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Comment by evouga | Hacker News Reader

Google used to be one of those companies, like Valve or Blizzard, who could be trusted to always ship a home run. Search, gmail, maps, chrome… I’m not sure what happened, but the contrast of Google then vs Google now is stark.

Even Google search barely works anymore. Google image search is completely broken, and I’ve found recently that I’ve been appending “site:reddit.com” to all of my text search queries to actually get useful results.

I’m not sure what this says about the future of Google, or the web in general. Nothing good.

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> or Blizzard,

This so much. 10 years ago, I would have bought every single Blizzard game. Back then, I explained to my parents that Blizzard was like Mercedes ("The best or nothing") for video games. Now all known talents have already left Blizzard and none of their games interest me any longer...

Isn't this what inevitably happens to all companies eventually?

You have a group of enthusiastic founders who make it big through smarts, passion and dedication and after a couple of decades, they retire, and the company is now mostly formed of people who are in just to cash in on the money and fame from having that brand name on their resume as people who are as smart, passionate and dedicated as the original founders were would most likely work on their own idea rather than said famous company.

On the tech circles online Google is known for being the place where you grind leet-code to get in so you can make big $ and coast (rest and vest), not break your back working on fancy world changing ideas. The latter is for start-ups.

Apple was ahead of the game too as they had the visionary Steve Jobs at the helm, while now, sure their stock is as high as ever and their M1 macs are great but you don't really see people queuing up for days in front of their shops anymore since their post-Jobs strategy has been less about disruptive innovation and more about entrenching and expanding their existing positions by leveraging their supply chain prowess.

Like a corporate version of the rise and fall of civilizations?

> [Ibn Khaldun] explains that ruling houses tend to emerge on the peripheries of existing empires and use the much stronger asabiyya present in their areas to their advantage, in order to bring about a change in leadership. This implies that the new rulers are at first considered 'barbarians' in comparison to the previous ones. As they establish themselves at the center of their empire, they become increasingly lax, less coordinated, disciplined and watchful, and more concerned with maintaining their new power and lifestyle. Their asabiyya dissolves into factionalism and individualism, diminishing their capacity as a political unit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asabiyyah

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/01/18/big-macs-vs-the-na...

> Summary, so far:

> Some things need talent to do really well.

> It’s hard to scale talent.

> One way people try to scale talent is by having the talent create rules for the untalented to follow.

> The quality of the resulting product is very low.

I think Mercedes is still Mercedes of cars?

The most important models, like the S class, the G class, and the AMG GT, still are the top notch in quality, quirks, and performance, but the other aren't like that

C and CLA class models are more like any other regular car with a nicer interior and maybe a better suspension, but at the end they even Renault engines (that aren't so well made), so they aren't so great than older versions.

All of this is AFAIK, so please correct me if there is any mistake.

Not in Europe. Mercedes was the Mercedes of cars when the S-Class was the pinnacle of automotive technology and only the rich and famous could afford them so they also had exclusivity going for them.

Nowadays, the S-Class is no longer nexus tech and thanks to cheap credit and rock bottom devaluation on the second hand market, they're not at all exclusive that even in the poorer parts of town where I live, there are lots of Mercedes and in Germany they're used as taxis.

mercedes were used as taxis when I visited germany.... 30 years ago.

it is, generally, yes. But what shapes companies in the long-term is the degree in which they can stem this natural tendency.

I.E. Amazon vs Kodak. Blockbuster vs Best Buy

Not just companies. Reversion to the mean is ubiquitous.

> and I’ve found recently that I’ve been appending “site:reddit.com” to all of my text search queries to actually get useful results.

This is a problem with the web, not with Google. The web has become littered with trash content

> This is a problem with the web, not with Google. The web has become littered with trash content

Isn't it the search engine's job to wade through the trash and return the results that are useful?

Not to mention, most of the trash was created because of Google search. Half the internet is optimized for the google bot, not humans.

The problem gets harder and harder as the trash gets more SEO

The problem gets harder and harder because trash generates profit, not because Google is fighting a holy war with the SEO hackers in an attempt to clear the web for us end users...

Trash content alway existed. Always.

AltaVista was all spam results when Google came on the scene. From where I sit, Google just doesn't care to work on search any more.

For example:

- pre 2005?, Google search terms were never aliased.

A search for Bob, never returned Robert or Bobby. To make things "easier", alias searching was added. Now, there is all sorts of algorithmic aliasing happening, and it poisons the results further.

- Couple this with the desire for verbal google searching to work, without complex queries, and even more aliasing/approximation of search results happen.

I've seen homonyms aliased as of... 2016? Why? Google voice searching.

- Quotes are only suggestions, only verbatim search forces precise terms (+ used to mean a word must appear as written, but was removed because it was interfereing with Google plus username searches..)

- These days, Google spends more time trying to take content from web pages, and insert the answers at to of page. They want to be wikipedia, with you never leaving their page.

All of the above, and more, show a steady decline in the desire for precise results, and instead, a desire to sacrifice search quality for profit, and pet projects.

As others in this thread have said, Google isn't Google any more.

Internet search algorithms are bit of an adversarial competition against bad content, no? Given the amount of money at stake for beating the search algorithm, shouldn't we expect any search engine to decline in usefulness over time?

> Given the amount of money at stake for beating the search algorithm, shouldn't we expect any search engine to decline in usefulness over time?

Internet search algorithms should be worth significantly more (and I imagine that this is the case; e.g., I doubt that the combined value of all spam sites together matches Alphabet's market cap).

Given that internet search companies should also have an edge acquiring talent, you would expect that internet search algorithms would win this fight.

The problem with aliasing is that it undermines the ability of users to refine their searches, especially in the case of Google with its unclear semantics for terms within quote marks.

I've switched to using DDG as my first search engine of choice because, while its ranking of sites initially is generally weaker than Google's, it gives me much more power to subsequently refine searches.

The web was always full of trash.

The problem is that the new trash is much more hostile: it's actively trying to subvert/cover the good stuff.

The web itself has transformed from a new frontier where people generally have good intentions, to a digital society undergoing active fraud, sabotage, and influence by commercial entities, governments, and wider society.

In the 90's when I first started using the WWW, it was mainly used by academics, techies and geeks - and it was glorious. People used to create web pages just for the hell of it, not for financial benefits.

Projects like IPFS might regain that thing we lost.

There's a reason our legal systems are composed of millions of pages of laws. It's because everyone tries to use/abuse everyone else, to a degree.

My theory is that two things changed: 1. complexity. As time goes by, systems become more complex, leaving less and less room for people to introduce changes swiftly. It's just like George Martin had a hard time shipping his latest A Song of Ice and Fire because there are just too many threads to figure out; 2. Culture. As times goes by, organizations bloat, and average quality of employees starts to decline. Plus, some people get promoted with controversy. Not everyone is Jeff Dean or Sanjay, after all. So, gradually and then suddenly, people create projects for promotion, and long-term vision goes out of the window. The two factors combined, a company transitions from being great to be mediocre.

I also have to append site:reddit to half of my searches if I'm actually looking for some sort of meaningful feedback or opinion on something. Everything else is blog spam or commercial content trying to sell me something

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