverage#countryregion-co...

2: https://support.google.com/mapcontentpartners/answer/144284#...

Re: The Mediocrity of Modern Google

#24

Post by zoogeny »

RobinL wrote: post #12
bilater wrote: post #6

What is this dumb article? Gemini pro 2.5 is getting talked a lot about in AI circles. AI Studio team is cracked and has been able to avoid the committee virus. Google has problems but this piece is written by someone who is not knowledgeable about this company and the space at all.

Agree, they write it off as: > Gemini 2.5 barely made a ripple in the broader tech conversation. But my sense (vibes from using it) is it's the very best model right now (though I have not tried the $200 a month exclusive openai offerings)

I also haven't used the $200 exclusive model. But I think Gemini 2.5 is by far and away the best LLM I have used.

I still use Claude for code but for any general reasoning questions, or even just for Socratic dialogue purposes, Gemini has really blown me away.

It is hard to imagine any LLM being so much better that it is worth going from $0 to $200.

Re: The Mediocrity of Modern Google

#25

Post by impure »

bilater wrote: post #6

What is this dumb article? Gemini pro 2.5 is getting talked a lot about in AI circles. AI Studio team is cracked and has been able to avoid the committee virus. Google has problems but this piece is written by someone who is not knowledgeable about this company and the space at all.

I love AI Studio. It's free to use and you can switch between models. Gemini 2.5 Pro's reasoning can be a little slow so if you don't need it you can switch to Gemini 2.0 Flash (which is capable of 100-200 tokens per second). You can even switch between models later. The only downside of using it over the user-facing Gemini web app is that you need to save your chats.

Re: The Mediocrity of Modern Google

#27

Post by timewizard »

SR2Z wrote: post #17
timewizard wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's common for startups to be acquired when they lack a clear path to profitability I just can't work out the economic logic of that. It seems to be then that there are secondary considerations, such as market domination, that provide the value in these transactions. I'm not sure how this argues against my point. > a large company has the resources and clout to turn a borderline business into a good one I can't de…

> I just can't work out the economic logic of that. Startups are often unprofitable despite having a good product. Large companies have an easy time of making good products profitable, but a difficult time in developing good products from scratch. > It seems to be then that there are secondary considerations, such as market domination, that provide the value in these transactions. Undoubtedly! But a profitable startu…

> Startups are often unprofitable despite having a good product.

There are lots of reasons a company can be unprofitable. Just having a "good product" does not mean there is a "market demand" for the product.

> Large companies have an easy time of making good products profitable, but a difficult time in developing good products from scratch.

You accidentally have made my point for me again. Why should this at all be the case? What natural economic factors lead to this outcome?

> that is dominating a market would not be acquired for a small amount of money

You could also just compete with them. Market domination is one of the factors in determining if an illegal monopoly exists.

> Google makes the majority of its money on ads.

So owning platforms that deliver ads is an important part of market lock up.

> brainless to ignore YouTube, Waymo, Pixel, Cloud,

All things that deliver ads or gather user data for the purposes of advertising, yes?

> All of these would be unicorns if they were independent companies.

With the exception of their cloud.. they all used to be independent companies.

That there are attributable reasons for the outcome is not interesting, why this illegal outcome is not prosecuted is.

Re: The Mediocrity of Modern Google

#28

Post by paleotrope »

mbrumlow wrote: post #19
jfengel wrote: post #9

"The company remains trapped in its “10 blue links” jail, even as the world moves toward direct, conversational AI interfaces." I don't want conversational AI interfaces. I like search. If I lose that because it's a losing model, then so be it. But I don't see the point in telling Google to follow somebody else's trend. They suck in so many ways, but this doesn't add to it. I find this kind of "what have you done for…

I think much of what Google was used for by many including probably yourself we called search, but it was really asking for answers. Link are good for search. Where wherever algo leads you to data that may have information you are looking for. On the other hand, if I just want the answer to a specific question, then links, that we tolerated for so long are bad. They are bad because once presented I now I have to dig…

The problem is when you say 'answers' what is provided are 'curated answers' which is what google has been doing which explains the terrible spam links. SEO is a way to provide an answer but usually not the one you want.

Re: The Mediocrity of Modern Google

#29

Post by mbrumlow »

paleotrope wrote: post #28
mbrumlow wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think much of what Google was used for by many including probably yourself we called search, but it was really asking for answers. Link are good for search. Where wherever algo leads you to data that may have information you are looking for. On the other hand, if I just want the answer to a specific question, then links, that we tolerated for so long are bad. They are bad because once presented I now I have to dig…

The problem is when you say 'answers' what is provided are 'curated answers' which is what google has been doing which explains the terrible spam links. SEO is a way to provide an answer but usually not the one you want.

Curated answers are not the same sort of answer I am talking about. In no way are answers generated by openAI really curated ( barring some political drama ).

Google understands that people want answers, and thus why they implemented answers.

A big problem for Google is I don’t think their revenue model works well with actual answers. Nobody cares about going to the site any more. In fact I am sure there were many talks internally at Google limiting what sort of answers they do provide that would result in less clicks on links.

Ad driven search as we know it is dead. For pay chat bots have a good chance of replacing ad driven speech.

SEO is effectively dead with AI chat system, thus again putting googles future in jeopardy.

Googles executives need to decide if they are going to be blockbuster, Redbox or Netflix, time is running out.

Re: The Mediocrity of Modern Google

#30

Post by SR2Z »

timewizard wrote: post #27
SR2Z wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just can't work out the economic logic of that. Startups are often unprofitable despite having a good product. Large companies have an easy time of making good products profitable, but a difficult time in developing good products from scratch. > It seems to be then that there are secondary considerations, such as market domination, that provide the value in these transactions. Undoubtedly! But a profitable startu…

> Startups are often unprofitable despite having a good product. There are lots of reasons a company can be unprofitable. Just having a "good product" does not mean there is a "market demand" for the product. > Large companies have an easy time of making good products profitable, but a difficult time in developing good products from scratch. You accidentally have made my point for me again. Why should this at all be…

> You accidentally have made my point for me again. Why should this at all be the case? What natural economic factors lead to this outcome?

Economies of scale. That's it. The overhead per employee is much, much smaller in a big company, it's much easier to acquire more labor/investment, and there's much more stability for planning.

This is a GOOD THING. This is how we enjoy cheap goods and services. It's all well and good to crow about small business, but actually dealing with small businesses frankly sucks as a consumer.

> You could also just compete with them. Market domination is one of the factors in determining if an illegal monopoly exists.

Google Search dominates the market mostly because it's better than all the other competitors. iPhones dominate the market (at least in the US) because people prefer them. Not all monopolies are the result of illegal behavior, and not all monopolies are equal.

Market dominance is necessary but not sufficient to call a monopoly illegal.

> So owning platforms that deliver ads is an important part of market lock up.

If you criteria is "all platforms which could deliver ads" then Google not only doesn't have the market locked up, they're incredibly far from it.

> All things that deliver ads or gather user data for the purposes of advertising, yes?

I don't know about you, but I find that I go to YouTube to watch videos, call Waymo to physically go from point A to point B, use my phone to make calls and browse, and use Cloud for my compute needs.

Just because a product COULD be used to deliver ads does not mean that's what it's for. It's nuts to try and see the world that way and I cannot even begin to understand why you would want to.

> With the exception of their cloud.. they all used to be independent companies.

Dude, no. Waymo, Pixel, Cloud, Photos, and Search are homegrown. YouTube was an acquisition - but comparing how much work has been done post-acquisition vs pre-acquisition it might as well also have been 100% in-house.

Your facts are seriously wrong here. Google is not acquiring finished businesses and extracting all the profit they can from them, PE-style; they're actually creating value.

> That there are attributable reasons for the outcome is not interesting, why this illegal outcome is not prosecuted is.

There are definitely things Google does which are illegal, like that Apple default search deal!

By and large, though, the company is wildly profitable because it offers services which its users find useful.

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