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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#931

Post by darrenoc »

eitally wrote: post #907
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 thi…

That amazing internal knowledge graph you're talking about folks on the outside never seeing? That is very ironic because that knowledge graph used to be Freebase.com and a lot of the data came from the open data community who volunteered their efforts and expertise. Then Google bought Metaweb and shut down Freebase.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#932

Post by darrenoc »

snewman wrote: post #864
skyfallsin wrote: post #814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@gregw134 Thank you for sharing! I've never worked at Google, but really curious what the engineering context is when you say "needs a launch" in the last line.

Guessing: perhaps this means, if someone needs credit for shepherding an improvement to search quality into production, here is a set of known improvements waiting for someone to take ownership.

Exactly. The main way to get promoted at Google is to claim that you launched something important. Results in a lot of busywork and misaligned incentives.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#933

Post by arromatic »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #924
arromatic wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did it shut down ?

Ultimately, lack of traffic. During Blekko's lifetime Google went from paying people less than $10M/quarter to send their search traffic to Google to over $4B/quarter to do that. If you are ad based you need traffic to serve ads to. At some point a pay for search model might emerge that has a big enough audience to support a company but that time is not yet here.

1 . Does that mean blekko was something similar to millionshort ? 2. Was blekko capable of tackling seo sites or blogspam taht we have today or it had the advantage of low spam site count from the old web ? 3. Does it have a chance of coming back like how yahoo has been recently hinting a comeback ? 4. A stupid question : How much will it cost it build a blekko today ?

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#934

Post by [deleted] »

srean wrote: post #835
arromatic wrote: post #161

Can Ben Gomes not launch a google rival or join bing ? I am sure msft will welcome him with open arm like they did Sam Altman . VSs will fund him without a second thought too .

Ben Gomes' Google and Microsoft (even now) are different beasts in terms of internal politics and culture[0]. Successful Googlers need not be successful at Microsoft. [0] To understand that, recall Vic Gundothra was an Microsoft export to Google. That's the kind of people that thrive in Microsoft.

[deleted]

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#935

Post by ChuckMcM »

arromatic wrote: post #933
ChuckMcM wrote: post #924

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately, lack of traffic. During Blekko's lifetime Google went from paying people less than $10M/quarter to send their search traffic to Google to over $4B/quarter to do that. If you are ad based you need traffic to serve ads to. At some point a pay for search model might emerge that has a big enough audience to support a company but that time is not yet here.

1 . Does that mean blekko was something similar to millionshort ? 2. Was blekko capable of tackling seo sites or blogspam taht we have today or it had the advantage of low spam site count from the old web ? 3. Does it have a chance of coming back like how yahoo has been recently hinting a comeback ? 4. A stupid question : How much will it cost it build a blekko today ?

Not sure on #1, definitely mitigated SEO sites and blogspam (on an individual basis, if you added a spammy blog to your personal spam list it stopped showing up in results). As a result on slashtag searches there was very little spam.

Would it come back? As it was? no. The folks at Bing used some of the techniques to mitigate some spam in Bing results but didn’t implement slashtags.

It would cost between $3 - $6M to go from scratch to developing a 3 billion page index with a 10 billion page crawl ‘frontier’. You can seed the crawl with Common Crawl. If you can get $10 RPM’s ($10 per thousand queries) and roughly 10M queries/day (so $10k/day recurring revenue) you can run an operationally cash flow positive business. You would want to grow it organically to a 10 billion page index on a 100 billion page crawl which would cover 90+% of the english language queries. With clever optimizations (like a news sieve to only index pages about the news that made ‘sense’) you might improve efficiencies. You would also want to focus on reference applications (people who use search to get their job done) for paid subscriber growth, and simpler commercial partnerships for managing ad lead generation on commercial search (people looking for products or services).

Also you would need to be an advertising ‘primary’ (not taking feeds from networks on a revenue share model) So, for example, working directly with Amazon to both efficiently access their internal product index and to surface it on commercial queries. Note people like Amazon do their own advertising business on their own index so you compete with that to some extent and navigating that early is essential.

Certainly doable but not something that your typical venture fund would go for. It would have a longer payback time (lower internal rate of return) than VC’s look for.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#936

Post by [deleted] »

srean wrote: post #835
arromatic wrote: post #161

Can Ben Gomes not launch a google rival or join bing ? I am sure msft will welcome him with open arm like they did Sam Altman . VSs will fund him without a second thought too .

Ben Gomes' Google and Microsoft (even now) are different beasts in terms of internal politics and culture[0]. Successful Googlers need not be successful at Microsoft. [0] To understand that, recall Vic Gundothra was an Microsoft export to Google. That's the kind of people that thrive in Microsoft.

[deleted]

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#937

Post by winternett »

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…

These search companies should have hired moderators to manually browse results and tag them based on keywords instead of leaving tagging up to content and info creators. The entire results game became fixated on trending topics and SEO spam that it became a game of insider trick trading, that's what makes results everywhere so terrible now.

In a bid for attention, only the fraudsters are winning, well, the platforms are winning lots of money from selling advertising, I guess that's why they're perfectly fine with not fixing results and ranking for many years now. I'm not sure there is a way back to real relevance now, there's no incentive for these large companies to fix things, and the public has already become used to the gamified system to go back to behaving themselves.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#938

Post by AlexCoventry »

kmeisthax wrote: post #646
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!

So, there's a few ways to explain it. From a business strategy level, TikTok exists, and is a threat to YouTube, so we need to compete with it. From a user perspective, Shorts highlights a specific format of YouTube that happened to have been around for a lot longer than people realize. TikTok isn't anything new, Vine was doing exactly the same thing TikTok was a decade prior. It was shut down for what I can only ass…

Thanks, that was helpful.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#939

Post by fuzztester »

immibis wrote: post #928
fuzztester wrote: post #754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are some good suggestions, particularly the first one: >let me directly enter my interests

YouTube has this feature

Where in the menu is it? I admit I have not checked out YouTube menus or features much.
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