Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?
economist.com
economist.com
From what I know about Google, they are serious about least privilege type of stuff internally and employees dont get arbitrary unbound access to systems or data.
You're responsible for your data, not Google, not Microsoft.
> At least it improved human life in serious ways (Typescript, VSCode,...).
In terms dev-related stuff, TensorFlow - literally something that's made today's ML possible, Kubernetes, BigTable, MapReduce, and yknow, that good old thing called Chrome..
I understand hating on Google. They're not that great, but none of the FAANG are "great".. They all have some terrible bits, some good bits. However, to say that Google has not provided anything except "spam stuffs" is very wrong.
Search alone has changed the entire way that humans consume information. I would say that today's internet landscape, for better or worse, would not exist without Google.
They're helpful to you, not me.
You may not use those things directly, but you're dependent on those who do.
There're choices for you to make. It's your choice.
Also, you don't use a Phone? or Maps? Really? Do you use Chrome? Do you use Firefox, because Google's contributed a massive amount to the web standards that are implemented in both Firefox, and Chrome.
You have already lost the argument. I'm sorry but nobody would care about anything you say because that almost just does not apply to anyone else.
Also the fact that those products have no effects on you has nothing to do with whether a company is important or if their products are significant or helpful to the vast majority of human population.
And to be a bit cynical, it feels the only purpose of this comment is to show that you have a unique lifestyle, not to contribute to the discussion constructively or based on consensus. (Of which there are many on HN)
I used it, and also guided other juniors to implement real world products which're running in production to help others human life in a very short time, in a maintainable way.
This was impossible before with old toolings.
Is it more clear to you ? I'm also sorry for not so clearly said, but that's how conversation works ;)
MapReduce was not and isn't something that made ML possible. It made data engineering at scale possible.
I don't necessarily disagree, but that's only from a technical pov. However, I think the release of it as a open-source library made it so that it's far easier to learn the tech that already existed. Vast majority of university courses use it to teach lots of different concepts that were far more "mathy" before.
> MapReduce was not and isn't something that made ML possible. It made data engineering at scale possible.
Yeah. Maybe I worded that wrong. I wasn't saying it made ML possible. Just that it's a huge contribution to the Open-Source tech overall.
Both MR and TF are net-negative for the outside world. I think more unis teach pytorch than TF now.
So all in all, disagreements with direction, but nothing wrong/evil on the level of any of the FAAN.
They are not like the other. I wouldnt include big entertainment company among technology behemoths
I believe this thread would have a much less dramatic headline if Google didn’t itself kill Google Search ten+ years ago.
Also, it bought most of the examples listed, not made these. It just saw an ads/dm opportunity.
I also remember using Opera on its last original engine and those “Get Chrome” banners which made a whole browser freeze and stutter on anything but Chrome. I’ve pointed that out a few times back then on forums, but not too many people noticed it, it seems. The “our ads our performance” trick fled completely under the radar.
And I agree, Google does take security more seriously than most places.
Related question, if security is so bad, how did they win Project J.E.D.I? (honestly curious)
Only* about. GCP and AWS haven't had cross-tenant security bugs, meanwhile Azure have had multiple, and trivial ones to boot. If a multitenant service can have such poor security, it's doubtful internal only stuff is any better.
IIRC there was some basic safeguards though, like a query must have had like 10 unique occurrences or something. I also have no idea if you could tie searches to people.
I was just looking at aggregate numbers. That was really cool. It was like Google Trends but with real numbers!
Just like the OP I have first hand info on how atrocious Microsoft’s internal privacy controls are.
The later versions of Windows are just ad space for Microsoft to advertise.
Azure is the worst of the 3 cloud providers. Horrible developer experience and documentation and reliability.
That said, I would still take Satya’s Microsoft over Balmers any day
Lets not use emotionally driven, ambiguous terms like 'evil' to describe these kinds of things. Google is not, for instance, conspiring to commit genocides, nor is Microsoft planning a coup in an Eastern European nation with the goal of colonizing them to use as indentured technical support.
What do you want a corporation/company/business (of any size) to be driven by?
- Ethical Metrics (could be solved by allowing corporations, directors, boards to face similar punishments to humans committing crime).
– Something that measured employee treatment.
Profit is such a shitty motive... it's effective, but still shitty.
It's the short sightedness that causes the most unethical behavior from the top down. 10-Qs... a man considered changing that timeline to help fix that problem but he was ostracized. Maybe one day la naranja will return.
I would be interested to see what an ethics motive looks like that gets people out of the bed in the morning to do a job they barely care about.
The primary driver for humans is status. Status in the military is achieved through leadership and honor. Status in academia is achieved through capability. These sectors provably show that people can be driven by things other than money.
The sad thing here is that there are tradeoffs. Nothing is as efficient or as effective of a motivator as money. But money is the driving force that is most detached from ethics.
The media likes to make a big deal out of privacy but mostly people only give a shit up to a point... so it doesn't effect googles bottom line and therefore google also doesn't give a shit.
There’s something to it. Ideas and implementations are pressure tested through market competition, so they get refined and adapted.
The issue with advertising specifically is that it’s inherently manipulative and often condescending. On the web it has a infectious nature, making everything a bit worse.
> People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.
> Banksy
Power is. Look at all the powerful dictators in the past, and what they did. Do you think Stalin was motivated by money? Napoleon? Mussolini?
How about "malevolent?"
I'd agree they are both evil in that they both seek to leverage your personal data against you for their own gain, but it sounds like Google does it while being more protective of what they've taken from you while MS also leaves you vulnerable in new ways through carelessness.
I'm not too worried about Bing though. That's nothing compared to Microsoft's access to your computer at the OS level. We know anything we do online will be seen by others, but being able to snoop on our personal files and log our keystrokes is a whole lot worse than knowing what we type into a search engine.
However improved/more popular Bing becomes, eventually Bing will end up in the same position Google is in now where they'll have to make their web search worse in order to constantly shove ads in your face instead of returning results that are useful, and slowly SEO spam will adapt to pollute Bing's results further. Google may not even mind if Bing starts gaining users. At this point Google can collect so much data from android devices that I doubt they need google search to peer into our lives like they used to anyway.
Really? I find Microsoft's documentation for Azure (in English) to be quite thorough and helpful. Their tools are well-designed and quite powerful.
Perhaps those of AWS and GCP are even more amazing, but I wouldn't call Azure "horrible" by any stretch of the imagination.
Microsoft is evil v1. Google and everyone post 2000 is evil v2.
They are just as evil as Microsoft but they've learned that amongst other things, you need to a) seem nicer and b) lobby politicians.
I'd argue that made them more evil.
Though it has to be said that Microsoft has learned, too, so at this point they're pretty much the same thing.
Don't forget security! Multiple serious and extremely trivial cross-tenant security exploits only in the past couple of years. AWS and GCP have had none ever, the much smaller OCI has had one.
Microsoft is the capitalist evil. Google is the technocratic AI evil. The first wants your money, as much of it as they can hoover, using dark patterns if useful for it. The second wants to optimize your life using _their_ metrics, without ever engaging with you (humanity is the problem - engaging with it never scales).
I have spent a significant amount of time on each and would suggest it's the only actual cloud. The others are data centers masquerading as a cloud, notice when us-east has issues for AWS, Azure had a spof dependency on a datacenter that didn't even have AZs... GCP is architecturally on another level. The others seem to be unaware of what 'cloud native' means, so if you are attempting cloud native on non clouds, you inherit their lack of foresight.
Why?
For one, I've had a Microsoft account for over 20 years now (anyone remember Hotmail?). It's long past due for me to be complaining, and Microsoft hasn't wronged me in that time anyway. By comparison, my oldest Google account only goes back just over 10 years, and horror stories abound even if I've been fortunate so far. I keep all my truly important correspondance and login tie-ins with Microsoft (read: my Hotmail).
For another, Microsoft nurtured over 30 years' worth of good will from me with Windows and Office; even though I hate many things about Windows from 8 and up, among other things, I will ultimately be a friend to Microsoft simply because they were a significant and positive part of my childhood and now my adult life.
These are companies, not family friends.
From memory, Microsoft used to be absolute bastards when it came to your data. They did everything they could to keep you gated in and without any control. Things like: refusing any export tools for your emails so you couldn't migrate to another provider; or, not allowing any non-web access to your email.
Then Google came along with GMail and revolutionised things: amazingly generous free data allowance, IMAP access, data download options, open standards, liberal approach to letting people set up various hacky app access, and so on. It was hugely successful for them, and forced MS to moderate their approach.
Google abandoned their Don't Be Evil strategy and sacrificed a lot of their principles (and, I would argue, a lot of their success with it), but at one point they had a positive impact and they've never been as evil as early-era Microsoft.
But on the other hand, Gmail was an absolute bitch to get early on unless you were lucky enough to be friends with someone who had an address already. Maybe it was justified, but I don't remember that period fondly.
And ultimately, whereas Microsoft at best improved and at worst stayed as EEEvil as before, Google went from hero to zero in just the last decade burning away all the good will they nurtured. As things stand, I'll happily throw my hat in with Microsoft here.
The monopolistic dominance is the issue. They have too much data and too much power, and leverage that to swallow other market categories. Today they have a deeply unhealthy dominance over the tech industry.
Google could do everything right and still be an existential problem. You say MS has data security issues, okay sure. I’d still rather have them or anyone at 25%+ of the market.
Google isn't forcing someone to use it. It's monopoly can disappear when something better it's there.
I wonder if the article authors were thinking of Xerox PARC's offices in Palo Alto's hills? Or the road named "Sand Hill Road" that used to have some venture capitalist offices? Other than those offices I can't think of any significant hill-based offices in Silicon Valley.
Well ... Not a big one, I grant you, but hill nevertheless :
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4231911,-122.084872,3a,75y,1...
Although Google, Maps, Youtube are of daily use they are monetized exclusively by advertising which is annoying and hated by many. It has been many years since Google has launched an innovative new product.
I don't think ChatGPT will gain daily traction after this hype. Anyway we could say that MSFT and AMZN have demostrated more power to innovate with different business models (not only adv) and products.
The GOOG stock has a PE (Price/earning) of 23, while Coca cola 26. So the stock market expect higher growth from CocaCola than Google. Quite surprising.
- GOOGLE PE (23): https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/pe-...
- COCA COLA PE (26): https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/KO/cocacola/pe-rat...
Stadia launched in 2019.
Also, it's already dead.
The only one of those I'd used was Geforce Now, and found it very similar to Stadia wrt latency. Stadia had a much nicer interface, though.
Stadia might have been well executed from a technical standpoint but AAA game streaming wasn't exactly a new and innovative idea in 2019.
Lol.
I love chatGPT but it clearly has a ton of issues. To declare Google dead that is point is completely absurd.
I can't think of a single transformative technology that actually has a first mover advantage. The first, second and third mover seem to make all the mistakes and setup the forth mover to learn from those mistakes for free and create a monopoly.
Counting out a company that owns Deepmind is just not rational.
I don’t know how much. Money it makes, but there is paid API access to maps.
Youtube Music is really .. strange.
It looks wrong/outdated everywhere.
Generated playlists (recomendations) are always (for days/weeks) the same. Not a bit randomization. It feels like they were approved by party commitete for years.
I don't understand why they decided social network in music service.
Ah hell. CUE-lists are still too novice technology for them.
I still think that last.fm 15 years ago was the best music service.
I find YouTube quite easy to use, esp the shortcut keys.
Recommendation system is another story.
Google's gotten through the first 95% of the work, but the remaining 95% is gonna take awhile.
1. Car infested ergo perfect venue area for testing autonomous cars, since the infrastructure is through and through car oriented at the detriment of every other form of mobility (walking, cycling, buses, trams, trains, etc)?
2. Super hot and sunny, ergo no fog, no rain, no sleet, no ice, no special weather conditions to handle.
3. Flat like a pancake, making terrain management, coupled with the nice, wide roads from point #1, so super easy mode.
Let's see them scale Waymo to at least 3 out of the following: San Francisco, NYC, Bucharest, Istanbul, Mumbai, St. Petersburg, etc.
That could be at least a decade away.
No it won't. It will be an option for those who can depend on a car service due to proximity to a city.
Sounds like a majority to me.
At the same time, a lot of these platforms ran effectively unopposed for many years, and now competition in advertising is spreading quite rapidly
Here’s a tour of the recreation https://maps.app.goo.gl/syHHp9GWmaGA5Woz7
The press loves a David and Goliath story; the young disruptor versus the stodgy disrupted.[1] At that time, Dropbox was David, coming out of nowhere in a hurry and had a product that seemingly should be so obvious for Google to launch but hadn't - making Google seem antiquated and slow.
Fast forward a couple of years (aka a decade) and Dropbox is still going ok but Google Drive is by far more ubiquitous.
I guess only time will tell.
[1] Dropbox Versus The World https://www.fastcompany.com/3042436/dropbox-versus-the-world
Which is perhaps why Google didn't really focus on creating a Dropbox like product until it was forced to because the more long term profitable for Google was a solution/vision based around a cloud first experience.
Not as mission critical as the desktop app, but still pretty frustrating that they can't handle this core functionality after years and millions spent on other bells and whistles.
The "at most a few years from profitability" after a period of what, 15 boom years?, doesn't sound that great as the 3rd place contender.
Also the comparison is between Google versus Dropbox (the underdog David that's analogous to OpenAI), not Google versus Amazon or even Google versus Microsoft.
Google is 51% of office productivity software market versus Microsoft. Microsoft is at 47%, Dropbox isn't even listed. [1]
Dropbox has a decent share of the personal cloud storage market but has really failed to expand beyond that vertical or become significantly profitable. [2]
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/983299/worldwide-market-...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1328893/global-file-shar...
Even Google winning the AI wars leaves them worse off as the operating profit potential of querying an AI vs their search index has to be far lower.
As to usage, once you start to integrate ChatGPT into your workflows it can meaningfully benefit vs traditional search. Ive been able to find information on specific programming language concepts, with generated examples, far faster than searching.
I can ask it about GameDev concepts and ask for bulleted lists or higher/lower level of detail in the answers. Information is presented in a much easier to consume manner
That being said, most stocks that are considered defensive are quite overvalued on a fundamental basis. I would consider a PE of 26 for Coke quite undesirable, though there’s much worse
In some ways, it might even be good. It's suffering from a kind of advertising resource curse nowadays, and being forced and able to diversify its economy would be best in the long term.
They had an enormous moat and edge in search, but not seeing it for this next wave of AI. Barrier to entry seems far lower
> Employees were encouraged to spend up to twenty-percent of their paid work time pursuing personal projects. The objective of the program was to inspire innovation in participating employees and ultimately increase company potential. For Google's part, Gmail and AdSense both arose out of side projects. In 2013, Google discontinued 20 percent time.
What has Google released since 2013[0]? Stadia?
Then you tack on that Google Search as of today is basically unusable/broken with people needing to append site:, double-quoting everything, or enabling verbatim search to get high quality results. Heck, on top of that, I also have a uBlock configuration that removes 280 domains from Google Results because they're all auto-generated spam of Stackoverflow answers.
There is something deeply wrong with the culture inside Google.
- GCP Suite (a full integrated and consistent suit, answering so many things)
- Google Workspace (trust me when you get to know everything that is possible you will be amazed)
- Tensorflow and other Machine Learning applications
Google Cloud is a worse clone of AWS, is that innovative? Redmond-style photocopying?
I'll give you TensorFlow, but we're talking about that being their death knell, so congratulations about signing their own death-warrant?
This certainly hasn’t been my experience. I’ve found GCP products to be much better/easier to deal with than their AWS counterparts.
It went from "spend 20% on whatever project you find interesting!" to "spend UP TO 20% on a project your manager approves of and can defend from their manager, with routine reporting on the status, direction, and potential outcomes."
Employees went from wanting to work at Google for the "20% Time" to not using it because it was a huge hassle that could risk their career advancement, if your 20% time project didn't pan out. It went from a perk to a gamble almost overnight.
The result in the same either way though: Google stopped innovating.
Can you describe exactly what you mean? If there is a way to hide specific domains from showing in search results, it would be an incredible boon for me.
https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter
In particular look in the dist folder, find your search engine(s) of choice, and then get the blocklist you'd like. Paste into "MyFilters" in uBlock.
Bonus: Here's one that entirely blocks Youtube Shorts in your Subscriptions feed:
www.youtube.com##ytd-grid-video-renderer:has(#thumbnail[href*=shorts])https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter
In particular look at: dist/google/ and stackoverflow_copycats.txt
Since I can’t paste screenshots from my terminal, you can see the sector P/Es on page 6:
https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/performance-repo...
I can say the exact same thing about countless other large companies: Facebook, Intel, Microsoft, Boeing, AMD, AT&T, I could go on and on. At some point, launching innovative new products isn't really that important for a company, when many people on the services that company provides.
Disrupt yourself before someone else does.
I'm not "blaming" them, it's the cycle of life. Gravity eventually wins.
This is also a key reason for all the layoffs: Growing, innovating companies cannot ONBOARD staff fast enough, because their value is decided by how big they will be in the future and how fast they can get there. People are a profit centre. But mature companies' (in mature industries) only source of increased value is in efficiency, getting the same revenues with less costs. So people are a cost centre and they succeed by showing they're efficient (aka laying off workers).
The article aims to offer a preliminary analysis of whether Microsoft can become a better parasite: Grabbing the content people generate online, paying nothing, and using it deftly to serve advertisement on the basis of private behavioral traits that are gleaned by prying open and subverting the use of all pieces of IT people use.
It is not too difficult by now to imagine alternate tech universes (Philip K Dick style) that have nothing to do with this nightmare, where more or less the same technologies empower individuals and companies and organizations rather than squeezing them dry. The combination of oligopoly status, moral laxity and political dysfunction means we are simply sitting around like sheep discussing whether a new butcher is about to get sharper knives.
In this model, are end users who use it to search for information parasites as well? After all, they are consuming content that other people generate online, and usually pay nothing for it. And they love to look for — and find — what they are interested in. If Google didn't satisfy that need well, people wouldn't have preferred it, and it wouldn't have grown.
Search should be democratized by governments. It is central and should be for everybody. No control.
I am confused. Are you suggesting that governments should nationalize the search part of Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, etc.? Or that they should build their own high-quality search engines? And what do we do until they have?
> No control.
Why do you think governments wouldn't control search engines if they were responsible for providing them?
> It is central and should be for everybody
How is the current model (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, etc.) not for everybody?
That may already be happening https://openwebsearch.eu/
The role of a government in a capatilistic society is to basically do the stuff that isn't profitable for corporations to do without exploiting the population. For example build roads, because if a corporation did that there would be tolls everywhere and it would be hard for poor people to improve their living standards if they couldn't economically move around. That seems to have happened on the internet. The internet is in the commons and everyone expects it to be free, the problem is that the infrastructure to navigate it was built by corporations and now we have to pay tolls through ads and trackers
Search provided by the Russian government to the Russian people, Chinese government to the Chinese people, British government to the British people, X government to the X people..
What could go wrong?
Users pay with their data. That is the whole point of the business model and it is obviously lucrative enough so that the entire tech infrastructure (devices, OS, browsers etc) can be repurposed to be a user data collection channel. If you want to find a real accomplice that is essential for the model to work, it is not the users, it is the advertisers. It takes two to tango in the adtech market.
I don't dispute that search (in its various incarnations) is an essential service in a digitally interconnected world. There are countless ways to pay for it (as a digital public good, as a user subscription etc) that are fundamentally better than what we have. It is also obviously true that some decades ago Google innovated technically. A lot happened since and it wasn't positive. Normalizing it simply prolongs the agony.
User attention is worth more but even then I would be hesitant to say such a grand claim.
The web was hard to navigate and you relied on webpages "befriending" each other and helping you navigate to similar pages. That was real navigation and it had terrible recall. Once google became the Internet's frontend everything was one or two hops away. It was awesome, and I think that it has evolved in a way that saves time with the snippets and knowledge graph panel at the expense of taking away clicks from sites that needed to serve their ads. Although today things are getting worse with walled gardens and SEO.
A problem that the internet has not solved yet is how to keep webpages up while there's increasingly more content. Most sites were maintained at a loss by people, or leeching resources at a university or company. The closest "people" have got to fix this IMO is through P2P, but it got too focused on piracy and got a bad reputation with malware too. And I think we never had the infrastructure to serve and share webpages we visited. Sharing today is still a mess and we still depend on centralized distribution + caching (and that's dying with https, only big companies who are better off giving caching servers away to ISPs can do this).
Ads came to "save" the internet from this problem. I really hate them and I wish we had a better model, but they seem a necessary evil as people just got used to believe that all digital things are free when they obviously cost something, and that still shows today in the apps stores.
Advertising worked just fine for more than a century, ever since the invention of consumerist society. (How much of that is really necessary in a society that is pushing headlong into unsustainability is another, bigger story.)
The disaster we have now in our hands is of a more immediate and crass nature.
Think about it: there are algorithmic breakthroughs that can help everybody on the planet raise their level of information retrieval and the only discussion is which of the former or the current consumer tech oligopolies will use it best to push ads and how to double down on a bad design.
Don't tell me you forgot Yahoo, Excite, Altavista, Lycos, and all those other search engines existed! Lycos also had hotbot and tripod.com, back when homepages were your internet presence instead of social media.
Maybe Google had results that were a bit more relevant and won that competition, but they didn't Change Everything.
It's as if you brought up the first Motorola phone or blackberry and compared it to the iPhone saying it was just ok.
Who do you think it would have been competitive for?
The GPT LLMs just raise the bar for information retrieval. And so it goes.
>the web was hard to navigate and you relied on webpages "befriending" each other and helping you navigate to similar pages. That was real navigation and it had terrible recall.
This is exactly why internet was decentralized. A network of social connections between small online spaces people congregated in was essential to find what you wanted. It was somewhat of a replication of the old world - where in order to find an answer, you first had to get into relevant circles (eg. a local club, university, etc). You didn't just get an answer to your question, you inevitably had to sift through a lot of other content and learn about new places.
Google cut through all of that. Ideally, you could just get the answer you wanted, and not even see the rest of the site. The first order effect was that everyone's life get better. The second order effect is that it killed the old decentralized web, because random discovery nearly died down.
LLM are only the next step on this, but I don't think they change much. I think it's mostly going to damage reddit. A lot of reddit questions are an attempt to find an answer to something that google is too dumb to find - but llms may be able to.
The defense to this - are chatrooms, like discord. Sometimes I see people complaining that so much information is now 'hidden' on discord. But that's the exact point. Making information hard to get means people are forced to interact with each other. This creates incentives to contribute.
That's the future. Chatrooms may be replaced by voice based vr, hard to say. We already passed the peak of public information dissemination, and are going back to old style "ask at the university", just more decentralized and online.
Speaking of that, I might as well provide some supprting evidence from a different part of the tech industry. Most people don't know that right now Blackrock and Coinbase are attempting a coup on the US dollar by seeking access to central bank liability for their stable coin? The Coinbase CEO even said it out loud that this year his stable coin will become the de facto central bank digital currency. I suspect that they have indirectly bribed someone at the Fed (how else does that work? esp since the Fed chairmen has come out strongly against stablecoins) and are basically trying to get the ability to get Fed loans at the Fed rate and loan out at the commercial bank rate without being a bank and by using a coin which they can mint themselves, so all the profits from interest create more reserves and the cycle keeps going. It is literally insane. The threat from Google and Microsoft to society pales in comparison. I may not have my understanding 100% correct but all banks are up in arms about it and the average person on HN has no clue this is happening. Just Google Blackrock, USDC and the Fed. The banks are calling it a backdoor CBDC.
Yes, Blackrock and Coinbase have partnered up to provide crypto trading access to Blackrock clients but how are they attempting a coup on the US dollar?
You'll have fuedal lords (aka billionaires) in control of the digital money supply. How is that not a coup?
These LLMs will be the end. They will capture enough of the user attention that the few remaining ad supported sites will be wiped out. “Content”, that low quality grist every site is filled with to capture users for a few seconds before they click on will become worthless, no different than the low quality crap the LLMs spew out.
Finally, we will stop trying to keep the bloated corpse of the web alive and will move on. It will be the death of a dream. At least we can all let go and focus our energies on a new dream. Whatever that dream is, I hope high quality, human created art, knowledge, opinion and creativity is at the center of it.
The correct interface for ChatGPT + search is just...ChatGPT. But it can also show you a list of web search results, when it's appropriate.
A super-clean interface, that always shows you exactly what you want.
That would be a killer feature and represent a real threat to Google.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/02/07/reinventing-sear...
I've seen this with many human published articles on the Internet too. The litany of citations fool everyone into thinking that the article is credible, but when I actually read the citations, they don't support the article at all.
"Get answers instead of being overwhelmed by options. Bing looks at search results across the web and summarizes responses to your specific questions and needs."
There's summarised cited searches and then there is the more ChatGPT option which is also available.
This is the intended behavior. It kind of ruins serendipitious web surfing via search. I look through 4 pages of 100 results in less than a minute and the web as google search presents it just feels so shallow now.
I also suspect the first set is very very small...
It reminds me of when Wikipedia was new and we were told repeatedly that we couldn't trust it (by teachers, articles, etc.). It didn't matter if we could point to studies that found Wikipedia had similar accuracy to other encyclopedias. They objected on the grounds that anyone could edit it and anything on it _could_ be wrong and there's no publisher or paid editors to ensure accuracy.
ChatGPT tends to do well on common questions, where the answer is plastered in hundreds of articles across the internet. The internal cooking temperature of a steak is a great example of this. There are many other types of questions it fails at.
A better example of where you shouldn't trust ChatGPT is asking it the distance between two cities. It'll get it right for a few common pairs of cities (eg London to Paris), but it'll give you a wrong answer for most less common pairs (eg London to Cairo).
Also ChatGPT is only knowledgeable about general things, but even there it makes errors. It's basically a very complex scraping algorithm, the more interesting part is the language generation; even then this stuff seems at least unethical if not illegal since it's using other people's work/research without citation.
Who checks if that book actually exists and is not made up? Especially if it's not a highly politically charged topic.
And then there are circular citations. Someone posts unverified/false info on wikipedia. Then it gets cited by some blog or other media that wikipedia considers trustworthy. And that then gets added to wikipedia as a reliable source.
Rare: 120-125°F (49-52°C) Medium-Rare: 130-135°F (54-57°C) Medium: 140-145°F (60-63°C) Medium-Well: 150-155°F (66-68°C) Well-Done: 160°F (71°C) and above
It's important to note that cooking steaks at low temperatures for extended periods of time can result in a more tender and flavorful finished product, compared to cooking steaks at high temperatures for a shorter amount of time.
Looks great to me.
Here's a chat I had today with ChatGPT:
Q: Who was the first US president with a last name starting with R?
A: Rutherford B. Hayes was the first US president with a last name starting with "R."
Q: no, a surname starting with R
A: Rutherford B. Hayes was the first U.S. President with a surname starting with "R."
Q: no, Rutherford is his first name
A: The first US president with a surname starting with "R" was Richard Nixon.
Q: no, Richard is his first name
A: The first U.S. President with a surname starting with "R" was James A. Garfield.
Here it's obvious ChatGPT is spouting nonsense, but in other cases it may not be.
Q: Who was the first US president whose surname begins with "R"?
A: The first US president whose surname begins with the letter "R" was John Quincy Adams.
Q: Adams does not begin with "R"
A: I apologize for the mistake. The first US president whose surname begins with the letter "R" was Rutherford B. Hayes.
Q: Hayes does not begin with "R"
A: My apologies for the mistake, the first US president whose surname begins with the letter "R" was James A. Garfield.
Q: Garfield does not begin with "R"
A: I apologize for the error. The first US president whose surname begins with the letter "R" was Richard Nixon.
Q: Nixon does not begin with "R"
A: I apologize for the mistake. The first US president whose surname begins with the letter "R" was George Washington.
Q: Washington does not begin with "R"
A: I apologize for the mistake. The first US president whose surname begins with the letter "R" was Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Q: Wasn't Theodore Roosevelt president before FDR?
A: Yes, you are correct. Theodore Roosevelt was the 26th President of the United States, serving from 1901 to 1909. He was the first US president whose surname begins with the letter "R." Thank you for pointing out the error in my previous answer.
So at least it's capable of parroting the correct answer after you deliver it. :-)
At least one person is working on this:
https://twitter.com/hsu_steve/status/1623388682454732801
While something like this would of course be incredible, even just current ChatGPT + the ability to web search for you would be quite amazing.
If MS isn't ready to completely replace Bing, then they should've made it an entirely separate page: bchat.com or something.
If someone built something that parsed sentences, stored facts, learned relationships between them, learned enough language processing to make connections between them in order to be able to say something new about the subject it didn't already know before-hand, then I'd be on that train. Right now I only see misery in our future if we just work on honing ChatGPT and it's ilk to better simulate BS.
I guess they opted for the search results as the default with the chat on the side as the link list is the current interface.
That's the pipedream, but in reality isn't the case yet even using just ChatGPT.
Bing's implementation is trying to balance raw ChatGPT outputs, with summarised cited responses in search.
I do think they need to speed up the animation for generating the summarised or ChatGPT result though...
Google, has all three. The real question is can they not shoot themselves in the foot while doing it.
Also SEO will always target the market leader.
As far as Bing's results: I keep thinking Google is trashy. Then I use Bing and I remember just how good Google is. That's my personal opinion. I am NOT going to claim they are SEO, and spam immune, far from. But they seem to do better than Bing in getting what I mean right.
ChatGPT may help MS, but is it a bandaid? Is it just a good PR bump? Who knows... Displacing Google is a large task.. and not one I'm sure I want MS to win. But I look forward to them trying, if only to make Google do better.
MS has them all three too.
And since, as you say, the algorithm part is not the most difficult part, others may enter the playing field soon (we already have DDG and Kagi, for example, with Kagi now experimenting with LLMs too).
MS has the money. Data is by far and away the hardest part, and DDG's own privacy policies etc will hurt it here, alas.
Personally, I think it is Google's race to win. But they have to DO it. If I start getting better results off DDG or Bing, I'll switch. I'm fickle, and own no loyality to Google.
I just want my StackExchange answers faster, before Google Coder, and Co-Pilot replace me. /s
I use a lot Ecosia (which gets results from Bing) due to them allegedly planting trees and being much more heavily into privacy.
My experience with Ecosia, thus Bing, is that for the overwhelming majority of searches (90% plus) the quality is comparable.
When you get into more niche searches Bing offers better results 1 out of 5 times and worse results 4 out of 5, with a worrying amount of those 4 being almost complete misses.
I still need to get onto Google occasionally when I don't find what I was looking for on Ecosia.
The other searches are worse. I too have tried. But in general I'm frustrated with Google now more than I've ever been.
I'm talking about lists like these: https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter/blob/mai...
It wouldn't take a small team more than a few weeks to get through these lists -- most of the work has already been done.
Alternatively, they could just let us add these lists to a first-party interface so we don't have to use plugins to achieve the same results.
The problem with search is not that our answers aren't summarized well, it's that the quality of information returned for those searches is getting increasingly worse, and we are getting increasingly worse at categorizing or filtering that information in any useful way. And LLMs pulling information in and summarizing it for me is... not helpful? It's summarizing the same garbage, except now sometimes it also summarizes it wrong.
But it's not even an issue with the quality (although the quality of information from LLMs is also pretty over-hyped I think). Conceptually, I don't know that this is a product that I would ever want. I can't think of any time where I've sat down to do a search on Google or DuckDuckgo and thought, "You know what I want? I want these results presented to me in a less structured format using natural language and with less granular knowledge about where each specific statement is coming from."
At least Bing seems to be trying to do inline citations in some of its answers, which is a step up over Google's AI announcement, I guess?
Maybe I'm just in the minority on that. Users seem to like this a lot. But my ideal version of the Internet is one that decreases the number of abstractions and layers and summaries between myself and primary data rather than increasing them. My ideal Internet is a tool that makes it easier for me to actually find things, not a tool that increases the layers between me and the raw source/information that I'm looking for. I already have enough trouble needing to double-check news summaries of debates, events, and research. Getting another summary of the summaries doesn't seem helpful to me?
I can think of some ways where I might use an LLM in search, even really exciting ways where maybe it could help with categorization or grouping, but it doesn't seem like Google/Bing are interested in pursuing any of that. I look at both the Bing and Google announcements and just think, "why are you making it worse?" But who knows, maybe the actual products will sell me on the concept more.
I do see LLMs as potentially more useful for “fanciful” queries, like “what can I make with kale, tomatoes, and mushrooms?”
I think that encyclopedias are cool, but I also feel like the Internet was hopefully going to be a slightly better version of that and that it's a little frustrating to be going in the opposite direction. I'm not sure how to articulate that other than that encyclopedias are in some ways a compromise around the fact that we very often don't have good search, so we accept human beings trying to pre-aggregate data for us with the hope that they are better than Google is at aggregating that data.
And I think Wikipedia is valuable not so much because of the summaries, and more because it's obsessively curated and has (or attempts to have) a very specific, predictable set of rules that it (tries) to adhere to about sources and coverage. The text-portion of Wikipedia isn't really the part that I think is most impressive about it. If GPT-3 was being used to aggressively curate search results and remove low-quality content, then yeah, that would be potentially interesting (although I'm not sure how well it could handle that task).
----
> what can I make with kale, tomatoes, and mushrooms?
I sort of see it, it's one of the more... it's fine. It wouldn't be a strict downgrade over existing search, maybe it would save time in some situations. But if I'm being completely honest, what I want as an answer to that question isn't a paragraph of text explaining multiple recipes, it's a bullet-pointed list of recipes with links to the original sites they're listed on, so I can check to see if they're worth making.
Bing's results (to its credit) seem like they're sort of headed in that direction, which, nice. Yeah, I could use that. But a bullet-pointed list of recipes is also... search results. So how much time and effort have we put into reinventing a cleaner search interface where at best it solves the same problems that search already solved, and where we in the meanwhile haven't made any progress on the really hard fundamental problem of "how do we get a good list of recipes to display in the first place and what does 'good' mean in that context?"
----
To be less cynical, one way I could see this genuinely being useful would be completely behind the scenes in a non-user-facing role just as a way of applying "tags" to webpages or doing filtering. I would love to be able to search "is spinach poisonous for rats who are pets and just because I used the word 'poisonous' does not mean I want 2 pages of links about exterminators or getting rid of wild rats."
An LLM would be a great fit for that, because we've done such a garbage job of categorizing the web that it's very difficult to know which words to type to exclude "categories" of information from a search query. So maybe an LLM helps standardize that a bit? But then I want a normal page of search results. I don't want to have a conversation with the LLM, I want the LLM's role to be exclusively "I think this webpage should be additionally included/excluded in your query. I think this webpage is about extermination even if it doesn't use that specific word."
If Bing's service ends up being able to do that kind of thing well, then yeah, that's useful. I'm a little skeptical they can, because... gestures to the current quality of search results, but maybe their integration with GPT gives them way more capabilities and ratchets up their quality.
But similar to above, it feels a little bit like reinventing the wheel. I can refine GPT queries during a conversation, great. Could I have that feature for regular search? Why do I need to do it as part of a conversation? That seems like a good thing tied to a bad UX (although again, I might be atypical in thinking that natural language conversations are often bad UX).
And I do want to couch that by saying that maybe Bing will surprise me and it will have easy options to do that kind of thing. I'm just not currently seeing it presented in a way that looks useful.
The first is a little more mundane: LLM embeddings. OpenAI currently offers an API that turns sentences into coordinates for a point in some 1536-dimensional conceptual space such that two points are close together if they are conceptually close together. This is insanely powerful. For example, you can generate captions for a bunch of images and store the embeddings for them. Then, you can look for a "picture of a rabbit eating a carrot" by turning that phrase into a 1536-dimensional point and looking for the nearest points around it. Basically, it blows open search technology for everyone. You no longer have to deal with synonyms, idiomatic phrases that mean similar things, misspellings etc - the problems you'd run into when trying to implement simple text search using traditional techniques. It all gets simplified to generating coordinates in some hyperspace and looking for nearest neighbors. This is a total game changer.
The second direction is ChatGPT. Sure, if you want to read a detailed analysis of the demographic situation in China, you'd prefer an article written by an expert. You would still use a search engine, pick a search result and do things the way you do them today. However, there's an entire collection of things that can be answered directly by ChatGPT. For example "how many mins should I hard boil an egg" or "Can I take NyQuil when I'm stoned" or anything else where you really just want a single sentence answer. Today, you launch a browser, search for what you want, skip past the first 10 advertisements, look for a site that seems reasonably reputable, click through all the GDPR warnings, scroll past the banner ads and the SEO optimizing bullshit text to find that one sentence that you wanted all along. Or, you could ask ChatGPT and get an answer instantly. (assuming chatGPT is good enough eventually).
It's hard to predict which of these two technologies will disrupt the current status quo in search. Neither might. But we haven't ever been this close to a level playing field in search since the 1990s. The excitement is hard to resist.
You know Google has been doing this for years now?
> However, there's an entire collection of things that can be answered directly by ChatGPT. For example "how many mins should I hard boil an egg" or "Can I take NyQuil when I'm stoned" or anything else where you really just want a single sentence answer.
Google has been doing this for years via search cards, which are AI generated summaries of website information.
Of course.
What’s changed is that before now, they were the only ones who could do it, vs now, everyone can do it. So this technology only got deployed where someone could get a promo out of it whereas now, every to-do list app, dating app, and even a reasonably sophisticated nigerian prince can find a place to deploy it.
Think of what gcc did to software tool chains, Apache to servers, Linux to operating systems and to a lesser degree, blockchains to distributed databases.
> Google has been doing this for years via search cards, which are AI generated summaries of website information.
Yes. But now, someone else can do it too. And if that someone else does a good job, Google just lost the opportunity to show advertisements to all of those “searches”.
Doesn’t mean that anyone is about to beat Google in terms of sheer talent and experience with this stuff. But a very hungry and determined community of entrepreneurs just got hands on something that’s about as good as Google’s secret sauce and they’re about to run wild.
> there's an entire collection of things that can be answered directly by ChatGPT. [...] assuming chatGPT is good enough eventually
I am a lot less impressed with this. And I know I'm an outlier and plenty of people are shocked at how good GPT is at this kind of problem, so I am constantly second-guessing myself and thinking to myself, "are we using the same product?" Because I think ChatGPT produces really bad quality information. It's cool, it's wildly impressive, it's a massive achievement and an incredible milestone for AI, but 'cool' is different from 'useful.'
Leaving aside the problem that answering simple questions is a very small subset of what search is used for, and isn't on its own probably a big enough category of questions to make me change search engines, the bigger problem is that the current state of ChatGPT seems to be wildly inconsistent about what it knows and what it doesn't know and I don't have a way to pre-predict what categories of information it's safe to ask about. And the only way for me to verify the answers it gives me are to... double check its work with a real search.
I would not advise anyone to ask ChatGPT for advice about what drugs are safe to take while high, that seems profoundly unwise to me.
So it's a bit like Instant Answers. Google has been trying to auto-answer questions for ages, and in practice the only time it's ever been useful for me is when it's extremely predictable and when I know that a category of question will only ever have its answer pulled from one site and where I know what the format of that answer will be.
Unpredictability is generally a quality that I try to avoid any time that I am using a computer. One of the primary strengths of a computer to me is specificity and predictability. And so the bar here is really high. The question I ask myself is, "would I want to replace a search engine with a human assistant?" And I think the answer is no, I feel like that would be missing the point of what a search engine is. And ChatGPT gives worse answers than a human assistant would, and its sources/knowledge is just as unpredictable as a human's would be if not worse. So, I also don't want to replace my search engine with ChatGPT.
It could get more accurate in the future, and if it does then maybe my opinion will change then, but... it's hard for me to get excited about using a worse product today on the promise that it might get better in the future. And I guess it's accurate enough that a bunch of people keep telling me that they're saving time when they use it, so maybe I don't understand what I'm talking about. But I just don't see how people are reaching that conclusion unless they're either asking questions where they don't actually care about the accuracy or unless they're just rolling the dice and trusting that ChatGPT won't accidentally poison them when they ask what drug combinations they can take.
First, you have people who don’t have any idea about how any of this works and are generally far removed from the tech communities. They did not see this coming. To this community, ChatGPT is a fascinating toy. It’s not perfect, but at this point everyone is conditioned to believe that thinks will somehow get better. This group is excited.
Second, you have the tech community who is skeptical. This group of people sees everything that’s wrong with ChatGPT and see the magnitude of work needed for anything to even start approaching Google as a credible threat. This group is generally confused by the excitement going around because it doesn’t seem warranted, and worse, the excitement is being seen in people who should know better. There’s a range of responses from being dismissive to feeling like they’re being gaslighted.
Third, you have the people who are filling up the YC summer 23 applications. They’re all looking for big unsaturated markets to build a pitch deck around. ChatGPT looks like a very promising sign post that says “look for ideas here” to this group. They are excited. Most of them will fail. But if anyone survives and manages to thrive, where will they be 10 years from now? How about FDA approved chatbots integrated with a blood pressure monitor and thermometer that can take a first pass at routine prescription refills at 1/100th the cost of an equivalent doctors appointment? How about live translation of television events synthesized back to the original speaker’s voice? How about video game engines that can synthesize music loops dynamically to keep up with the gaming pace of that particular gaming session?
Sure you might say, but none of that “dethrones google”. My response to that is - what role does a text based internet play in daily life 10 years from now? Everything on the internet today went something along this path: primary research -> classrooms -> textbooks -> niche blogs/forums -> mainstream websites.
10 years from now, would you bet against primary research -> ChatGPT ingress -> widely deployed ChatGPT model? What role do ad driven websites play in this chain? What role does a search engine play in this chain?
Sure, it doesn’t make the internet nor search engines obsolete. But it changes how we do things. Potentially in a very big way.
I suspect I'm a little bit more skeptical about this than other people might be? 10 years out is a long way to predict and I'm hesitant to try, but I might be primed wrong looking at voice assistants/video/etc... where I think the format changes have been a little over-exaggerated in some ways in the past, and where I think people have traditionally underestimated how much staying power traditional models have. There were a lot of things that were supposed to kill a traditional text-based Internet, but the only thing that's come close is video, and that seems to get a lot of blowback; I'm not sure it was an improvement.
But regardless, your comment is a insightful perspective that gives me some alternative ways of looking at this. So I think I agree. I might be just more on the skeptical side of things of how well-suited the current tools are for building the kinds of applications you're describing, but I get the theory.
And generative AI that's separate from AI answering questions is kind of another story; I can absolutely imagine potential creative impacts around stuff like music loop generation, art generation, etc... I similarly am looking at the current state of things and saying, "well... the tech doesn't seem to be as good as people say it is, so I don't want to start using it now before it improves", but I can at least imagine how things might change if the tech does get good. I'm not sure it would be a "revolution" or that it's going to put artists out of business or whatever, but it could potentially lower the barrier of entry for certain applications. And certainly LLMs for general website classification I think would be a really good use that I wish was being pursued more.
At the least though, even if I'm skeptical, I can definitely understand why someone would have that perspective, and your summation of the different groups rings true to me.
I still don't think I want it in my current search box today though :) I don't think that LLMs are useless at all, I'm just not sure searching in specific is a good use for them.
And this doesn't seem unreasonable, given that you get everything for free or at a very low cost. When you pay for high quality books or periodicals, you get in return much better sourced information written by people who know a lot more about the subject they're writing on than the average journalist or AI language model.
Yes, occasionally one might find high quality contents in blogs, forums, wikis, or open-access periodicals, but far more are locked inside proprietary platforms or behind paywalls that do very little to actually compensate the authors.
Search engines and content platforms are supposed to make it easier to find what you want. But the reality is that it's a lose-lose situation for both the writer and the reader. The writer is forced to give up their contents at a very low price and overpay for ads, while the reader is left with low quality contents that aren't relevant to their needs. But neither can escape the monopoly, who alone profits at everyone else's expense.
Most of my web searches are for looking up specific things, to find the specific link(s) that contains the information I need. These aren’t searches that are going to be made better or faster by an ML model-they’re not natural language queries, they’re just a bunch of terms.
I do agree though, that without citations to the original source - any "Facts" that ChatGPT offers are absolutely untrustworthy.
I… don’t really get it either.
But I’m also a cranky person who can’t stand every damn thing being a video whether it makes sense for the content or not, etc.
Even before this, you've seen the search engines add features to cater to that kind of use, things like Siri handing off questions it didn't understand to a search engine (as well as the other assistants that can do that), indications of this behavior in how companies like Google show themselves being used in ads.
Of course, regardless of the true prevalence of that behavior, it's probably in Google et al.'s favor to encourage that. Regular search sort of inherently cedes some power and control to the pages the results are coming from, where you're sending users away to if their answer isn't right in the snippet. But the "answer box" features, or an LLM that just tells you "the answer to your question" directly on the page keeps you there, treating the search page as your source of information and not somewhere else.
Beyond that, most of the results that rank for anything are plainly worse LLM blogspam padded for SEO. All you're doing here is cutting out the middleman.
The problem with chat gpt for factual question search is, of course, that it's not factual. It's job is to produce coherent sentences, not actually tell you factual information. So until they manage to get that right it's not a superior product.
There are two types of search, people looking for a specific resource (like searching for a song on youtube) and people just looking for an answer to a question. If a LLM can be factually accurate, its a superior search product for that specific use, which is probably the majority of search.
That said, ChatGPT does a very good job of understanding what I am looking for. If Microsoft could just insert this understanding into its regular search algorithms it would seem likely to significantly improve the quality of search results.
Its some combination of:
1. ChatGPT is so much better than previous versions that Google themselves was stunned by the utility.
2. Incompetence/Gross negligence across Google
3. No way for them to reconcile the lost ad revenue, so they released nothing. This case is hard to argue for, as they would know theyre a sitting duck.
Regardless I am hoping for a massive Google failure. Theyre the ones responsible for the SEO content waste land that is the modern internet. We have all suffered at the feet of their ad machine
Why are you blaming Google for not being perfect while making the best free search engine, after you spent your whole life refusing to pay for a non-free one?
Google is a monopoly, there is nothing anyone can do. Their search engine and business model has structured the internet and thus society. This thing needs to die
The same OpenAI ran by Sam Altman, who just last year was part of a crypto biometric scam called “Worldcoin” that attempted to collect biometric data from some of the worlds poorest in exchange for a shitcoin?
I’m sure they’ve done their due diligence and aren’t just pushing out a broken product as quickly as possible after it went viral because they saw dollar signs…
> I’m sure they’ve done their due diligence and aren’t just pushing out a broken product as quickly as possible after it went viral because they saw dollar signs…
Why wouldn't they? If they bet and win, they significantly disrupt the search market and many others. If they don't, people still don't use Bing. The rest of their business will continue on as is.
It's a no brainer.
Microsoft also?
> Why wouldn't they? If they bet and win, they significantly disrupt the search market and many others. If they don't, people still don't use Bing. The rest of their business will continue on as is.
The GP was responding to a post that said that Microsoft 100% did their due diligence.... I'm unsure to what you are responding.
At best they want to avoid bad publicity of their tech just being bad enough to throw out racist remarks. But the company who dropped "don't be evil" from their mission statement, and who fired AI ethics researchers for their research in AI bias that Google did not like is not a morale authority on the matter.
Also, Google does not provide an ad-free paid version of google, you statement is a non-sequitur.
I'm no fan of Google, but this seriously glosses over a rather complex situation. A paper may have been the catalyst, but I'd argue definitely not the reason for the firings. You can't just demand things with the threat of quitting, then act surprised when you're terminated.
The drama afterwards is largely irrelevant and if anything Gebru’s refusal to just meekly accept the company line demonstrates just how valuable she is in this field. The dismissal isn’t the real story, the retraction of the paper is the real problem the OP is referring to when discussing Google’s moral issues.
Touchscreens are the worst interface option. The feedback of feeling a button, or anything made for the job, is better than typing without specific feedback onto a screen. It won out because of you don’t have a set interface it’s bettor.
Now for search, chat gpt will likely always be less reliable than a list of results you can vet yourself for content and source.
That said… I don’t think people care about truth that much these days so one response that feels correct is could be good enough for most. Terrifying times we live in folks.
Hottest take I've seen on here for a while. In a very specific, very limited set of mobile usecases, buttons may offer a more pleasant experience than a touchscreen. I only say that because there's usually exceptions to any statement, but I can't actually think of one.
Touchscreens didn't win because of some lazy sheep-like consumerism, they won because the product is superior. If Chat-GPT style models defeat traditional search engines it will be because the product is better, not because people are content with a response that "seems correct."
It’s a crap interface compared to others but it’s the best to do anything. That’s why it won.
One is not superior to the other over all, but each is better at certain things. The difference is that more people will pay money to maximize their user experience scrolling through feeds and watching videos, compared to typing emails.
I still miss my landscape key board phones. The droid 4 still holds a special place in my head.
Touchscreens win when you need multiple interfaces in the same amount of space.
When defining "better" you need to indicate the metrics you are using. LM's might be "better" when measured with certain metrics, but like most things are worse when measured using other metrics.
I can understand why some times you might just want a chat response to a question rather than a web search.
But I swear that if I even suspect Siri's response is influenced by advertising or endorses a product, I will take the homepod and punt it down the street.
Irony of this article, predicting end of Google, is that articles like this are going to be replaced by these summaries too.
In addition, my gut feeling says that Google does things better than Microsoft.
This comes from my experience with working with Google and GCP products vs working with Microsoft Office/Windows and Azure.
With Google, everything feels consistent, well documented and well presented: from Meet/Gmail to BigQuery, Tensorflow, Cloud SQL, Firebase, etc.
With Microsoft I frequently observe inconsistencies in design patterns, broken links and outdated documentation. Just compare for example Office products, the concept of Office 365, Live Account vs Outlook account, Windows, Bing, Azure products, etc. Basically its hard to find any commonality and it feels that there is generally a lack of vision for the entire suit.
I therefore extrapolate that Google will answer this hype in a more structured way, anchored to a vision, putting it against a grand scheme of things and deliver it as a seemingly integrated solution to the suite.
But Google's product track record has been abysmal lately. Based on their horrible live event today, it seems like things are not so grand behind the scenes there anymore.
Edit: based on the subtitle, it seems like I am correct.
That's why it's absolutely nonsensical to see all these articles, because they are talking about a chatbot as if it's trivial to turn it into a search machine. That's an entirely different problem.
And answers as text wrapped around a factual knowledge base just sounds like the sort of queries Google Home already handles in natural language form. That can certainly be improved upon, but it isn't obvious that the LLM engineers will beat the search engineers to it...
I guess HN users tend to look up lots of facts and whatnot. But generative AI is not a better UX for queries like "LeBron James instagram" or "wordle" or "Avatar 3 release date" or "WSJ" or "Spanish to English" or "cricket news".
I really am getting old ...
If/when Bing gains dominance and starts abusing its position, I'll probably change positions, but that's the way it goes when there's a lack of competition in the market. You're left cheering for the best of the worst.
If you ask google a question then an awful lot of the time the majority of top 10 results will be promoting or selling stuff.
At the moment ChatGPT is like having an personal assistant that used to be an world leading expert, but has been sniffing glue for the last 5 years. He knows a lot of shit but you can't trust it. But he can help you get started and he's fun to be around.
Except ChatGPT isn't fun to be around. It's been castrated of humor and dominated by extreme political correctness. I think GPT is the catalyst for a change, but in Microsoft's hands it'll just be a glorified Clippy.
As for training data scraped from the internet, it will be split like steel was with "pre-war steel", due to atomic bombs rendering steel unfit to use in geiger counters. We'll have pre-gpt data.
> BIG TECH AI CHATBOT GOLDRUSH!!!!!!
> "Google sucks now, I use Kagi/DDG/Searx instead"
> "I have to quote search to get the results I want. Google has seriously gone downhill"
Can we cut the shit for two seconds? It was never all that great to begin with. None of them were.
Also, these news outlets are just fucking lazy and need to go outside and do actual journalism instead of regurgitating the same trash over and over. ChatGPT is less redundant than they are
But a lot of people fed up with Google and will be glad to try something different.
It's like when Apple came and eat 15-20% of market of notebooks.
Dominance of Microsoft still not ended.
Actually I suspect that Yandex search is better - I like how they preview answers for technical questions. Picture search - seems that Google is the worst.
Maybe it's time to start search different topics in different engines.
Hm. Actually AI could help to implement such functionality
I had to use DuckDuckGo to locate some mailing list threads (about an apache jira issue) which were clearly on Google at least a few years ago.
So "hdfs forward seek" in Google returns nothing, but DDG does.
If Google isn't repurposing all its search compute to something else secret, I can't explain why it suddenly got all dumb and forgetful of the 2015s internet.
Why would they replace Google with another bloated adware search engine then?
I used to be one of these people, not going to lie, but Bing is worse than Google when it comes to UX. The results are not as high quality, bloated and really messy UI.
I switched to DDG and then Brave Search later on and I can honestly say that Brave Search gets a lot of things right. Mainly the results quality and the clean UI and widgets.
At least I hope so.
Ultimately, Microsoft will make it easier for Google to catch up because its internal culture is and will continue to be unchanged, no matter how much technology they inject from OpenAI. Make no mistake, behind the shiny PR, it's still the messy Bing AI organization, the demoralized Microsoft Research organization and good ol' Microsoft.
Which begs the question...why produce any content at all? It will be gobbled up by AI and you'll never hear back. Thanks, I guess.
I can think of one issue delaying this inevitability: consumer laziness. Most people type one or two words, usually misspelled. That makes for a pretty poor AI prompt.
A word salad of untrustworthy bullshit instead of the pages you were looking for is not going to upend search.
It's not a replacement for search in any way.
Now if the search engine could find pages which satisfy complex queries in natural language, referencing content and relationships among content, that could be something.
At best, you can have this: if it looks like the user is typing a question into the search box, an AI-generated side bar can complement the answers.
The web search side of it cannot go away, otherwise you just have a sophisticated Eliza.
If I'm going to see a factual answer, I want external references for those facts before I trust it. I'm likely not a subject matter expert, if I'm asking about something; I can't tell when the AI is bullshitting.
Now if the AI-powered search engine had an intelligent index of all the texts of all the crawled web pages such it could do some basic reasoning about it to serve up those pages based on sophisticated questions (and not simply serve up original prose based on those texts), that could be a game changer.
Large corporations can seemingly stay alive and kicking for a long time after their death. Nokia, Kodak, Palm, RIM just to name a few.
I've witnessed the demise of Palm, then Nokia and RIM, following similar patterns, when they start reacting it is already over.
RIP Google.
"As an AI language model, I do not have opinions or personal thoughts. However, it is unlikely that chatbots like ChatGPT will replace traditional search engines like Google in the near future. While chatbots like me can provide quick answers to specific questions and engage in conversational interactions, they still have limitations and are not as comprehensive or efficient as search engines like Google. Google and other search engines have access to vast amounts of information and use complex algorithms to deliver relevant and accurate results.
That being said, chatbots like me can complement traditional search engines by providing an alternative, more conversational interface for accessing information. Additionally, advances in natural language processing and AI technology may lead to chatbots becoming more sophisticated and capable of handling more complex tasks in the future."
The recent Yandex hack/leak has the cynic in me connecting the dots and, seeing how Google search seems to be facing REAL threats to it's dominance since it's creation... maybe some guys with the deepest pockets in the world are starting to enter WAR mode.
Destroying Yandex advantages on the SEO battlefield by way of divulging their parameters to the world would be the Franz Ferdinand assassination moment of the Great Search War.
Search in general, and specifically Google search, depends on Adwords for revenue similar to how newspapers used to depend on classified ads. Once ChatGPT.next or something similar removes the opportunity to display ads that people will click on, search will face a similar crisis of revenue to newspapers. Maybe Google will figure out the economics of the new landscape, but it certainly won't hold the same position of prominence in the internet at large as it does now.
It’s also worth mentioning that Google PageRank was not the first search engine. No, it was good 4-5 years after the first usable search engine came to market. I think the same will be true for AI chat.
Brave Search natively shows you reddit discussions on every search query. You can give that a try as well.
Yes, finally we are going to see a shift, but their 'dominance' is not going to necessarily change that much in some kind of 'step function'.
I suggest that Siri is about to get a lot better, and act more like we wanted it to act a decade ago.
As amazing as ChatGPT is, it's actually not that useful for most regular people other than as a more human form of search.
I think Google results will improve quickly enough that whatever MS does will seem novel but not necessarily have some kind of huge consumer impact.
We'll see search for company info and help directories get a lot better.
Remember that both MS and Google are 'etablished' companies, the later a bit slow moving and not firing on all fronts.
Why would anyone think a company that can't get Skype to work, is going to marvel the world with some 'new thing'.
OpenAI folks are on a roll, rapidly trying to make cool looking experiments, focused on 'wowing the world' not on direct revenues. Making that translate into products is another dimension altogether.
The most interesting stuff will come from startups.
This is not because the info is not indexed or is behind a walled garden though, I now have to find the source website and go directly to their docuemtation myself, or their github. It's not an 'issue' but defeats the purpose of google search itself.
In a strange change for me particularly, for news/general info I actually will search through sites like reddit or twitter to get some actual targeted results.
Even today, engines rank your results by geoip, trying to be smarter than you ask them to be. Two individuals doing the same quoted search will get different results. Perhaps I'm just getting old, but I do miss when searching was a matter of writing a good query, not a matter of what the engine thinks you will want to ask next and what else might interest you.
Scaling a ChatGPT like product to that level would be challenging I assume - and extremely expensive. Is that correct?
Their challenge in that particular area is the relevance of “search” itself.
Most of that decline can be attributed to them indirectly via the behaviors they incentivized (and LLMs will now nail that coffin shut), with the social media siloes playing their part.
But they shouldn’t lose an edge here unless they give it away. Never say never.
Unfortunately, one cannot enable both 'time' and 'verbatim' option under Tools in Google Search. I guess I should go ask ChatGPT why that is the case...
Their Q4 2022 revenue was $76B [0]. YouTube + 3p ads were a combined $16.5B. That's about 20%, not about half.
[0] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q4_alphabet_earnings...
Serve users what they want, deals to hunt for: Apple Maps. Leverage Foursquare and Yelp lessons.
Windows: Most use Chrome (Google default), the rest use Edge (Bing default).
MacOS: Safari (Google default) and Chrome (Google default)
Android: Chrome (Google default)
iOS: Safari (Google default)
So it looks like the only vulnerability here would be iOS and then possibly PC/MacOS if enough users switch their browser.
(and its not like Microsoft couldn't pay them either anyway)
I'm not saying DDG is amazing, only that you don't need a "Mercedes" to pick up milk.
And with Edge being "basically chrome", and supporting Chrome plugins, the switching cost from Chrome -> Edge is quite small.
But for mobile, Android + iOS dominate...so that all goes to Google.
I think this could mean that Bing + ChatGPT has a really opportunity to beat Google in Search...it's gonna be hard, but I've never even considered them more than a distant 2nd option until now.
AI question and answer searches have existed for a while. Alexa does an equivalent job as ChatGPT and I find it to rarely be useful. Google's stroke of genius was to skip curation and algorithmic ranking in favor of a heuristic. Namely, PageRank. I know it's gone through years of refinement, tuning and tinkering, but the fundamental basis of popularity is just a way more reliable and durable approach than trying to intuit what people want based on what's on the page. You'd absolute be back to dark days of blackhat SEOs bombing results by inundating GPT with keywords. It won't work. The popularity model works with and only with a network effect of having zillions of successful searches to mine. Maybe Bing has just enough data to be useful and maybe ChatGPT can do a marginally better job of giving boxed answers to specific questions, but that's not the thing that makes search valuable.
Google search results are just screwy. Probably all that money is interfering with the algorithm.
No.
It’s that simple.
Absolutely ludicrous.
So of course, I just tried this with ChatGPT. It glitched mid-response, but here's the entire exchange:
Me: Is the level of the ocean the same on both sides of the Panama Canal?
ChatGPT: No, the ocean level is not the same on both sides of the Panama Canal. The Panama Canal is a man-made waterway that connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, and its locks raise and lower ships to accommodate differences in sea level between the two oceans. -- Load failed -- I hit retry The Atlantic Ocean side of the canal is higher than the Pacific Ocean side, with a difference in elevation of approximately 26 meters (85 feet). This difference in elevation is compensated for by a system of locks, which raise and lower ships to the appropriate level for transit through the canal. The locks fill with water from the higher ocean and drain into the lower ocean, allowing ships to pass from one ocean to the other without having to navigate significant differences in sea level.
Me: Why is the level of the ocean different?
ChatGPT: The difference in sea level between the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the Panama Canal is due to various geological and oceanographic factors.
One of the main reasons is the shape of the landmass and ocean basins. The Atlantic Ocean is relatively shallow and has a broader continental shelf, while the Pacific Ocean is deeper and has a narrower shelf. This shape influences the ocean currents and tides, and helps to maintain a difference in sea level between the two oceans.
Another factor is the prevailing winds and currents in the region. The trade winds in the Pacific and the prevailing westerlies in the Atlantic both play a role in shaping the sea levels on their respective sides of the canal.
Additionally, the location of the Panama Canal at the narrowest point of the Central American isthmus has a significant impact on the difference in sea level between the two oceans. The geography of the region funnels ocean currents and water into the narrow channel, leading to differences in water pressure and sea level on either side.
In summary, the difference in sea level between the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the Panama Canal is due to a combination of geological and oceanographic factors, including the shape of the landmass and ocean basins, prevailing winds and currents, and the geography of the region.
-- comment -- Although ChatGPT is correct that the levels differ, it is wrong about the amount: it's nowhere near 85 feet. It gives believable reasons for the difference, but doesn't mention tides, which (as I understand it) are a significant factor. It also doesn't mention salinity, which (again, as I understand it) is also a factor. I gave it a chance to catch the error:
Me: Is the difference really 85 feet?
ChatGPT: The difference in elevation between the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the Panama Canal is approximately 26 meters, or approximately 85 feet. However, it's worth noting that this figure can vary slightly due to tides, seasonal changes, and other factors. The exact difference in elevation can also depend on the specific location within the canal, as some areas may be slightly higher or lower than others. Nevertheless, the difference in elevation between the two sides is typically around 85 feet.
-- Comment -- No luck correcting that 85 feet number. I also asked about tides and salinity:
Me: Do tides or salinity contribute to the difference?
ChatGPT: Tides and salinity can contribute to the difference in sea level between the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the Panama Canal, but the main factor is the shape of the landmass and ocean basins, the prevailing winds and currents, and the geography of the region.
Tides do have an impact on the sea level in the canal, as they can cause fluctuations in the water level on both sides. However, the impact of tides on the difference in sea level between the two oceans is relatively small compared to the other factors mentioned above.
Salinity can also influence the sea level, as differences in salinity can cause water to expand or contract, leading to changes in sea level. However, the impact of salinity on the difference in sea level between the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the Panama Canal is also relatively small, as differences in salinity in the canal are primarily caused by fresh water inputs from rivers and rainfall, rather than differences in ocean salinity.
In summary, while tides and salinity can contribute to the difference in sea level in the Panama Canal, the main factor is the shape of the landmass and ocean basins, the prevailing winds and currents, and the geography of the region.
-- Comment -- Much has been made of ChatGPT's (sometimes unfounded) confidence. I don't know enough about the ocean-level subject to judge here. Clearly ChatGPT is confident, but is it correct? I don't know. Given that a quick Google search wasn't able to convince me that ChatGPT is wrong (apart from the 85 feet thing) I'm calling this even on the facts. The experience asking ChatGPT was clearly easier than Google.
Honestly, the number of times ChatGPT inserts this and variations of fluff is absolutely bordering on insane. Like, that was your question - why include it in every single sentence of the answer…
> However, the impact of salinity on the difference in sea level between the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the Panama Canal is also relatively small, as differences in salinity in the canal are primarily caused by fresh water inputs from rivers and rainfall, rather than differences in ocean salinity.
Surely "differences in salinity in the canal" are not what's relevant to the sea level on each side and how much impact ocean salinity has on that.
A fine example, I suggest, of how it does not understand things; it just spews out plausible strings of words.
Unless Bard sucks too much
Data is king in AI. And nobody beats Google there. They will figure out how to leverage that advantage.
Over the last year, its become palpable.
Google has such utility in this regard that in some cases, a hallucinating lie-machine offers better answer than an index of what information is available on the internet.
This issue with with Googles failure to respond to the deluge of SEO driven content in their searches. They can do better. They've chosen to not do so.
idk, sounds plausible to me, the way things've been going.
Yet GANs work quite well
AI will be a victim of it’s own success too. Or it will need to be human researched and curated rather than just letting an algorithm run freely across the web.
I’d argue that they even encouraged it.
It has been a self-fulfilling positive feedback loop since then.
And unfortunately Google has become worse than ever at being able to differentiate between insight and fluff.
It can only index stuff that's on the Web. Stuff on the Web is, contrary to what is popularly asserted, only a tiny fraction of all human knowledge.
I think people are forgetting how bad search was before Google. Google drove Web directories to extinction. Remember Yahoo!? Back in that era, if I were looking for something as simple as the University of Michigan, I clicked and drilled down through a Yahoo directory. The obvious search query would have been useless. Google changed all that.
I view Google as the yellow pages. It works well for that. Is it an oracle of knowledge? Of course not. How could I possibly expect to find knowledge on a place where there is no reward for making it available? People producing knowledge don't work for free.
I've tried ChatGPT and it's no better. It serves up stuff that is flat-out wrong.
Not optimize for "most documents indexed" but "highest quality of results". One of them encourages adding spam to their index, the other encourages removing spam from their index.
HN is constantly pushing this notion that "spam" is some well-defined, solvable problem, so obviously Google wants it. That narrative just doesn't make sense from any angle. The notion that more click bait improves Google's bottom line is absurd
Product reviews alone, whether it is enterprise software or sports clothing should be something that they can easily comb through by hand, as humans, and uprank sites that are putting out more than affiliate link assemblies.
Im legitimately asking, who is responsible for Search at Google? Prabhakar Raghavan is SVP, Search, Assistant & Ads, and I click under him, he has 8 product groups reporting to him, and none of the people are responsible for Search. Yossi Matias is responsible for Search Engineering.
It may at first come off as a laughable answer, but Google Search has been in a directionless spiral since Marissa Mayer left. Her Yahoo tenure was not well received, but at Google she cared about the end quality of the product. Her title was Search Products and User Experience. Notice how we have gone from User Experience to Search Engineering, forgetting about the people who actually use the product.
You are dealing with a moving target that has a huge financial incentive. It's a very difficult problem.
You figure out a way to crowdsource certain decisions and establish who you can trust. Ask them questions with right and wrong answers. You start to tackle it one product category at a time. Instead of pagerank, which was a web of who linked to who" you start figuring which voters you have who consistently turn in good feedback.
This is some form of metamoderation that slashdot tried to implement.
If you are going to be a tastemaker, stop hiding behind "the algorithm" having some mind of its own that cant be controlled.
Luckily HN posters don’t exactly represent a meaningful portion of the population.
I see two options: a) Google can't do any better than that, b) Google has a reason to keep it in the current state (I'll put "Google doesn't know because nobody at Google has used Youtube in the last 5 years" and similar options under "a").
a) sounds ridiculous, b) sounds conspiratorial. What are the other options?
And again, I'm not saying they are making search worse on purpose (no "from now on our core mission is to make search suck"). I'm saying they aren't optimizing for SERP quality. They seem to care about index size (maybe it's an internal KPI? would certainly explain their aggressive guessing at additional URLs that you might have on their page but don't link to, don't add in sitemaps etc, and their stubbornness in keeping results from the index even if they've been 301ed or 410ed ages ago (they do get downranked after a while though)), but I assume that they mostly care about paid ad clicks, and if something increases ad clicks while the result quality decreases, they'll do it.
> The notion that more click bait improves Google's bottom line is absurd
If you don't find what you're looking for on the first try, you'll need to try again, and see more ads. What else are you going to do, go elsewhere, visit a library, ask the town elders or give up on looking for things you want to know? You don't have a choice, you know it, they know it.
I find it equally plausible that Youtube's search sucks badly because they don't care what you're looking for, they want you to watch videos that they predict will lead to the maximum time spent on the site, again so you watch more ads. What other explanation is there that the world's leading search engine has the search of one of their flagship products run at 1999 quality? Presumably they have giant teams of people working on that too?
And yet for some reason they're all too eager to serve up sites scraping stackoverflow.
That’s still a thing, although it seems they’re A/B testing its removal. I just opened a private tab (as I always do) and got a boring "More results" button, but I tried another browser (also with a private tab) and got the classic pagination.
It's still there right now.
Today:
* Any term that might be related to a commercial product? That product comes first and frequently only.
* Search for two terms? It will first give it's prefer result for each separately - usually commercial products (ha). And then might give them together.
* Quoted terms are often taken as vague suggestions. Negative sign is often useless, etc.
So do I. I can't tell you the last time I even held yellow pages in my hands.
#1 result is a long article with culinary history, detailed instructions, many pictures, and a credited author originally from Shanghai.
#2 result is a simple recipe listing from Buzzfeed. Written by a young white guy from Minnesota who worked as a producer. No fluff, no pictures, no backstory. Doubtful the author ever made the recipe at all. You could grab a recipe database and generate thousands of these pages.
I've been burned by #2 too many times disregard the fluff. It shows their investment in the content.
In the last 2-3 months search quality for me has absolutely crashed and is barely usable.
I'm willing to accept that maybe you are exaggerating to make a point. Maybe you have a better example that is actually illustrative?
In the present day, I cannot find my answer on the first page. If I click on the top hits the page is a deluge of useless blogg fluff which takes me more time to find what I am looking for.
More often than not have to add reddit, forum, stackoverflow, etc to find what I am looking for because online communities provide more concise answers.
This is why googles utility has collapsed.
It's not that the content doesn't exist or isn't indexed, its that its been drowned out by noise. Sifting through noise better was the entire reason google took off from more standard crawlers. It now returns results worse than crawlers from the previous era.
That is an absurd exaggeration.
Before the results would just not match what I was looking for. Now they do match what I was looking for, except some AI procedurally generated the content to show up when I searched those terms, with no regard for the accuracy of what the page says.
If I say "show me the best winter gloves, and only from sites that you can verify actually product tested" and it follows the instruction (ignoring sites that just have a list of popular search results aggregated) then it is better. If it doesn't do what I want, I expect to be able to follow up and teach it.
I expect the chat style stateful search to take instruction for what type of sites I want results from. "Return me a list of websites with recipes for Bolognese that do not have a long story above the recipe. Build a table with the top five results normalized for portion size, comparing and contrasting the ingredients. Highlight unique ingredients in bold."
Relevant search results that aren't just marketing sites or the big websites.
> It can only index stuff that's on the Web.
And much of it isn't really exposed by Google search.
> I view Google as the yellow pages. It works well for that
It used to. For me, it stopped working well for that a few years ago and has been getting steadily worse ever since.
The competition for many kinds of search terms is causing a race to the bottom. E.g. tech docs, lyrics, recipes, reviews.
That’s why Kago has a lense for “non-spammy recipe searches” — there’s just so much noise on popular, easily copyable material.
You don’t get the best site by popular vote like PageRank was known for, you get the one that generates the most ad revenue.
Then, with Google, it got better and almost all results were relevant.
But we’ve been regressing over the years, and now we’re at the point where 80% of all results are both irrelevant and simply SSO spam.
I find it really hard to believe Google has some of the smartest people in the world on search and they cannot identify this.
For example, just the other day I was searching for one string that I knew was part of a common code repository. To my surprise google couldn't find anything at all. Yandex on the other hand found the repository immediately and linked to github.
Other common issue with google is the difficulty of finding stuff like forum posts related to the search query. Sure, you could append "reddit" to the query, but there are still plenty of traditional forum sites and some of them have decades worth of discussion. I Never see those sites pop up on a typical google search unless I specifically look for them. Again, with yandex, my experience is much better, it is not uncommon to see posts from forums to be on the first page of results.
ChatGPT usually gives me the answer that I'm looking for and nothing else. Sometimes it does add extra info, which often teaches me about something that I wasn't aware of at all.
But the greatest benefit is I can ask it to clarify anything I don't understand. I don't need to go on a completely new Google quest, or jump through hoops to register on some site and hope a random internet person will ordain to help me out. I can just ask, in the same conversation, and immediately get clarification.
Many people underestimate the incredible learning opportunities a well trained language model provides. It doesn't matter that it hallucinates or lies. Whatever it claims is usually easy to validate. What matters is the speed with which you can find uncluttered new leads or answers.
Google didn't innovate that much except to provide a clutter-free interface and slightly better search. Prior to that, I used Webcrawler and then HotBot. A search like what you described would have easily returned useful results.
I want you to start a blank slate C (or C++) project. Ask Google how to write heapify, push_heap, and pop_heap in C. Ask ChatGPT the same.
I did this a few weeks ago. I literally could not find the answer on Google. ChatGPT gave me actual C code that I definitely did not trust but did verify.
Google results for questions like that are genuinely awful. It’s full of shitty tutorial websites that are full of ads and either don’t have the answer I need or don’t have it in a convenient form.
And I've /recently/ hunted for something obscure, couldn't find it, managed to find an old bookmark to it, the server was still online and the content I wanted was still there. And no amount of crafting of a google search would bring it up. And the server in question didn't contain copyrighted material which would have resulted in a takedown block or anything like that.
It's frustrating how /bad/ Google has gotten for anything other than fairly basic, high level "searching".
I mean what you just listed.
Google won the search war because of PageRank eliminating lots of spam, and then something like 15 years of staying ahead of SEO spam and providing useful search.
Lately it seems like they've given up on the arms race and let the SEO spam win, but it isn't clear why.
And Google didn't produce high quality search for free, they used ads and sold the eyeballs they won.
Lots of trash out there but Serious Eats is good quality.
I use BBC good food, almost always straight to the point
I get not everyone is a foodie that cares about the details and wants to tweak it, but I appreciate them.
https://www.verybestbaking.com/toll-house/recipes/original-n...
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/10813/best-chocolate-chip-...
Also, once the ChatGPT AI takes off and becomes ubiquitous, then what if there is a lack of credible content for it to train on?
How much do you think companies are willing to spend to be the answer to, "what is the most reliable car?" or, "who should I vote for?"
In theory it is possible that sponsored content will creep in, but that does not invalidate the incredible benefits a well trained language model will have, even despite the occasional for-profit bias.
You mean all your Replika "friends" that spit out answers from Bard's mouth? :)
And why is the GoogleBot still on HTTP 1.1...
Google search has two huge problems: SEO and censorship. Search for anything related to products/torrents/streams/politics on Google and your results will SUCK, due to one of the two reasons stated above.
The recent Yandex hack/leak has the cynic in me connecting the dots and, seeing how Google search seems to be facing REAL threats to it's dominance since it's creation... maybe some guys with the deepest pockets in the world are starting to enter WAR mode.
Destroying Yandex advantages on the SEO battlefield by way of divulging their parameters to the world would be the Franz Ferdinand assassination moment of the Great Search War.
Are you asserting that they look at their copious data and decide to make search worse because it makes them more money? Rather than figuring out a way to make search better and then further optimize their advertising income with this better product? And it seems like they've been pretty damn clever about monetizing quality over the years. It's possible that they have chosen to make search worse for profit, wouldn't be the first time a business did something like that but they have a pretty deep institutional fear of search losing relevance and it's hard to see them doing that.
As a long time user and user of the other guys before google, I think Google is shockingly good at finding specific answers to specific questions that I have about all sorts of things, often with fairly deep technical context. Now what is definitely lacking is in the good old days I'd enter some search terms, get pages of results and then some time later I'd find myself enjoyably down some rabbit hole that is tangential to my search needs on some part of the internet that I never even knew existed before. Maybe I'm too busy with work, but I used to spend a lot more time doing internet "research" to get some specific answers, that time seems to be much more efficient; I do sort of feel like I'm corralled to smaller portion of the internet than I used to be. I don't feel like I can't find the information but I have had a hard time re-finding some specific web page I found once way back.
Where does ChatGPT and Bard fit in this? I've played with ChatGPT and it's fun, it's neat, I haven't been able to get it to some how synthesize some wisdom though. It's not hard to see it just mimicking things. That might be valuable. That might be fun. Using it to seed search might be an enjoyable thing. Maybe it can help extract context from people to find out the actual question they are asking to find the actual answer they seek. Now I can absolutely see ChatGPT/Bard assisting in me wasting time going down rabbit holes, I'm not sure it'll be as enjoyable or as magical as how it used to be.
Are there some examples of shitty google search you can bring up? I just entered "Roth contribution income limit" and without even going to another website, I got what looks like a legit answer to my question. Now I'll click though a few to make sure it's accurate and authentic; at a glance, it's coming from Schwab and it looks like a legit answer to my question. Bing comes up with the same answer, it's presented in a nice table but it's lower on the page and below a sizable paid ad from Merrill Lynch (edge?)
are what?
>I don't get the HN hate of Google as a search tool. Yes, SEO has made searching more difficult, but Google is still by far the best search engine provided that your searches are focused and you use search tools (e.g., excluding terms, focusing on certain sites, etc.). I've tried other search engines (e.g., DDG, Bing) and they just aren't as good as Google.
What if their search is better just because way, way way more people use it?
If it existed on the internet, Google would find it for you and it was usually the top resault. It was amazing.
Today, it's a shadow of its former self.
You regularly have to search, wade through the ads that are written like informative articles, adjust your query slightly and repeat the process. It's rubbish.
The web was overwhelmingly informational up to an inflection point where it became overwhelmingly commercial. That's the thing people are upset about.
And it's not Google's fault.
But it also remains true that Google's search just doesn't work well for many people, and that some alternatives work better for them.
No, back then if you searched a topic you were MUCH more likely to find self hosted content from someone who nerded out on an issue and is sharing their insight, not publishing boilerplate because they feel they need to.
Google solved a big problem and then went to sleep while counting their money. They even started to be evil.
Now the original problem has evolved but Google hasn't managed to keep up.
Content that is just literally directly copied from other domains often.
Focusing on certain sites? If you know what site you want, why not just go there? You don't need Google for that.
I've had very limited success with their search modifiers. The main one I want to work is the literal search by putting things in quotes. But I don't think that has ever actually worked for me.
If they brought back the + modifier and it worked, that would also go far.
They have a really compelling package that is hard to replace, especially how well they understand local queries.
That as well as strong funneling factors in place, Chrome and Android being some of the biggest.