It’s been talked about here before, but fundamentally it’s when the advertising guys won the power struggle over the search engine guys. Previously, advertising was a means to fund cool technology (and also get filthy rich).
Now it’s just a way to make the number perpetually go up, sucking every last drop of value out of the system.
Plus the complete lack of vision or strategy from Google’s senior leadership.
panarchy 6 days ago [-]
> Plus the complete lack of vision or strategy from Google’s senior leadership.
I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years.
Search peaked in like 2009
Maps has only become slower and less informative (I remember when it use to actually display everything that was in a location and not just the popular/paid for stuff) since 2009
Google Docs was incredibly impressive... in 2006 and now almost 20 years later there's been a few QoL improvements, but nothing wow worthy.
And it seems everything else they've done has been shuttered and/or wasn't all that innovative in the first place and usually just trying to copy someone else work but in an uninspired way.
bigfatkitten 6 days ago [-]
> I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years.
When you hire an ex McKinsey CEO and get the guy who destroyed Yahoo Search to run your search business, this is what happens.
> I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years.
They invented the technology behind LLM's. So whether you use Gemini or ChatGPT, that was pretty impressive.
Also, Waymo is crazy impressive. If you're considering Alphabet as a whole (which there's no reason not to, it's all under the same stock ticker).
Those are two industry-changing things, so I think Google's doing OK.
deanCommie 6 days ago [-]
A perfect example that illustrates the problem.
The difference to me between whether a company is able to do something amazing vs. a person working at that company does, is whether they're able to productize it/do something with it or not.
Google is famous for hiring the smartest people in the world, and has been for 20 years. That's good. It hires those people and gives them permission to do whatever they want. That's good too! (maybe not for the sharesholders, as we come to see, but for the world of technology and for humanity)
But if all of the authors of the Transformer paper end up having to leave Google and each start competing startups, that shows that the only impressive thing Google has done is managed to hire those people to do the research. That's it.
They had a goldmine and they wasted it.
crazygringo 5 days ago [-]
> They had a goldmine and they wasted it.
What are you talking about? They launched Gemini. They didn't waste anything. And you can't force employees to stay. Employees leaving to compete is as old as Silicon Valley.
Google was just being more conservative about launching it until their hand was forced by OpenAI. And for good reason too, considering all the hallucinations. But then they launched. They didn't "waste" anything.
mountainriver 5 days ago [-]
No they weren’t nearly as invested in it which is why OpenAI won and Gemini still isn’t great. They had a massive lead which they squandered
deanCommie 4 days ago [-]
In the LLM space, there is a definitive 1st (OpenAI), a definitive 2nd (Anthropic), and then there's "everyone else".
Depending on how you measure you could claim Facebook is 1st if you grade them on a different scale for being the most "open-source". But quality wise, they're pretty much in the "everyone else category.
Anthropic is new to a definitive 2nd position, and it remains to be seen if it's durable (probably not).
But regardless of how you measure, Google/Gemini is squarely in the "everyone else" bucket.
When they should have been the definitive first - leading the entire industry with every launch, the way OpenAI is.
YetAnotherNick 5 days ago [-]
Transformer is research, which could is just function of hiring good folks and spending money, not any business goal. And Waymo came out in 2009, one of the last product where google had some long term goal and they actually stuck with it instead of discontinuing it.
If you look into 2005-2009, there were products like Chrome, Waymo, Youtube, GCP, Google docs and lot more that were very ambitious. After 2009 I can't name any one product on that realm.
treis 5 days ago [-]
Has anyone come up with a product like that recently? It seems like the Web is basically the same as it was in 2010.
immibis 4 days ago [-]
The web is way more centralized than in 2010.
YetAnotherNick 4 days ago [-]
Figma is something that definitely comes to mind. And somewhat notion and retool.
crazygringo 5 days ago [-]
If you're going to completely ignore the entire category of "research", then I don't know what to tell you. Because the whole subject here is what impressive things Google has done. How can you possibly exclude anything that derives from their research?
And no, Waymo didn't "come out in 2009". It still hasn't come out except in three limited areas, but it's shown astonishing success where it has. So again, if you're only going to count the year a project was started, and not the decades of work it takes to build a world-changing business... I don't know what to tell you.
Except just... talk about moving the goalposts. Geez. I'm pretty sure there isn't a single company on earth that you're going to find impressive enough.
YetAnotherNick 4 days ago [-]
It's not at all moving the goalposts. You can at least see transformer is not an ambitious project for Google. It's just few researcher getting paid well doing good research. Google put lot more resources in say Alphago.
What was argued was not whether Google created impressive things. I was clear what I meant was Google hasn't started anything to their product suite. Adding to the product suite is more challenging than research project for the company, and it was where Google thrived and which led to success of Google.
I'm guessing lots of people would argue Google doesn't really get credit for that.
nitwit005 6 days ago [-]
> Google Docs was incredibly impressive... in 2006 and now almost 20 years later there's been a few QoL improvements, but nothing wow worthy.
Give the product owner a raise then. Any time Microsoft tries to radically change Office, everyone just gets annoyed, and searches like "where is the print button in excel?" will suddenly skyrocket for a month or two.
Arguably Google Docs has done the best. It hasn't changed much, whereas all the other things you mentioned have got significantly worse.
dijit 6 days ago [-]
Meet is also an outlier.
It doesnt have all the features in the world but it has some technically impressive ones, least of all the “I can tell you’re all in a meeting room, so I am going to selectively increase the audio where people are speaking and prevent echo from all the speakers”.
I’d love more love for screen sharing, but meet is the only product I see that is getting materially better over time.
bengale 6 days ago [-]
Meet is actually surprisingly brilliant tbh.
lazide 5 days ago [-]
100% agree - it also has had essentially no fanfare or sales/marketing, despite it being far and away the best VC software (IMO).
maeil 5 days ago [-]
Against all odds, they somehow learned from their dozen failed attempts at the space, and succeeded the 13th time.
2 days ago [-]
bayindirh 6 days ago [-]
> I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years.
Meet team ported advanced audio processing, environmental noise cancelling and camera effects to Firefox, and they work really well.
It's not impressive of course, but interesting enough to notice.
everfrustrated 5 days ago [-]
Glad to hear this has changed. For many years Meet did everything they could to detect Firefox and block running on it, even when Firefox supported the underlying standards/apis.
N3Xxus_6 6 days ago [-]
They invented the transformer architecture that powers GPT and other llms.
manquer 6 days ago [-]
Bell labs and Xerox PARC did great impactful work long after their parent companies were relevant and still do .
The fact Google did the initial work on transformers but only OpenAI was able to productize is an indictment of their stagnation more than an achievement.
dageshi 6 days ago [-]
Or they recognised the fundamental problem which is that LLM's will kill the motivation for people to upload new information to feed the LLM's with.
If websites can't earn a living through ads because LLM's don't send them any traffic anymore, where do the LLM's ingest new information from?
The web continues to deteriorate because of this and nobody has solved this problem.
pfannkuchen 6 days ago [-]
I’m pretty sure they were just terrified of the PR impact of another “humans classified as gorillas” type incident.
mu53 6 days ago [-]
And they ended up with "put elmers glue on pizza" type incident.
AI is messy
numpad0 5 days ago [-]
I agree that they recognized the fundamental problem but I have different speculation as to what the problem is: the problem must be it's technologically too boring and obviously not profitable to them.
It's culmination of decades of NLP researches, but it's also just East Asian predictive text percussively adapted for variable word length language. It must've been clear to whoever core people that it's fundamentally a sluggish demo or at most a cheap outright-sold commodity product.
IMO they would be right unless someone finds a reason that LLMs can't ever be self hosted in the way Google Search can't be. They must have just saw by the way it is that LLM is at best a regularization engine for that magic box.
lazide 5 days ago [-]
It’s fundamental, IMO.
LLMs have to have something ‘true’ (or at least statistically probable) to validate against for training.
Taking the output from it and feeding it back into itself is, essentially, an Ouroboros. Or like locking a human in solitary.
The more/longer it happens, the more deranged it’s going to get.
kweingar 6 days ago [-]
> only OpenAI was able to productize
What do you mean? Anthropic and Google both have widely used products based on transformers.
michaelt 6 days ago [-]
As I recall, the timeline was:
2017, seven Google employees invent the transformer architecture and publish a paper. Google's investing heavily into ML, with their own custom 'TPU' chips and their 'Tensorflow' ML framework.
2019ish, Google has an internal chatbot they decide to do absolutely nothing with. Some idiot tells the press it's sentient, and they fire him.
2022, ChatGPT launches. It proves really powerful, a product loads of individuals and businesses are ready to pay for, and the value of the company skyrockets.
2023, none of the seven Transformer paper authors are at Google any more. Google rushes out Bard. Turns out they don't have a sentient super-intelligence after all. In fact it's badly received enough they end up needing to rebrand it a few months later.
Classic tortoise-and-hare situation - Google spent 5 years napping, then had to sprint flat out just to take third place.
jasonvorhe 6 days ago [-]
Have you ever listened to what Lemoine said? Sure, we have no proof and he's under NDA so probably no documentation that can be scrutinized. But still, his alleged chats were chilling in some ways. They probably didn't except him to go public and so they had to spend years nerfing their chat bot before launching it as a product and that's why it sucks: They're too careful and have too much to lose in bonuses. Google will probably lose some market share over the next few years before they're getting nervous to put someone with a longer leash into the CEO seat.
tdeck 6 days ago [-]
I recall this particular person seeming like a bit of a crackpot on internal forms before (and for reasons unrelated to) the Lamda chatbot. I didn't know him personally and don't even remember the details anymore but it made an impression that wasn't dispelled by his reaction to a new model passing the turing test.
tnias23 6 days ago [-]
Except tortoise is supposed to win. Maybe we just haven’t given it enough time?
tdeck 6 days ago [-]
For the tortoise to win in technology it needs to be dedicated to relentlessly polishing and improving something over a long period to make the best product experience. Those aren't traits I particularly associate with Google unfortunately.
PKop 5 days ago [-]
Do you not know the story? The hare is the one that naps and wastes time instead of just going full out and winning from the start.
OJFord 6 days ago [-]
Google is the hare, in GP's comment.
6 days ago [-]
xnx 5 days ago [-]
> just to take third place.
At worst, Google is in a tie for first.
manquer 5 days ago [-]
It is easier to judge revenue or market share than technical quality of the models itself objectively , they are relatively close to each other functionally .
In the market, I would say both Anthropic and openAI have been able to do that much better than traditional big tech including Google.
mu53 6 days ago [-]
OpenAI is the market leader by far with the most name recognition. Google was the last to market. Its initial release of Gemini was a total flop because of the meme "Use elmer's glue on pizza to keep the cheese on". It has finally become more consistent, and it manages to compete with other models though I never see anyone recommending Gemini first.
All of these companies are in the red, but OpenAI has the most revenue.
0xDEAFBEAD 6 days ago [-]
This is a bit of a tangent, but I don't think OpenAI's brand is all that durable. You can see that Perplexity.AI has been gaining rapidly. At this point they have half as much search traffic as OpenAI:
You don't search for openai. You go to chat(gpt).com
0xDEAFBEAD 5 days ago [-]
Wouldn't that also apply to Perplexity.AI?
gjvc 6 days ago [-]
Bell Labs and Xerox PARC were great improvements on their successors.
antupis 6 days ago [-]
Google has very research division but productising those inventions is the problem.
cma 6 days ago [-]
It was used in Google translate, and BERT was incorporated into search in 2019, though I don't think it was a clear win for search, I feel like I started having to add exact quotes to everything technical/programming around then.
jumping_frog 6 days ago [-]
One thing I don't understand is google has so much metadata on search sessions to RLHF their search results.
E.g. when I start a search session to solve a programming problem (before llms), I will continually search different terms to get to my solution webpage. Then stop. This session metadata and the path I took is highly significant data that can be used to help llms recognise what research itself looks like.
cma 6 days ago [-]
Not RLHF, but my understanding was they heavily use that data and it was a big part of their moat, part of why competitors wanted to clone their results because they couldn't derive as good of quality from the web alone (Microsoft used the bing toolbar to clone them in the 2010s).
4 days ago [-]
viraptor 6 days ago [-]
> can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years
Android is getting genuinely better. Also AndroidAuto.
tensor 6 days ago [-]
Hard disagree, I used Android for years but after they removed feature after feature that I found useful, and replaced them with features that shovelled ads at me, I finally gave up and switch to iOS.
I think the last straw was when I was forced to replace the stock launcher just to avoid the built in unblockable google search ads. That made me consider why I bothered with Google at all anymore if all I do is hacks to work around their crappy ad filled UI.
jasonvorhe 6 days ago [-]
You mean the Google sidebar in the Pixel launcher with Google News that replaced Google Now? Yeah, that was awful. But you could disable it in either the launcher settings or the Google app itself. I'm glad I'm on GrapheneOS now.
mbarr 4 days ago [-]
I recommend Microsoft's Launcher, it's simple and gets out of your way. Similarly, Edge's search widget just launches a browser and executes your search. This really should be the stock behaviour that Google should provide.
tim333 6 days ago [-]
I don't know about deep level impressive but I'm finding the new Google Lens thing built recently into Chrome pretty cool and useful. You click it and highlight part of the page and then it figures what the image is or ocr's text in it and optional translates or searches it. I use it multiple times per day. Also just being able to do that was a bit sci-fi 15 years ago.
Deep level impressive but maybe just by a company owned by Google is the Deepmind stuff like AlphaFold which recently got a nobel prize and AlphaGo and MuZero. Also you may have heard of the chatgpt/llm stuff that's trendy now, all based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(deep_learning_arc...
Uhhrrr 6 days ago [-]
+1 for Lens - It can translate manga in near-real time.
askvictor 6 days ago [-]
If, by better, you mean more locked down, and with incremental tweaks, sure. I would much rather have Android from 5 years ago, and the ability to make it work how I want, than what there is now.
viraptor 6 days ago [-]
You still can have seen Android from 5 years ago experience. There's lots of custom ROMs for that. On the other hand, for an average person, I believe Android is better today in most ways.
Eavolution 6 days ago [-]
They exist but I can't use them because I need my bank apps to work, and magisk can only trick some of them.
askvictor 5 days ago [-]
Most of the 'new' features in Android over the past 5 years have been available in custom ROMs during that entire time. While there are, indeed, minor improvements for the average user, it's been very minor, and leaves you wondering why they didn't have it in the first place (or it's exclusive to Pixel or some shit like that).
And the average person won't even notice most of the new features/improvements; perhaps the biggest one is the camera, and that's all done in hardware or AI these days, which is not Android per-se than a photography app (which, again, is usually a Pixel exclusive)
5 days ago [-]
hulitu 5 days ago [-]
> Android is getting genuinely better
At what ? Stealing user data ?
They are still not able to arrange some widgets on the screen and to underestand that, if an app does not have microphone permission, you don't need a bloody microphone widget on the screen.
_DeadFred_ 6 days ago [-]
The number one feature I use Google Assistant for (and probably most people's most common usage) is to say "Hey google, set a timer for X minutes". If I dare do anything else with my phone during it's reply of "OK, five minutes, starting now" I risk the timer just... disappearing. If I can't count on it for one of the most commonly used tasks for phones I have zero faith for other things and don't even bother to figure out how to use it as more than an internet access terminal/music player.
franze 6 days ago [-]
Google Photos
viraptor 6 days ago [-]
Has anything serious changed about photos in the last 15 years? I've used it before then and can't really think of anything apart from embedding search and random reminders. But those are really small features.
dmoy 6 days ago [-]
Well Google photos wasn't released 10 years ago, so ... that at least?
Unless you're thinking of Picasa, which is a whole different conversation lol
jazzyjackson 6 days ago [-]
I mean, afaik the standout feature of Picasa was shared web albums where you could invite people to add photos and permissions were managed via Google accounts, so, it's easy to confuse the two. From memory the only thing that changed when moving from Picasa to Photos was that I no longer had a desktop app where to keep photos on disk + Picasa had a neat map of geolocations (maybe Photos caught up or can you still not view photos on a map? I know apple does this, I just use ACDSee now and keep it offline)
Yeah, I'm treating Picassa as Photos 1.0. Apart from the stand-alone app it's basically a continuation with data migrated by default.
dageshi 6 days ago [-]
Google photos is awesome. I genuinely love it, I've been uploading my old travel photos to it and every few days my phone reminds me of some old memories.
lancesells 6 days ago [-]
They bought that though.
sabbaticaldev 6 days ago [-]
> Android is getting genuinely better.
that’s really something you don’t read often
beaugunderson 6 days ago [-]
> Maps has only become slower and less informative (I remember when it use to actually display everything that was in a location and not just the popular/paid for stuff) since 2009
"Ground Truth" is truly dead... we've been to 25 states in the last year and the speed limits displayed in Maps were correct about 10% of the time.
yencabulator 21 hours ago [-]
Areas with multi-million populations get updated maybe every few months, and might import and manually fix up data from the official sources, e.g. city planning.
Areas with tens of thousands of residents get updated on a multi-year schedule; a year-long construction related speed drop might remain in place for years after the construction ends.
Truly remote areas are batch imported from other systems, traced out from satellite images, or some such. Mountain and desert roads are rough suggestions at best.
This seems to have always been true of Google Maps.
pixl97 6 days ago [-]
Eh, were you going to? If say it's accurate about 80% of the time and with in 10mph all of the time. About the only time it gets really confusing is when you're on stacked highways/interchanges.
beaugunderson 6 days ago [-]
Maybe in or near a large city… In the vast majority of the country it’s not even close (55 in a 25 recently, many hundreds of miles where it won’t even show a speed limit even on major freeways in Florida)
yencabulator 21 hours ago [-]
> I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years.
The stupid thing is that, for example, ChromeOS is genuinely technically very impressive. Wayland over virtio to securely expose GUIs from untrusted virtual machines is brilliant technology. I want that, reimplemented by someone who cares about an open source ecosystem.
It's just a dead product.
pimlottc 6 days ago [-]
Google Docs has gotten much slower now that they render everything in a canvas [0]. It’s fine for some things but for large docs it’s painful.
I haven't noticed any slowdown at all, and it wouldn't depend on the document size anyways. In fact, I remember Docs slowing down on 30-page files a decade ago, whereas now it handles 100 pages just as fast as 1.
Only the visible portion of the document is rendered (previously in HTML, now in Canvas). Everything before/after is just the document data.
Maybe you started working on longer docs coincidentally around the same time Docs switched to canvas?
FridgeSeal 6 days ago [-]
My “favourite” part about google docs is where if you scroll marginally faster than glacial, large sections of the page just give up and disappear.
You then have to wait for docs glacial performance to catch up and re-render things again.
It’s genuinely garbage and the “live collaboration” features go unused most of the time.
6 days ago [-]
ksec 5 days ago [-]
>> Plus the complete lack of vision or strategy from Google’s senior leadership.
>I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years.
It is strange to see how the "narrative" of Google unfolds. If parents and grand parents said this in 2015 or 2005 it would perhaps be an extremely unpopular opinion. Or I doubt both would have that opinion in 2015 or 2005.
But >complete lack of vision or strategy from Google’s senior leadership > has been a thing since 2003 - 2004 during their IPO. None of their problems happening now is really new. Their "Dont be Evil" BS, their WiFi privacy issues in 2006 - 2007 before Steve Jobs take a jab on stage in 2008. That was before most people thought about privacy. Not developing a browser against Firefox and then Chrome. It took some Firefox developers some 10+ years before they realise may be Chrome and Google isn't what they thought. They basically earn more money than they know what to do with it and had zero discipline on what, how and where to use it. They continue to pay $10 - $20B a year to Apple as default search engine. Apple is very good at extracting value out of Google. While it seems no one at Google cares about it.
Needless to say I have been ringing the alarm bell on google for 20 years. I wished Mozilla take notes earlier. But they have their own sets of problems.
If there is one thing other than search that Google has achieved was they managed to lift up the salary of the whole Tech industry. They single handedly pulled the average salary of programmers up 10% YoY for many years since IPO. To the point in ~2018 - 2022 many really thought Google's starting salary for a new Junior Dev is $200K.
klooney 5 days ago [-]
I think Meta deserves more credit for the salary growth- they weren't a part of the cartel of companies colluding to keep salaries down, and them poaching from Google helped to force Google to defect.
ksec 4 days ago [-]
I agree. But Meta is still much of a forbidden word on HN. I believe we had this discussion on HN people dont want their salary rise to be attributed to Meta ( then Facebook ) in 2014 - 2016.
gdubs 5 days ago [-]
When I started at Google it has a very Montessori-like atmosphere. Really brilliant people there who were given a lot of autonomy to go and figure things out.
By the time I left, almost nine years later, the culture was dominated by fear and conflicting top-down directives — and the autonomy was gone.
fire_lake 5 days ago [-]
Where can this culture be found in 2024?
shepherdjerred 6 days ago [-]
YouTube, Google Maps, Google Photos, Android, Gemini, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Google Chrome, Go, Bazel, Google Fiber, Google Fi
bigfatkitten 6 days ago [-]
They've been enshittifying YouTube since they bought it, and Maps is following the same road.
Gemini is Google saying "look at me, I can jump on the AI bandwagon too."
Android has had a bunch of facelifts, but from a user perspective isn't much different to what it was a decade ago. Same for Google Photos.
Google Fiber is dead and all but buried.
Google Fi is just another MVNO.
shepherdjerred 6 days ago [-]
I won’t comment on Google ruining products, only that they have produced impressive things in the last 15 years.
bigfatkitten 6 days ago [-]
They have, but those things are almost all incidental to their products.
makeitshine 5 days ago [-]
The HN community seems split between people who want simple products that do one thing well, and others that want continual feature churn and additions. What was Google Docs need exactly to be better? It seems to work perfectly for the targeted users.
clown_strike 4 days ago [-]
They don't want features added to it, they want to see new revolutionary products similar to it. I remember the magic of early Google, delivering products and features that actually solved problems. Gmail offered 1GB storage while Yahoo acted like giving you 15MB was generous.
Ironically I think the dearth of innovation is related to consumers having been rendered too passive since 2010.
Nobody has "needs" for Google to address anymore; now we are told what we should want (clear indication that advertising execs now run the show), usually under protest as they forcibly reshape industry standards and kill beloved products.
The infantilization of AI and the subsequent hilarity of Gemini blackwashing white historical figures says all it needs to about the culture shift.
Search is also censored to an embarrassing degree. Queer theory is treated as irrefutable fact and you'll find infinite dubious content promoting it, while conspiracy theory and anything critical of Israel is downranked or delisted altogether.
Early Google gave us lightsabers [for "free"]. Now they sell lefthanded safety scissors and insist nothing has changed. All stars burn out eventually.
mycall 5 days ago [-]
> I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years.
The Transformer.
ffsm8 6 days ago [-]
> I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years.
I find that hard to fathom. I think what you meant to say is "an impressive right that actually got made into a b2c product".
Otherwise you'd have to ignore that they kinda pioneered llms, until OpenAI poached their tech, polished into a (for a consumer) breathtakingly functional "AI"
They also kept researching self driving via weymo etc
On the business side they've also made a significant mark on the programming world via k8s, golang and angular2 among other things
But I'd completely agree with the sentiment that they completely dropped the ball wrt their original target demographic. Beyond the improvements to android, I can't really think of anything since 2010 either that really improved things.
hulitu 5 days ago [-]
> They also kept researching self driving via weymo etc
A lot of other companies do this. Nothing special about Google.
onetokeoverthe 6 days ago [-]
Yes maps is really bad. No street addresses. Very few named locations.
When google required hosting blogspot content on their servers instead of self hosting that was the end of the freedom there. 2009.
_blk 5 days ago [-]
Flutter is pretty cool. Maybe not as impressive as some last achievements, but darn useful to save money on Android+iOS development.
peutetre 5 days ago [-]
> I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years.
The open sourcing and open patenting of VP8, and the work done on VP9 and AV1 were genuine public goods from Google.
throwaway2037 5 days ago [-]
AlphaFold, which helped to win the Nobel prize for chemistry, is not enough for you?
pdimitar 5 days ago [-]
For 20 years? No.
fragmede 6 days ago [-]
That Waymo thing is pretty cool. Transformers seem like pretty foundational work, even if they weren't the ones that ultimately popularized it in the market.
5 days ago [-]
mountainriver 5 days ago [-]
Go and Kubernetes are both impressive? But I generally agree with the sentiment
What does it do better than a self-hosted Synology Photos, for example?
wetpaws 4 days ago [-]
[dead]
intunderflow 5 days ago [-]
Kubernetes
ruraljuror 5 days ago [-]
Go was designed in 2009 as well; so another case in point.
asah 6 days ago [-]
[flagged]
qwerpy 6 days ago [-]
Maps may have had lots of improvements but they keep relentlessly cramming more and more ads and sponsored content into it. I now actively avoid using it as much as possible.
Which is directly relevant to the topic being discussed here. Engineers work hard to make real improvements but the product as a whole is sabotaged with the never ending pressure to monetize more.
6 days ago [-]
maeil 5 days ago [-]
Not going to be mild here, Google Maps is the absolute poster child of enshittification. Sorry if you've worked on it, it's even more enshittified than search, and the best example of the company being run by the Ads division.
This overview 8 years old but it's only gotten worse [1]. Everything in the UI has been optimized purely for businesses and ads, not for users. I'm blessed enough to now live in one of the few countries where Google Maps is not dominant, where local players are more popular.
I've gone and taken current screenshots of both to show the difference. Current Google Maps [2]. Note how you can't even hide those UI elements blocking the map, but more important is the map itself. Current locally popular maps app [3]. It.. actually works well as a map, like Google Maps used to before Ads took over the business. And just a single touch on the map to hide the UI.
I'm sure the Supernova Hotel and Hostel Ani & Haakien are bringing Google some great cash money though, splendid user feature!
Before I lived here, I of course used Google Maps. And when I go abroad, I have to use it. And every single second spent with it is a stark reminder of how much worse it is than the map apps that are most popular here and are not enshittified.
Some of that stuff is impressive, but I think you might be stretching a bit with lyrics and calculator. They're nice quality of life improvements, but I don't think I'd classify them as "impressive".
askvictor 6 days ago [-]
Docs and Sheets are still so much better than Word and Excel, except that there doesn't seem to be a way to, from the desktop, launch a .csv into Sheets (or .doc into Word).
Though I think that, for every minor improvement, I could name a regression or product shut-down.
sirjaz 6 days ago [-]
Docs and Sheets would only be impressive if they actually released a native desktop app for MacOS and Windows
dalyons 5 days ago [-]
Why would I want this? Why does that make it more impressive?
sirjaz 5 days ago [-]
It would make it impressive that they could make it local without depending on chrome. In addition that it would allow the collaborative aspects natively. Just like on Android or iOS.
sillyfluke 6 days ago [-]
Sorry no: maps has gotten way worse for my use cases. On mobile, they started agressively trying to get you to use the app instead of browser and try to get you to turn on your location constantly. They also kneecapped the "near to here" query button when looking at an adress on the mobile browser, where you need to try to use a roundabout hack to get it sort of working. Constantly enshittifying the mobile browser in favor of the app is not a bargain with the devil I'm willing to accept.
eesmith 6 days ago [-]
Calculator and currency conversion were in Google search before 2009.
kibwen 7 days ago [-]
The paperclip maximizer reports steady and heartening progress on converting all available matter in the Earth system to paperclips. Shares of $PCLIP are up 20% on the news.
0_____0 6 days ago [-]
Universal Paperclips was my favorite piece of art I interacted with this year (so far). It really affected how I think about what I'm doing, and what humanity is doing as a whole.
eddd-ddde 6 days ago [-]
Ultimately I think humans are innate optimizers. It's the reason why I stay playing factorio until late at night, because I want to see those production graphs go up up up.
lowbloodsugar 6 days ago [-]
Ugh, but having to grind fish, fish! just to get a spidertron with a reasonable amount of lasers…
marcosdumay 6 days ago [-]
Does the spidertron cost increase on the space expansion or anything?
I've always built as many as I wanted from the fish I get by accident while building other stuff.
lowbloodsugar 6 days ago [-]
I just built my first fish farm and it appears that one cannot improve the quality of fish. Anyway, I had enough bits lying around to build 5 spidertron as soon as I unlocked the tech so I guess it’s pretty simple. I copied Nilaus’ parameterized mini-mall and then adapted that for assemblers and biochambers so maybe it just seemed easier.
BlueTemplar 6 days ago [-]
You can even cultivate fish in the Space Age. It involves interplanetary logistics though.
cen4 6 days ago [-]
Most importantly Content keeps exploding. Total available human Attention does not grow.
So how does Adtech generate more and more revenue and sells more and more ads year on year?
Simple answer - Fraud.
araes 6 days ago [-]
Similar to my own thoughts on the issue.
It's a lot like the credit card issuing banks. Two notable big names, Wells Fargo and Bank of America both "illegally used or obtained consumers’ credit reports, and then applied for and enrolled consumers in credit card accounts without consumers’ knowledge or authorization." [1][2]
Banks had each employee need to sell 50 credit cards a month. Employees sold 50 a month.
Banks needed "line goes up" for every quarter. Banks had each employee sell 100 a month. Employee's tried to sell 100 a month.
Banks needed "line goes up." Eventually market was saturated, yet banks said sell 1000 credit cards a month. Employees replied, "we cannot, market is saturated." Bank said "sell 1000 a month." Employee's responded with "make shit up, open accounts without consumers knowledge." Fraud.
Advertisers are locked into an arms race for attention with each other. Even if you were stuck with the same slice of eyeball time, you can still grow by selling it for more, and in many ways that's what google's auctions are set up to do. But google's investment in youtube in particular has steadily grown the eyeball-time they have access to as well. I'm not ruling out fraud but I don't see how these facts prove fraud, it seems more like google continuing to naturally benefit from the decline of traditional print and television media.
causality0 6 days ago [-]
Sometimes I wonder what fraction of people employed in advertising think they're making the world better by exposing customers to good products and what percentage aren't in denial about the fact they're weaving dollars out of human misery.
dasil003 6 days ago [-]
Never worked in ad tech so no incentive to see things one way or the other. I do think it’s sad that so much brain power has gone into it, but “weaving dollars out of human misery” is a bit much.
walleeee 6 days ago [-]
Indeed, it's not fair to lay all the blame at the feet of the middling adtech worker. Plus a good fraction of the fibers are certified non-human.
jumping_frog 6 days ago [-]
Attention has a common resource problem. If you (google) don't overgraze your cattle on it, the facebook will because they both are getting the same users at the same time. It's a race at this point. I am getting ads from same company being recommended on both Meta and Google ads real estate.
xnx 5 days ago [-]
> how does Adtech generate more and more revenue and sells more and more ads year on year
Shifting spend from legacy media, and extracting more value from the sellers' margin.
e6u4u 6 days ago [-]
Is total available human attention actually relevant here? It implies that all the possible attention is available already for advertising purposes which doesn't seem true at all.
baq 6 days ago [-]
If it was the economy would shut down soon after it happened.
fire_lake 5 days ago [-]
More people are getting online every year
VyseofArcadia 6 days ago [-]
> Total available human Attention does not grow.
Yes it does. It scales with population, which last time I checked is still going up.
baq 6 days ago [-]
The growing population is starved of dollars. You care about attention of dollars, not of people.
> but fundamentally it’s when the advertising guys won the power struggle over the search engine guys
How would that explain Google search results getting worse though?
Ads only get viewed as long as Search is high quality and people don't switch to a competitor.
Ads fill up the top with sponsored results, but they don't affect the organic results. If by "the advertising guys won" you mean they got more sponsored slots, all that means is they got more sponsored slots. It doesn't affect the quality of organic results.
So I don't understand what your theory is here.
youoy 5 days ago [-]
> Ads only get viewed as long as Search is high quality and people don't switch to a competitor.
This is what someone thinking long term would conclude. On the contrary, lowering the quality of your search causes people to spend more time in the search engine since they have to try more searches. This in turn increases the probability of clicking an ad.
int_19h 3 days ago [-]
"The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users... advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
— The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998
1vuio0pswjnm7 6 days ago [-]
"Previously, advertising was a means to fund cool technology (and also get filthy rich)."
What is advertising now.
Is it possible that the "technology" being funded is "the delivery of advertising over a computer network".
Is that "cool technology". If not, then is the "cool technology" serving as bait to lure in ad targets, i.e., is it merely a component of the advertising services technology.
Why not sell or license the "cool technology" for fees instead of hiring "advertising guys". Why can't this unspecified "cool technology" exist on its own. The parent comment implies there is "value" in "the system", presumably independent of advertising.
lupire 6 days ago [-]
If you've been on the Internet during the last 20 years, you'd notice that people in general aren't willing to pay for something if something cheaper exists, and the "cost equivalent" of advertising exposure is perceived as extremely, extremely low, even by people who dislike advertising.
yencabulator 22 hours ago [-]
Thought experiment:
Boeing letting McDonnell Douglas take over
Google letting DoubleClick take over
1oooqooq 5 days ago [-]
it's even earlier.
when the search engine guys won over the diverse team of web surfers.
search engine was the automation of cheap labour. but early search relief heavily on the ranks early sites won by directory era curation.
search engine tech was unknowingly piggy backing on work from the surfers.
it would crumble for sure since there were no more surfers. AI just made it extremely obviously that Its done.
ayberk 6 days ago [-]
Yeah, you can't talk about the deterioration of Google without talking about the deterioration of the culture at Google.
I didn't like working at AWS for the most part, but I have never seen Google-level dysfunction there. There were a lot of times I disagreed with decision, but I could always understand the reasoning behind it. On the contrary, I can't explain most of the decision being made at Google. The enshittification from the very top has been amazing to watch, even for someone like me who joined only 3.5 years ago. Both senior and mid-level leadership lack a clear vision and the execution has obviously been horrible. Google needs a hard reset if they want to be successful again. I'm not buying the "too-big-to-fail" bullshit.
eitland 7 days ago [-]
> Morgan: Literally Danny said he sat with an engineer team with examples of people in the room and said why aren’t they showing up and they did their “debugging process” and couldn’t figure it out.
Meanwhile a single Swede with a single desktop class machine in his living room created a search engine so good that I would often switch to it when Google failed.
These days I use Kagi, which has prioritization and block lists (which I don't use because the results are good out of the box).
Wanna know what is really interesting about the Kagi story?
While Kagi is building its own index, for a long time they were kind of reselling a wrapped version of Google + Bing results, but still were extremely much better IMO.
I have two theories:
- either Kagi has some seriously smart systems that read in the first tens of results and reshuffle them
- or more likely in my opinion the reason why results have been so good is because kagi has api access which bypass the "query expander and stupidifier"[1] on the way in to Google and the personalization thing on the way out. That way they just interact with the core of Google search which somehow still works.
[1]: "stupidifier" the thing in the Google pipeline that rewrites
- "obscure-js-lib" (think one that a previous dev used, that I now need to debug
- to "well-knowm-js-lib-with-kind-of-similar-name".
Or decide that when I search for Angular "mat-table" I probably want some tables with mats on even if they don't have anything to do with Angular.
bigfatkitten 7 days ago [-]
The stupidifier also rewrites searches for SmartOS, Illumos et al as Solaris just to make sure you get nothing but irrelevant results.
0xDEAFBEAD 6 days ago [-]
I suspect running a small search engine creates a built-in advantage, because the SEO experts won't be trying to manipulate your results.
eitland 1 days ago [-]
Late, but SEO gaming does not explain these observations from sibling comments:
Google: You misspelled “sorta-related.js”. Here you go.
Me: Did I stutter?!
araes 6 days ago [-]
Have one of those I actually thought was kind of funny, and bit like having a conversation with an AI.
Tried searching for quotes from the Matrix because of all these AI issues and asked:
"Quote of Agent Smith to Mr. Neo 'How will you speak with no mouth?'"
and got back:
"You're wrong. Agent Smith never refers to Neo as anything other than Mr. Anderson." Completely did not even try to answer the question.
Course, these days it's more Harlan Ellison "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" [1]. Kind of went beyond the Matrix to total thought control and constant machine torture. "How will you search if all results are false?"
I had Google AI unambiguously assert that a passive LC network could never have an output voltage higher than the input voltage because that would need an active device. It's just dangerous.
hulitu 3 days ago [-]
How do you think it will raise the voltage if it just seats there, being _passive_ ? You need an _active_ network to raise the voltage. /s
20 years ago in the "AI" class, the proffesor said, that the biggest problem with (machine) learning, is that sometines, it will learn wrong, and you have to teach it again.
MichaelZuo 5 days ago [-]
And nowadays it sometimes just silently drops a huge range of matching verbatim results without even informing the user.
It’s especially serious when searching for UN related documents, which have a special document symbol structure.
e.g. 99.9%+ of the documents under the classification A/C.1/… simply don’t show up with a “A/C.1/“ search, except for a handful. And it’s not like irrelevant results are clogging it up either, as Google only returns 40ish results for the whole internet. When there’s thousands of publicly accessible UN documents in that category…
int_19h 3 days ago [-]
According to the Kagi FAQ, "our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide", so I don't think they are relying entirely on their own index.
Novosell 5 days ago [-]
What is this swedish search engine you're talking about?
kassner 5 days ago [-]
marginalia.nu
jayd16 6 days ago [-]
If you get to scrape competitor results then all you need to do to improve them is strip out the ads. It's not exactly rocket science if that's allowed.
sabbaticaldev 6 days ago [-]
true. But scrapping results is what google does so what’s the problem here?
efitz 7 days ago [-]
I’m not precisely sure what problem the author is talking about. Is it the fact that some sites have built a business model around search results or is it that Google changed it search algorithm and they don’t like the way they are prioritized or is it something else?
It seems kind of unreasonable to expect Google to never experiment with their algorithm; and unfortunately at its core it is a zero sum game. You might be a winner today but a loser tomorrow.
if your concern is about revenue, sharing or referrals or ad placements or ??? then I would point out that it’s very unwise to build a business whose success is based entirely on the whims of another business.
I think search in general is becoming a very poor way to discover content as it is slowly getting planted by LLMs and also for years has been gamified by SEO.
I think that the right model for content discovery is either crowd sourced by a like-minded community, like hacker news or curated; if the curator or community drifts away from your interests, then you have to find a new one, but oddly enough, this can actually be done within the same framework.
dghlsakjg 6 days ago [-]
> then I would point out that it’s very unwise to build a business whose success is based entirely on the whims of another business.
When that other business is a monopoly, what choice do you have? The rise of google has effectively killed all other sources of traffic. Web sites used to get their traffic from things like webrings, directories and a variety of smaller search engines. Now? Google, or one of its properties, and to a smaller degree Meta are basically it. The curator and community discovery model is a victim of google, not a solution to it.
Ferret7446 6 days ago [-]
Building a business that relies solely on Web traffic is iffy for reasons unrelated to Google. Supply far, far exceeds demand, to the point that you have to pay to get people to visit your website. Which really explains a lot about the current Web ecosystem.
nicbou 5 days ago [-]
Every single business currently depends on one platform or another. Google Search, Google Maps, social media or Booking.com have become gatekeepers for entire industries.
tdeck 6 days ago [-]
You could say the same about any business that requires some of a person's time and attention. Or some of a person's money.
dismalaf 6 days ago [-]
Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, even YouTube (Google property but not Google the search engine) are all paths to discovery. To a lesser degree sites like HN. There's also nothing actually stopping anyone from going to Bing or something. My Chrome browser takes me to Bing if I type in it or change the search engine...
Also de-ranking SEO spammers is a net positive IMO.
dghlsakjg 6 days ago [-]
They are paths to discovery, but are they actual drivers of traffic?
My impression is that if you aren’t listed on google, your site is pretty close to dead. In any case, if you somehow managed to drive traffic via other social media, you are one underpaid moderator’s hasty decision from ruin.
The point isn’t about deranking spammers it is about concentrating a huge majority of traffic (and therefore power) in the hands of a single entity which is unaccountable to anyone.
benrutter 6 days ago [-]
I think traffic/discovery patterns are a really good distinction. Something like Hacker News, Reddit etc will drive a lot of traffic in a short burst. People are sharing "cool stuff" and visiting it in one go.
Ideally, we need a fix as well for more regular discory of problems people have. If I want "Norwegian cooking blogs" google will probably return me mostly spam, and waiting for someone on reddit to maybe post something in that category obviously isn't an option.
dghlsakjg 5 days ago [-]
Oddly enough using google to search “site:Reddit.com Norwegian cooking blogs” is actually a great strategy.
tempest_ 6 days ago [-]
Another thing to consider is that those sites would rather you did you click those links. They don't benefit when you leave the platform and they down rank things they think will cause users to leave the walled garden regardless of the content.
tempest_ 6 days ago [-]
There is nothing stopping people from going to Bing sure but I think you are forgetting that most people now a days interact with the internet through a mobile device.
Typing w w w . b i n g . c o m on a mobile device is are a huge barrier to entry vs just using the google search box Google pays the phone manufactures to bake into the the OS.
rockskon 6 days ago [-]
There is absolutely something stopping me from going to Bing and I wager it's the same reason with most other people:
Despite how awful Google has become in recent years...Bing is still consistently worse.
dismalaf 6 days ago [-]
> There is nothing stopping people from going to Bing sure but I think you are forgetting that most people now a days interact with the internet through a mobile device.
If anything I'd say mobile demonstrates that Google doesn't have a monopoly... TikTok literally occupies a majority of gen Z's app usage... 4 of the most used mobile apps (Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook) all belong to Meta. My wife doesn't even know which browser is on her phone (Samsung Internet)...
hollerith 6 days ago [-]
Wait: which manufacturer's OS doesn't let the user switch the search engine to Bing in Settings?
tempest_ 6 days ago [-]
They totally let you. How many people do you think go in and change the default? Otherwise paying to make Google the default would not have any value.
mandeepj 6 days ago [-]
> Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, even YouTube (Google property but not Google the search engine) are all paths to discovery.
Add blogs, News sites, and forums - to that as well.
refulgentis 7 days ago [-]
In a sentence, the theory is that as search added optimization layer based on ML, after optimization layer based on ML, it's nigh-debuggable.
Put another way, Google launched 1000 experiments that got +0.2% CTR and seemed innocuous, and now they have a system that only wants to give out Reddit and Quora links.
I've seen this story on Google's private Blind section multiple times. Usually, coupled to discussion about a more cautionary approach taken by the pre-2020 head of search, who was worried about this outcome.
IMHO they're feeling out the same outcome without the benefit of the above knowledge. I don't see this theory well-understood outside Googlers, modulo a pair of popular blog posts, whose name I can't recall, that hit the nail on the head.
(disclaimer: xoogler as of oct 2023, didn't work on search)
Filligree 7 days ago [-]
I agree. But it's a tough problem, isn't it?
I don't just mean filtering out the spam; that's a hard problem on its own. But the good-click metrics... if serving up reddit and quora links at #1 makes more people satisfied with the first result, defining satisfied as 'reads the #1 page and doesn't go back for more', then...
What's wrong with that metric?
That isn't a rhetorical question. It's tempting to claim the users are wrong to prefer it, but not very nice. Why do they do so?
throwawayffffas 6 days ago [-]
> if serving up reddit and quora links at #1 makes more people satisfied with the first result.
It does not, what google is optimizing for is ad click-through not organic results click-through. The whole model is you will search for X see a couple of ads and a sea of bad results and opt to click on the ad.
It's the same reason that if you search for "graphics card" on amazon and sort by price you will get 20 pages of "Graphics card Holders" and "Graphics Card Elbows". They want you to not actually use the search just click on their ad.
baranul 6 days ago [-]
This is a good explanation of the method behind the madness. The manipulated results are for steering people to what they want to serve them. Clicking on their ads or corporate preferences.
The problem appears to be it's hard for them to realize that people are getting fed up with the antics and are seeing through the manipulations. It's like an abuser or bully, that thinks they will keep getting away with the poor treatment of others, who they think are "below" them. At some point, enough people can take a stand, and not put up with the lack of transparency and black-box manipulations. They are going to keep demanding change or find alternatives.
refulgentis 6 days ago [-]
Users aren't wrong (tangentially, I strongly believe they don't like it)
Bravely flattening a root cause analysis to one agreeable-sounding villain, I'd do Goodhart's Law. Click-through rate not being a great proxy for user satisfaction.
i.e. I always clicked reddit first, I used to append reddit to my searches. But I get a very uneasy feeling now that everything has reddit 3 times in top ten. Impossible. It's a big world. It'd be like if Encyclopedia Britannica started just including the snippet-sized version of Wikipedia articles. Not what I'm looking for from that product.
jumping_frog 6 days ago [-]
You have it backwards. People started adding reddit because the default google was serving up has gotten so bad. If the default was good, I wouldn't need to add reddit or quora.
nox101 6 days ago [-]
> I think that the right model for content discovery is either crowd sourced by a like-minded community, like hacker news or curated;
I'm curious how you'd scale that. Google gets 8.5 billion searches per day. 8.5 billion "Ask HN: Where's the best resource for X" isn't going to scale to that.
cyberax 6 days ago [-]
> Where's the best resource for X"
Reddit is a pretty credible alternative for that.
nox101 6 days ago [-]
That is not my experience. The mods there close any question that's been asked before even if the previous one is out of date and is closed to new answers. They also just seem to close most questions period.
romanows 6 days ago [-]
Are you sure you're not thinking about Stack Overflow? I hate defending reddit ever since the API debacle, but there are scads of subreddits, many with different sets of mods, and all of the ones that help me with product reviews don't seem to have aggressive moderation?
Edit: for example, I was searching for woodworking design software this morning and got a lot of helpful-looking results from reddit.
lotsofpulp 5 days ago [-]
It was a while ago. I would presume many posts and replies to posts are by marketers and/or LLM bots, especially for posts asking for product/service recommendations.
onionisafruit 6 days ago [-]
I may be wrong, but I don’t think op is responsible for scaling their suggestion up to serve everybody on the internet.
nine_k 6 days ago [-]
Then it's a model for discovery of a tiny sliver of content :shrug:
Google is now moving towards the position AltaVista used to have: everybody is using this search engine because of its breadth of coverage, the users are often unhappy with having to search for a long time and adjust the query many times, and complain about the inefficiency of it.
I hope Kagi will grow and attain a large enough market share to afford indexing more of the web. Maybe we'll have a really useful search engine again, like it's 2001. For a few more years at least :-/
rkagerer 7 days ago [-]
Speaking of which, I would love a curated Android app store. It says a lot that you still can't filter by ad-free apps in it.
colordrops 6 days ago [-]
F-droid and Aurora
nine_k 6 days ago [-]
F-droid is good, but where's the curation part?
colordrops 6 days ago [-]
What type of curation are you looking for? F-droid curates for open source and "anti-features" which are documented on each app page. And Aurora allows you to search Google Play while filtering out apps that utilize ads. What exactly do you want?
cyberax 6 days ago [-]
It's curated. It clearly marks "anti-features" of the apps.
Ferret7446 6 days ago [-]
You can help create one, since unlike iOS, Android doesn't have an app market monopoly. There are already many alternative app stores.
mrandish 6 days ago [-]
App Finder in the Play Store will filter by ad-free and a bunch of other parameters.
raincole 7 days ago [-]
> I think that the right model for content discovery is either crowd sourced by a like-minded community, like hacker news or curated
This is how all the subreddits that are remotely related to politics or news got so biased.
Of course I don't know what the alternative is. If I did I would be making that ideal site instead of scrolling HN.
dangus 7 days ago [-]
Also the article did a terrible job by confusing LLM and AI query results with Google’s not-LLM search engine.
And yes, like you alluded to, search engines aren’t the only way to acquire your readership or regular customers. Some media outlets basically don’t even use search engines to drive traffic, like so many social media based businesses out there. There are hundreds of thousands of businesses that barely have a linktree page.
fallous 6 days ago [-]
"I think that the right model for content discovery is either crowd sourced by a like-minded community" and now you've re-created the original Yahoo search, which was killed off in the original Search Engine Wars by the likes of AltaVista and later Google because it didn't take long for the amount of new content on the web to overwhelm the manual curation process.
A manually curated system can only truly work with a constrained domain of content/subject matter and tolerance for high lag regarding new information. Wikipedia is an example of what that kind of system would look like.
thayne 6 days ago [-]
> it is slowly getting planted by LLMs and also for years has been gamified by SEO.
I think that is basically what they are complaining about, from a content creator's perspective. They are upset that their quality content (according to them at least) is losing to ML generated garbage, and that google engineers don't even seem to be able to understand why that happens.
lupire 6 days ago [-]
Maybe the Google Search engineers should ask the team next door, that has been receiving the lion's share of Google's funding over the last 3 years years, with the express goal of doing exactly that?
baranul 6 days ago [-]
My take on what the author was getting at, is how Google's manipulation of its algorithm has led to poor results and backfired on them. Not just for the users of its search engine, but small businesses counting on being discovered that way.
Arguably, the problem is black-box algorithms and how they are manipulated. The same problem can be faced by any curated community, where there is little to no transparency. Curated can still mean manipulated. People can jump from place to place, but that may not be advantageous, because where they want to be or the most likely places for discovery are not available.
23B1 7 days ago [-]
> it’s very unwise to build a business whose success is based entirely on the whims of another business.
Show me a business free of dependencies and I'll eat my hat.
RiverCrochet 6 days ago [-]
Bad argument. Having all of ones business dependencies to be that from a single business, subject to its whims, is unwise regardless of the fact that no business can exist without dependencies at all.
no_wizard 7 days ago [-]
Everything exists in a system. I suppose the least (and therefore most resistant) to dependency related issues is small family farmers that run things like U Pick farms and grow a diversity of crops
jumping_frog 6 days ago [-]
I think you should read the blogpost again. Google wants these smaller websites to come into search results but it can't coax the The Algorithm to do it. That's why they are actively trying to debug these issues.
aspenmayer 6 days ago [-]
> I think search in general is becoming a very poor way to discover content as it is slowly getting planted by LLMs and also for years has been gamified by SEO.
Did you mean supplanted here?
emmelaich 6 days ago [-]
It's a problem that rankings changed so dramatically and no-one really understands why.
Perhaps the ranking was terrible before and now is better. Or is it the other way around?
RA2lover 6 days ago [-]
The capability of A/B testing should have made this experimentation a one-armed bandit problem, which is far more ammenable.
sberens 6 days ago [-]
Does anyone have a set of queries that google returns poor results for?
I spent a few minutes looking at my search history (filtering chrome history by "google search"), and the vast of my queries are quite simple (e.g. people's names) that google does well on (in fact I find google search for people better than linkedin sometimes).
I also tried a few complex queries and compared them to Kagi:
"How much bitcoin does microstrategy own" -> Google returns the correct snippet from here[0] while Kagi only linked to articles about how much it acquired in the last few days.
"how to pronounce stratchery" -> Google returns the correct snippet from the Stratechery website[1] while Kagi's first result is a spam entry[2] with the wrong pronunciation (the second result is a tweet with the correct pronunciation).
I'd be curious to see more comparisons!
Edit: I just remembered Dan Luu's post (https://danluu.com/seo-spam/) but after looking through my search history, the queries he uses are not at all representative of my day to day searches.
You’ve subconsciously altered your search behavior to avoid categories that Google is horrible at.
Any product reviews will be SEO garbage (blogspam too 10 lists). Anything travel will be a page full of ads before organic results, if any. You just know to not even bother so you’re left with the queries that still work.
tim333 6 days ago [-]
I was wondering the same thing. I see all these complaints that Google is awful and broken but it generally seems to work fine for me, apart from stuff that all the search engines struggle with.
Some example of something that's hard to find with Google but easy with something else?
If Google is so bad why don't people, myself included click on one of the other ones?
I sympathise with Giant Freakin Robot not getting clicks - I'd never heard of them. But that's different from Google being bad from a user point of view.
I just tried clicking on them all - they all work. Baidu is kind of funny as it's all in Chinese and searching The Sound of Music came back with Chinese which Google translated to "The Nun and the Seven Naughty Children!"
luckylion 5 days ago [-]
> If Google is so bad why don't people, myself included click on one of the other ones?
I believe because stickyness is a strong force. Google gets worse, but you know it and you know how it fails and what to do to make it better (i.e. how to word your query differently, what parameters to add etc when you get terrible results).
You don't know this for any other search engine, so you need to make a) an active decision to try another search engine, and b) learn how to use it so it delivers what you want.
And I assume that, for most people, Google isn't bad enough to make that kind of investment.
Earlier today I tried to find out what's currently happening in Sudan, is there any shift in the civil war etc. Google was pretty useless. News articles from 6 weeks ago, the best results were probably Wikipedia, but they ranked the Timeline higher than the actual article. I tried with "sudan civil war", "sudan civil war maps" etc.
I tried just now and Yandex actuall provided much better results for what I wanted. They had sudan.liveuamap.com, they showed polgeonow.com, which looks very interesting (can't say if accurate or trustworthy, but definitely topically relevant), sudanwarmonitor.org etc. Compared to Google, they show much less "top 1000 media sites" and more of what look to be topic-experts.
Bing found sudanshahid.org (again, don't know how accurate), multiple arcgis.com-hosted articles, and also included sudanwarmonitor.org. I'd say more Big News Corps than Yandex, but less than Google.
On this search, I'd say Yandex was best, Bing second, Google last. Yet still I use Google as my daily driver, I think mostly because I don't know how far I can trust Yandex, and I have a general bias against MS products. It's certainly not because they don't deliver better results -- but I know Google and it's "the devil you know", until Google becomes too hard to extract results from, at which point I'll be forced to switch.
lukev 7 days ago [-]
Google has clearly transitioned away from prioritizing customer value (and content creator value, unless you're an advertiser) in favor of some internal opaque KPIs.
After switching to DuckDuckGo years ago, and Kagi last year, it's obvious every time I go back to Google how much they have lost the plot.
It'll take another decade before they lose dominance, but the writing is on the wall. Inertia and market position are the only reason they're still on top. Meanwhile, the younger generation barely uses web search, and the tech savvy are starting to drain away more and more quickly.
Startups should be excited. Rather than being the 800-lb gorilla that is going to come take your lunch, Google is the walking dead behemoth waiting to be harvested for conceptual parts.
manquer 6 days ago [-]
Seriously ! after switching to Kagi along with recent annoying changes to Google search last 2 years , the switch back to google unimaginable.
Recently I realized that i only !g to google from kagi just a handful of times this year and every time to instant regret .
A marked contrast to couple of years back with DDG !g would instinctive and probably half the time and results felt better in google . Sticking with DDG felt idealistic and the quality second class, not so with Kagi, it feels the $10 pays off every month in much improved productivity.
It is to be noted that Kagi uses google search index as a source, so it is not like Google cannot improve the results or UX technically, just not possible institutionally.
v1nvn 6 days ago [-]
Meanwhile, the younger generation barely uses web search
I might be a little out of touch, but what do they do instead?
aboardRat4 6 days ago [-]
They use the search box in Telegram, Tiktok, Whatsapp, Wechat, etc.
ivanjermakov 6 days ago [-]
I tried several times to find some specific reel I saw in Instagram and had a really poor experience. Results were not only what I was looking for, but seemingly off-topic completely. Understandably, video content is harder to index if author does not put effort to give more context.
concerndc1tizen 5 days ago [-]
I wonder about that as well.
Perhaps they are easily distracted and forget what they were searching for in the first place, because they're presented with a shiny object?
CaptainFever 6 days ago [-]
A significant amount also use ChatGPT.
onemoresoop 6 days ago [-]
Social media.
danjl 7 days ago [-]
Google's customers are advertisers. Customers are the people who pay you money. Consumers are just the product.
Aeglaecia 6 days ago [-]
google was always by far the best search engine compared to the competition, so data harvesting, advertising etc were accepted costs of doing business. now search engines all suck with the advent of seo, ai pollution, and enshittification - so there is no longer an overwhelming benefit to using google. interesting to witness control slip from a behemoth.
praptak 6 days ago [-]
"As is the fact that around the same time others also warned that one common consequence of mass layoffs is they tend to turn internal systems into black boxes because everybody with a deep understanding of them has left."
Direct loss of knowledgeable people is real but it is not the main reason for these systems becoming black boxes.
For every knowledgeable person laid off there's twenty who stay and adjust to the new reality where their future at the company is much less certain. These adjustments vary person to person but literally nobody goes to say "Whoa, I better improve the documentation and share my knowledge so that I'm easier to fire!"
firefoxd 6 days ago [-]
When I was leaving a job, I decided to start documenting things. I had a solid documentation before I gave my two weeks notice. Then I used the remaining time to refine it, it was a pretty good documentation.
A month after I left, they contacted me and offered contract work, which i declined. For the following year, employees reached out to me directly for help. It didn't matter that everything I helped with was already documented.
My take is there isn't a solution for proper knowledge transfer in companies. That's why I find it fascinating when people get fired on a whim. You lose so much more than an employee.
iepathos 6 days ago [-]
> Whoa, I better improve the documentation and share my knowledge so that I'm easier to fire
I don't disagree that people react as you say and create knowledge silos with the misguided idea that it protects their job, but I do want to point out the consequences of it for any here who may be considering doing so on purpose. Knowledge silos do not secure your job. They in fact limit your ability to advance, limit your ability to collaborate across an organization, limit your ability to adapt, limit your ability to take up other tasks, limit your ability to delegate, and reduce collaboration and project success thereby reducing your perceived performance within an org. There are a bunch more reasons why knowledge silos are bad not just for an organization but for individual engineers living in the silos, but you don't need to take my word for it, there are multiple studies published on this you can find.
praptak 5 days ago [-]
It's not only misguided job security. Silos is what you get by default. You need additional effort to prevent silos rather than some nefarious additional effort to lock information up.
People who are uncertain that they're still around in a year are much less willing to put this additional effort which pays off in the long term.
jopsen 6 days ago [-]
I've seen the opposite effect.
Where people in a large organisations work to make an open source project more resistant to organizational changes (and priorities).
But yes, layoffs certainly has negative side effects.
transcriptase 6 days ago [-]
I doubt many will see this, but Yandex (yes, the Russian Google), is basically 2006 Google in the sense that it shows you what you want versus what Google’s lawyers and a bunch of SF dweebs working on their promo packet have in their best interest for you to see or not see.
Perhaps there’s domestic Russian things that are censored but that’s far outside my use-case.
aboardRat4 6 days ago [-]
Yandex is only good if you search in English, because Yandex doesn't care about the English market :D. They only care about Russian and Turkic makers. (Maybe Vietnam? I forgot.)
bitcurious 6 days ago [-]
Yandex is following the same trajectory. Yandex reverse image search used to find websites with an image, a la old Google. Now it’s the same “similar image” crap.
account42 4 days ago [-]
Exactly. At least Google gives you an "Find image source" button that restricts the result to exact matches. If the Yandex artificial stupidity decides you actually want some different image you don't get a choice. IME the Yandex image index also seems much smaller than Google's.
OTOH Yandex still gives your direct image links and is better at showing you the largest versions of an image (although too often that's just a blurry upscale).
FrustratedMonky 6 days ago [-]
Isn't most of Google from 2006 open source, or at least known in publicly available papers? So someone in the US should be able to re-create Google, and go back to basic page rank.
Is there anything preventing new search engines? Except scale and servers. But what most of us want is just plain old ordinary search as it existed in 2006, so that is probably reproducible.
I know there are some other engines. Like DuckDuckGo, but just found out they are really just Bing.
Which I guess begs the question, if Google Sucks so bad, why doesn't Bing take over??? It isn't as bad, even if not great.
Edit: After reading more posts. Appears Kagi is doing this.
lmkg 6 days ago [-]
PageRank relies on pages from one domain linking to pages on another domain as the main signal of quality. But no one does that anymore, because of PageRank. Most cross-domain links are from "partnerships" made under the explicit premise of boosting PageRank score. The metric became the goal, invalidating the metric.
Another factor is that since 2006, social media has displaced blogs. Blogs were a rich source of "authentic" cross-domain links, and the movement of online discussions to consolidated and closed platforms has dried up that well. Some even go so far as to pin the downturn of blogging on the demise of Google Reader.
account42 4 days ago [-]
I wonder if you could solve the PageRank problem by backpropagating negative scores for known bad sites. Then if someone sells out all they end up doing is ruining their own reputation.
baq 6 days ago [-]
The problem with openness has been turned on its head two years ago. Nowadays it’s the only way to not have your thoughts eaten and transformed in inexplicable ways by a myriad of LLMs.
robryan 6 days ago [-]
Social media still has a lot of links. They are probably all have "nofollow" on them. Assuming google honors that.
account42 4 days ago [-]
Ironic, isn't it?
BarryMilo 6 days ago [-]
> so that is probably reproducible
Is it? How many more pages get published each day? If you include each YouTube video and social media post, it's easily several orders of magnitude. Organizing this kind of firehose isn't easy, neither is prioritizing/ranking it.
2006 was child's play in comparison.
transcriptase 6 days ago [-]
The difference is 2006 Google just showed you what you were searching for. 2024 Google runs your query through 200 legal, moral, and “benefit to Google” layers of filtering, reinterpreting, and reordering before showing you results.
If you don’t believe me, search “watch frozen 2” (or anything else) on google, then on yandex. Both knew what you wanted, but only one is actually going to return the relevant results.
5 days ago [-]
lubujackson 6 days ago [-]
Strongly agree. It's like an alternate internet where Google stayed cool.
anal_reactor 6 days ago [-]
I use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine, and Yandex as secondary
riiii 7 days ago [-]
Sobering read on how Google was destroyed from the inside.
Yes, 2019. Without any insider knowledge, I remember a Google update at the end of 2019 where they really went to shit, gone from "don't be evil" all the way to evil
It was actually later than I expected it to happen but it seems like distinct enough event that it's had reverberation all the way to the present.
frompdx 7 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Ylpertnodi 6 days ago [-]
>Sent from Firefox
Read using brave (ubo on)
CatWChainsaw 6 days ago [-]
Every time Ed Zitron is mentioned on this site someone shows up with a hateboner, it's getting super old.
Everyone has a bias, it's not a crime to let it show. I know it's Silicon Valley's dream to flatten all human experience into emotionless 0s and 1s but they need to knock it off and you need to stop enabling them.
frompdx 6 days ago [-]
I fail to see what part of my comment constitutes a "hateboner". Avoiding bias in journalism predates silicon valley by decades, if not centuries.
CatWChainsaw 6 days ago [-]
Besides clearly being outdated guidance (see election 2024 + "substack is the new journalism"), not even "unbiased" journalism is merely a bland recitation of facts, and there's a world of difference between that, an article with an obvious slant, and straight-up dog-barbecue levels of bullshit and lies.
It IS frustrating, beyond frustrating, that Google nuked the web for ad money. The idea that you have to report that by neutrally dictating a string of facts or else forfeit all credibility is stupid.
s1artibartfast 6 days ago [-]
Does this strike you as a source where one would expect unbiased journalism? Does it claim to be such? It strikes me as a personal blog of opinion pieces.
peepeepoopoo92 7 days ago [-]
It's almost as if over a decade of exclusively optimizing for employees who are good at leetcode, will lead to a workforce that isn't capable of doing things besides solving well-defined leetcode problems. Wow, who could have guessed?
rvz 7 days ago [-]
This. When you also bring in employees whose function is to do only one specific thing, such as editing a CI system, maintaining a google-specific internal tool for decades, they cannot easily adapt or are completely inflexible or incapable of changing.
Anything that requires a tiny bit of creativity of a new change requirement, it is going to be an issue.
ldjkfkdsjnv 6 days ago [-]
The leetcoders moved into management, and have no product vision but immense sway over the direction of the company
Animats 7 days ago [-]
Giant Freakin' Robot was an aggregation site. Its "content" is links to other web pages with blithering about them. Google seems to recognize aggregation sites now, and down-ranks them. Google itself is an aggregation site, and there's no reason for it to pass traffic to other aggregation sites.
If only they'd down-rank Yelp, etc.
bl4kers 7 days ago [-]
A quick browse through their website shows only links to original content as far as I can tell
xnx 5 days ago [-]
Linking to content is aggregation. Hacker News is an aggregator in that way.
ivanjermakov 6 days ago [-]
Experienced internet users, what use cases do you have for an internet search? For me it is one of:
a. I know what website has this information and I go directly there (e.g. Wikipedia or Github or Google Maps)
b. I need a real human opinion or feedback (usually a Google search by Reddit domain only)
c. I need some well-known information that is easy to verify and this is the problem LLMs are very good at
This is >95% of my "surfing" activity. I think I would barely notice major search engines going down one day.
jshen 6 days ago [-]
You aren't using the internet, you are using Reddit as a walled garden. This is risky if you believe a decentralized internet is valuable
account42 4 days ago [-]
Exactly. I have used the site:reddit.com filter too but it's at best a hack that will only work until SEO scammers game reddit instead - and that's probably already well under way.
What is really needed is a search that lets me filter to results where the author doesn't profit from me seeing the result. Filtering for websites without advertising might be good enough. Not something Google will ever provide due to conflicting interests.
ivanjermakov 6 days ago [-]
Not quite. I still treat Reddit as an aggregator of small niche communities e.g. games or not-so-popular hobbies. And this is a relatively small part of my internet usage.
jshen 6 days ago [-]
Right, but you basically said that you don't need search because you only use a few sites. That, or you do use search in the form of Reddit indexing the web which is your major search engine.
There is value in anyone being able to publish their content without a gate keeper. All content shouldn't be locked within a few walled gardens.
blisterpeanuts 6 days ago [-]
Tangential to the main topic is this quote from the article:
> I barely getting by, I’m eating at the food bank now, I had grossed $250,000 last year
It’s too bad he’s in such difficulty that he has to eat at a food bank, but where did all that money go? And, presumably, decent money earned in previous years?
In a cyclical business, or a business dependent on the vagaries of a giant monopolistic corporation that can change the rules seemingly arbitrarily, it’s prudent to save for a rainy day.
carlosjobim 6 days ago [-]
He probably eats at a food bank so that he doesn't have to touch the money he invested in the stock market when making $250 000. Asking him to touch his nest egg would just be cruel, so I recommend everybody in the food bank to get out of the line and make room when he shows up to fill his duffle bags.
xvector 6 days ago [-]
Could be anything. For example, he may have aggressively been paying off a mortgage or student loan debts.
blisterpeanuts 6 days ago [-]
He stated that he did not have a mortgage.
rkagerer 7 days ago [-]
The worse Google gets, the bigger the opportunity for someone else to displace them and do better. Hopefully, someone who actually gives a damn about their users.
jackcosgrove 7 days ago [-]
Whatever the next version of information retrieval at internet scale is, I don't think it will involve indexing the web. I think the web's moment has passed.
Maybe the future is something like publishers supplying datasets to train models on? Or like how search was built on top of the web, it will be something more organic and ad hoc.
tempest_ 6 days ago [-]
The internet is shrinking. The value of indexing the wider internet has less and less value to the average person. So much sits in walled gardens now and for many people that is perfectly fine. If it isnt in tiktok or instagram it doesnt exist.
globular-toast 6 days ago [-]
Isn't this just a return to pre-90s internet? Back then the internet was only used by a few educated people. The masses watched TV etc to fill their time. Now it's tik tok etc. The early 2000s was an unusual time when more people actually used the internet, but it's going back to normal now.
xvector 6 days ago [-]
The future of content is social media. Instagram Reels and TikTok. Snapchat and YT Shorts.
People don't want to read articles, they want to watch short form videos about what's interesting to them.
An interesting side effect is that I think this will lead to more direct-to-consumer sales. Customers will be led straight to your website instead of an Amazon order page.
carlosjobim 6 days ago [-]
It still needs to be indexed to be searched. Doesn't matter if it's articles, books, videos, posts, long or short.
> An interesting side effect is that I think this will lead to more direct-to-consumer sales. Customers will be led straight to your website instead of an Amazon order page.
That's an excellent outcome if it happens. Businesses should produce quality information and content related to their product category, instead of purchasing ads on other websites. There's a lot of good examples of this.
killjoywashere 6 days ago [-]
The difference between theory and practice is that, in practice, all theoretical exponentials are eventually sigmoid and, in the very long run, bell-shaped.
hintymad 6 days ago [-]
It looks to me that the real problem with Google is that Google has become the most bureaucratic company in the past 15 years or so. Case in point, how many product managers are in the Infra org? Tens since 2019, right? But then, why does an internal Infra org need so many PMs? If Infra is like that, we can imagine how Google functions.
voidfunc 6 days ago [-]
There's been a pretty massive expansion of bureaucracy in every company in the last fifteen years. And government. And academia.
It seems like the idea of building a lean company has totally fallen by the wayside.
Gunax 5 days ago [-]
> Once old media started shifting its focus to the internet, they soon realized they weren’t any good at it. They couldn’t do what we could do, so their efforts were an unmitigated disaster.
Unable to compete with us on a level playing field, the old print media industries resorted to lawyers. They saw independent publishers getting a lot of traffic from Facebook, so they began threatening Facebook with lawsuits if they didn’t show their content more often, and our content less.
Can anyone explain this? How do you sue Facebook for giving bad recommendations?
0xmarcin 5 days ago [-]
Blogs and small sites still show up when you look for obscure contents like "RS232 DTR line". So far when I had a very specific question related to hardware or software I could find it via Google.
I find that blogs and small sites do not have a chance when looking for a commercial products or when trying to find a review for a product. There is too much SEO spam and fighting for the top positions.
But if you are doing something that cannot be commercialised easily or is very niche your blog will have easy time on Google (programming is not a niche anymore).
account42 4 days ago [-]
Sometimes small sites show up. Sometimes nothing shows up even though there are matching small sites out there.
construct0 5 days ago [-]
Yeah, if you're specific about it and know what to expect it's usually workable. In any case, this blog post is an indicator of what's about to come next.
notadoc 6 days ago [-]
Google search results now are nearly unusable, most look like this:
- Top of the page is slow loading AI regurgitation of deeply buried real web results, but often wildly inaccurate. No thanks.
- Next are a bunch of YouTube videos you don't want to watch where you have to wade through dozens of ads and hours of content to get the 3 seconds of information you're looking for. No thanks.
- "Related search" nonsense that nobody ever wants to see but if you click on those you will get more of the above. No thanks.
- Some useless unrelated shopping links you almost certainly don't want. No thanks.
- Way down at the bottom, 2-3 real web search results, non-keyword matched, and only from major mainstream outlets that are part of the Trusted News Initiative (Orwell?!) that have turned into glorified content farms which spit out non-expert written content on every conceivable subject for Googlebot (and now most of this content is AI written or from the cheapest possible third world contractors). No thanks.
Those "real web search results" used to be independent publishers that are referenced in this article, which were often topical experts with deep knowledge on their respective subjects, and those people and businesses have been destroyed over the last few years by Google updates that clearly prioritize their own slop and their "trusted" corporate ally content farms over the independent web.
They also disappears tons of content, and anything critical or outside of the mainstream acceptable narrative is nowhere to be found, sort of like searching for "tank man" from inside China, something everyone in the west used to poke fun of and point to as an example of digital totalitarianism.
If I were running Google search I would immediately roll back all of their search changes to somewhere around 2014-2016, which was roughly the last time you could find true keyword matched web results from a hugely diverse array of expert sources, and then very cautiously reassess. Obviously they would never do that, so I am not sure they can recover from their own demise.
BTW I don't find DuckDuckGo or Bing to be much better, they seem to just mimic Google results. Search is in real trouble.
season2episode3 5 days ago [-]
I'm curious if you have a specific query I could type into Google that's instructive of your claim that information has been disappeared. (honest question).
tomrod 7 days ago [-]
What has happened to cause Google to get so bad at search?
flenserboy 7 days ago [-]
This is only to repeat what has been said by many, numerous times, but —
1. The point of search was no longer to provide requested data, but to generate clicks for Google's ad service.
2. Generating clicks for Google's ad service required that exact text search, boolean searches, & everything else useful had to be excised because giving what was asked for reduced engagement.
3. Ads had to be stuck on the top half of the results page, & the second half of the search results, for more clicks to be earned, had to be filled with garbage sites that did not provide what was sought. This encouraged the proliferation of scrapers & bot-generated text sites. Hand-in-hand with this was the elimination of long-tail results, as digging into results might give useful results.
4. It appears that a decision was made at some point to curate & direct answers toward particular results. While much has been made about certain political leanings being almost disappeared by this move, it appears to be much more likely that this was a result of returning results which generated more ad revenue & clicks (which may say more about the sorts of sites Google runs ads on than anything else).
5. In parallel with the dominance of ad-revenue mining, data mining became a major purpose of receiving search requests. Thus the requests for location information on every search, tied in with the drive to personalize results not for the purpose of giving good results, but to give identified users results they were more likely to interact with to both interact with Google ads & give Google more data to suck down & use.
If we could get them to revert back to the 2006-era search engine, where more than just major sites & bot farms are indexed, we would have something useful. But that's not going to happen.
nothercastle 7 days ago [-]
It’s bad when their shitty ai implantation can find the answer but none of the links that it pumps out have anything relevant just seo spam.
readyplayernull 7 days ago [-]
Value extraction.
readams 7 days ago [-]
The web is just much more hostile now. It's not a conspiracy by Google. Over the years the bad actors are chipping away. Now with LLM content it's going to be even harder to pick out the actually useful content, since even humans will have a hard time discerning.
eitland 7 days ago [-]
Disagree.
Kagi and search.marginalia.nu are both proof that it is possible to deliver very good results - if you don't stack the incentives against it.
Havoc 6 days ago [-]
What surprises me is how calm Google is. I’d say my own Google usage has drop 80%+ too since LLM arrival. All the Google products remaining are likely loss leaders. YouTube w/ Adblock etc
WalterBright 6 days ago [-]
People often say that successful businesses inevitably grow until they take over the world. The trouble is, as an organization gets larger, it becomes optimized for what it does, and the internal bureaucratic inertia becomes impossible to adapt to new business realities. And so it eventually collapses.
kaoD 6 days ago [-]
How do you explain Microsoft though? Even though they lost the smartphone train they seem to be taking all the right steps under Nadella and seem to be adapting well to all the new market circumstances.
To me it feels that leadership matters more than we give them credit for. It's just that most leadership sucks.
WalterBright 6 days ago [-]
Great question. There's been a boom recently in giant tech companies. I suspect that is attributable to AI being a big productivity booster, which overcomes creeping calcification. For a while.
I agree with you that Nadella has done a spectacular job, and that leadership matters more than most people think it does. I'd call his performance an outlier.
m3kw9 6 days ago [-]
Check out their cloud API dash board it’s like the nuclear power station control room. 50 toggles, I would have went default to simple mode and an advanced mode. But no, they put every dial and switch in front
moralestapia 5 days ago [-]
Late to this comment thread but my two cents.
They have started breaking down search in Gmail as well, I've noticed that for a month or so. Just as it started on Google search, exact, verbatim queries, are not being returned in the result set.
Google's too big to fail already, as evidenced by the complete inept leadership it has had for the past decade, while the stock keeps going up.
Midwit's take would be : "But that's the job of a CEO, to make the stock go up". Nope, what I'm saying is that in spite of the CEO, it is a natural monopoly that is prone to grow. Them missing out the AI wave, which they pretty much created, will go down in history as top idiocracy in companies.
With Chrome's forced departure and ChatGPT actually giving you accurate results their hegemony could be threatened. I would have expected these things to be a wake up call for them, but nope, whoever runs the thing recently decided to start enshittifying Gmail now. Great work, pal, destroy whatever's left!
nicbou 5 days ago [-]
Google Maps search is also acting like that now. The search button searches for “kaffee” but I must change the query to “cafe” to get more results. Even then it misses obvious cafes to return random ones across the entire country.
Sometimes I search the same business type I see under a listing, and it won’t return any results. Not even the business I was just looking at.
Queries like “cafe laptop” returned cafes and highlighted reviews about laptop-friendliness. Now it returns random cafes.
The search experience across Google products feels like this now.
tu7001 6 days ago [-]
"Anybody who has used Google for search over the past year knows that it lets a lot of LLM-generated spam" I haven't used google for years, so what does it exactly mean?
gwittel 5 days ago [-]
Google search results are full of garbage pages populated with LLM generated content (the pages exist solely to serve ads and capture search results).
Search spam is not new, but the use of LLMs simplifies the ability to make pages that look like legit content (increasing the likelihood they’ll show up in search results).
TriangleEdge 6 days ago [-]
I don't feel like this article has much interesting information even tho I agree with the premise.
I've been using AI tools to search now. I barely ever use a raw search bar anymore.
jazzyjackson 6 days ago [-]
I appreciated the quotes pulled from people this affects, and I hadn't heard of this particular summit.
I've basically moved all my search to perplexity but would like to do something on prem now that I can fit the 70B models on my machine, I still have to choose a search index (maybe I can self host searXNG) but that still relies in part on what Google classifies as worthy of ranking, no?
I hope webrings and reputation networks can make a comeback somehow so my LLM only has to comb through high quality material instead of searching for a needle of useful text in a mountain of spam.
pcdoodle 5 days ago [-]
Remember when you could locate memes using google? In the name of political correctness, our tools have been blunted.
onetokeoverthe 7 days ago [-]
ML experts at Google (El-Mahdi El-Mhamdi at least, if I recall correctly) who has since left warned that LLMs should be avoided because they made products chaotic and hard to control...
It’s incredible that the search results suck so much and then this article. They should just let paid users rank their upvote and downvote the results they get and feed those into the algorithm.
danjl 7 days ago [-]
I understand the frustration, but this article is just conspiracy theory based anecdotal data l. The claim that the engineers don't understand the Google search algorithm is not backed up by anything aside from a casual conversation with one person. These are just random thoughts by somebody who doesn't actually understand how Google works, who their customers are, and they're just frustrated because they are not generating revenue using whatever system they had before. And it is feeding off a story that has very little basis in fact.
seliopou 7 days ago [-]
Are there any paid search engines that the HN hive mind would recommend? I pay for my news to ensure quality. It stands to reason I should also pay for my search as well.
genghisjahn 7 days ago [-]
Kagi has been mentioned a a half dozen times in this comment thread.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7 days ago [-]
Kagi. Used it and it is useful.
What is nice, is that it is small enough user base that it is not worth it for sites to spend a lot of effort on SEO for it.
rawgabbit 7 days ago [-]
Nowadays I use ChatGPT to search the web. I am very impressed.
kagi : costs about one Starbucks trip per month, and is extraordinarily high signal to noise, unlike Google.
xvector 6 days ago [-]
I've been using Kagi for a few months now and it's getting kind of annoying. Maybe I have too many pin/raise/lower/block filters, but I've been finding myself adding !g to a lot of my queries now.
jjtheblunt 6 days ago [-]
i bet it's your "tuning" with the pin raise lower block filters.
I think once using those it can obfuscate the benefits.
oidar 6 days ago [-]
Kagi. Kagi. Kagi. Once you realize how much time you wade through garbage results with google, Kagi pays for itself.
TexanFeller 7 days ago [-]
Kagi. It’s completely replaced Google for me.
aboardRat4 6 days ago [-]
Not paid, but I use bing and qwant. Sometimes Yandex.
wetpaws 7 days ago [-]
[dead]
6 days ago [-]
Rendered at 14:14:08 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Now it’s just a way to make the number perpetually go up, sucking every last drop of value out of the system.
Plus the complete lack of vision or strategy from Google’s senior leadership.
I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years.
Search peaked in like 2009
Maps has only become slower and less informative (I remember when it use to actually display everything that was in a location and not just the popular/paid for stuff) since 2009
Google Docs was incredibly impressive... in 2006 and now almost 20 years later there's been a few QoL improvements, but nothing wow worthy.
And it seems everything else they've done has been shuttered and/or wasn't all that innovative in the first place and usually just trying to copy someone else work but in an uninspired way.
When you hire an ex McKinsey CEO and get the guy who destroyed Yahoo Search to run your search business, this is what happens.
They invented the technology behind LLM's. So whether you use Gemini or ChatGPT, that was pretty impressive.
Also, Waymo is crazy impressive. If you're considering Alphabet as a whole (which there's no reason not to, it's all under the same stock ticker).
Those are two industry-changing things, so I think Google's doing OK.
The difference to me between whether a company is able to do something amazing vs. a person working at that company does, is whether they're able to productize it/do something with it or not.
Google is famous for hiring the smartest people in the world, and has been for 20 years. That's good. It hires those people and gives them permission to do whatever they want. That's good too! (maybe not for the sharesholders, as we come to see, but for the world of technology and for humanity)
But if all of the authors of the Transformer paper end up having to leave Google and each start competing startups, that shows that the only impressive thing Google has done is managed to hire those people to do the research. That's it.
They had a goldmine and they wasted it.
What are you talking about? They launched Gemini. They didn't waste anything. And you can't force employees to stay. Employees leaving to compete is as old as Silicon Valley.
Google was just being more conservative about launching it until their hand was forced by OpenAI. And for good reason too, considering all the hallucinations. But then they launched. They didn't "waste" anything.
Depending on how you measure you could claim Facebook is 1st if you grade them on a different scale for being the most "open-source". But quality wise, they're pretty much in the "everyone else category.
Anthropic is new to a definitive 2nd position, and it remains to be seen if it's durable (probably not).
But regardless of how you measure, Google/Gemini is squarely in the "everyone else" bucket.
When they should have been the definitive first - leading the entire industry with every launch, the way OpenAI is.
If you look into 2005-2009, there were products like Chrome, Waymo, Youtube, GCP, Google docs and lot more that were very ambitious. After 2009 I can't name any one product on that realm.
And no, Waymo didn't "come out in 2009". It still hasn't come out except in three limited areas, but it's shown astonishing success where it has. So again, if you're only going to count the year a project was started, and not the decades of work it takes to build a world-changing business... I don't know what to tell you.
Except just... talk about moving the goalposts. Geez. I'm pretty sure there isn't a single company on earth that you're going to find impressive enough.
What was argued was not whether Google created impressive things. I was clear what I meant was Google hasn't started anything to their product suite. Adding to the product suite is more challenging than research project for the company, and it was where Google thrived and which led to success of Google.
? Microprocessors ? Neural networks ?
Give the product owner a raise then. Any time Microsoft tries to radically change Office, everyone just gets annoyed, and searches like "where is the print button in excel?" will suddenly skyrocket for a month or two.
It doesnt have all the features in the world but it has some technically impressive ones, least of all the “I can tell you’re all in a meeting room, so I am going to selectively increase the audio where people are speaking and prevent echo from all the speakers”.
I’d love more love for screen sharing, but meet is the only product I see that is getting materially better over time.
Meet team ported advanced audio processing, environmental noise cancelling and camera effects to Firefox, and they work really well.
It's not impressive of course, but interesting enough to notice.
The fact Google did the initial work on transformers but only OpenAI was able to productize is an indictment of their stagnation more than an achievement.
If websites can't earn a living through ads because LLM's don't send them any traffic anymore, where do the LLM's ingest new information from?
The web continues to deteriorate because of this and nobody has solved this problem.
AI is messy
It's culmination of decades of NLP researches, but it's also just East Asian predictive text percussively adapted for variable word length language. It must've been clear to whoever core people that it's fundamentally a sluggish demo or at most a cheap outright-sold commodity product.
IMO they would be right unless someone finds a reason that LLMs can't ever be self hosted in the way Google Search can't be. They must have just saw by the way it is that LLM is at best a regularization engine for that magic box.
LLMs have to have something ‘true’ (or at least statistically probable) to validate against for training.
Taking the output from it and feeding it back into itself is, essentially, an Ouroboros. Or like locking a human in solitary.
The more/longer it happens, the more deranged it’s going to get.
What do you mean? Anthropic and Google both have widely used products based on transformers.
2017, seven Google employees invent the transformer architecture and publish a paper. Google's investing heavily into ML, with their own custom 'TPU' chips and their 'Tensorflow' ML framework.
2019ish, Google has an internal chatbot they decide to do absolutely nothing with. Some idiot tells the press it's sentient, and they fire him.
2022, ChatGPT launches. It proves really powerful, a product loads of individuals and businesses are ready to pay for, and the value of the company skyrockets.
2023, none of the seven Transformer paper authors are at Google any more. Google rushes out Bard. Turns out they don't have a sentient super-intelligence after all. In fact it's badly received enough they end up needing to rebrand it a few months later.
Classic tortoise-and-hare situation - Google spent 5 years napping, then had to sprint flat out just to take third place.
At worst, Google is in a tie for first.
In the market, I would say both Anthropic and openAI have been able to do that much better than traditional big tech including Google.
All of these companies are in the red, but OpenAI has the most revenue.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
E.g. when I start a search session to solve a programming problem (before llms), I will continually search different terms to get to my solution webpage. Then stop. This session metadata and the path I took is highly significant data that can be used to help llms recognise what research itself looks like.
Android is getting genuinely better. Also AndroidAuto.
I think the last straw was when I was forced to replace the stock launcher just to avoid the built in unblockable google search ads. That made me consider why I bothered with Google at all anymore if all I do is hacks to work around their crappy ad filled UI.
Deep level impressive but maybe just by a company owned by Google is the Deepmind stuff like AlphaFold which recently got a nobel prize and AlphaGo and MuZero. Also you may have heard of the chatgpt/llm stuff that's trendy now, all based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(deep_learning_arc...
And the average person won't even notice most of the new features/improvements; perhaps the biggest one is the camera, and that's all done in hardware or AI these days, which is not Android per-se than a photography app (which, again, is usually a Pixel exclusive)
At what ? Stealing user data ?
They are still not able to arrange some widgets on the screen and to underestand that, if an app does not have microphone permission, you don't need a bloody microphone widget on the screen.
Unless you're thinking of Picasa, which is a whole different conversation lol
Sunsetting blog from 2016 for good measure: http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2016/02/moving-on-from-pica...
that’s really something you don’t read often
"Ground Truth" is truly dead... we've been to 25 states in the last year and the speed limits displayed in Maps were correct about 10% of the time.
Areas with tens of thousands of residents get updated on a multi-year schedule; a year-long construction related speed drop might remain in place for years after the construction ends.
Truly remote areas are batch imported from other systems, traced out from satellite images, or some such. Mountain and desert roads are rough suggestions at best.
This seems to have always been true of Google Maps.
The stupid thing is that, for example, ChromeOS is genuinely technically very impressive. Wayland over virtio to securely expose GUIs from untrusted virtual machines is brilliant technology. I want that, reimplemented by someone who cares about an open source ecosystem.
It's just a dead product.
0: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-...
Only the visible portion of the document is rendered (previously in HTML, now in Canvas). Everything before/after is just the document data.
Maybe you started working on longer docs coincidentally around the same time Docs switched to canvas?
You then have to wait for docs glacial performance to catch up and re-render things again.
It’s genuinely garbage and the “live collaboration” features go unused most of the time.
>I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years.
It is strange to see how the "narrative" of Google unfolds. If parents and grand parents said this in 2015 or 2005 it would perhaps be an extremely unpopular opinion. Or I doubt both would have that opinion in 2015 or 2005.
But >complete lack of vision or strategy from Google’s senior leadership > has been a thing since 2003 - 2004 during their IPO. None of their problems happening now is really new. Their "Dont be Evil" BS, their WiFi privacy issues in 2006 - 2007 before Steve Jobs take a jab on stage in 2008. That was before most people thought about privacy. Not developing a browser against Firefox and then Chrome. It took some Firefox developers some 10+ years before they realise may be Chrome and Google isn't what they thought. They basically earn more money than they know what to do with it and had zero discipline on what, how and where to use it. They continue to pay $10 - $20B a year to Apple as default search engine. Apple is very good at extracting value out of Google. While it seems no one at Google cares about it.
Needless to say I have been ringing the alarm bell on google for 20 years. I wished Mozilla take notes earlier. But they have their own sets of problems.
If there is one thing other than search that Google has achieved was they managed to lift up the salary of the whole Tech industry. They single handedly pulled the average salary of programmers up 10% YoY for many years since IPO. To the point in ~2018 - 2022 many really thought Google's starting salary for a new Junior Dev is $200K.
By the time I left, almost nine years later, the culture was dominated by fear and conflicting top-down directives — and the autonomy was gone.
Gemini is Google saying "look at me, I can jump on the AI bandwagon too."
Android has had a bunch of facelifts, but from a user perspective isn't much different to what it was a decade ago. Same for Google Photos.
Google Fiber is dead and all but buried.
Google Fi is just another MVNO.
Ironically I think the dearth of innovation is related to consumers having been rendered too passive since 2010.
Nobody has "needs" for Google to address anymore; now we are told what we should want (clear indication that advertising execs now run the show), usually under protest as they forcibly reshape industry standards and kill beloved products.
The infantilization of AI and the subsequent hilarity of Gemini blackwashing white historical figures says all it needs to about the culture shift.
Search is also censored to an embarrassing degree. Queer theory is treated as irrefutable fact and you'll find infinite dubious content promoting it, while conspiracy theory and anything critical of Israel is downranked or delisted altogether.
Early Google gave us lightsabers [for "free"]. Now they sell lefthanded safety scissors and insist nothing has changed. All stars burn out eventually.
The Transformer.
I find that hard to fathom. I think what you meant to say is "an impressive right that actually got made into a b2c product".
Otherwise you'd have to ignore that they kinda pioneered llms, until OpenAI poached their tech, polished into a (for a consumer) breathtakingly functional "AI"
They also kept researching self driving via weymo etc
On the business side they've also made a significant mark on the programming world via k8s, golang and angular2 among other things
But I'd completely agree with the sentiment that they completely dropped the ball wrt their original target demographic. Beyond the improvements to android, I can't really think of anything since 2010 either that really improved things.
A lot of other companies do this. Nothing special about Google.
When google required hosting blogspot content on their servers instead of self hosting that was the end of the freedom there. 2009.
The open sourcing and open patenting of VP8, and the work done on VP9 and AV1 were genuine public goods from Google.
Also the search is very lackluster
https://takeout.google.com/
Which is directly relevant to the topic being discussed here. Engineers work hard to make real improvements but the product as a whole is sabotaged with the never ending pressure to monetize more.
This overview 8 years old but it's only gotten worse [1]. Everything in the UI has been optimized purely for businesses and ads, not for users. I'm blessed enough to now live in one of the few countries where Google Maps is not dominant, where local players are more popular.
I've gone and taken current screenshots of both to show the difference. Current Google Maps [2]. Note how you can't even hide those UI elements blocking the map, but more important is the map itself. Current locally popular maps app [3]. It.. actually works well as a map, like Google Maps used to before Ads took over the business. And just a single touch on the map to hide the UI.
I'm sure the Supernova Hotel and Hostel Ani & Haakien are bringing Google some great cash money though, splendid user feature!
Before I lived here, I of course used Google Maps. And when I go abroad, I have to use it. And every single second spent with it is a stark reminder of how much worse it is than the map apps that are most popular here and are not enshittified.
[1] https://www.justinobeirne.com/what-happened-to-google-maps
[2] https://www.directupload.eu/file/d/8755/pn47kkvj_png.htm
[3] https://www.directupload.eu/file/d/8755/ruwp2jy7_png.htm
Though I think that, for every minor improvement, I could name a regression or product shut-down.
I've always built as many as I wanted from the fish I get by accident while building other stuff.
So how does Adtech generate more and more revenue and sells more and more ads year on year?
Simple answer - Fraud.
It's a lot like the credit card issuing banks. Two notable big names, Wells Fargo and Bank of America both "illegally used or obtained consumers’ credit reports, and then applied for and enrolled consumers in credit card accounts without consumers’ knowledge or authorization." [1][2]
Banks had each employee need to sell 50 credit cards a month. Employees sold 50 a month.
Banks needed "line goes up" for every quarter. Banks had each employee sell 100 a month. Employee's tried to sell 100 a month.
Banks needed "line goes up." Eventually market was saturated, yet banks said sell 1000 credit cards a month. Employees replied, "we cannot, market is saturated." Bank said "sell 1000 a month." Employee's responded with "make shit up, open accounts without consumers knowledge." Fraud.
[1] (Wells Fargo, millions of accounts, $3B civil settlement, $3.7B CFPB judgement, 2020), https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wells-fargo-agrees-pay-3-bill..., https://www.forbes.com/sites/anafaguy/2023/07/11/bank-of-ame...
[2] (Bank of America, unspecified # of accounts, 2023) https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/bank-of-am...
Shifting spend from legacy media, and extracting more value from the sellers' margin.
Yes it does. It scales with population, which last time I checked is still going up.
You can click `chart` for an easier visualization
How would that explain Google search results getting worse though?
Ads only get viewed as long as Search is high quality and people don't switch to a competitor.
Ads fill up the top with sponsored results, but they don't affect the organic results. If by "the advertising guys won" you mean they got more sponsored slots, all that means is they got more sponsored slots. It doesn't affect the quality of organic results.
So I don't understand what your theory is here.
This is what someone thinking long term would conclude. On the contrary, lowering the quality of your search causes people to spend more time in the search engine since they have to try more searches. This in turn increases the probability of clicking an ad.
— The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998
What is advertising now.
Is it possible that the "technology" being funded is "the delivery of advertising over a computer network".
Is that "cool technology". If not, then is the "cool technology" serving as bait to lure in ad targets, i.e., is it merely a component of the advertising services technology.
Why not sell or license the "cool technology" for fees instead of hiring "advertising guys". Why can't this unspecified "cool technology" exist on its own. The parent comment implies there is "value" in "the system", presumably independent of advertising.
Boeing letting McDonnell Douglas take over
Google letting DoubleClick take over
when the search engine guys won over the diverse team of web surfers.
search engine was the automation of cheap labour. but early search relief heavily on the ranks early sites won by directory era curation.
search engine tech was unknowingly piggy backing on work from the surfers.
it would crumble for sure since there were no more surfers. AI just made it extremely obviously that Its done.
I didn't like working at AWS for the most part, but I have never seen Google-level dysfunction there. There were a lot of times I disagreed with decision, but I could always understand the reasoning behind it. On the contrary, I can't explain most of the decision being made at Google. The enshittification from the very top has been amazing to watch, even for someone like me who joined only 3.5 years ago. Both senior and mid-level leadership lack a clear vision and the execution has obviously been horrible. Google needs a hard reset if they want to be successful again. I'm not buying the "too-big-to-fail" bullshit.
Meanwhile a single Swede with a single desktop class machine in his living room created a search engine so good that I would often switch to it when Google failed.
These days I use Kagi, which has prioritization and block lists (which I don't use because the results are good out of the box).
Wanna know what is really interesting about the Kagi story?
While Kagi is building its own index, for a long time they were kind of reselling a wrapped version of Google + Bing results, but still were extremely much better IMO.
I have two theories:
- either Kagi has some seriously smart systems that read in the first tens of results and reshuffle them
- or more likely in my opinion the reason why results have been so good is because kagi has api access which bypass the "query expander and stupidifier"[1] on the way in to Google and the personalization thing on the way out. That way they just interact with the core of Google search which somehow still works.
[1]: "stupidifier" the thing in the Google pipeline that rewrites
- "obscure-js-lib" (think one that a previous dev used, that I now need to debug
- to "well-knowm-js-lib-with-kind-of-similar-name".
Or decide that when I search for Angular "mat-table" I probably want some tables with mats on even if they don't have anything to do with Angular.
- Not showing loads of valid results when looking for UN documents and instead just return 40 or so out of thousands: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42288776
- Returning something we absolutely did not ask for in a verbatim query: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42278753
Me: “exactly-this-thing.py”
Google: You misspelled “sorta-related.js”. Here you go.
Me: Did I stutter?!
Tried searching for quotes from the Matrix because of all these AI issues and asked:
"Quote of Agent Smith to Mr. Neo 'How will you speak with no mouth?'"
and got back:
"You're wrong. Agent Smith never refers to Neo as anything other than Mr. Anderson." Completely did not even try to answer the question.
Course, these days it's more Harlan Ellison "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" [1]. Kind of went beyond the Matrix to total thought control and constant machine torture. "How will you search if all results are false?"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...
20 years ago in the "AI" class, the proffesor said, that the biggest problem with (machine) learning, is that sometines, it will learn wrong, and you have to teach it again.
It’s especially serious when searching for UN related documents, which have a special document symbol structure.
e.g. 99.9%+ of the documents under the classification A/C.1/… simply don’t show up with a “A/C.1/“ search, except for a handful. And it’s not like irrelevant results are clogging it up either, as Google only returns 40ish results for the whole internet. When there’s thousands of publicly accessible UN documents in that category…
It seems kind of unreasonable to expect Google to never experiment with their algorithm; and unfortunately at its core it is a zero sum game. You might be a winner today but a loser tomorrow.
if your concern is about revenue, sharing or referrals or ad placements or ??? then I would point out that it’s very unwise to build a business whose success is based entirely on the whims of another business.
I think search in general is becoming a very poor way to discover content as it is slowly getting planted by LLMs and also for years has been gamified by SEO.
I think that the right model for content discovery is either crowd sourced by a like-minded community, like hacker news or curated; if the curator or community drifts away from your interests, then you have to find a new one, but oddly enough, this can actually be done within the same framework.
When that other business is a monopoly, what choice do you have? The rise of google has effectively killed all other sources of traffic. Web sites used to get their traffic from things like webrings, directories and a variety of smaller search engines. Now? Google, or one of its properties, and to a smaller degree Meta are basically it. The curator and community discovery model is a victim of google, not a solution to it.
Also de-ranking SEO spammers is a net positive IMO.
My impression is that if you aren’t listed on google, your site is pretty close to dead. In any case, if you somehow managed to drive traffic via other social media, you are one underpaid moderator’s hasty decision from ruin.
The point isn’t about deranking spammers it is about concentrating a huge majority of traffic (and therefore power) in the hands of a single entity which is unaccountable to anyone.
Ideally, we need a fix as well for more regular discory of problems people have. If I want "Norwegian cooking blogs" google will probably return me mostly spam, and waiting for someone on reddit to maybe post something in that category obviously isn't an option.
Typing w w w . b i n g . c o m on a mobile device is are a huge barrier to entry vs just using the google search box Google pays the phone manufactures to bake into the the OS.
Despite how awful Google has become in recent years...Bing is still consistently worse.
If anything I'd say mobile demonstrates that Google doesn't have a monopoly... TikTok literally occupies a majority of gen Z's app usage... 4 of the most used mobile apps (Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook) all belong to Meta. My wife doesn't even know which browser is on her phone (Samsung Internet)...
Add blogs, News sites, and forums - to that as well.
Put another way, Google launched 1000 experiments that got +0.2% CTR and seemed innocuous, and now they have a system that only wants to give out Reddit and Quora links.
I've seen this story on Google's private Blind section multiple times. Usually, coupled to discussion about a more cautionary approach taken by the pre-2020 head of search, who was worried about this outcome.
IMHO they're feeling out the same outcome without the benefit of the above knowledge. I don't see this theory well-understood outside Googlers, modulo a pair of popular blog posts, whose name I can't recall, that hit the nail on the head.
(disclaimer: xoogler as of oct 2023, didn't work on search)
I don't just mean filtering out the spam; that's a hard problem on its own. But the good-click metrics... if serving up reddit and quora links at #1 makes more people satisfied with the first result, defining satisfied as 'reads the #1 page and doesn't go back for more', then...
What's wrong with that metric?
That isn't a rhetorical question. It's tempting to claim the users are wrong to prefer it, but not very nice. Why do they do so?
It does not, what google is optimizing for is ad click-through not organic results click-through. The whole model is you will search for X see a couple of ads and a sea of bad results and opt to click on the ad.
It's the same reason that if you search for "graphics card" on amazon and sort by price you will get 20 pages of "Graphics card Holders" and "Graphics Card Elbows". They want you to not actually use the search just click on their ad.
The problem appears to be it's hard for them to realize that people are getting fed up with the antics and are seeing through the manipulations. It's like an abuser or bully, that thinks they will keep getting away with the poor treatment of others, who they think are "below" them. At some point, enough people can take a stand, and not put up with the lack of transparency and black-box manipulations. They are going to keep demanding change or find alternatives.
Bravely flattening a root cause analysis to one agreeable-sounding villain, I'd do Goodhart's Law. Click-through rate not being a great proxy for user satisfaction.
i.e. I always clicked reddit first, I used to append reddit to my searches. But I get a very uneasy feeling now that everything has reddit 3 times in top ten. Impossible. It's a big world. It'd be like if Encyclopedia Britannica started just including the snippet-sized version of Wikipedia articles. Not what I'm looking for from that product.
I'm curious how you'd scale that. Google gets 8.5 billion searches per day. 8.5 billion "Ask HN: Where's the best resource for X" isn't going to scale to that.
Reddit is a pretty credible alternative for that.
Edit: for example, I was searching for woodworking design software this morning and got a lot of helpful-looking results from reddit.
Google is now moving towards the position AltaVista used to have: everybody is using this search engine because of its breadth of coverage, the users are often unhappy with having to search for a long time and adjust the query many times, and complain about the inefficiency of it.
I hope Kagi will grow and attain a large enough market share to afford indexing more of the web. Maybe we'll have a really useful search engine again, like it's 2001. For a few more years at least :-/
This is how all the subreddits that are remotely related to politics or news got so biased.
Of course I don't know what the alternative is. If I did I would be making that ideal site instead of scrolling HN.
And yes, like you alluded to, search engines aren’t the only way to acquire your readership or regular customers. Some media outlets basically don’t even use search engines to drive traffic, like so many social media based businesses out there. There are hundreds of thousands of businesses that barely have a linktree page.
A manually curated system can only truly work with a constrained domain of content/subject matter and tolerance for high lag regarding new information. Wikipedia is an example of what that kind of system would look like.
I think that is basically what they are complaining about, from a content creator's perspective. They are upset that their quality content (according to them at least) is losing to ML generated garbage, and that google engineers don't even seem to be able to understand why that happens.
Arguably, the problem is black-box algorithms and how they are manipulated. The same problem can be faced by any curated community, where there is little to no transparency. Curated can still mean manipulated. People can jump from place to place, but that may not be advantageous, because where they want to be or the most likely places for discovery are not available.
Show me a business free of dependencies and I'll eat my hat.
Did you mean supplanted here?
Perhaps the ranking was terrible before and now is better. Or is it the other way around?
I spent a few minutes looking at my search history (filtering chrome history by "google search"), and the vast of my queries are quite simple (e.g. people's names) that google does well on (in fact I find google search for people better than linkedin sometimes).
I also tried a few complex queries and compared them to Kagi:
"How much bitcoin does microstrategy own" -> Google returns the correct snippet from here[0] while Kagi only linked to articles about how much it acquired in the last few days.
"how to pronounce stratchery" -> Google returns the correct snippet from the Stratechery website[1] while Kagi's first result is a spam entry[2] with the wrong pronunciation (the second result is a tweet with the correct pronunciation).
I'd be curious to see more comparisons!
Edit: I just remembered Dan Luu's post (https://danluu.com/seo-spam/) but after looking through my search history, the queries he uses are not at all representative of my day to day searches.
[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/11/29/micro...
[1]https://stratechery.com/category/about/#:~:text=UPDATE%3A%20....
[2]https://www.howtopronounce.com/stratechery
Any product reviews will be SEO garbage (blogspam too 10 lists). Anything travel will be a page full of ads before organic results, if any. You just know to not even bother so you’re left with the queries that still work.
Some example of something that's hard to find with Google but easy with something else?
I mean some recent global use stats are
Google 89.33% bing 4.15% YANDEX 2.8% Yahoo! 1.33% Baidu 0.83% DuckDuckGo 0.69% (oct 2024, https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share)
If Google is so bad why don't people, myself included click on one of the other ones?
I sympathise with Giant Freakin Robot not getting clicks - I'd never heard of them. But that's different from Google being bad from a user point of view.
I just tried clicking on them all - they all work. Baidu is kind of funny as it's all in Chinese and searching The Sound of Music came back with Chinese which Google translated to "The Nun and the Seven Naughty Children!"
I believe because stickyness is a strong force. Google gets worse, but you know it and you know how it fails and what to do to make it better (i.e. how to word your query differently, what parameters to add etc when you get terrible results).
You don't know this for any other search engine, so you need to make a) an active decision to try another search engine, and b) learn how to use it so it delivers what you want.
And I assume that, for most people, Google isn't bad enough to make that kind of investment.
Earlier today I tried to find out what's currently happening in Sudan, is there any shift in the civil war etc. Google was pretty useless. News articles from 6 weeks ago, the best results were probably Wikipedia, but they ranked the Timeline higher than the actual article. I tried with "sudan civil war", "sudan civil war maps" etc.
I tried just now and Yandex actuall provided much better results for what I wanted. They had sudan.liveuamap.com, they showed polgeonow.com, which looks very interesting (can't say if accurate or trustworthy, but definitely topically relevant), sudanwarmonitor.org etc. Compared to Google, they show much less "top 1000 media sites" and more of what look to be topic-experts.
Bing found sudanshahid.org (again, don't know how accurate), multiple arcgis.com-hosted articles, and also included sudanwarmonitor.org. I'd say more Big News Corps than Yandex, but less than Google.
On this search, I'd say Yandex was best, Bing second, Google last. Yet still I use Google as my daily driver, I think mostly because I don't know how far I can trust Yandex, and I have a general bias against MS products. It's certainly not because they don't deliver better results -- but I know Google and it's "the devil you know", until Google becomes too hard to extract results from, at which point I'll be forced to switch.
After switching to DuckDuckGo years ago, and Kagi last year, it's obvious every time I go back to Google how much they have lost the plot.
It'll take another decade before they lose dominance, but the writing is on the wall. Inertia and market position are the only reason they're still on top. Meanwhile, the younger generation barely uses web search, and the tech savvy are starting to drain away more and more quickly.
Startups should be excited. Rather than being the 800-lb gorilla that is going to come take your lunch, Google is the walking dead behemoth waiting to be harvested for conceptual parts.
Recently I realized that i only !g to google from kagi just a handful of times this year and every time to instant regret .
A marked contrast to couple of years back with DDG !g would instinctive and probably half the time and results felt better in google . Sticking with DDG felt idealistic and the quality second class, not so with Kagi, it feels the $10 pays off every month in much improved productivity.
It is to be noted that Kagi uses google search index as a source, so it is not like Google cannot improve the results or UX technically, just not possible institutionally.
I might be a little out of touch, but what do they do instead?
Perhaps they are easily distracted and forget what they were searching for in the first place, because they're presented with a shiny object?
Direct loss of knowledgeable people is real but it is not the main reason for these systems becoming black boxes.
For every knowledgeable person laid off there's twenty who stay and adjust to the new reality where their future at the company is much less certain. These adjustments vary person to person but literally nobody goes to say "Whoa, I better improve the documentation and share my knowledge so that I'm easier to fire!"
A month after I left, they contacted me and offered contract work, which i declined. For the following year, employees reached out to me directly for help. It didn't matter that everything I helped with was already documented.
My take is there isn't a solution for proper knowledge transfer in companies. That's why I find it fascinating when people get fired on a whim. You lose so much more than an employee.
I don't disagree that people react as you say and create knowledge silos with the misguided idea that it protects their job, but I do want to point out the consequences of it for any here who may be considering doing so on purpose. Knowledge silos do not secure your job. They in fact limit your ability to advance, limit your ability to collaborate across an organization, limit your ability to adapt, limit your ability to take up other tasks, limit your ability to delegate, and reduce collaboration and project success thereby reducing your perceived performance within an org. There are a bunch more reasons why knowledge silos are bad not just for an organization but for individual engineers living in the silos, but you don't need to take my word for it, there are multiple studies published on this you can find.
People who are uncertain that they're still around in a year are much less willing to put this additional effort which pays off in the long term.
Where people in a large organisations work to make an open source project more resistant to organizational changes (and priorities).
But yes, layoffs certainly has negative side effects.
Perhaps there’s domestic Russian things that are censored but that’s far outside my use-case.
OTOH Yandex still gives your direct image links and is better at showing you the largest versions of an image (although too often that's just a blurry upscale).
Is there anything preventing new search engines? Except scale and servers. But what most of us want is just plain old ordinary search as it existed in 2006, so that is probably reproducible.
I know there are some other engines. Like DuckDuckGo, but just found out they are really just Bing.
Which I guess begs the question, if Google Sucks so bad, why doesn't Bing take over??? It isn't as bad, even if not great.
Edit: After reading more posts. Appears Kagi is doing this.
Another factor is that since 2006, social media has displaced blogs. Blogs were a rich source of "authentic" cross-domain links, and the movement of online discussions to consolidated and closed platforms has dried up that well. Some even go so far as to pin the downturn of blogging on the demise of Google Reader.
Is it? How many more pages get published each day? If you include each YouTube video and social media post, it's easily several orders of magnitude. Organizing this kind of firehose isn't easy, neither is prioritizing/ranking it.
2006 was child's play in comparison.
If you don’t believe me, search “watch frozen 2” (or anything else) on google, then on yandex. Both knew what you wanted, but only one is actually going to return the relevant results.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
It was actually later than I expected it to happen but it seems like distinct enough event that it's had reverberation all the way to the present.
Read using brave (ubo on)
Everyone has a bias, it's not a crime to let it show. I know it's Silicon Valley's dream to flatten all human experience into emotionless 0s and 1s but they need to knock it off and you need to stop enabling them.
It IS frustrating, beyond frustrating, that Google nuked the web for ad money. The idea that you have to report that by neutrally dictating a string of facts or else forfeit all credibility is stupid.
Anything that requires a tiny bit of creativity of a new change requirement, it is going to be an issue.
If only they'd down-rank Yelp, etc.
a. I know what website has this information and I go directly there (e.g. Wikipedia or Github or Google Maps)
b. I need a real human opinion or feedback (usually a Google search by Reddit domain only)
c. I need some well-known information that is easy to verify and this is the problem LLMs are very good at
This is >95% of my "surfing" activity. I think I would barely notice major search engines going down one day.
What is really needed is a search that lets me filter to results where the author doesn't profit from me seeing the result. Filtering for websites without advertising might be good enough. Not something Google will ever provide due to conflicting interests.
There is value in anyone being able to publish their content without a gate keeper. All content shouldn't be locked within a few walled gardens.
> I barely getting by, I’m eating at the food bank now, I had grossed $250,000 last year
It’s too bad he’s in such difficulty that he has to eat at a food bank, but where did all that money go? And, presumably, decent money earned in previous years?
In a cyclical business, or a business dependent on the vagaries of a giant monopolistic corporation that can change the rules seemingly arbitrarily, it’s prudent to save for a rainy day.
Maybe the future is something like publishers supplying datasets to train models on? Or like how search was built on top of the web, it will be something more organic and ad hoc.
People don't want to read articles, they want to watch short form videos about what's interesting to them.
An interesting side effect is that I think this will lead to more direct-to-consumer sales. Customers will be led straight to your website instead of an Amazon order page.
> An interesting side effect is that I think this will lead to more direct-to-consumer sales. Customers will be led straight to your website instead of an Amazon order page.
That's an excellent outcome if it happens. Businesses should produce quality information and content related to their product category, instead of purchasing ads on other websites. There's a lot of good examples of this.
It seems like the idea of building a lean company has totally fallen by the wayside.
Unable to compete with us on a level playing field, the old print media industries resorted to lawyers. They saw independent publishers getting a lot of traffic from Facebook, so they began threatening Facebook with lawsuits if they didn’t show their content more often, and our content less.
Can anyone explain this? How do you sue Facebook for giving bad recommendations?
I find that blogs and small sites do not have a chance when looking for a commercial products or when trying to find a review for a product. There is too much SEO spam and fighting for the top positions.
But if you are doing something that cannot be commercialised easily or is very niche your blog will have easy time on Google (programming is not a niche anymore).
- Top of the page is slow loading AI regurgitation of deeply buried real web results, but often wildly inaccurate. No thanks.
- Next are a bunch of YouTube videos you don't want to watch where you have to wade through dozens of ads and hours of content to get the 3 seconds of information you're looking for. No thanks.
- "Related search" nonsense that nobody ever wants to see but if you click on those you will get more of the above. No thanks.
- Some useless unrelated shopping links you almost certainly don't want. No thanks.
- Way down at the bottom, 2-3 real web search results, non-keyword matched, and only from major mainstream outlets that are part of the Trusted News Initiative (Orwell?!) that have turned into glorified content farms which spit out non-expert written content on every conceivable subject for Googlebot (and now most of this content is AI written or from the cheapest possible third world contractors). No thanks.
Those "real web search results" used to be independent publishers that are referenced in this article, which were often topical experts with deep knowledge on their respective subjects, and those people and businesses have been destroyed over the last few years by Google updates that clearly prioritize their own slop and their "trusted" corporate ally content farms over the independent web.
They also disappears tons of content, and anything critical or outside of the mainstream acceptable narrative is nowhere to be found, sort of like searching for "tank man" from inside China, something everyone in the west used to poke fun of and point to as an example of digital totalitarianism.
If I were running Google search I would immediately roll back all of their search changes to somewhere around 2014-2016, which was roughly the last time you could find true keyword matched web results from a hugely diverse array of expert sources, and then very cautiously reassess. Obviously they would never do that, so I am not sure they can recover from their own demise.
BTW I don't find DuckDuckGo or Bing to be much better, they seem to just mimic Google results. Search is in real trouble.
1. The point of search was no longer to provide requested data, but to generate clicks for Google's ad service.
2. Generating clicks for Google's ad service required that exact text search, boolean searches, & everything else useful had to be excised because giving what was asked for reduced engagement.
3. Ads had to be stuck on the top half of the results page, & the second half of the search results, for more clicks to be earned, had to be filled with garbage sites that did not provide what was sought. This encouraged the proliferation of scrapers & bot-generated text sites. Hand-in-hand with this was the elimination of long-tail results, as digging into results might give useful results.
4. It appears that a decision was made at some point to curate & direct answers toward particular results. While much has been made about certain political leanings being almost disappeared by this move, it appears to be much more likely that this was a result of returning results which generated more ad revenue & clicks (which may say more about the sorts of sites Google runs ads on than anything else).
5. In parallel with the dominance of ad-revenue mining, data mining became a major purpose of receiving search requests. Thus the requests for location information on every search, tied in with the drive to personalize results not for the purpose of giving good results, but to give identified users results they were more likely to interact with to both interact with Google ads & give Google more data to suck down & use.
If we could get them to revert back to the 2006-era search engine, where more than just major sites & bot farms are indexed, we would have something useful. But that's not going to happen.
Kagi and search.marginalia.nu are both proof that it is possible to deliver very good results - if you don't stack the incentives against it.
To me it feels that leadership matters more than we give them credit for. It's just that most leadership sucks.
I agree with you that Nadella has done a spectacular job, and that leadership matters more than most people think it does. I'd call his performance an outlier.
They have started breaking down search in Gmail as well, I've noticed that for a month or so. Just as it started on Google search, exact, verbatim queries, are not being returned in the result set.
Google's too big to fail already, as evidenced by the complete inept leadership it has had for the past decade, while the stock keeps going up.
Midwit's take would be : "But that's the job of a CEO, to make the stock go up". Nope, what I'm saying is that in spite of the CEO, it is a natural monopoly that is prone to grow. Them missing out the AI wave, which they pretty much created, will go down in history as top idiocracy in companies.
With Chrome's forced departure and ChatGPT actually giving you accurate results their hegemony could be threatened. I would have expected these things to be a wake up call for them, but nope, whoever runs the thing recently decided to start enshittifying Gmail now. Great work, pal, destroy whatever's left!
Sometimes I search the same business type I see under a listing, and it won’t return any results. Not even the business I was just looking at.
Queries like “cafe laptop” returned cafes and highlighted reviews about laptop-friendliness. Now it returns random cafes.
The search experience across Google products feels like this now.
Search spam is not new, but the use of LLMs simplifies the ability to make pages that look like legit content (increasing the likelihood they’ll show up in search results).
I've been using AI tools to search now. I barely ever use a raw search bar anymore.
I've basically moved all my search to perplexity but would like to do something on prem now that I can fit the 70B models on my machine, I still have to choose a search index (maybe I can self host searXNG) but that still relies in part on what Google classifies as worthy of ranking, no?
I hope webrings and reputation networks can make a comeback somehow so my LLM only has to comb through high quality material instead of searching for a needle of useful text in a mountain of spam.
What is nice, is that it is small enough user base that it is not worth it for sites to spend a lot of effort on SEO for it.
https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-search/