A decade ago, I had calculated that a startup would need at least $1B (but more likely $4B) of capex to match Google if trying to use conventional crawl/index tech. With conventional tech, quality upper bound is more or less fixed so you are forced to match breadth to compete which is super expensive. With model-based index, you need less than $100M capex to turn on the proverbial flywheel because you can now sacrifice breadth for very different notion of quality. This is a game changer because we will soon see dozen or so strong startups which will chip away the search share, each trying to leverage, cost optimize and improve this tech.
Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight
431–440 of 518 posts
Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have Excel, and of course Sheets. I actually find Excel to be too full of features (same with Word). It's just too hard to figure out a simple thing like having the top row be column headings (yes, I do know how to do it, but it was not immediately apparent). "Someone, somewhere, might want to do this, so let's put it in" is obviously what's happened with Office for 30 years now.
Excel is the #1 programming language by a wide margin, and it evolved rather than was designed.
I remember when all reports were crystal reports which you don't see as much anymore? Excel is on the way out.
Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google Maps is unequivocally the champion in terms of reviews, and this is what really matters when it comes to actually finding places to go. Not just that, but it's directly monetizable because if the user journey starts with a Google Maps search query, e.g. "lunch near me", those first few results are worth real money.
Isn’t this saying that google maps started optimizing the thing that made money- rather than the thing customers want? Apple Maps will get better at reviews as more people switch over.
Apple Maps leverages yelp for reviews which is a better dataset than google reviews.
And just like above said, google is optimizing for ad revenue not user experience. This opens the door for a competitor to swoop in and offer better results.
Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight
#434Seems like Google leadership is freaking out. Also sounds like they really believe the whole founder-hero mythology if they think that Page-Brin can save the company. I don’t know how Google could be saved but perhaps having grateful and happy employees that would just build things in their 20% time might have been a better strategy. A truly revolutionary step would have been to buck the layoffs trend. But of course…
The fear is a lot deeper than quality of chat GPT's results for now.
Google is afraid that ads driven business models might get dislodged for "give me a service and I will pay you money for that" model. That will be a nail in the coffin. Imagine someone brings a marginally better conversational search engine with a low enough subscription price that some people migrate to use it rather than ad infested, SEO driven web results.
Also, with benefit of hindsight, Microsoft seems to be planning to attack Google from the flanks.. competition on a different business model than a better ad driven engine.
Sundar isn't exceptionally promising is spot on. We have so many cases of small business people being locked out of their accounts etc. They seemed to have preferred being a cool engineering company, not a B2B product company that other businesses can trust.
It is probably incorrect question to ask, but do some Google employees anonymously feel that lot of culture wars waged within company (Damore episode, the fights of ethics AI team with leadership) have caused the company to loose focus? I'm not disregarding moralities of the positions, just thinking if it was the case that many senior executives have to spend time firefighting company image in media due to these episodes.
Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Search ads are pretty much the perfect internet business model - if my biz is having a sale on lawnmowers, who better to target than people googling for "buy lawnmower"? If this is done right, everyone walks away happy and google makes a killing. ChatGPT is great, but it's pretty far from providing good answers to "where can I get a good deal on a lawnmower right now?" They might take over a decent share of…
If ChatGPT had up to the minute crawl results and my Geo location, that'd be enough. "Help me buy whichever budget electric range Wirecutter recommends at the moment". > Okay, here's the store near your home that is selling the Frigidaire electric range that Wirecutter is currently recommending, at the best price. > Would you like to buy it online at roughly the same price or get the address of the store?
I don't understand how this is different from what Google currently provides, except that it skips one step (navigating to wire cutter, selecting some text and right clicking, then "search web for [product name]").
The only difference, which is not an improvement, is that you've suddenly given Wirecutter total power. At least if you make users visit the site and read a bit of the review, the reviewer has the hurdle of writing some text that can convince a human reader that the results are not totally bought and paid for.
Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight
#436Last time this happened people thought social was the future. Facebook was considered a threat to everything since they had the social-graph, so everything had to become social. Google+, Google Buzz, Orkut.
Moving out of social will turn out to be their big mistake. They should have stayed persistent. The data is the new king and absolute differentiator in the world of AI. Facebook is fortunately sleeping at wheel. Musk is quickly realizing how important this is and have already turned off 3rd party access.
they are out of social? what is YouTube? To me it's almost indistinguishable from Instagram at this point. The only difference is that some of the content I consume on IG is from my friends, but those are not monetizable interactions and it's almost completely separate from the content creator content consumption I do there. So YouTube is basically IG minus the unprofitable part.
Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well I'd say they both put all their eggs in one basket & let that basket deteriorate. Show of hands - people who feel google search has improved in the last 5/10 years vs people who feel it's gotten demonstrably worse? So they have a monopoly product that is something like a 2 sided market (advertisers & search users) where both sides hate using it..
It autosuggests and I don't even have to click on links half the time anymore. I'd call that progress. Not ground shaking like ChatGPT but half the time I get the (right) answer to my question just by typing some related words into the search bar. I don't know how many Google searches I did yesterday, but it feels like a lot. It does has problems with certain queries beyond a certain depth, which I also get frustrate…
The auto suggesting where they filter prompts to only safe terms
You literally can't go to page 2 anymore
It ignores what you ask and answers what it think/wants you see.
Previously you controlled search now you are lucky if a site is even in the index.
Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight
#438What's the general opinion on Sundar Pichai as CEO? I haven't been excited about Google since Eric Schmidt, but I don't know how much of that is down to the CEO, and how much is just down to a different world and larger company. In contrast I think most people would agree that Microsoft is a much more interesting and maybe better company with Satya Nadella as boss.
My impression is that he's not a leader but a care taker. This article kind of shows the two founders swooping in for some emergency leadership. That's not a good look. I think they've been coasting on their past glory for a decade now. Yes they make money but otherwise they are just doing more of the same and just building out the stuff they've had for more than a decade (Search, Ads, Youtube, Maps, Android, etc.).…
Google has really stayed true to its mission: connect people and information.
When I'm sitting at my desk and in focus mode, I get information by opening a web browser and navigating to google.com. But if they hadn't invested in Chrome, that might not have been the case by now.
If I'm out and about, I access information via my phone. They built Android for that. If my only option were Apple or Microsoft phones, I might not be asking Google for information.
When I'm sitting at home on the couch, I just yell my queries and a little round computer answers back. It could use some improvement, but it's still me asking Google.
Along the way, Google finds ways to monetize the dispersion of information. I don't really mind because there's literally no alternative that doesn't also try to retain some of the value add.
So why this myopic focus on search? There are a lot of products here that keep me in the ecosystem. Google is a platform company that knows a lot about me and makes my life easier and along the way takes money from advertisers.
Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight
#439> Google’s approach to AI in recent years has been conservative compared to some rivals Well yes of course. They are the incumbent and they've been in cash generating mode for a while. With a large lead over "competitors", if we can even call them that, and a virtual monopoly status in the both the ad space and search space, it's perfectly normal for Google to move at a glacial pace. They have no external need or int…
their market share in the total ad market is very far from a monopoly
Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight
#440With all those smart trillion weights models, can't they figure out which page is a useless keyword trap (90% of what google search finds these days) and which is a genuine useful page? Would be a huge help.
the web might just lack genuine, useful, reliable information for most queries.
People here love to remark that they prefix every query with "reddit" but ime the only difference is that they've tricked themselves into thinking their results are worth something.