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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#631

Post by barfbagginus »

breck wrote: post #472
eatsyourtacos wrote: post #353

ChatGPT is my default now basically.. almost anything I search for is technical in nature and it gives me the proper result almost all the time. Even if it's setting up a dedicated server for a game etc

Yes, I think this is the more likely explanation, rather than the sinister story provided (afaik). I also use ChatGPT more than Google now. LLMs are the future. Making your search engine worse to squeeze profits now is not as big a deal as it would have been 5 years ago. Still sad, but I honestly care less and less about what Google search does now that we have ChatGPT, Claude, etc.

Please make sure to evangelize that a little bit... There's something weird going on where some people "get it" about how to use llm's effectively, while other people can't get past the idea that they are stochastic parrots on LSD.

I believe that this is because getting good results out of llm's requires greater critical thinking and writing abilities than simply composing keywords for search. Unless we support and educate our peers here there's the risk that many of them could be left behind in a way that could be harsher than what happened to people who couldn't "just Google it".

I'm considering that I might be over inflating the urgency here. But I increasingly feel we may have a duty to educate our peers here, or risk letting them fall behind to their own and our own detriment.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#632

Post by skydhash »

barnabyjones wrote: post #529
AlexCoventry wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YT Shorts itself is kind of a mystery to me. It's an objective degradation of the interface; why on earth would I want to use it? It doesn't even allow adjustment of the playback speed or scrubbing!

I think there is a large demo of people now who actually prefer to watch videos in portrait.

If you’re watching a single subject of interest video on your phone (TikTok type of content), it’s great. But landscape videos is more pleasant and there’s a reason we move from 4:3 for media. But that actually means watching the videos, but what I see is a lot of skipping.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#633

Post by eutropia »

sumanthvepa wrote: post #537

Full Disclosure: Prabhakar Raghavan was my skip-level manager at Yahoo! and I'd known of him well before that, from my days at IBM Research. The author says very few people knew who Raghavan was. Clearly he isn't a computer scientist. It is more an indication of the ignorance of the writer than anything else. Raghavan's contributions to Computer Science and, Search in particular, which were made long before he joined…

This is a very long way of saying a very intelligent person was “just following orders”.

Gomes said no. Raghavan clearly didn’t.

If that’s not a clear cut case of “bearing responsibility” I don’t know what is.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#634

Post by baryphonic »

gregw134 wrote: post #250

Ex-Google search engineer here (2019-2023). I know a lot of the veteran engineers were upset when Ben Gomes got shunted off. Probably the bigger change, from what I've heard, was losing Amit Singhal who led Search until 2016. Amit fought against creeping complexity. There is a semi-famous internal document he wrote where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning, or at leas…

I'm glad you shared this.

My priors before reading this article were that an uncritical over-reliance on ML was responsible for the enshittification of Google search (and Google as a whole). Google seemed to give ML models carte blanche, rather than using the 80-20 rule to handle the boring common cases, while leaving the hard stuff to the humans.

I now think it's possible both explanations are true. After all, what better way to mask a product's descent into garbage than more and more of the core algorithm being a black box? Managers can easily take credit for its successes and blame the opacity for failures. After all, the "code yellow" was called in the first place because search growth was apparently stagnant. Why was that? We're the analysts manufacturing a crisis, or has search already declined to some extent?

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#635

Post by barfbagginus »

cbsmith wrote: post #441
axus wrote: post #195

Is Google desktop search dead? It's certainly been "shittier" but it's been adequate. Unlike Bing and Yahoo, there isn't clickbait fake news all over the screen. In a market where competitors are a bookmark away, it should be dead, but the big names seem to all collude on having a bad experience that makes more short-term money. How is success being measured internally for "the man who killed Google Search"? Are prof…

Yeah, the amazing thing is that everyone talks about how Google destroyed search, but fails to acknowledge that nobody with a better search emerged. The amount of money at stake with regards to search is such that the decline of search across the board is far more a reflection of a systemic cause than anything that happened inside any particular company.

Gpt4 driving the Bing tool is a better search engine than Google. First it can critique your objectives and turn them into effective search terms. Second it can filter through spam and avoid displaying it. Third it can reach into the contents of Target pages and actually extract the solution to the problem you're having.

These are all things that classic search engines had the opportunity to provide, but declined, in some cases due to the anti-competitive nature of reaching into pages and extracting answers, and in other cases because they would have reduced revenues.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#636

Post by eutropia »

istillwritecode wrote: post #585

I know Prabhakar. He was my manager at Google Research and he tried to recruit me to Yahoo in 2005, but I went to Google instead. This article stinks of hatred and misunderstanding about how Google works. It's possible that Prabhakar bears some responsibility for the decline of search experience, but it sounds over the top to assign all blame to him as a manager.

To take something as useful as google search (was) and sacrifice it on Moloch’s altar for profits is profoundly bad. To the right person, such a level of callous indifference would inspire feelings of hatred.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#637

Post by barfbagginus »

temporarely wrote: post #281

So Yahoo sent a guy to Google search and he killed it, and a Google sent a gal to Yahoo to kill it. > a computer scientist class traitor Loved this. In addition to this class traitors, we also had (much earlier) counter-revolutionaries that sold us a Tech Utopia in 90s and then promptly setup camp in FANGS to give us the Surveillance Tech Dystopia. [my tongue is somewhat lodged in my cheek here but only a bit]

Two reasons to use Marxist terminology for these things:

1) It literally terrorizes capitalists

2) It's hilariously catty and fun

[Edit: not sure why demz downvotez, ~owo~. Hope it's cuz I made demz capitawists a widdle angy, uwu :3

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#638

Post by madcoderme »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #611
gregw134 wrote: post #250

Ex-Google search engineer here (2019-2023). I know a lot of the veteran engineers were upset when Ben Gomes got shunted off. Probably the bigger change, from what I've heard, was losing Amit Singhal who led Search until 2016. Amit fought against creeping complexity. There is a semi-famous internal document he wrote where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning, or at leas…

Machine learning or not, seo spam sort of killed search. It’s more or less impossible to find real sites by interesting humans these days. Almost all results are Reddit, YouTube, content marketing, or seo spam. And google’s failure here killed the old school blogosphere (medium and substack only slightly count), personal websites, and forums Same is happening to YouTube as well. Feels like it’s nothing but promoters…

It's like "Do some SEO magic and Tada!"

And who forgot the recent Reddit story.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#639

Post by re5i5tor »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #611
gregw134 wrote: post #250

Ex-Google search engineer here (2019-2023). I know a lot of the veteran engineers were upset when Ben Gomes got shunted off. Probably the bigger change, from what I've heard, was losing Amit Singhal who led Search until 2016. Amit fought against creeping complexity. There is a semi-famous internal document he wrote where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning, or at leas…

Machine learning or not, seo spam sort of killed search. It’s more or less impossible to find real sites by interesting humans these days. Almost all results are Reddit, YouTube, content marketing, or seo spam. And google’s failure here killed the old school blogosphere (medium and substack only slightly count), personal websites, and forums Same is happening to YouTube as well. Feels like it’s nothing but promoters…

Hard disagree. As another reply mentions, just compare the alternatives such as Kagi that aren’t breaking search by pursuing ad growth.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#640

Post by freetinker »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #611
gregw134 wrote: post #250

Ex-Google search engineer here (2019-2023). I know a lot of the veteran engineers were upset when Ben Gomes got shunted off. Probably the bigger change, from what I've heard, was losing Amit Singhal who led Search until 2016. Amit fought against creeping complexity. There is a semi-famous internal document he wrote where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning, or at leas…

Machine learning or not, seo spam sort of killed search. It’s more or less impossible to find real sites by interesting humans these days. Almost all results are Reddit, YouTube, content marketing, or seo spam. And google’s failure here killed the old school blogosphere (medium and substack only slightly count), personal websites, and forums Same is happening to YouTube as well. Feels like it’s nothing but promoters…

A bit chicken-and-egg. Another perspective: Google’s system incentivizes SEO spam.

Search for a while hasn’t been about searching the web as much as it has been about commerce. It taps commercial intent and serves ads. It is now an ad engine; no longer a search engine.

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