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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#911

Post by eitally »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #213
maxerickson wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is definition of dead? 15 years later they have huge majority of traffic share and lots of revenue.

You know how a chess player will say something like "mate in 6" because their experience of all the options left to their opponent are both easily countered and will not prevent them from losing? Companies, and tech companies in my experience, get into death spirals due to a combination of people, culture, and organization. Pulling out of one of those is possible but requires a unique combination of factors and a str…

fwiw, there are approximately 25,000 FTEs reporting up to Thomas Kurian, and I'm not sure how many thousands of TVCs. That's just for Cloud, and doesn't include the massive numbers of additional, relevant employees directly support Cloud from within TI. Part of Google's problem is that it's so big and so broad, and has always insisted on a monorepo for internal source code, and it's outsourced to vendors as much as possible, that it's nearly impossible to disentangle any one business unit from the next. I predict that if the FTC or the EU seriously try to break up the company, this will be there argument against it.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#912

Post by _xivi »

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?

What are you comparing it against? Do you actually have a better alternative or just having a bad day?

The fact that you tried to pick on 2 of the results for such a generic keyword, show that it's miles ahead of mainstream search engines which are filled with SEO spam.

I tried that same search on Google, duckduckgo, bing, brave, yandex, even yahoo and needless to say the results were pretty much all SEO spam, list-style keywords farming from generic websites such as NYTimes (how tf is NYTimes an authoritive source on purchasing headphones?). Whereas in Kagi you get a wide range of helpful results focused around reviews/enthusiasts/forums, here are some of the results: youtube video reviews, reddit discussion, discussions on sound design forums, a Quora qusetion, the headphones page on best buy, amazon, walmart, etc.

And as the other comment said, Kagi also has life-saving features that empower the user to have control over the search results [0]. As far as I know the only weak point in Kagi (at the moment) is doing more local-focused searches.

Regardless of the quality of results (which mind you, are already quite superior), it'd be still worth paying for if only to support its ad-less search model and help nurture it. Prove that it's a viable model for the sake of the web. For everyone sake. It's a great effort for that alone. Combine both the model and high-quality results and it's the best in class with no one even close.

[0] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/website-info-personalize...

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#913

Post by exodust »

dpkirchner wrote: post #890
exodust wrote: post #870

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll need to do better than "pedo-guy" to quality your statement. What you call "disagree" was actually a public attack from the diver out of nowhere. Musk didn't know him. The guy went to the media and claimed Musk was acting in bad faith by offering a sub to the rescue efforts, and that "Musk can shove his sub up his rear end." It was inexcusable slander out of nowhere. Musk admitted to reacting poorly, apologisi…

I don't think I do. It's the kind of retort I'd expect from a 12 year old who may not know better, but Musk is an adult. Calling someone a pedophile without proof is one of the worst things you can do to a person -- especially when you have a megaphone as large as Musk's. If you think saying someone's offer of help was made in bad faith is as slanderous as saying someone is a pedophile, we'll never see eye to eye.

A team of engineers built the sub. It wasn't the work of one man.

I think we could see eye to eye, but first you'll need to acknowledge that rubbishing the work of others during a time when kids need rescuing, is the worst possible time to unleash attention-seeking mudslinging against other parties.

The sub wasn't suitable in the end. So what? It was a desperate situation. Help was scrambled from across the world. Many ideas were tabled. The way those boys eventually came out was extremely risky. Anyway, this topic diversion is off the main topic of rubbishing some Google staffer who "killed search". All the best.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#914

Post by alvah »

etempleton wrote: post #308
sailfast wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed - I can appreciate the sentiment and the history, but the ad hominem is not really necessary to prove the point and undermines the credibility of the post. I still use Google, but man has it become difficult to get to what I want.

I agree, but all of the alternatives are no better. Bing and Duck Duck Go are okay sometimes, but truly terrible other times. Google is consistently worse than it once was, but still better than the competition. I know search is hard to do well, but if Google is truly floundering where is the startup that for it better and not just better for a very specific niche area, but truly better across the board?

I use Perplexity (mainly a legacy of wanting access to Claude when it wasn't officially available in my country, but Perplexity offered it & was available here). Search definitely wasn't my use case, but I accidentally discovered Perplexity is a much better search engine than Google or Bing in many cases (and I don't mean that in the sense that people who don't know how anything works will attempt to use ChatGPT as a search engine). Perplexity is actually really good at this & consistently brings me useful results when 2024-vintage Google can't.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#915

Post by earngurus234 »

rugina wrote: post #753
ytdytvhxgydvhh wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’ll define the industry for the coming decades. I used to work in machine translation and it was the same. The older rules-based engines that were carefully crafted by humans worked well on the test suite and if a new case was found, a human could fix it. When machine learning came on the scene, more “impressive” models that were built quicker came out - but when a translation was bad no one knew how to f…

I think NM translation was broken all along. Not in the neural network part but in choosing the right answer. https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.398.pdf

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#916

Post by dapf »

cbsmith wrote: post #555
ryeights wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author called Sundar a McKinsey consultant, not Raghavan. >A quick note: I used “management consultant” there as a pejorative. While he exhibits all the same bean-counting, morally-unguided behaviors of a management consultant, from what I can tell Raghavan has never actually worked in that particular sector of the economy. It also seems like a stretch to say that Yahoo's former "Chief Strategy Officer" had no in…

He called Raghavan a "management consultant", whilst acknowledging that he never was a management consultant. It's slinging pejorative nonsense labels.

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#917

Post by dapf »

sumanthvepa wrote: post #564
ryeights wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author called Sundar a McKinsey consultant, not Raghavan. >A quick note: I used “management consultant” there as a pejorative. While he exhibits all the same bean-counting, morally-unguided behaviors of a management consultant, from what I can tell Raghavan has never actually worked in that particular sector of the economy. It also seems like a stretch to say that Yahoo's former "Chief Strategy Officer" had no in…

So why needlessly call him a management consultant? Yes it is a stretch to say he had much influence. There reason is very simple. Yahoo! was in its death throes. The core products were not bringing in revenue, and it was in the middle of multiple hostile takeover attacks by various private equity players. First it was a hostile offer from Microsoft, a hostile take over effort by Carl Icahn, and then a finally yet an…

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#918

Post by xenago »

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…

A lot of words to say 'I think it's ok to follow orders blindly and torch valuable technologies'. Gomes had principles, you and Raghavan do not.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#919

Post by xenago »

wayne-li2 wrote: post #222

Even though I agree with what the author is saying, the tone of this article is off putting to me. There are ways to call out people for being bad at their job without resorting to “class traitor” and “ratfucker”. That being said, Google search is 100% dead. I append “reddit” to every Google query to get actual results from people, and I don’t see it on Reddit, I give up on my query.

Sometimes the tone is warranted. Destroying internet search for profit warrants scorn of all kinds. Zitron was too kind

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#920

Post by dapf »

sn41 wrote: post #610

Great article. But the author can't be serious about no one knowing who Prabhakar Raghavan is. He is, for instance, the co-author of the definitive text on randomized algorithms [Motwani and Raghavan]. He has also been a well-respected database researcher for many years. In a previous avatar, Raghavan was a pure theoretical computer scientist. As a student, he won the best student paper in FOCS, the Machtey award, wh…

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