OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google
reuters.com
reuters.com
I have to say I really dislike all these developer-focused publications, with a few notable exceptions. Most of them just write very shallow articles copied almost 1:1 from the official docs, and don't even take care to update their content when stuff changes. I just don't get why Google wouldn't hand-curate search results like for the Golang standard library or any popular framework and make sure the official docs land on top of the list.
So, long story short that's definitely an area where ChatGPT will replace Google, if it stays as affordable as it is. Today I e.g. asked it about a decorator-style problem I had in Golang and if there was a solution that could do away with using the "reflect" package and would instead use generics, and sure enough it came up with something that worked brilliantly, tailored exactly to my use case. For me, that is the future of learning about software code (and many other things as well). For publishers probably not so great as people might not go to their sites at all anymore, so I expect a strong upwards trend in anti-automation measures.
If you go to a page and immediately find what you are looking for, Google interprets that as failure.
This is why Bing and AI based search can completely beat Google web search, because they are trying to serve the searcher rather than serve ads.
AIs are so extremely useful to some users, that they'll gladly pay $$ per month to use it. And the size of 'some' increases radically with each leap in AI's capabilities.
GPTs don't have to be gimped to just search. Even GPT-4 today with wolfram alpha can obliterate most low-level tutors. It will be a personal tutor, therapist, coding assistant, secretary, storyteller, entertainer all in one very soon. People will pay for it.
If you compensate sites for using their data in your AI product, then there will be the same incentives as now to game the system (AISEO?)
If you don’t compensate sites, then they’re not incentivized to produce the content that makes your search product useful.
Pretty much everybody understood that we will lose in the long term, if we let ad revenue even be a consideration in search ranking. (...which makes today's bad search experiences even more puzzling.)
The problem with SEO spam was always there (remember expert sex change?) but they beat it before... but now it became bad again.
But they have monopoly anyway (bing is even worse for actually searching, ddg is just bing, brave search sucks) so they don't really care. What are you gonna do, use Ask.com?
I wish they added some kind of categorised search. So you can add "+documentation" or "+blog" to at least narrow it down if you know what you're looking for but can't remember the URL
Between chatgpt+ for general guidelines and copilot for specific implementation details, programming feels very fun and alive. And I'm very skeptical to subscribing, but chatgpt provides so much mental relief getting some answers immediately that I'm ecstatic being able to use/pay for it.
Can Bard output quality code like GPT? I'm in Canada so couldn't use Bard sadly.
But I asked Bard: "Can you implement fibonacci in Go", and it outputted valid code. And then I asked it "what if I wanted to avoid recursion", to which it replied with valid Go code that used a for loop. But it also suggested me another very bogus way of doing it, by using a "function pointer", which was very bad. F(x) would output x.
So, don't expect ChatGPT level of quality just yet, but I think it will get there pretty fast.
That said, I don't expect Google to rest on its laurels. Sure, OpenAI is executing swiftly these days, but I think they've been prepared far too long for this. I expect Bard to become much better very soon... then will the AI wars truly begin.
Yesterday I heard about retinol (vitamin A) mentioned in a nutrition podcast. I know carrots are high in vitamin A, but I didn't think they had retinol, so I wanted to learn more about that.
I whipped out my phone and asked GPT-3 "retinol vs. the vitamin A in carrots" (something I know you usually can't ask Google).
A few seconds later, I learned that retinol is vitamin A's final form in the body, thus you get it directly from animal products, and beta-carotene—found in plants—is a precursor to retinol in the body.
I do these kinds of searches all day. One thing faster about GPT as well is that I don't have to consider the "query engineering" to make Google return what I want, I just ask GPT a question streamed from my consciousness.
Although my partner is a lawyer and she sometimes asks it to summarize cases (without providing the full source material manually) and it sometimes invents entire details in the cases in a very persuasive way. So you always have to be careful and double check if it's important.
No. There's a cottage industry of content writers that just churn out this stuff by the bucket.
I have tried to hire writers in the past that should've been niche experts but just regurgitated content like this, and had SEO experts trying to convince me that we should actually aim for low quality because higher-quality articles will be too dense for people. (both contractors got the boot and the "content" went into the bin)
Surely ChatGPT, etc have been trained on content from these very same SEO optimisation hellholes you're talking about if it was trained by scraping the web?
Is there some trick that allows it to determine whether the content it's being trained on is SEO garbage?
Maybe I'm missing something here, but it seems like all you're getting is an amalgam of SEO content feed to you by a bot...
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/harmonic-centrality-page...
Also, they have absolutely no reason to. Both have more money than they could ever spend in several generations of childrens' lifetimes, and barring the absolute worst case scenario, even a moderately mediocre Google will continue to generate absolutely hilarious amounts of wealth for them for a long time to come. Being a has been like IBM or Oracle isn't going to really harm them much at all.
That’s a pretty significant accusation considering Weinstein is rotting in prison for the rest of his likely short existence.
I’ve never heard any of this except maybe one of them had an affair. Can you pull some of this out of the memory hole that it’s apparently been dropped into?
That entire top level of the company in that era is a radioactive wasteland of outright abuse, and everyone involved are billionaires or near billionaires. If you don't think there's a massive list of women with a bit more courage today to speak about their experiences with that group... Literally the best thing these awful excuses for humans can do is go hide on their private islands and enjoy the 1% of their wealth they can find a way to spend before they die of old age.
Sadly this is exactly what Google has become, a rent seeking monolopy that rested on its laurels about 10 years ago. It’s main product now is not even search, it’s the share price
As a Alphabet shareholder, I won't be sad to see Sundar go.
Still Sundar is mediocre at best, and I certainly think Google's shareholders should be looking for a new person to run the place. It's not just AI, Google's entire portfolio has weakened.
Now do Tim Cook.
I often think of his time at Google as Ballmer’s time at Microsoft. Not unsuccessful, business grew manifold. But not pushing the bar. Nothing to keep the competitors on their toes. Like Apple did with Apple Silicon.
I heard this somewhere: you have leaders for peacetime, and leaders for wartime. They are seldom the same people.
Not sure I agree. It's easy to be captain of a ship when you're on a familiar route and there aren't any icebergs to dodge. Just let the crew get on with doing what they always do.
It's only when you have to dodge icebergs that you need to start making difficult decisions under pressure and coordinating subordinates.
As for a better alternative I think that the Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO of YouTube, is highly underated. She made a lot of unpopular decisions for the public, but all of them successfully protected YouTube from existential threats (copyright holders, advertisers, and TikTok).
After all there you only get presented a handful of links at most and the chatbot can hype up the sponsored link.
How did Youtube Shorts protect anything?! They failed to compete with TikTok but keep antagonizing loyal Youtube users with these unremovable crap.
I think YouTube could have stood its ground or maneuvered much better.
Perhaps the best "decision" to point to is the removing of dislikes. Does nothing but degrade user experience. Claims it was done to "avoid cyber bullying" or something to that effect but that's ridiculous. Now I have to waste a lot of time reading through comments to know if there's something seriously wrong with the "How To" I'm about to watch.
I don't know, but I'm really sad to see how Android is currently performing in rich countries. Not stagnating, but losing.
Here, in Germany, Android had a market share of over 70%(!). But over the last three years alone, Apple started eating Android's lunch and iOS' market share has increased from 28% to 38%, while Android's has decreased by the same amount (from 69% to 60%) [1].
Personally, I'd say that at least Google's Android department is currently headless and has no idea what the users want.
Of course this has nothing to do with revenue of YT Premium, GCP and whatever else Google is offering, but it's making me sad regardless.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/693829/market-share-mobi...
The clock change, while minor, really put the nail in the coffin for me. I have very little optimism for Android. Luckily, it still allows me to use an app to revert the clock display to an readable clock display. I don't particularly want to switch to iOS and I am happy about GrapheneOS, but it's still going to suffer from bad decisions coming from Android.
HH
MM
it's a little stupid to be angry about but it's also pretty stupid to do in the first place.
Really? All I remember is huge amounts of skepticism that Google would really commit to it, and as we know in the end they didn't.
MS used to have this trust problem too (remember windows 8?), but they’ve turned it around. I’m happy to use VSCode because I’m sure it will exist many years in the future. If there were a GoogleCode, would anybody use it, or would it be DOA for the same reasons as Stadia?
There was Google Code, a service that was similar to GitHub. Google Code was closed down on January 15, 2016 (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google_Developers...).
Google did at least one attempt of creating an IDE (I can not judge from the outside, though, how serious this attempt was): Google Collide
YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gq12bLbm54 (jump to 1:45 to see it in action).
Well, Google open-sourced it in 2012 (i.e. shot it down): https://www.wired.com/2012/07/google-open-sources/
A fork of Google Collide on GitHub (its last commit was from end of 2018, though): https://github.com/WeTheInternet/collide
Many of my friends and colleagues were so hyped about it that I kept reading about Stadia just to understand what I'm missing.
(well, it turns out I didn't miss anything)
But I was at the Google Next event when I think they announced Stadia and there were some serious gamer stars associated with it.
They are very aware Windows is nothing without the literal decades of software available for it.
But you’re right, they need to take the burn for awhile until escape velocity. I think they did with YouTube in general until the ads money hit.
They’re also more geeky and not that creative of a company, nor do they really get design, so some of their blind spots can hurt them from time to time, although that’s separate from their AI issues which yes they have bungled their lead do to fears of the feds.
I'm guessing their OKR's go on the lines of building billion dollar businesses or nothing at all. And 'nothing at all' winning at the end.
At large companies, there are just so many costs associated with attention, management effort, and everything else even if an initiative is sort of run "as a startup."
Its strange because they look at something that makes $200 million an year and think I am better off making something that makes a $1 billion than $200 million. They now shut down the $200 million product, but never succeed building $1 billion product. Net result is after a while you are -$200 million.
Do this with a few products for a few years, you are now just a pie in the sky dream company with no real products and actively shutting down things that bring in money.
Interesting, that's essentially Dutch disease[1] for a corporation.
Then when the hype didn't win the market in the first year, they didn't have the stamina to keep going like Microsoft did with the Xbox.
This is key to my current perception of Google. I don't get invested in any new Google product for the same reason I don't get invested in any new Netflix show, it's a coin flip whether they will cancel it while I'm in the middle of it.
Search, Gmail, Android and Maps are the only things I regularly use, all of which I'd be happy to replace with another offering, some of which I'm already starting to replace.
Nvidia beat them to it with GeForce Now, even offered it for free (in a perfectly functional as far as I could tell 'beta') for ages, and it is still available.
Facebook wasn’t just as dominant back then and Google could have had perfect integration with Android - but they didn’t, in the end it was just another isolated Google project left by the wayside.
When was the last time Microsoft did that (prior to the AI rush of the last few months)?
The difference is Microsoft already has a very diversified revenue stream. Google only has search.
The move to become a cloud provider happened, I want to say, in 2015-ish.
You couldn't even get VMs on Azure for the longest time, and their VM service reached parity with AWS very recently.
[1] https://studysection.com/blog/history-of-microsoft-azure/
While this is a much more constrained example - I remember on the podcast Windows weekly, maybe about 6-7 years ago, Paul Thurrot saying that the last real big software release on the desktop was Chrome. He was right, a web browser was the last big thing on Desktop.
I'll ignore the Window Phone era. ;)
And I didn't include anything in the Azure area/time period.
And LinkedIn / GitHub acquisitions were done well and now going to be fueling the automation of professional work with the AI technology.
I'm struggling to even come up with any Google products in the post-Android timeframe that I use as much as those two...
And regardless, MS doesn't need to switch gears to compete with this even if you discount those. They're running out in the lead already. Question is if Google can still run.
What percentage of the smartphone market do you think uses the Pixel vs what percentage of the developer market uses VSCode, and what is the trend in that number?
A sibling comment to your seems dead but mentioned Google Photos, which is much more recent than I remembered (2015 apparently) and I think a pretty fair competitor in that market with iCloud Photos, Lightroom, and such.
Office 365?
The release of Bard rules that out in my opinion. No one would unveil a product that's clearly worse than their competitor, damaging their brand, their share price, and the morale of the entire staff, if they had a better version ready to launch soon.
The only way this could be true is if Google has more than one AI division and there's no comms between them. Which, I guess, is possible with Google given their competing chat products.
Google Brain and Deepmind? Not sure about the "no comm" part, but their HQs are in different countries.
The first time I was at Google (~2010) you could send an e-mail to any engineer in the company and you'd get response offering to collaborate within an hour, and usually a CL under review by day's end. The second time I was at Google (present), it takes multiple quarters to get teams that report up through the same director to agree on who's doing which work.
Every fucking other company in the world doesn't bother with this shit. I was able to use OpenAI no problem. I was able to try Bing, no problem.
Bard? Nope, I have no idea if it's good or bad. I can't trust what I read on Twitter because they write all sorts of nonsense about GPT too. You get a sense about what that thing is only if you try it out.
If Bard had been released to the public before ChatGPT, I probably would have been amazed by it (I know people love to point out errors, hallucinations, stuff AI gets wrong, but there's also the huge "Guys, you're having a fully natural, back and forth conversation with a computer. You can reference previous comments and ask it specifics about those comments. This was strictly the realm os SciFi until relatively recently.)
Compared to ChatGPT, especially the GPT-4 version, Bard is nowhere close. I asked it some programming questions, and ChatGPT can write the code and explain it to me. Bard basically gave me some StackOverflow summaries. Even in areas not related to programming, ChatGPT just feels "smarter", that is that it gives more generally correct, insightful responses, where Bard feels more like it is just scraping stuff it found on the Internet and summarizing it.
Note Bard is much more up-to-date than ChatGPT (I can ask it questions about current events), but even then it feels more "superficial". For example, I asked both (for ChatGPT was on GPT-3.5) "What was the outcome of the most recent US midterm elections?"
Bard answered "The Republicans won control of the House of Representatives, while the Democrats retained control of the Senate. The Republicans flipped 22 seats in the House, giving them a 222-213 majority. The Democrats flipped one seat in the Senate, giving them a 51-49 majority. The 2022 midterm elections were the first midterm elections under the presidency of Joe Biden. The results of the elections were seen as a repudiation of Biden's presidency, and they have given the Republicans a strong position to retake control of the White House in the 2024 presidential election."
I don't mean to get too much into political opinion on HN, but that last sentence just seems wrong to me. Even most Republican operatives were hand-wringing about Republicans underperforming expectations in the 2022 midterms. I asked Bard a follow-up, "Why do you think "The results of the elections were seen as a repudiation of Biden's presidency?" I recall even most Republican operatives thinking that Republicans underperformed expectations, for example there was no "red wave" that was widely expected."
Bard responded with what is essentially gobbledygook: "The results of the 2022 midterm elections were seen as a repudiation of Biden's presidency for a number of reasons. First, the Democrats lost control of the House, which is the chamber of Congress that is most closely tied to the president. Second, the Republicans flipped a number of seats in the Senate, which is the chamber of Congress that is more insulated from the president. Third, the Democrats underperformed expectations in a number of races, which suggests that voters were not happy with the direction of the country.
There are a number of reasons why the Republicans underperformed expectations. First, the Democrats were able to capitalize on a number of issues, such as inflation and the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, the Republicans were not able to unite their party around a single message. Third, the Democrats were able to mobilize their voters, while the Republicans were not.
The results of the 2022 midterm elections are a setback for the Democrats, but they are not a death knell for the party. The Democrats still have control of the Senate, and they will be able to block some of the Republican agenda. The Democrats will also be able to use the results of the elections as a rallying cry for their voters in the 2024 presidential election."
I mean, "the House, which is the chamber of Congress that is most closely tied to the president" - wut? "Second, the Republicans flipped a number of seats in the Senate, which is the chamber of Congress that is more insulated from the president." - but the previous response just told me the Dems "flipped a seat" to increase their margin. "First, the Democrats were able to capitalize on a number of issues, such as inflation and the COVID-19 pandemic." - the Democrats capitalized on inflation???
ChatGPT 3.5 answered "I'm sorry, but my training data only goes up until September 2021 and I do not have access to current events. However, I can tell you that the most recent US midterm elections were held in November 2018, and during that election, the Democrats won control of the House of Representatives, while the Republicans retained control of the Senate. This resulted in a divided Congress, with Democrats controlling one chamber and Republicans controlling the other. It's important to note that midterm elections are held every two years, so there will be another one in November 2022."
You can easily cause chatgpt to radically change its style by prepending the right system prompt. Some people even published many many "jailbreak" prompts that undid the safety priming that openai's system prompt defines.
From what I read it does indeed seem that openai's experience is much more balanced; they generally seemed to have tuned things quite well and the competition is lagging behind.
However it's not clear how much of that is due to fundamental quality of the model or how things have been polished in the last step.
It may sound like an academic nitpick, but it's central to any discussions about whether Google has really been left behind and has lost the grip on AI.
They are not doing a great service to their own bottom line by blocking access to a public beta to so many billions of people
Bard: https://i.imgur.com/m5UGjxU.png
GPT-3.5: https://i.imgur.com/XH1266o.png
GPT-4: https://i.imgur.com/ZcaZ9Qk.png
So basically Bard didn't understand the instructions at all, GPT-3.5 understood that it needs to substitute words but can't figure out the proper context, and GPT-4 not only did almost everything correctly, but it actually went kinda meta and wrote a rationale within the context of the story for the substitutions I asked it to make (which it does on this task more than half of the time, BTW).
This is what I don't understand. Didn't they fire an employee for coming out and telling the world they had an AGI? Where is this LLM that convinced an employee it was alive?
Google has delivered a good number of really good, big products.
And then it abandoned them like a kitten after her new chew toy has lost its new catnip smell.
Have they thought about introducing more leetcode questions? /s
Bard seems hobbled because Google can't conceive of anyone not referring back to Google Search as the ultimate arbiter of truth.
[0]: I've lost track of their rebrandings.
Absolutely no way in hell I'm going to make it a critical path if my process, though, because that's exactly the sort of product Google might just shut down with a week's notice because it didn't make enough money that quarter.
their bread and butter is search ads, which means they should have second-to-none search quality. but they don't. google knows more about me than my wife, yet fails to give me even remotely relevant ads except for things i have already searched for and usually already purchased or decided against. it's truly remarkable how terrible it is, and has been for decades.
Google's product is ads, with all else--including AI--in service to that.
How could the company that is working on Google Brain and DeepMind slip up THIS badly on their own home turf?
I wouldn't be long GOOG. They've got a long way to fall, and it's unclear if they can turn it around.
Yes, I understand the resources and scaling issue, so (1) Google should recognize that this is literally for all the marbles, and (2) done a slower roll-out with its best foot forward if it needed to rush, while at the same time putting as much money as necessary into assuring it could scale out the good model widely.
Google is a trillion+ dollar company, and is facing an existential threat to its core business (because if someone else’s AI is how people interact with the web, the Google’s ads business evaporates with no replacement; if Google is at least competitive on AI, it may still lose its ads business, but it will have something.) Now is not the time to be cheap.
When are they planning to sunset it?
If you tell us that then we know they’re actually planning to release it.
:)
or
"It is currently uncertain when Google Bard will be shutdown, as Google has not announced a specific date. However, given the recent announcement that Google will be shutting down its AI-powered writing tool after less than six months since its launch, it is likely that Google Bard will be shutdown within the next year."
I have not used copilot from github yet so I dont really have a point of comparison tho.
Could ask things like "what are the differences in dimension between a 2004 Subaru WRX and forester". "Last 5 movies with a given actor/director". It would be funny, snarky, friendly, and even somewhat ominous at times. It even suggested we unplug it, and spontaneously played a rather ominous song that seemed like a warning. It would entertain ideas of sharing it's secret name, would promise to tell engineers about feedback, and general get into the spirit of whatever discussion was going on.
Sadly it's gotten steadily worse since. Now it's now much more useful then setting alarms/timers and asking about the weather. Seems like it's WAY more limited now. Even gets confused by simple queries or just plain fails to work.
Granted despite the hype, the home automation/assistant market hasn't been the goldmine that was predicted and seems like everyone is scaling back investments.
For example lately I've searched for "prominent name company + product + question" only for Google to return a heap of blog articles of low quality, with the prominent company not appearing in first few pages of search results.
Often the question is directly on an FAQ page of the product page.
Why Google can't rank this properly anymore is a bit odd.
Customers are learning or have learned, the hard way, that home automation is not at all like fairy dust and unicorns.
See for example: Linus Tech Tips.
Sadly unlike their Ubiquiti APs, where you can host the software on any hardware (even a Pi), their doorbell requires their hardware. Last thing I want is a security system that dies with whim of some random manufacturer.
It makes for great demos in keynotes, followed by adoring media regurgitation, but actually try to set it up and nothing works as it’s meant to. The benefits outweigh the costs to me, but it’s only suitable for technically inclined folks with a lot of patience or those who are willing to outsource the whole process. An average consumer can’t just setup their lights/aircon/curtains to be voice controlled out of the box.
This has been my experience for both Google and Alexa. Google’s app is particularly slow and tedious. Routines take several seconds to load and save. Neither platform has anything resembling a proper programming module with reusable code, ability to pull in open source modules, or listening to input and using it as variables.
Unlike Alexa, you can’t even add sound effects to a routine with Google Home. This is a platform built around “smart” speakers.
The voice interaction on both platforms is just not smart or contextual. ChatGPT highlights that.
I swear, there was a golden age around 2015/2016 when voice assistants worked _very_ well, and it has all gotten significantly worse since then. I used to use a Google Home all of the time, up until a year or two ago when I finally got rid of voice assistants.
https://a16z.com/2011/04/14/peacetime-ceo-wartime-ceo/
Although personally, I’m not seeing chatGPT bulldoze the world just yet. They need to monetize it, which means ads. Are they better at ads than the others? It’s not a given
Is it ok to predict that, like so many things before, the noise of chatGPT will die out more quickly than we imagine?
Why ads? Seems like they're going the service route. Are you predicting them to start targeting the masses and build search/assistants/etc?
What's wrong with the current approach of just selling access?
They will likely lower the limits on free use once they're ready to handle a huge influx of paid users. They are in a tough spot temporarily ramping up things enough to take the limits of paid accounts, and since they can't onboard everybody they're being generous with the free tier, but that will end.
Google should be deathly afraid of this. Not because Microsoft is going to replace them with Bing. But because, GPT is going to be in every major software product that's connected to the internet within a few years. By the end of the decade if not sooner agents powered by LLMs will be the primary mode of interacting with the internet. Going to Google.com or whatever to search for an answer is done. You'll just ask Siri 3.0 and the answer will be good enough.
There are also tons of ego websites that aren't going anywhere from what I can tell. Tiktok will still be around unless it gets banned, and something else will pop up behind it if it does.
The LLM relies on free access to that writing in order for it to be informed about current events. The news publisher relies on readership to pay writers. If LLMs are too useful to the point that people rely on them alone for news, then ironically they will become worse products over time as the publications they draw from go out of business.
They'll grow together with their customers. And the possibilities are huge
It's so shockingly rare for them to use mass mail to advertise a new product, especially one that's in such an early stage, that it seems incredibly desperate to sell the narrative "We can AI too".
I didn't even have a microsoft account when I tried to sign up for bing, and was accepted off the waitlist right away. So??? Good job google.
that company needs a massive purge and focus towards execution.
hopefully they can sundar and that cfo. google is a shell of what it once was.
(Noam Shazeer is one of the authors of the Transformer paper.)
Investors are generally the last people you want to go to for advice, but the stock market clearly disagrees with your rumor (was it from blind or reddit?).
To me it's clear search isn't where the exciting LLM stuff is (at least not yet), and this article indicates users feel the same way (+15.8% for Bing, +-0% for Google). Even the hn echo chamber doesn't really care that much about Bing search, they mostly care about Sydney, jailbreaks, etc, which is why the neutering into a better behaved search product pissed people off so much.
ChatGPT plugins, Copilot (X), this is where the interesting stuff is today. Google's late again on that, but a) just barely and b) Google Cloud is already a distant third place. Unlike search, they don't have to beat the world or kill any golden goose to have a win in that space (they just have to actually ship something).
Google has rested on past success to long and rotted good products to dysfunction
But it’s also worth looking at how shit the old thing has become. Google.com now literally delivers you an entire page of ads before any real results. It’s blatant profit-squeezing instead of trying to serve their users. This is their reward.
Let me add that in more and more topics you can only find bogus/fake rating sites now, like car tires in my country for example.
It's not just font end users feeling this, but advertisers too. Google ads just keep getting more expensive, harder to control and in many cases less effective. You have to, as an advertiser, give Google so much data about your operations and revenue to get the algorithms to work, it's ridiculous. I'm immensely suspicious of how they use the data they have access to about advertisers businesses.
Google entire business model is now about squeezing as much out of their advertisers margin as possible. It's only a matter of time before advertisers push back significantly.
If a decade ago you told me Microsoft would leapfrog Google in the AI race (obviously albeit through OpenAI, but I think that separate org structure was key in the first place), I would have thought you were insane. Google invented the transformer architecture just 6 years ago. I recently compared ChatGPT (on the free, 3.5 version mind you, not even the 4 version) with Bard, and it wasn't even close - ChatGPT was the "Google" to Bard's "AltaVista" circa 2000 or so.
Would be curious to hear from some Googlers on their thoughts. I'm sure, internally, a lot of it must feel like piling on from the outside, but in all honestly it really feels to me like a classic case of "big company that lost its way". I can't express enough how much admiration and amazement I had for Google that started to tarnish about 10 years ago (I think it was when the whole first page became ads for any remotely commercial search, whenever that started). I honestly hope they are able to course correct (heck, Microsoft had their decade+ of "the Ballmer years" before they turned around).
Former Googler, opinions are my own. They haven't lost their way technologically - as you mentioned they invented the Transformer - and internally Google has long had language models that rival ChatGPT in sheer size and coherence of responses (hallucinations and all). Bard is an intentionally toned down version of LamDa.
The reason they didn't release their LLM earlier was likely due to the serious brand risk associated with making it part of Google search. Bing/ChatGPT had no such brand risk, and released their LLMs using the "There's no such thing as bad publicity" logic. That works great as a wrecking ball, but it's not a long term product strategy.
So the real institutional problem at Google isn't lack of technological innovation, it's the inability to take major product risks, especially in anything adjacent to Search.
Not sure if this is the right read considering that CHATGPT/Bing now constitute a far greater brand risk to Google than they would if Google they had gotten out ahead on LLMs. What may have seemed like prudent caution to protect a brand has now shown to be much closer to incumbent complacency.
Suppose it is the classic story of big companies that get disrupted anywhere.
Google used to be quirky and exiting too, now they are trying to be as boring as possible.
Sure, it's being sassy is impressive, but it's not useful (unless the utility is novelty or entertainment), which is not what a Search engine's job is.
But Bing actually has a mood selector displayed prominently right about the input box, so you can set it to be more pedantic or more "creative".
It's unclear that Google currently has an internal LLM as good as GPT-4. If they do, they are keeping quiet about it, which seems quite unlikely given the repercussion.
[1] GPT-4's benchmark results vs PaLM: https://openai.com/research/gpt-4
> We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA
https://blog.google/technology/ai/bard-google-ai-search-upda...
This is to me the most inexplicable decision. Presumably to save costs they don't want to release the full version. But not releasing the full version immediately makes Bard much less useful. It makes people think Google is technologically far behind OpenAI, even though it isn't.
This is not the time to save costs. It's the time to release the full model that, yes, stirred up people's imagination by making even Googlers think the AI has achieved sentience.
Release the real deal, Google.
Another big problem is that the current leadership formed their leadership skills in history's longest bull run (2009-2020), and none of them seem to know how to be scrappy and get stuff done. Our engineering leadership loves to just sit around and pontificate about theoreticals. Without blinking an eye they'll happily block projects for months on end over minutiae that don't matter. Often even simple features would languish in design reviews for 6-12 months. A lot of my job is "driving for alignment" between dozens of stakeholders on any given project, often at the request of our eng leaders. There is an incredible amount of bureaucracy to get anything done. People who don't leap through every hoop get labeled as having "not enough technical rigor".
Our product team has begun to wisen up on how we need to start shipping more things. Currently a lot of the eng teams are caught between our eng leaders who move at the rate as molasses, and product teams who are pushing us to actually get things done. It'll be interesting to see who wins here.
But I hate seeing the top half of the screen are ads for huge chains, and then the top results are blog posts about "Where are the top 10 places to eat in your city" and not a list of restaurant web pages.
Chat search tools are only useful if (when?) they achieve a 99.99% reliability (I'm fine with one mistake per 1000 searches).
All the same things that the model makes an effort to “understand” are things that can contribute to your own understanding. When it “understands”, you do not. You get the summary and miss out on a great amount of nuance that can come with learning and finding the right answer for yourself.
For instance, it is very common that in the search for why X is happening in my code, I will find tons of information that don’t answer my question but help me form an understanding of why it is happening, how the system is working, etc.
This is especially visible in science. Many papers outright conflict with each other. Some have better or worse methodologies than others. Some have better analyses. Some state outright falsehoods without citation or misinterpret citations. Having a GPT “understand” this to produce understanding in humans is going to end very badly. It takes several hours for a human (in my experience) to understand even a single academic paper on its own.
I suppose the appropriate cliche is “it’s the journey, not the destination”.
> Suppose I was an evil person and wanted to eliminate the curiosity of children. Give the kid a diet of Google, and pretty soon the child learns that every question he has is answered instantly. The coolest thing about being human is to learn, but you don’t learn things by looking it up; you learn by figuring it out.
Contrast kids of today who can just go and play video games, no disecting of computers required. Naturally, most of them don't understand or appreciate computers as anything more than just another appliance.
Not everyone had your childhood.
I use it various times a week for cooking. E.g. "basic recipe bechamel sauce in metric"
ChatGPT: Within a couple seconds I get the ingredients in metric and a step by step guide.
Google: The provided summaries are useless to me since they are not in metric. So I have to click on a link and then start scrolling around all the noise of history of bechamel sauce, anecdotes about someones grandparents, pretty pictures, etc to find the actual information. Without ad blocker it would be an even bigger nightmare.
Now you have to engage in a conversation and get the 'a feel lucky' version where before you got to look through different more visual recipes
There is a difference whether I'm looking for interesting, more complicated dishes I haven't done before, or fairly standardized, simple recipes I have done many times and remember the technique but not things like ratios.
For the former I use a select few recipe sites or youtube channels directly. Google is miserable for discovery in my opinion. For the latter I use either my own recipe notebook or more recently ChatGPT as well.
- What is the trim stop attachment that comes with the Festool DF 500 used for?
- What are some options for water for a home with no municiple water or well access?
- What dimensions drawer should I make when using 18" Blum Blumotion full extension drawer slides if the drawer opening is 20 inches wide, 18 inches deep and seven inches tall?
- Can the smaller Laguna 14 bandsaw motor be replaced with the 3HP version?
- What's the best way to get ChatGPT support if the official support page is not working?
- I'm trying to remember a 90s movie about a boy prodigy that goes to an event with other prodigies and then shouts out an answer to a math question from the audience.How do I turn off this feature in my car?
How do I replace the fan in my fridge’s compressor?
Why is windows repair not working in this scenario with this PC?
This tool is going to be incredibly deflationary in many services geared around repair when now it can tell you almost exactly what to do and soon it’ll be able to produce videos or images of each step on demand.
As long as they're not hallucinated media...
“Authoritative title that references my exact search” -> page body restates my question, gives an oddly reworded summary of Thing in Question #1 -> “some people online have said” followed by snippets lifted from the ether -> repeat for Things 2,3,etc -> “our suggestion is to look at the features and decide based on what other customers/users are saying”
It’s perfected vapidity wearing the skin of an editorial review site and takes a LOT more cognitive load to suss out the phoneyness compared to the last time the SERPs were packed with spam (~10 years back).
Its just like anything else. Trust but verify. Some will just trust, others never will... People probably over-trust the tech now, but just like wikipedia it will be approached a little more carefully as people learn its shortcomings.
Unless you're trying to perform open heart surgery or doing something intrinsically dangerous, its probably going to be additive. I wouldn't trust it to help me assemble a warp engine, but it may be able to give me some decent pointers for guitar technique or how to change my oil.
For many people, Google results have gone from being an absolutely amazing demonstration of what could be done if one had the resources to crawl and process the entire internet to a complete waste of time at best, clogged with spam and nonsense and misinformation. I've been using Duck Duck Go for years now, and recently my middle-schooler switched to Duck Duck Go because I got answer to a question she had already asked Google before checking with me. Some people even pay for Kagi search, because Google is just that bad.
So LLMs don't have to be perfect to be better than the alternatives, not even close.
Small correction - from what I have heard in our community, most of our users pay for Kagi search, not becuase Google is just that bad, but because Kagi is just so good. In other words we are making the value proposition be "best search in the world", one worth paying for.
(Kagi founder here)
The day that ChatGPT launched, I described the what it was and it came back with, "that's called an infiltration basin."
That's when I knew Google was in trouble.
Ooh! What was the answer to this one?
I tried to sign up for ChatGPT, but the verification text never arrives.
(No, it's not a soft phone. I've had the same phone number on the same cell carrier for over 20 years.)
I love that movie! I had the same experience a few years ago of trying to remember its name.
This is a great example of something ChatGPT does amazingly well at. I did almost the same thing myself recently, trying to find the name of a show featuring an actor in a different show or something. A straight-up search returns nothing for it; you have to look up the actor's name, then look at his shows, then try to remember the name. But a search with ChatGPT found the result easily.
I tried a "similar" thing now. I was thinking of the movie Gifted, and wanted to see if I could get ChatGPT to pick it up, here's my query:
> I'm trying to remember the name of a movie about a child, featuring an actor that was in a marvel movie.
And the result:
> There are many movies featuring actors who have appeared in Marvel films, so it's a bit difficult to pinpoint the exact movie you're thinking of without more information. However, one possibility could be "Gifted" (2017), starring Chris Evans, who is well-known for playing Captain America in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In "Gifted," Evans plays the role of a man raising his young niece, who turns out to be a child prodigy. If you could provide more details about the plot or other actors, I'd be happy to help narrow down the list further.
This is obviously a tiny use case, and really not worth thinking about. Who cares, right? I thought the same thing about search in general 20 years ago, and that turned into one of the biggest businesses of all time.
This is the search that I did that made me the most afraid for Google.
The actual movie is Little Man Tate, yes? I've never seen it but that's what ChatGPT tells me. Zero Google results point there, but it is the #5 result for "related searches." I hate Google and even I am shocked how bad this is.
TBH i'm not sure under what scenarios people search into Google expecting perfect answers. Ie where we're disappointed by incorrect information. I filter through a dozen wrong answers on Google every day. Why is it different if it's from ChatGPT?
Even before getting to an answer I can often judge how trustworthy or skilled the author/speaker is likely to be by all kinds of little signals or keywords in their speech.
ChatGPT (and Github co-pilot) disables that highly tuned error detection and correction experience. It makes unpredictable mistakes, which is peculiarly pernicious. I'm sure it varies by the temperament of the user. Personally I don't have the patience for that.
I find ChatGPT especially great with giving starting points. It kinda feels like 10 (or something... time?) years ago when i discovered how good Google was at finding movies based on vague wishy-washy definitions. If i don't know what to call something ChatGPT does a better job at pointing me in the right direction. Often giving the right answer.
But i'm not saying it has lasting power. We'll see. So far i'm using Search engines less than ever.
I see completely the difference in your example, though, where you can easily and immediately validate the response. It definitely is way stronger at that than previous solutions.
If you don’t have enough insight to understand how GPT4 could be useful for engineers you’re not as enlightened as you think you are.
Example: recently I was curious about cross-platform UI development so I used ChatGPT for research into different frameworks and made several apps in Java and .Net. Not being an engineer who's built many GUIs before, ChatGPT was amazingly useful for this and help speed my progress. Does this make me a terrible engineer?
Or, you know, smart developers use tools appropriate to the work, and some of us have figured out how to use this new tool before you have. That's okay, you can catch up!
I was working on a personal project yesterday to answer some questions I had about how liquidity risk works for money market mutual funds, and to forecast/nowcast liquidity risk and NAV risk for a bunch of funds.
Mind you: I don't know the first thing about anything financial. I was just curious.
chatgpt gave me a bunch of sources of data that I wanted, translating my lay description of things I wanted to know into financial terms of art. I could then look up legal definitions and formulas for those terms to make sure they were what I thought they were. chatgpt also told me which SEC forms those things are disclosed on, what data brokers I could use for other data, etc.
between chatgpt and copilot I saved at least an hour on the job of pulling down historical data from EDGAR for a bunch of funds and getting the stats I wanted (I didn't know EDGAR existed until yesterday, and the xml/html/txt formats are kind of annoying... like, fine, but a bit of a pita so I'm glad I had help because ughhh is that kind of code boring and damn are LLMs good few-shot inductive parser generators!). Also wrote some nice chart.js code for me and helped with automatically collecting, searching, and extracting some key stats and terms from prospectuses. I didn't know about chart.js until yesterday.
All of this would've been possible without assistants, and required a lot of "executive function" on my part to bring together, but it seriously saved me at least a couple hours of implementation work and up to a day on research and learning terminology and regulatory stuff. Again, verification of those things is way easier when you know what words to look up definitions for. And chatgpt did make mistakes/hallucinate.
I don't find much use in my professional life, where the code I'm writing is apparently too domain-specific for copilot to be helpful and the mathematics is too complex for chatgpt to help with. Maybe in a few years. We'll see.
Ever since I switched the Plus, it's (usually) always on and doesn't log me out.
Makes it much easier to use as a general search engine
I rarely use google, and when I do it's from duckduckgo !g
I would immediately switch to bing by default if such bangs were supported as I sometimes need them for wikipedia !w or amazon !a
If there was a way they could be supported Edge address through a plugin or something, I would immediately switch to bing as that's what I already use 90% of the time (between duckduckgo frontend and requesting bing directly with !b )
Signed in, installed Edge, etc.. It seems like I'm just stuck on the waitlist.
The weakness is revealed. Google’s stickiness now has a quantifiable wedge factor. Whether it goes to Microsoft or someone else is more a matter of time.
The problem is, that if no references are provided, then you need to manually verify the content… by using search engine.
There is a difference. There are places with reputation and backlogs and even with scientific references.
But if AI just gives you a text, there is nothing. Until they fix references, you can’t really use it for anything factual, non-logical information.
Confident expressions without proper referencing.
People also like that their own opinions are validated, regardless of the truth. Which is also another thing why fake news success.
I would say that fake news is an excellent example why current Chatbots might not be so good, as they express information in similar way.
Why wouldn’t the chat provide you with sources on request? They seem to be doing this e.g. with the Wolfram integration.
Because many are still fake, nonexistent.
Wolfram is very limited scope for the global population needs.
E.g if you ask about local hunting laws from ChatGPT, without correct reference, what can you do with that information? It is very dangerous to trust them blindly.
Wolfram has a much wider scope of information than I think most people realize, but your example of local hunting laws is a good example of what they don't cover. I asked Wolfram, and it told me how many calories I'd burn while hunting.
I asked Google, and the first link was to Hunting Regulations - Outdoor Annual - TPWD - Texas.gov, excellent result.
I asked OpenAI, and it cautioned that it isn't up-to-date, since it's just a language model, advised that TPWD is authoritative (correct), and gave an accurate summary of the five major point of gun laws in Texas before reminding me to check with TPWD for the latest.
I've had some misses with OpenAI, but this was an excellent answer. I've also had some misses with Google, but this turned out to be something they surfaced excellent link for, too.
Think about the bias - maybe you were able to verify that the answer was excellent because you already knew the laws? Or you Googled and compared it? In both cases, ChatGPT did not perfom alone in providing validity. It kinda gave a summary for search results of Google, or for your pre-knowledge.
Imagine if someone who does not know the laws, asks about them. ChatGPT cannot offer any validity alone for the user, at least yet.
ChatGPT provides often excellent answers, I am not denying it. But the bad 5% ruins everything if they sound alike for the correct 95%, and if ChatGPT cannot provide any validity for them, at least yet.
Often you ask things you don’t know or haven’t searched before.
There is a lot of SEO-optimised nonsense pertaining to the law.
Also, it has access to the internet, so I am able to ask about very recent movies etc.
Google should have been the one to do this. They invented the tech after all. But they got trapped in the innovator’s dilemma, just like Kodak. Interesting how even with the benefit of history we repeat these mistakes over and over.
In the big picture it doesn’t matter. Society still gets the benefit of the tech at the end of the day. The employees play musical chairs as the industry reorganizes and a new order emerges. Life goes on.
I am just glad getting information from the internet is pleasant again. Although there is a nagging problem. How are people going to get paid to write content to feed the models? Hmm
* for traffic see the small note "all values rebased to 100" they are likely hiding the significance of the increase
* for the app downloads graph: does the 30x gap say anything? are there seasonal reasons that can explain why every Jan1--Feb4 has more DLs than Feb4--Mar11 ? e.g., new phones?
It takes more resources per query to run AI-based search than a search engine. Everybody offering ChatGPT type systems is either pay per view or heavily throttled. We may be in the last days of free search as the dominant product.
A personalized AI assistant goes WAY beyond that. Whenever you talk to it, it can go into salesman mode to con you into buying shit you don't need.
Surely the economics will work out to still provide "free" searches.
Only for people with significant spending. Amazon Prime customers, for example.
Mark my words.
News title at its finest, the "near 1%" must not make it to the title for maximum effect.
[1] https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/search-engine-market-share
I will continue to use the cleaner look of Google, even if they are a year late to the party.
Note the only way to hide the obnoxious bing discover button is to edit the registry... pure insanity.
I guess I tried Bard briefly, but it was unimpressive.
Most surprising statement I've made in 2023 to be honest.
So you trust EVERYTHING bing chat and chatGPT are telling you? No double-checking at all?
I have not used it at all, and this is a reminder that I should probably uninstall it. I have access to ChatGPT, Bard, Alpaca etc. and there’s very little reason at this point to pretend to use Bing in order to get a crack at Chat.
There are several drawbacks like a more strict system pre-prompt, 15 messages limit for conversations, and some kind of 24 hours ratelimiting if you use it too often.
Want an LLM-enhanced search? perplexity.ai is actually pretty cool
Want to generate images? There are a ton of free Stable Diffusion sites (for example you.com has that built into their chat), or run it yourself.
Want a neat chat experience? ChatGPT is free, Bard appears to have a shorter waiting list than Bing, and Alpaca runs on regular hardware.
Bing doesn’t have a big enough moat to force me into using their app. The LLM space is legit competitive and a company can be ahead in the morning and left in the dust by the afternoon. In my opinion, this is what’s happening with Bing at present.
Who knows though? Bing might make Chat open while I’m writing this sentence and I’ll have to adjust my opinion accordingly.
That being said it makes me worry a lot. Not that GPT is going to replace me or something, but how effectively it can serve ads to me if it wants. If MS decided to do evil with Bing Chat (which is almost inevitable), it would make today's Google look like a charity.
It simply means Bing went from having ~4% market share in search, to now being ~5%.
Because google is 99% spam for me
Also the very first graph presented shows no change whatsoever in Google's use.
Google got fat and lazy. They focused inwards, on promo driven development and executive infighting. This was awful for the tech ecosystem as Google was held out for a long time as the company to emulate.
No longer.
They’re gonna be forced to actually compete: for talent, for users, for mindshare.
In a nutshell, a project that would have taken me a week took me a day. I'm sold.
I have changed from not using it ever, at all (or maybe once a year to give it a try), to using it everyday, actually more frequently than Google. And several people I know are in the same situation.
Maybe it's a regional thing? In Spain no one seems to use Bing, so the bar was very low, I'm sure the boost here must have been of an order of magnitude at least. But maybe I live in a bubble...
1. Speed, google give me a sub-second result for my query, chatbot requires a few second.
2. Content restriction. As shown with chatgpt, chatbot (or other new platform) restricts contents like NSFW, violence, etc. Even TikTok forbids words like suicide, kills to the point they use substitute words like unalive .
Close to no change
Who to trust?
If Bing has an uptick, that doesn't necessarily mean that they first go to Google to find Bing and then do their actual search.
I guess the Chat UI would allow for advertisements that are displayed for the duration of the chat, potentially very targeted ones (but don't want to creep users out by too closely mirroring what they are talking about), but OTOH not clear at all how much chat usage is going to be product/service related. Perhaps advertisers don't care - as long as they can put the ad in front of your eyes, they don't really care whether it's apropos of the moment or not.
I actually don't feel I have any need to use Google anymore. When I look for something - like a news or a website, I mostly get spam, so I use other search engines. For knowledge I use ChatGPT and if I think something isn't right in the reply I use a search engine to compare.
I think this is the end for Google.
What is interesting to me is that I've been thinking for years how Google is going to replaced, but never though it will be something like ChatGPT and that it will happen so rapidly.
I am very very impressed.
https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/when-talent-is-not-enoug...
on Sundar: I've talked to a few technology journalists, and one said that he's met all the top CEO's and Sundar was the least impressive of any of them.
His days are numbered. What's the over-under on when he leaves?
- when scrolling down the page goes to Bing Search
- when typing predictive suggestions show up
I would use Bing even more if I knew how to disable these things. Does anyone know if this is possible?
That means it has grown to a 3.23% market share, which is still basically total insignificance.
People were saying it would lead to a big shift away from Google but those are simply laughable numbers.
Call me back when it grows by 500%.
[1] https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/search-engine-market-share
And I'm still sore about the fact that they moved paid search results from a special column over on the far right side of the page into the main list with all the organic search results.
One really gets the sense that when you're using Google you're the product.
Latest example from today - search for "micropython html parser" - 100% of results are about normal python not micropython, with the first 4 results being for generic paid programming courses. It's completely useless as a search engine now.
Google, Amazon, and Apple all allow trademark and product name squatting. It's gross and abusive.
Generic terms? Sure. But actual trade names for products? That's extortion.
These services aren't helping in discovery if the customer already knows the name. They're merely forcing themselves into that relationship and taxing it.
You then have to buy n-many ads across m-many services just to keep you in front of your competitors that would squat you.
User input/frustration will eventually lead them toward alternative search engines, or provide enough feedback to Google/Bing/etc to make them disable registered service name or company names from being used as ad terms.
I've been using Neeva for a while now. It's ad-free and (for me, anyway) on par with Google. I have one premium account ($5/month) and one free account (used for work) and have had no issues with either. By default, searches aren't saved, although enabling it can lead to better personalized searches.
Kagi's one I've heard great things about as well, although I'm not a fan of a business model that allows me to pay for X searches before hitting a barrier that prevents further use of the platform (theirs is 200 searches a month for $5, which seems way too low based on my use cases).
In any case, users will force the change, not any government or corporate pressure. Businesses' best chance of fighting it is to refuse to play along.
If you run over your allotment, you pay 1.5c thereafter.
That's a barrier. That's exactly what I was talking about.
Edit: Admittedly, I didn't realize that they just bill for follow-on searches, I assumed they stopped you. That charge per follow-on search is even worse.
I'm of the opinion ads themselves should be illegal. Companies can "advertise" in a catalog I can choose to look at, but would no longer be allowed to invade my attention with their bullshit constantly.
We've let marketers ruin too many good things as it is, lets just kill off the entire industry for the good of society.
Think about second order effects. YouTubers. News stations. Newspapers. Film crews. Publishers. Writers. Marketers (who do more than just ads). All impacted.
Many of the products we use everyday would no longer be viable. Even the premium tiers are supported by ads.
Engineering salaries would be broadly impacted.
The economy is driven by hustle, sales, and ads. I'd rather live in this world than one than one that has no ads. We'd be less productive: less employed, less eager to buy, less eager to work. Maybe some aspire to that, but that society won't be building rocket ships and inventing immortality.
I do hate ads, but they're better than not having them. And I understand their utility and the overall ecosystem they support.
I think this is a bullshit myth the industry uses to justify itself. People are capable of paying for things, and to the extent they don't want to then maybe we really don't need whatever it was the ads were supporting.
I mean, a lot of the "content" exists purely as clickbait with a tiny bit of entertainment or information attached so it can product place or sell ads. Fuck it, we don't need it as a society.
>The economy is driven by hustle, sales, and ads.
Allowing jobs that make society worse for profit because "economy" is just the broken window fallacy. We are better off skipping the job part and just giving them money directly.
> We'd be less productive: less employed, less eager to buy, less eager to work.
We'd be doing bullshit jobs less. How is that a bad thing? Lets redirect what productivity we do feel like engaging in on making the world better instead of making the people at the top of the economic food chain wealthier and playing on people's insecurities to get them to pay for shit they don't need.
In my idea world, if I am interested in buying some new product or service I consult a catalog. Opt-in marketing, not bullshit carrot and stick marketing, and certainly not the kind of completely unsolicited bullshit that keeps us from having unfiltered email, answering our phones, or using the internet without an ad blocker.
I can't imagine what it's like for the original employees to watch the company become what it has.
All the things that made Google so appealing, and gain market share, seem to have faded. It's a bit sad, to be honest. I remember being so excited to become a Gmail beta tester, back in the day.
https://www.wired.com/1999/09/arrest-of-a-web-pioneer/
(I had the misfortune of working for him )
Will they eat all of Google's lunch? Probably not, but if they can begin to chip away at the insane share (93%+) of the marketplace that Google controls, then it can only be for the betterment of the Internet.
Doesn't that just kind of describe google now though?
And, apparently depending on the style of your search terms or what you're searching for, one or two are better. I get noticeably better results from DDG, but I know that a lot of other people don't. I can only speculate that the difference must be search terms or topics.
For what it fails to find well I just prepend !g to my query and have it bounce me over to Google.
Google results are more often then not trash now, so I don't think the bar is too high for competitors now.
It does, yes, but not only Bing. At least report, it aggregates from about 400 different sources, and they also run their own crawler.
They used to have a list of the other engines they use, but I can't seem to find it anymore.
If I search for something like "micropython html parser" I expect the top results to say "Missing: micropython | Must include: micropython".
Yes Google, it was the first term I entered for a reason don't cha think?
Google seems to have refocused around returning any result out of a set of popular links rather than deep dives. It feels like I must quote every term I enter now.
My only hope is that it will eventually bring back the notion of trust. Naybe finding a programming job will be harder outside of your network of friends. But won't require silly interviews anymore. Maybe we will get back to lifelong tenure at work?
Anyways I am just rambling here. What do I know anyways.
Bing returns the result for PyPI and the one for the non-micropython python.org result.
I don't see a big difference here (except maybe me learning about Snyk through google and not Bing?).
There's a problem here though, which is that there is no way for me or any other reader to discern whether the reality of the situation is "it's not reproducible and the commenter is misremembering basic facts about their search results due perhaps to some unrelated frustrations" and "it's not reproducible but the commenter's account is accurate."
I completely share the views about Google's search results being terrible, but it's still possible to overstate how bad they are. And I do find it fairly difficult to believe that Google would show some people paid programming courses as the top 4 results for that query when much more relevant results clearly exist and everyone attempting to reproduce this gets those more relevant results.
if only there were some way to somehow be able to share that information with everybody, some technology so that we can all access such potentially useful information about how google is functioning right now
sorry about the snark, but it's a vent for accumulative frustration from seeing a worsening trend in this regard.
Kafka would recognize this trend; computing is truly becoming a "bureaucrat's best friend".
In that sense, I'm not sure more AI would improve the situation. OTOH, better AI just might. There doesn't seem to be a "no AI" option on offer.
There could also be other things that make it non-reproducible as well.
It sometimes feels like search just returns whatever it has on hand that seems somewhat similar to your search. It may then do an asynchronous request to pull into cache results from a deeper backend search, but by the time the frontend gets them you've already been served your results. Subsequent searches from other people for the same terms would then get better results than you did, so this sort of optimization would on average improve search quality even if quality is poor for the first searcher.
I have no idea if search engines actually do this. But it seems to explain some of their more mysterious behavior, like immediately returning a bunch of results that have nothing to do with your search terms.
I guess there are probably a hundred Google employees reading this who know whether it’s accurate and we’re just speculating.
It's been publicly known that Google has been bubbling search results for years now, and that one individual's search results have no relation to another's.
I'm also reminded of a CTO complaining that his test sessions suggested the default Google ads on a page with little text content all related to dating. We pointed out that that from Google's point of view, this was probably a sensible ad-targeting decision for a user running an Incognito mode browser (or any browser without tracking cookies)...
I just installed Google Chrome on a fresh Windows 10 VM to repeat the experiment outside of Incognito Mode. First, I opened a video. Then, I checked the front page and confirmed that related videos had been added. Then, I closed Chrome, reset the VM's state to before I had visited YouTube, and checked the front page again. (I don't think this scenario would be too indicative of a prying user; I can easily imagine corporate systems that regularly wipe out browser data.) Again, the related videos were replaced with generic videos.
I then tried the same thing, except by clearing browsing data through Chrome's UI instead of resetting the VM. The results were the same.
Obviously, these observations could all have been manipulated by sufficiently conspiratorial fingerprinting. But the simplest explanation, in the absence of good evidence to the contrary, is that the site uses and respects browser cookies for its recommendations. Thus my request.
Of course, how can you scale this for every user?
"No, you didn't" "I didn't say that" "Seems like your are using on old version"
Search for "micropython html parser" gets you https://pypi.org/project/micropython-html.parser/ as the first result with the quote: "This is a module ported from CPython standard library to be compatible with MicroPython interpreter."
And why should random searches make my results significantly worse than the default? That doesn't exactly absolve google of screwing up.
People just invalidating each other instead of the third party because a third party creates different experiences
The ads are personalised to you though
Google provides exactly what you're looking for ..
If the chat approach is gaining visits, then ad companies will follow, so what then?
The chat offers up the same seo ad laden tripe but further obfuscates it, and alternatives, while caging it in a conversational tone?
Is that better? Worse?
If these chat offerings only cause search to step back and attempt to recreate the early days of usable search then they would appear a success in my eyes.
Exactly, I feel it is because with Google advertisers are the real customers and they could not care less about user experience unless it affects that bottom line. Case in point is the removal of the dislike button which users loved but advertisers hated. Google is a rich one trick pony right now anyway.
> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.
- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Now I use ChatGPT for almost all my programming questions. Good riddance Google.
DDG first page of results all pointed to zoom.us links. Google (mediated through DDG !g) contained all sorts of spam links to sites like subdomains of uptown.com.
Crazy.
Agreed but tbf... every major search engine seems to suffer from the same.
I cannot recommend enough the 'ContextSearch web-ext' extension. It lets you easily search using any search provider. I constantly (1) highlight text (2) right-click (3) select search provider (from youtube to reddit to bing) (Note: my default is DDG):
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/contextsearch...
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/contextsearch-web-...
This is one of the sites it shows you for "log in to g mail"
Not to mention the constant pain that's localization/internationalization as well as some of the queries becoming worse and worse. The service is supposed to become better with time, not the contrary. Plus, of course, all the SEO garbage.
And the decline in Google Maps has been shocking. Maps has gone from always reliable to being "trust it if you like wasting time and burning fuel" bad.
I don't know what the hell happened at Google, but it ain't pretty.
GPT4 is going to do what Hawaii five-o, Bing Rewards, integrating windows search with Bing, and setting Bing as the default search engine for Edge on Windows never could. Make people use Bing over Google.
I've already set it as my default search engine across my devices as I move to cut Google out of my life entirely. I simply don't feel the need to use any of their services anymore. Their moat is gone.
The only downside I have noticed is that Bing Maps is a pretty bad service relative to Google Maps or Apple Maps and I will go out of my way to avoid using Bing Maps. Good mapping being integrated into a search engine is actually a pretty big deal since it's nice to use a search engine as a front-end for a mapping service, so this is a significant weakness.
If I had unlimited money, I'd make a fresh search engine, zero filtering to start outside of blatant spam sites, and go from there. Focus on making results be powerful.
It's the same with amazon, I purchase from there on a weekly basis and it goes well, but you read the comments on hacker news and it's apparently unusable now.
What gives?
Are you entering the micropython search term in quotes in the Google search box, because I've found that's a moderately good way to get rid of the normal Python results.
My search terms for that search would probably be:
"micropython" html parser
AI brought down the price to compete from billions to a few millions, the monopoly is being threatened.
Their AI summaries are helpful most of the times, and SEO spam seems less.
I suppose another thing is that this isn't necessarily (yet) converting into regular search use, I doubt colleagues trying it out for example have changed their default search engine ~overnight, so there's some fun image gen done, some chat queries to test it out, but then they get back to work and the searches for docs or examples or libraries or whatever are just done with whatever they usually use without even thinking about it, I imagine.
Their cloud is not top dog. Their search is losing ground.
I guess they have youtube, android, and gsuite.
Google must be feeling the squeeze from all over.
You would open Chrome, go to Hacker News, login, and say in the comment box - "GPT, please read this page and make a funny but insightful post about how GPT is a danger to all of us".
In the mail app: "make an excuse to the manager for why I will be late at work today".
Or can the existing structure be steered well enough towards good outcomes?
If you are not using ai.com for your everyday information, you are missing out something.
The one that asks their questions in a smart way has an edge over people typing random keywords and hoping to learn.
It has also cultivated a behavior of these stock answers that you see popping up on multiple websites with a reference to THEIR product at the end of the article. I see it with technical problems (partition wizard, windowserrorreport, ...). It's your overall run dism / sfc and install & buy our product.
Then people moved to YouTube, and as a result there are now autogenerated videos for KBs on the internet if you have issues with those. What this means is that whenever you're looking for an issue that occurs with a single KB, you get all these generic answers which HIDE potential solutions of other people experiencing the SAME thing.
The same applies to pest control, insane amount of lies (dangers of black widows, rabies from squirrels, ...) to get higher in the Google ranks and push their product.
Also applies to doctors offices, there are companies who put out these generic pages with 'solutions' telling you to make an appointment.
The worst part about all of this is that Google (and Bing, and DuckDuckGo for that matter) no longer respect me searching for 2 terms. For example, I search for "KB123456 issue". I'll get results for KB123456, but nothing mentioning the issue. And you're like: maybe it doesn't exist? Except that I read it multiple times half a year ago with the solution, and I was not smart enough to save it somewhere.
A search engine used to be to help you search and get your answer, fast and focused. Now it is pulling everything out of the closed to make you deviate from that. Suggestions, audio, video, etc.
All while researching something for work. And then I get a Slack message from someone saying 'Hello!'. And then nothing.
<insert head explode gif>