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Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

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Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#691

Post by a96 »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #617
andrewmutz wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot the main source of pressure: you sell off equity in your company in exchange for cash. The buyers are buying the promise of future profits. At first, you still hold the vast majority of the voting rights, but over time you sell more and more and expectations rise and rise. Eventually you are an organization whose purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term. Hence a page full of ads, and no r…

>purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term. I see this constantly repeated in anti-capitalist/anti-corporate rhetoric, but on the other side, shareholder meetings, finance conferences, financial service talks, no one ever wants this. Maybe the 20 year old stock bros on discord pumping penny stocks, but no serious shareholder of any company with a name you might recognize. It happens, there are cases…

Shareholders may not want it, but management usually does want to make it look like they had a great quarter.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#692

Post by a96 »

NoPicklez wrote: post #370
justapassenger wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very common story in industry. You start nimble, and disrupt bloated platforms. Then, as you grow, pressure grows and you also bloat. Then new company comes that brings nimble product and disrupt you. Search, TV->internet video, newspapers->internet - all of them go through those cycles.

Well Google has been a very good example of not giving into that pressure for a very long time. Their landing page remained ad free for decades and their revenue came from sponsored links through ad-words which was a minimally invasive ad strategy which didn't show banners etc.

For values of decades close to one.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#693

Post by infecto »

MrMember wrote: post #590
infecto wrote: post #572

There also has been a drastic change in YouTube search in the past year. It used to be that search would be logical, you search for a specific string and you can go through pages of videos that matchup to that. Now it at least feels like they have completely mixed that original search with a some sort of ranked preference of what they think I want to see. It’s a shame and an actual huge downgrade.

YouTube search will also only show you maybe 10 videos relevant to your search terms and then just give you random videos it wants you to watch that have little or nothing to do with your original search.

Yes! This is exactly it and at least for me the change happened sometime in the last year. I often look at real estate online in Vietnam and a year ago I could scroll through pages of houses, now I get a handful of somewhat relevant videos and then it’s cirque videos. It’s wild how bad it is.

Reminds me of how they blew up the rabbit hole of next videos long ago. I remember long long ago, my favorite part was the next video queued up after watching a video. You would go down these wild rabbit holes of videos that got ever more specific. Now it’s the same issue with search a bunch of unrelated videos recommended for watching next.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#694

Post by a96 »

zahlman wrote: post #301
kragen wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they had no ads for several years. AdWords were introduced in 02000, at which point Google had existed (initially as google.stanford.edu) for four years, since 01996, which was 40% of the amount of time the Web had even existed. I started using Google in probably 01998, when people on Slashdot got excited about how much better their search quality was than AltaVista, but it probably wasn't until 01999 that I swit…

Why the leading zeros on year numbers?

So you'd know that they're octal.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#695

Post by a96 »

rpdillon wrote: post #90
stinkbeetle wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My memory says that wasn't such a big selling point. When Google first came out it blew all other search engines away in terms of result quality. If, back then, Yahoo and Altavista were minimalist and Google was a garish nightmare of ads and flashing gifs and nested banners and affiliate buttons, I would still have happily used it for the results. Google's search interface is still reasonably clean IMO. Nowhere near…

Speed. Altavista, Dogpile, Metacrawler and the rest were slow, and Google felt instant.

Yes. Altavista and Metacrawler worked really well. Google managed to be just a little bit leaner and faster still. They probably did start to have a bigger index at some point, though.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#696

Post by coldpie »

jeffisabelle wrote: post #686
coldpie wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Perplexity, as a business, sustainable? I'm skeptical of these "AI search is better than web search" claims. Not because it's not true, but because of how wildly subsidized these AI things are. Web search doesn't suck because it's an impossible problem, web search sucks because it has to be profitable, and the profitability comes from making it suck. That's not true today for AI tools, but it will be in a few year…

> web search sucks because it has to be profitable, and the profitability comes from making it suck. That's not true today for AI tools, but it will be in a few years. Many people pay to use _AI tools_, that already brings in revenue. I had chatgpt plus since very early days, which was 20$/month, I don't have it at the moment because my company provides pro plan to me (and every other engineer) which is probably arou…

I'm skeptical that a significant number of people will be willing to pay cash money for these products when web search still exists for free, but we'll see!

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#700

Post by freediver »

IgorPartola wrote: post #433
Mistletoe wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will you fight the inevitable slide that happens if you ever got on top? I’m convinced Google started with the absolute best of intentions before the money and greed turned them into a horror movie villain.

Kagi is unlikely to ever be as popular as Google. Free is always more popular.

Luckily popularity contest is not our goal. Just making a good service that serves the needs of those who appreciate it.
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