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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#201

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #174
beachy wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They may be concerned, but what can they do? Google has poisoned the well, and the entire web is now a swamp of SEO driven drivel. Forget about a "Jobs returning to Apple" miracle. As they say, "you can't get there from here". There's no easy path for Google back from the short term profit-driven corner they've painted all of us into.

The web is over now. Google first, AI later killed any incentive to create content for the open web

Perhaps you're talking about financial incentives. And if so, then perhaps you might be right.

But there are plenty of other incentives that AI hasn't touched at all.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#202

Post by hattmall »

ianbutler wrote: post #185
imzadi wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just recently switched to Kagi. It's worth paying a few bucks to get decent results.

I find myself seeing nothing useful on Kagi, going to Google, seeing nothing useful, then asking ChatGPT and sometimes seeing something useful and othertimes being led on a wild goose chase. The general state of information retrieval seems bleak. Reddit is usually the solution for me, even on technical matters now.

I typically go google -> yandex -> kagi -> chatgpt.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#203

Post by thaumaturgy »

ethbr1 wrote: post #110
akaij wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it was a very good description. The person mentioned is responsible for turning one of the most important pieces of software used by billions, into user-hostile experiences that's better for only a few, including himself, just for profits.

As context, I offer the engineer oath used by some countries for certified engineers: >> I am an Engineer. In my profession, I take deep pride. To it, I owe solemn obligations. >> As an engineer, I pledge to practice integrity and fair dealing, tolerance and respect, and to uphold devotion to the standards and dignity of my profession. I will always be conscious that my skill carries with it the obligation to serve h…

This here is one of the reasons I reject the title "software engineer".

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#204

Post by sevagh »

maxerickson wrote: post #187
ChuckMcM wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really glad the article came out though, it fills in some gaps that I was fairly confident about but didn't have anything other than my sense of the players and their actions to back up what I thought was going on. I and a number of other people left in 2010. I went on to work at Blekko which was trying to 'fix' search using a mix of curation and ranking. When I left, this problem of CPC's (the amount Google got…

What is definition of dead? 15 years later they have huge majority of traffic share and lots of revenue.

Number of HN complaints per day posted.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#205

Post by justinbaker84 »

gnicholas wrote: post #152

> Larry Page and Sergey Brin left Google in December 2019 (the same year as the Code Yellow fiasco), and while they remain as controlling shareholders, they clearly don’t give a shit about what “Google” means anymore. Is he saying that the two of them together hold enough voting shares to completely control Google? Or is he using the phrase "controlling shareholders" in a different way?

The shares they own give them 51% of the votes because when they negotiated a deal that gives them a lot more votes than anybody else. They own about 12% of the company.

Those numbers are for both of them combined. If one of them had a serious disagreement with the other they could join forces with other shareholders to create a new 51% majority.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#206

Post by ametrau »

ianbutler wrote: post #185
imzadi wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just recently switched to Kagi. It's worth paying a few bucks to get decent results.

I find myself seeing nothing useful on Kagi, going to Google, seeing nothing useful, then asking ChatGPT and sometimes seeing something useful and othertimes being led on a wild goose chase. The general state of information retrieval seems bleak. Reddit is usually the solution for me, even on technical matters now.

This describes my own experience 100% accurately.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#207

Post by TheCleric »

gnicholas wrote: post #152

> Larry Page and Sergey Brin left Google in December 2019 (the same year as the Code Yellow fiasco), and while they remain as controlling shareholders, they clearly don’t give a shit about what “Google” means anymore. Is he saying that the two of them together hold enough voting shares to completely control Google? Or is he using the phrase "controlling shareholders" in a different way?

According to this they own 86% of class B shares together: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/011516/top-5-g...

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#208

Post by reshie »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #114
itronitron wrote: post #89

I switched over to DDG sometime in 2017 or 2018, haven't used Google Search since.

I try. I swear to god I try. Then the DDG search results come up, and they're just dumb. It's like they trained some dog to bring the search results. If it were a dog coming up with them, you would be amazed and rightly so. The dog reads, it vaguely understands the topic you're looking for. It can sort of find something related to it, but not really relevant. But look, it's actually a god doing it. Woohoo. Of course,…

DDG uses bing as it's backend.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#209

Post by beezlebroxxxxxx »

debatem1 wrote: post #172
morphentropic wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man they used to drop some awesome stuff: Google Maps, GMail (remember the hype over Gmail invites?), Google Earth... then they just stopped improving stuff and started releasing multiple versions of things and abandoned them all, over and over again. Very strange.

I was there around this time and remember the first time someone said out loud that they were doing project Z because "that's what will get me promoted". I argued until I was blue in the face that it was a bad idea, but they didn't care: they had their objective and knew how to get it. Unhappily, everyone was right: he got promoted and the project was an expensive failure. My two cents is that Google has been consume…

The dominant culture in the company began to mimic the history of Raghavan: failing upwards, short-term gains with long-term detriment. When you get back far enough you begin to see a recurring pattern of it with these MBA/exec types who basically only have a bean-counter, extractive, understanding of running a business or making things.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#210

Post by bbor »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #178
ot1138 wrote: post #76

Phenomenal article, very entertaining and aligns with my experience as a prominent search "outsider" (I founded the first search intelligence service back in 2004, which was later acquired by WPP. Do I have some stories). The engineers at Google were wonderful to work with up to 2010. It was like a switch flipped mid-2011 and they became actively hostile to any third party efforts to monitor what they were doing. To…

I'm really glad the article came out though, it fills in some gaps that I was fairly confident about but didn't have anything other than my sense of the players and their actions to back up what I thought was going on. I and a number of other people left in 2010. I went on to work at Blekko which was trying to 'fix' search using a mix of curation and ranking. When I left, this problem of CPC's (the amount Google got…

A) I think it’s important to acknowledge that in many ways Google is actively trying to keep CPC low - what they care most about is total spend. A low CPC means an effective advertising network where interested consumers are efficiently targeted. Their position is complex thanks to their monopoly status over online advertising.

B) I don’t think it’s fair to characterize recent layoffs as some put-off collapse… criticize Google all you want for running a bad search engine, but right now they’re still dominant and search is the most effective advertising known to man. They’re raking in buckets of money: they had 54K employees on 01/01/2015, and 182K on 01/01/2024. Similarly, they made 66B in 2014, and 305B in 2023. The latest layoffs are them cleaning house and scaring their workers into compliance, not the death throes of a company in trouble — they’re barely a dent in the exponential graphs: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb...

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