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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#321

Post by resource_waste »

nbittich wrote: post #102

Everytime I need to make a search on Google, I start to feel anxious, already convinced I'm not going to find anything useful about the problem I'm trying to solve. This often means I already tried everything else. It's a sad situation.a product shouldn't make you feel anxious.

I'm like this with Microsoft products. Anytime I need to buy one, I'm so worried I'm going to buy the wrong one. Once I have it, I'm worried its attached to the wrong account. Once I run it, I'm worried it wont start and I'll need to install it through some weird microsoft store. Then when its working, I'm worried my OS is going to slow down because of telemetry reporting. And I really hope microsoft team screen share works during an important meeting.

Google is disappointing. Microsoft actually makes me scared. Fortunately Apple hasnt really made its way into corporate life, so I've been spared their punishments.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#322

Post by foobarian »

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.

Search engines worked a lot better when the internet had a higher SNR in the link graph. Nowadays it's an ocean of SEO sewage and no search engine can do a good job. It's not that Google ruined search by showing ads; it has genuinely become a harder problem. There is not much that can be done except set up a federated darknet where any commercial activity is banned; otherwise, the incentives are all wrong.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#323

Post by stefan_ »

skilled wrote: post #7

Google is doing something similar now[0], both from a searchers and a site owners perspective. Barry Schwartz regularly posts Google updates on his site[1], for over a decade no less. Since August 2023, those updates have been reaching the 500 mean comment range with many updates reaching 700-900 comment range. And this has been happening for 8 straight months! People have been robbed of their livelihoods and many ha…

Ok, but the likelihood is 99.9% that I would rather read posts on Reddit than any LLM autogenerated ad laden malware garbage from SEO spammers.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#324

Post by binarymax »

jeffbee wrote: post #317
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds a lot like Kodak. I remember running into Kodak engineers, at an event in the 1990s, and they were all complaining about the same thing. They were digital engineers, and they were complaining that film people kept sabotaging their projects. Kodak invented the digital camera. They should have ruled the roost (at least, until the iPhone came out). Instead, they imploded, almost overnight. The film part was…

The just-so story about Kodak is one of those things that bugs me. Kodak did own the digital camera market, stem to stern, for years. They did not ignore it. They did, however, invent all that stuff a little early, before the semiconductor manufacturing technology had matured to the point where it could be a consumer good. The company imploded because it spent all of its time, attention, and capital trying to become…

Yeah, lots of things happened for a perfect storm of downfall…probably starting with the antitrust breakup of the film processing division.

They did indeed have a huge patent arsenal from all their research efforts that was very valuable. They were also really good at consumer tech - so it’s a shame it didn’t amount to more.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#327

Post by resource_waste »

lo_fye wrote: post #37

The thing I love about this story is that it demonstrates that even in a global mega-organization, a single person can make a huge difference, for better (Gomes) or for worse (Raghavan).

>a single person can make a huge difference,

This is probably the most true thing. It might depend on the person and the environment, but there are certainly people you cannot discount.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#328

Post by y04nn »

nbittich wrote: post #102

Everytime I need to make a search on Google, I start to feel anxious, already convinced I'm not going to find anything useful about the problem I'm trying to solve. This often means I already tried everything else. It's a sad situation.a product shouldn't make you feel anxious.

This is my experience too, I'm baffled that when making a basic search about a programming language on Google, the top results are only SEO garbage that waste your time for a basic answer. I'm better off asking GPT those days.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#329

Post by hedora »

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.

Append a "?" to the end of the kagi query. It runs what appears to be a ChatGPT RAG query backed by a search engine index, and puts the results at the top of the normal search engine result page. It greatly outperforms any other LLM I've played with, and, as a bonus, each paragraph in the response contains working hyperlinks to primary sources.

If you don't want to pay Kagi or login, you can play with it here:

https://kagi.com/fastgpt

(no need to append "?" when you run queries through that form).

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#330

Post by yifanl »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #277
neilv wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and gives us a name to actually blame. Understanding the dynamics is great, and we can learn from that, and apply it to other situations. As for who to blame for something a company does, shouldn't outsiders blame the entire company? That's our interface, and also how we can hold the company accountable for its collective behavior. It's also a defense against scapegoating: it wasn't just one person who made a unila…

> shouldn't outsiders blame the entire company No, I firmly believe that this level of indirection over-diffuses responsibility in a way that enables the malfeseance we're observing. It's a social dark pattern that I'm keen to identify and disrupt.

I disagree, because this ends up with implying that if you just got rid of That One Fucking Guy, then everything with Google Search would be good.

Which... is not a claim I'd agree with without extremely convincing evidence.

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