Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean like ExxonMobil, Comcast, and Monsanto? Wait, what was your point?
Monsanto isn't really that big.
Dow-DuPont would have been a better example.
Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World
351–360 of 445 posts
Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World
#352The comparisons between Google and Apple aren't as apples-to-apples as everyone in the media seems to think. If we're talking about the future of these companies, and their earning power, they are situating themselves very differently. Apple is really a consumer electronics company, Google is an artificial intelligence company. And investors think more money will be in the future of AI instead of consumer hardware an…
I absolutely agree that comparing Google and apple is silly. But calling Google an "artificial intelligence" company is just feeding another buzzword into the fire.
They mostly use the AI to try to convince you to buy shit. It may be an uninspired use of artificial intelligence, but it's still artificial intelligence.
Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
Precisely. The image recognition and natural language processing that's "just a deep learning algorithm" today would have blown the socks off anyone ten years ago. Chess playing programs were AI until they could decisively beat all humans, and then we decided that chess doesn't require intelligence. Self-driving cars were AI until they got close to market and now apparently driving a car doesn't require intelligence.…
Many things would have blown the socks off people of a previous time. That doesn't make them all AI, especially since many of the results we see today are not due to novel techniques a ten-years-ago AI researcher wouldn't have known about, but rather to ten years' worth of advancement in refining the techniques and in the availability of computing power to use those techniques with. A lot of it is just "yeah, if we c…
Even within the last six months I've seen very confident posts here to the effect of "an AI that is worth a damn at go is still at least 10 years off".
Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
are there no organic listings at all? or is it just that there are now way more paid listings so the first page is entirely paid placements? thats a pretty big difference. I recall that when froogle/google-shopping first launched they were just filling in content from search results because they didn't have very much direct engagement by vendors. maybe that's changed now so the search results were just scaled back be…
There are no organic listings at all. The only way into Shopping results is via AdWords' Product Listing Ads. http://googlecommerce.blogspot.com/2012/05/building-better-s...
It looks like it was because of stale product data in shopping
>We believe that having a commercial relationship with merchants will encourage them to keep their product information fresh and up to date. Higher quality data—whether it’s accurate prices, the latest offers or product availability—should mean better shopping results for users, which in turn should create higher quality traffic for merchants.
Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World
#355It's interesting to that it took this long, just considering the utility of each company. If Apple disappeared tomorrow I'd be moderately inconvenienced, I'd have to pick up an Android handset instead of my iPhone and maybe set up some new podcast feeds. If Google disappeared the world would screech to a halt.
How's that? To search the web, I'd go to DuckDuckGo or Bing or whatever. Other companies also provide web mail, maps, office document solutions, etc. Google's definitely better at those things, but using a worse version of those products would not cause the world to "screech to a halt." Probably the most disruptive thing if Apple vanished would actually be every tech company suddenly needing to figure out how to use…
Every tech company is a bit of a stretch. Get out of california more.
Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are no organic listings at all. The only way into Shopping results is via AdWords' Product Listing Ads. http://googlecommerce.blogspot.com/2012/05/building-better-s...
It looks like it was because of stale product data in shopping >We believe that having a commercial relationship with merchants will encourage them to keep their product information fresh and up to date. Higher quality data—whether it’s accurate prices, the latest offers or product availability—should mean better shopping results for users, which in turn should create higher quality traffic for merchants.
This makes sense. I stopped using google shopping a long time ago precisely because it seemed like so many of the results were junk for whatever reason (staleness is a likely reason). "Junk" meaning the search result did not lead to an option to actually buy the product I was searching for. I haven't tried it since then, so I can't comment on if it's actually better now or if it's due to these changes.
Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "McDonalds is actually a real estate company and not a hamburger company because they make more money from rent than from food" I find this interesting. Are McDonalds making most of their revenue from real estate rents from their franchisees and/or those involved in their supply chain, or is the bulk of this land outside their hamburger business?
McDonalds is an interesting case in that they own all (well, almost all) the real estate for all the restaurants. The franchise owners pay rent based on sales which can end up being hefty. Some activist investors are pushing them to spin off that real estate into a REIT so that both sides of the business can be more fairly valued. Dollars wise McDonalds does make more in rent than in selling food (by about 2x).
You have to take into account that McDonalds is a franchise, so the system company doesn't actually sell much food. (The individual restaurants do.)
Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI is whatever hasn't been done yet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect#AI_is_whatever_hasn....
Precisely. The image recognition and natural language processing that's "just a deep learning algorithm" today would have blown the socks off anyone ten years ago. Chess playing programs were AI until they could decisively beat all humans, and then we decided that chess doesn't require intelligence. Self-driving cars were AI until they got close to market and now apparently driving a car doesn't require intelligence.…
"The game of chess, is like a swordfight.
You must think first, before you move."
-Wu-Tang Clan
Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Calling someone an "X company" means that they make their money from X. Sure, but even so ( except for the way some people treat Google), we typically call companies that make their money by placing ads in a service or media offering an "X company" where X describes the service or media offering, not "advertising". From that perspective, Google is an online services company, with AI playing an important role in som…
Google did most of what they do now ten years ago, before their activity had much arguable "intelligence". They have used AI to enhance various existing services but the improvements hardly seem earth shattering to me [insert earth-shattering counter example HERE]. Google's more pure AI product such as the Google Car are so-far vaporware at best. Calling Google an "AI company" seems like calling Ford in 1962 "a strea…
I think there's a dramatic difference in search 10 years ago compared to now, due to better natural language understanding, which is very much an "AI" technology IMHO.
I've had to un-learn my search query habits from the past. I used to attempt to express queries in ways that I thought would help the search engine (limit it to keywords, suppress keywords that are likely to produce false positives, etc.). Now, it seems better to put in sentence fragments, and the old way of a few specific thought out keywords is actually worse at producing the result I want.
The difference is small to the average HN user (most of us are just as capable of expressing queries both ways, and we'll find what we're looking for) but the latter kind of query is far more accessible to the average person.
Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having worked on the Drive team, I can assure you Google Apps (which includes GMail, the Docs editors, and Drive) has much more than 50 million. A quick search on public figures for these services will give better numbers. Edit: Those are Apps for Work numbers, excluding consumers - obviously you can't compare just a subset with a total.
Why does Drive lack where Dropbox has succeeded (efficient, reliable syncing)? (Honest question, since you mentioned you're on the Drive team)
I used to have a ton of issues with reliable syncing but I haven't had any issues with it in the past year or so.