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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#901

Post by [deleted] »

halo18 wrote: post #883
KetoManx64 wrote: post #841

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://kagi.com/ de-prioritizes SEO ad sites and also lets you blacklist sites from your search reaults. Never going back to google after trying it

Doesn't seem to be doing great? The example search I got on their home page was 'best headphones' which pretty immediately surfaces http://www.quietheadphones.com/ - which is openly for sale, and also covered in affiliate links. A bit farther down the page is a 'best headphones for 2020' article. And this is the example result set they push on the home page to a potential buyer. You guys pay for this thing?

[deleted]

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#903

Post by devchix »

Now there's a Google response, and a response to that response. I love it when journalists bring the receipt. Is it even deniable that Google search is terrible now? Remember a time when there was not anything close to Google search, and Bing! was a joke? I never thought I would switch, but my daily driver now is Bing+CoPilot. I've run the same search on both Google and Bing and the results are mostly better on Bing, with the majority of crud still in the result of both, but the better, more relevant results, are on Bing.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#904

Post by Grazester »

devchix wrote: post #903

Now there's a Google response, and a response to that response. I love it when journalists bring the receipt. Is it even deniable that Google search is terrible now? Remember a time when there was not anything close to Google search, and Bing! was a joke? I never thought I would switch, but my daily driver now is Bing+CoPilot. I've run the same search on both Google and Bing and the results are mostly better on Bing,…

Bing is still worse than Google for me.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#905

Post by acdha »

nebula8804 wrote: post #900
acdha wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not optimistic on that point: the executive class is very openly salivating at the prospect of mass layoffs, and that means a lot of technical staff aren’t quick to inject some reality – if Gartner is saying it’s rainbows and unicorns, saying they’re exaggerating can be taken as volunteering to be laid off first even if you’re right.

Yeah but what comes after the mass layoffs? Getting hired to clean up the mess that AI eventually creates? Depending on the business it could end up becoming more expensive than if they had never adopted GenAI at all. Think about how many companies hopped on the Big Data Bandwagon when they had nothing even coming close to what "Big Data" actually meant. That wasn't as catastrophic as what AI would do but it still wa…

I’m sure we’re going to see plenty of that but from the perspective of a person who isn’t rich enough to laugh off unemployment, how does that help? If speaking up got you fired, you won’t get your old job back or compensation for the stress of looking in a bad market. If you stick around, you’re under more pressure to bail out the business from the added stress of those bad calls and you’re far more likely to see retribution than thanks for having disagreed with your CEO: it takes a very rare person to appreciate criticism and the people who don’t aren’t going to get in the situation of making such a huge bet on a fad to begin with – they’d have been more careful to find something it’s actually good for.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#906

Post by etc-hosts »

mrkeen wrote: post #695
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…

> 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 least contain it as much as possible, so that ranking stays debuggable and understandable by human search engineers. There's a lot of ML hate here, and I simply don't see the alternative. To rank documents, you need to score them. Google uses hundreds of scoring factor…

For a few months last year every time I searched for information about a package related to software available in homebrew, the first few results were to a site that clearly just had crawled all of the links in homebrew, and templated out a site of links corresponding to each package name. and thats about it. It would have been nice if the generated pages contained any useful information, but alas it did not.

There's got to be a better way.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#907

Post by eitally »

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 was there from 2015-2023 and, although I didn't work in Search, I remember a lot of the bigger initiatives designed at improving Search for users, like the project to add cards for the top 500 most commonly searched medical terms/conditions, using content from Mayo and custom contracted digital art (for an example, here's a sample link: https://www.google.com/search?q=acl+tear ). There were a lot of things like this going on at any point in time, and it was terrific to see. Then I discovered the manually curated internal knowledge graph, that even included many-language i19n. And then that it was possible for any googler to suggest updates/changes/additions.

Point being, there's a lot of amazing stuff that folks on the outside never would have seen, and it would be a shame for beancounters to ruin it all with decisions actively not "respecting the user".

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#908

Post by eitally »

justinbaker84 wrote: post #854
ChuckMcM wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That it is, but a more apt comparison would be Duck Duck Go which was a contemporary of Blekko and definitely out performed relative to Blekko's success. DDG still going strong and even buying TV ads, so yeah. That said, how Blekko and Watson ended up squandering good technology in search of something else is also an interesting learning experience/tale.

I agree with everything you are saying, but the stock price is up 6x over the last 10 years and revenue is still growing 13% a year so nobody at google is going to listen to any of this. Basically ad dollars have continued to transition from old media to digital media over the last decade+ and that mass migration has created enough revenue to cover up all of Google's core problems.

The reality is that this firehose of money is what allowed those core problems to grow & fester. That and the practice of using TVCs for as much as possible, to the point where nearly every process that's documented is outsourced, and often no one inside really understands how things work anymore.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#909

Post by eitally »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #749
makeitdouble wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this, Microsoft is really really good at understanding businesses, in a way Google will probably never be I think. Having on premise hosting options for Exchange and all their core services is an example of that, even as they're also pushing for 365 in the cloud. I remember them being earlier than GCP to deal with GDPR and the in EU requirements as well but my memory might be failing.

They're starting to lose the thread though. People use Windows at home and at school and then employers use the same thing because they don't want to retrain people. But the home versions of Windows are becoming so malevolent that they're losing market share. Meanwhile all the things that used to require Windows are becoming web pages and phone apps. You go to a university and it's full of Macbooks and if you see a P…

Moreover, it's increasingly easy each year for companies to support BYOD and let employees procure whatever they want that meets IT requirements. My current employer gave all non-tech staff $2000 to buy themselves a laptop, which was then enrolled in some fleet management systems with almost a single click.

Frankly, I see very few people choosing Windows anymore.

Also, another point to add: Microsoft's Intune fleet management system is perfectly capable of managing Macs, and you can use AD as your IDM source of truth for just about anything, including SSO for Google Workspace & ChromeOS devices.

To your last point, Windows Server is a hard requirement in many enterprises because of legacy or procured software that requires it. That is entirely separate from end user computing.

(I used to run end user computing for an F500, and I also ran the Enterprise Apps org at the same time. This was from about 2008-2015, and initiatives including mass migrations aware from MS Office to Workspace, and replacing thousands of Windows laptops with Chromebooks.)

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#910

Post by eitally »

makeitdouble wrote: post #768
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're starting to lose the thread though. People use Windows at home and at school and then employers use the same thing because they don't want to retrain people. But the home versions of Windows are becoming so malevolent that they're losing market share. Meanwhile all the things that used to require Windows are becoming web pages and phone apps. You go to a university and it's full of Macbooks and if you see a P…

> if you don't need Windows then why do you need Azure instead of AWS or any of the others? I don't have enough insight, but there's more to it than Windows/Microsoft services tie up. It's clearly not the ease of use for small customers, it could be the contract making, or something else that makes it better deal for businesses beyond just the cost bundling. For instance I remember Apple hosting iCloud on Azure. And…

Apple spends >$2b/yr with Google to host iCloud data on Google Cloud.
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