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

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#271

Post by correlaroate » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:43 PM UTC

BirAdam wrote: post #253

correlaroate wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is dead man walking, unless something very substantial changes. Beyond search, they are controlling the Android ecosystem. Your predictions may be immature.

Android being open source means that any competitor can take it and run with it. Tbh, the main issue with that is the staffing required in terms of software engineers, but we’re Google to make the wrong move, I imagine Samsung would waste little time.

> Android being open source means that any competitor can take it and run with it.

Oh yeah we are really seeing all those successful forks taking off. /s

On a more serious note, the key parts are not open source, that's why all those alternative ROMs are having a hard time and nobody can really run Android without official builds outside a niche of enthusiasts who are fine with sacrificing certain functionality.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#272

Post by morgannewman » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:57 PM UTC

Solvency wrote: post #261

courseofaction wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, and people's unwillingness to pay for the things they value causes the thing to no longer be 'for' them. It's for those who are willing to pay for it (investors).

This seems like a yesteryear problem. People today are paying for EVERYTHING in a subscription model. Streaming services. Midjourney. YouTube. Twitch. Even ChatGPT4. I would gladly pay $10/mo for an information-centric search engine that filters out all blogspam and supports power queries.

[dead]

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#273

Post by visarga » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 5:09 PM UTC

Loquebantur wrote: post #255

candiodari wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why this is supposed to be Google's fault. I mean it doesn't matter of course: this is happening, and the only real question is if it will continue, maybe if something can be done. Who's fault it is ... Google is doing a lot to preserve the web. It's not enough, perhaps. Probably. But it's quite unclear to me what they could do to reverse this. Plus we've all seen what this has lead to in meat-space. Info…

It is mainly Google's fault since Google is the main actor in this space. You put up a false dichotomy, as if Google disappearing would mean a void to wander the world eternal. The internet is very much like public infrastructure. It is crucial to explicitly determine what functions there are indispensable for society to thrive. Ironically, finding available information is just such an indispensable utility. Imagine…

> Imagine roads only being present or usable when conducive to advertisement.

There's also a big interest in tracking people for reason du jour.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#274

Post by visarga » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 5:12 PM UTC

bushbaba wrote: post #263

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…

AI LLMs are just curating what content to train on vs indexing the www. It’s actually even more gatekeeper-y

What exactly does gatekeeping mean in the context of LLMs? One has several options: you could directly use a search engine, employ an LLM equipped with a search engine plugin for queries outside the training set, or personally fine-tune a LoRA with your specific data in a matter of hours. We have easy, moderate, and complex solutions at our disposal.

Rather than gate keeping, LLMs actually compress the search index into a manageable size, enabling easier sharing. While it's impossible to download the entirety of Google, you can conveniently download a LLaMA, promoting both privacy and autonomy. This marks a departure from the days of having every click and search keyword tracked.

Perhaps the advent of LLMs and Generative Image models by 2030 could allow us to cut the cord and navigate a virtual internet, have a room of our own to dream and be free, essentially functioning as an augmented imagination where we set all the rules.

Local LLMs solve the old problem of accessing information without leaking out what you are looking at, something that bothered me every since BitTorrent and copyright wars.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#275

Post by correlaroate » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 5:30 PM UTC

Loquebantur wrote: post #245

joelanman wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As commercial enterprises currently are set up, they have no incentive whatsoever to preserve the ecosystem they are thriving on. Worse, they profit more when harming it. As seen here with Google, that is true irrespective of the nature of the affected system. It's not just the quality of websites that is negatively hit either. The real victims are us, civil society and our future. The information realm that is the i…

> Even more than that, it should provide us with the freedom to discuss among ourselves and reflect on ourselves, humans and humanity, about the future of society.

I usually hear this "freedom of speech" stance until somebody hears something they don't like, then it's out the door and censorship gets a foot in the door.

As long as there is no consensus in society what speech is ok and what's not, we won't get anywhere. Currently, we are mainly leaving this to platforms to decide, and they cater to their customers (which are ad clients), not to what is best for society. Obviously there needs to be some moderation and banned contents. But a line needs to be drawn and anything beyond that needs to be free. No matter if some individual gets hurt by it or not.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#276

Post by THENATHE » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 5:45 PM UTC

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".

Why is w3 so low? I always found it at least marginally helpful.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#277

Post by BizarroLand » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 5:54 PM UTC

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #118

This is the Internet version of the tragedy of the commons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons So many people and groups want to profit with as little effort as possible that the commons (freely available data, open APIs, FLOSS software, etc.) is being overrun with little to no regard for the long term effects. Data can be copied endlessly, but it has to be generated the first time and updated or el…

We're in that part of a MMO where you can't find a quest giver because the spammers and sellers are packed so deeply that it is turning into a blur.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#278

Post by nine_k » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 6:02 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #33

xbkingx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moment I saw the term "SEO" it was like a stopwatch ticked on until search was dead. It used to be frowned upon to do little tricks, like keywords in a tiny, transparent font picked up by crawlers, but not seen by users. When gaming search engines became a profession, the end of search appeared on the horizon. Guess we're headed back to web rings and link indexes (which will be consolidated, heavily monetized, an…

Yes. We can point to the exact moment in time when Google turned to the dark side. It was on August 9, 2006, when Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, addressed the Search Engine Strategies conference.[1] This was the moment that SEO, now officially endorsed by Google's CEO, became respectable. Until then, SEO was considered to be a branch of the spam industry. There were conferences such as the Web Search Spam Squashing Sum…

> web rings and link indexes

The popular "Awesome ${whatever}" collections are very much that, link indexes for relatively narrow areas.

Curation matters. This is something computers are still bad at, or are too expensive to deploy for a mass-market service.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#279

Post by dash2 » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 6:04 PM UTC

Grimblewald wrote: post #152

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.

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 he…

Materials chemistry sounds more like the second Industrial Revolution (post 1870) than the first.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#280

Post by AtNightWeCode » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 6:08 PM UTC

I think the article is mostly incorrect. The deep web has been way larger than the open Internet for a very long time. I see other problems with Google search like it does not work as well as it did some years ago.