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Why does Google still have the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button?

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Re: Why does Google still have the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button?

#61

Post by bushbaba »

bhawks wrote: post #54

The only substance I can extract from this article is that the author really dislikes Google. If there is any other signal it's buried in the noise of the preachy and verbose writing style. At least the links to $90 books don't include an affiliate tracker :). Google is a company that has built things which have changed the world (whether this tends to the good / bad / neutral will take a much longer time to sus out…

Google DID build things which changed the world. Now of days what have they built that changed the world?

Youtube, aquisition. Android, aquisition. Workspaces, aquisition. DoubleClick, aquisition. Waze, aquisition.

Feels like it has been roughly a decade since Google changed the world.

Re: Why does Google still have the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button?

#62

Post by gilrain »

bhawks wrote: post #54

The only substance I can extract from this article is that the author really dislikes Google. If there is any other signal it's buried in the noise of the preachy and verbose writing style. At least the links to $90 books don't include an affiliate tracker :). Google is a company that has built things which have changed the world (whether this tends to the good / bad / neutral will take a much longer time to sus out…

> whether this tends to the good / bad / neutral will take a much longer time to sus out

This conveniently implies that nothing should or can be done about Google’s known, current abuses. After all, in the grand arc of time, who’s to say they won’t have had a positive impact by someone’s reckoning?

Re: Why does Google still have the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button?

#63

Post by throwawaygh »

bhawks wrote: post #54

The only substance I can extract from this article is that the author really dislikes Google. If there is any other signal it's buried in the noise of the preachy and verbose writing style. At least the links to $90 books don't include an affiliate tracker :). Google is a company that has built things which have changed the world (whether this tends to the good / bad / neutral will take a much longer time to sus out…

> whether this tends to the good / bad / neutral will take a much longer time to sus out - and it'll certainly vary on the perspective of the person looking back

The only truthful answer is "all of the above".

But, I suspect Google's fate is the same as IBM.

It fades into obsolesce within a generation. It's already happening. The tell-tale sign is that its search product is becoming absolutely useless as every search category follows the same pattern as the recipe problem (have you googled error messages recently? If even stack trace search results are dominated by useless ad spam, you're done...). It used to be that search was the sacred cow of Google. You could inject a few very obvious and low-screen-real-estate ads into search, but that was it. All sorts of shady shit happened in every other product category, the company shut down services left and right, etc. etc. But search -- search was sacred. Take a reasonable profit, and no more. That mentality is apparently gone.

Our children will think of Google like we think of IBM. They'll remember a company that invented the search engine, as well as the "just save everything and then search for stuff" mode of work. The core innovation was an enormously useful and a powerful augmentation to human intelligence, but in the end the innovation factory was burned to the ground by smart people yielding spreadsheets.

Re: Why does Google still have the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button?

#64

Post by coding123 »

muzani wrote: post #59
xanaxagoras wrote: post #16

It's like the last little bit of personality Google has left.

The doodles are personality too

Except that they used to be there because it was fun. Now they are doing it to keep up with expectations.

Re: Why does Google still have the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button?

#65

Post by wutbrodo »

gilrain wrote: post #62
bhawks wrote: post #54

The only substance I can extract from this article is that the author really dislikes Google. If there is any other signal it's buried in the noise of the preachy and verbose writing style. At least the links to $90 books don't include an affiliate tracker :). Google is a company that has built things which have changed the world (whether this tends to the good / bad / neutral will take a much longer time to sus out…

> whether this tends to the good / bad / neutral will take a much longer time to sus out This conveniently implies that nothing should or can be done about Google’s known, current abuses. After all, in the grand arc of time, who’s to say they won’t have had a positive impact by someone’s reckoning?

How does the first sentence follow from the second? The possibility that a company does good "in the grand arc of time" is no excuse for not holding them to the law.

Now if you're saying "negative effects", then comparing to longrun impacts is fine. But "abuses" is a much stronger claim, and enforcement needn't have anything to do with estimates of longterm benefit.

Re: Why does Google still have the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button?

#66

Post by wutbrodo »

robbedpeter wrote: post #55
nhoughto wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah if they removed it there would definitely be commentary about how theyve changed. Plus there must be a whole team that managed that functionality, what would they do then? Help fix the search results maybe..

I've recently begun thinking that Google can't, in fact, improve their search results. They've forced the algorithmic landscape of available data onto a local optima because of seo and financial incentives. The only way they could improve results would be the cooperation of all players - website owners would have to agree to not try to game the algorithm, which will never happen. Everything is so oriented around gami…

In my opinion, it's not going to be as simple as someone outcompeting them at the existing game. It's that someone will beat them at the next iteration of the game, at a new paradigm of information discovery and distribution.

The analogue here is Microsoft losing its software dominance not due to a desktop competitor overthrowing them, but through failing to play the Web and mobile games as effectively as the new dominant players.

Re: Why does Google still have the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button?

#67

Post by Gigachad »

lamontcg wrote: post #47
xanaxagoras wrote: post #16

It's like the last little bit of personality Google has left.

But its not, its a reminder of when they were cool, and that button might actually work and not dump you into a morass of listicles and low effort blogspam posts.

No, I don’t ever remember the button being useful. I believe they have looked in to removing it many times but people just like the look of it. But these days the google search page has largely become irrelevant anyway.

Re: Why does Google still have the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button?

#68

Post by wutbrodo »

IncRnd wrote: post #36
readams wrote: post #23

The article loses a lot of credibility when it just casually accuses Google of being white supremacists as though nobody could dispute this.

I clicked the link for that and was taken to a page where I could purchase the scholarly work, "Algorithms of Oppression - How Search Engines Reinforce Racism". $28 softcover / $90 hardcover And, the credibility was gone.

Your prior on a claim that something supports white supremacy should be damn near zero in 2022.

Re: Why does Google still have the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button?

#69

Post by clpm4j »

bushbaba wrote: post #61
bhawks wrote: post #54

The only substance I can extract from this article is that the author really dislikes Google. If there is any other signal it's buried in the noise of the preachy and verbose writing style. At least the links to $90 books don't include an affiliate tracker :). Google is a company that has built things which have changed the world (whether this tends to the good / bad / neutral will take a much longer time to sus out…

Google DID build things which changed the world. Now of days what have they built that changed the world? Youtube, aquisition. Android, aquisition. Workspaces, aquisition. DoubleClick, aquisition. Waze, aquisition. Feels like it has been roughly a decade since Google changed the world.

Cloud infrastructure, the Go programming language, Kubernetes. Now of course your definition of "change the world" comes into play here, but it certainly hasn't just been advertising and acquisitions.

Re: Why does Google still have the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button?

#70

Post by Gigachad »

robbedpeter wrote: post #55
nhoughto wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah if they removed it there would definitely be commentary about how theyve changed. Plus there must be a whole team that managed that functionality, what would they do then? Help fix the search results maybe..

I've recently begun thinking that Google can't, in fact, improve their search results. They've forced the algorithmic landscape of available data onto a local optima because of seo and financial incentives. The only way they could improve results would be the cooperation of all players - website owners would have to agree to not try to game the algorithm, which will never happen. Everything is so oriented around gami…

I don’t think it’s possible. SEO is targeted at google because that’s what the users use. If another engine became top, seo spammers would redesign around that.

It’s almost similar to how GANs work. Google tries to filter crap from content and the SEO spammers try to generate crap that is indistinguishable from content. And we settled at a point where seo spammers have won and their content looks like real valuable content but without real substance that ML can’t identify yet.

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