Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimsimmons | Hacker News Reader

You should look up global search volumes and Google share of it. There’s no dent

Kodak had pretty strong film sales when the first digital cameras hit the market as well.

Yeah but that doesn’t mean anything. Kodak saw a train coming, did a study that told them that they had to do something, but then sat on the tracks.

Fuji, who was also big in the chemical film business, came out just fine.

> Kodak saw a train coming, did a study that told them that they had to do something, but then sat on the tracks.

Replace "Kodak" with "Google" and that's the exact impression I get from friends who work there

I just resigned from Google. There’s no future with current leadership. I was a at high level (6), with an incredibly broad scope of responsibility, making an absurd amount of money. But life is too short to spend my days propping up a dying monopoly when there’s bigger game to chase.

It’s also institutionally arrogant, they really think they are the best, Jeff Dean and Urs are Gods, and no other company can do what Google does. OpenAI just destroyed that myth, yet on the inside they haven’t woken up to the change.

Hey, myself and an ex-microsoft dev (like 2007-2008, not recent), with some VP experience have teamed up. We're working on memory solutions for AI, as well as creating better agents, workflows, etc... In the early days it'll mostly be a GUI over langchain/autogpt/babyAGI, eventually it might morph to creating our own in-house brain-like database, something beyond vectors (or built on top of them w/ a better ranking/indexing based on frequency/recency). Hit me up, if you'd consider partnering up.

Sounds like fun. Do you have a specific end product in mind or are you just in the experimentation stage?

Curious what "absurd levels of money" means, even if you could just vaguely gesture at it

levels.fyi

I take it you don’t work at Google?

bad analogies are bad

> There’s no dent

By the time there is a dent, it's too late.

Sounds great but you’ll have to provide some logic because I don’t automatically follow your extremely confident opinion…

The fear of investors and, to some extent, Google, is that LLMs will supplant traditional search and by the time enough people are catching on to affect metrics the momentum will be too great to stop. My experience with LLMs has not led me to believe that is all that likely but opinions differ there.

We need search to be able to fact check the LLMs, but this might become extremely difficult once all the content is written by them…

Just like how it is hard to fact-check Wikipedia now that it's used a reference. A thought came to me - perhaps it's Wikipedia that should be worried that it'll be supplanted by LLMs.

[citation needed]

The phenomenon they're referring to is when something spurious is posted on Wikipedia with no or poor citations, then used as the source for a "reputable" article (without citations), then the article is cited by Wikipedia, making the spurious information look more trustworthy.

1) that hardly ever happens, it hasn’t caused any widespread issues in the decades Wikipedia has existed.

2) All sources are cited so they can be easily verified by the reader.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...

The user experience with ChatGPT is pretty good. No ads, no spam results. There are downsides too of course: the hallucinations, and the way the ChatGPT site wants me to log back on now and then.

I was very happy with Google but recently on my iPhone the Google website started nagging me to log in every time I do a search. This is a poor experience, add to that the ad results that have gotten harder and harder over time to distinguish from real results.

I’ve found it amusing but haven’t gotten that much practical use out of it. I still make multiple Google searches every day.

People here are praying very hard for Twitter to fail. Nearly any social media post nowadays has 50-100 comments predicting Twitter's failure and ranting about Musk. He is living rent-free in many heads now.

Its utterly ludicrous how so many intelligent and rational people are becoming un-hinged whenever Twitter/Musk is mentioned.

Any publicity is good publicity it seems like. People don’t get that hating is not the opposite of love, it’s indifference. Mute and forget.

I just sent the second part of this to my friend WRT his ex-wife…

Hate is just confused admiration

I confusedly admire bigots and racists? That doesn’t make any sense…

Many bigots are revealed as self-hating closet cases and fetishists, so I could see a naïve analysis attempt to flip it around and assume it must go both ways.

I actually think the "living rent free in heads" peaked awhile ago. At this point it's just clear in a more pedestrian way that things aren't going well over there.

Apparently the people that have Musk living rent free in their heads are living rent free in your head.

Mental subletting.

It reminds me of the Trump thing, it seems people really lose all rationality when they are faced with a man who publically doesn't care and does whatever he wants and is successful at it. I wonder if we will one day have a psychological name for this. It must be related to something in the human brain that touches on social repression and decades of instilled moral codes like "Don't say this, nobody will like you" and then when somebody does it anyway, you feel like it's an invader from a different tribe or a tribe member violating the fabric of what holds together the tribe. When really, he's not doing much different at all and they'd privately do the same exact jokes as a kid like "Twitter is Titter! haha! Like titties get it?" I bet lots of people had such a dumb thought but repressed it and when a supposed adult and major social figure acts like that, it evokes anger that the tribe is in danger.

"and is successful at it."

Overpaying, creating a mass exodus, destabilizing the platform, and losing tons of advertisers is "successful?"

The Twitter thing is still in progress and probably his first project where you could say that he has a problem

I’d argue that one of the reasons Tesla and SpaceX are successful is not just because Elno is a “visionary” (or functional equivalent). It’s because he was/is supported by a cadre of “true believers” (eg that we must disrupt the auto industry in order to do something radical about climate change). Those true believers (like all true believers), are willing to put up with lots of strange behaviour in the name of that belief.

Twitter on the other hand was bought with a management layer that could fairly be characterised as the opposite of true believers in whatever Elon is selling. Hence the implosion.

What are your thoughts about The Boring Company?

Yeah you're right about this, but it isn't irrational. Human societies have been as successful as they have because of social contracts. The phenomenon you're highlighting here is just society's immune system to protect itself against violators of those contracts.

Trump fomented an attempted insurrection and you are shaking your head about the rationality of the people who are concerned?

It's concerning that you're not.

When Chrome launched, it only launched with ~2-3% market share in the first week compared to Firefox. Everyone thought that Chrome wasn't that good and Firefox would be fine. However I knew on day one that Firefox was in serious trouble and I switched browsers immediately. But what I didn't know is that Firefox would do nothing to compete for 10 years.

Chrome launched with an absurd amount of money to burn, though.

And... I don't recall this "everyone" that you are citing. Chrome launched when Google had a ton of good will.

> Chrome launched with an absurd amount of money to burn

OpenAI has $100bn+ from Microsoft, and millions of paying subscribers.

$100bn+?

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/08/microsofts-complex-bet-on-op...

"Microsoft’s $13 billion bet on OpenAI carries huge potential along with plenty of uncertainty"

Yeah, no idea where I got this $100bn number in my head... I guess that does sound pretty ridiculous now that I think about it!

How many of the companies with the largest market cap (top 15) were also in the top 15 20 years ago? Why do you think Google will be an exception to this reality?

I think the answer is network effect. As soon as there appears a properly working easy accessible alternative (not Mastodon), people with will start moving to it. At first it won’t be visible in twitter’s popularity, but when the new service reaches some critical mass of users - the popularity will start falling quickly. Let’s see if Notes is this alternative.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

By the time someone makes a bad argument its too late. We are beyond reason.

1. ChatGPT is very, very new, and habits change slowly

2. For non plus users, chatGPT UX is poor with slow responses, captchas and random logouts

3. All of this will eventually change

There is no more major growth for Google, which is all that matters to Wall Street.

It will go down slowly, but it will go down.

Google wanted to be an Answer Machine before ChatGPT hence "I'm Feeling Lucky" button but road to there is long and hard. I think the biggest Google's problems are SEO spam often coupled with scams and fraud and last but not least, lack of transparency on how exactly they rank their search results.

I don't think we should pretend that google doesn't have the power to crush spam today if it wanted to. They have chosen to let scrappers have top spots in their search results and their reputation is dying as a result.

> For non plus users, chatGPT UX is poor with slow responses, captchas and random logouts

There are tons of free custom UIs to chatGPT by now, all vastly superior to OpenAI’s. No captchas or login screens, just paste your API token once and it gets stored in local storage.

Thanks for mentioning this. I'd assumed this was the case, but I'd been wary of using them because I wasn't sure which of them would be reliable and non-sketchy. Your comment made me take a second look, this time specifically for FOSS custom UIs, and https://chatwithgpt.netlify.app/ seems pretty decent (and is FOSS).

You can also put a hard dollar limit on OpenAI just to be safe.

I used Bing today. I’m denting.

I used bing chat (supposedly using gpt4) and it was far more annoying than openai free chatgpt (supposedly using gpt3.5)

Somehow Microsoft found a way to make it worse?

I'd pay Microsoft monthly if they'd just give us untethered gpt-4 access, the same from the API, for those of us on the waitlist. I don't care if it wants to marry me, haha - I think being able to maybe full around with the settings could make it play nicer too.

Of course they did. That ought to be their slogan. "Microsoft: finding a way to make it worse since 1975"

Yes, I wonder why is so difficult for people to understand this. Microsoft wants to make your life worse, even when they have good software.

I find it hard to believe that they WANT to make my life worse.

I think that they are simply ok with making my life worse if it makes their life better at all.

I have access but don't have a box with Edge running on it nearby to use it. What about it was worse? A few friends tell me that uniting chat with the LLM makes it hallucinate a lot less and makes it easier to check its work, but they only used it a couple times.

Agree, prefer to pay for chatgpt then using Microsoft’s free crapware.

exactly.. its not very usable. They don't even have to innovate anything. just copy ChatGPT interface and display the results.

I tried Edge and bing, God awful. You just feel their desire to take control of your experience of the web. On the flip site, made me see how much Google own us all.

I use ddg everyday and I hate it. I resort to Google shortly after. Not personalised so I guess I am missing out on decent returns.

Have you tried kagi? I‘m finding it better than ddg and often on paar with G.

+1 for Kagi. It's been my default search engine since Jan '22 and I'm very happy with it. On the rare occasions when I use Bing or Google I'm reminded all over again why I'm happy to pay for search.

I’m having the same experience. Anytime I’m not satisfied with kagi’s results, I try Google and that’s usually worse.

I tried ddg, but i found myself adding !g a lot, so i just switched back.

try Brave’s search service

What's wrong with Edge? I started using it when Chrome started eating my RAM, it's been mostly unobtrusive and unnoticed, like a good browser should be.

I installed it on Mac to use Bing Chat.

It immediately took over my whole screen, in a completely weird way that no native Mac app ever did before (in my experience, though I don't use that many Mac apps).

Edge keeps trying to turn on sync-to-Microsoft. I keep saying no. Once, I think it turned it on without asking.

I assume it has more telemetry than Chrome... anyone checked?

I wanted to be the default browser, ok. It wanted to import all my info.. no thanks there was other nastyness I don’t remember.

Then it showed me so much junk and crappy news on new page, it was pure propaganda.

That was the end of it. I know it’s possible to configure all those things, but the starting experience was soo bad I got away quickly.

It is classic microsoft behavior. They don't create apps, they create traps. The end goal is just to make people slaves of their software. The software they create is just "leverage" so they can trap more and more of you or your business.

It seem to me that Google at first was focused on making the best products but ended up in a very similar place. Absolute power corrupt absolutely.

This is indeed a theme for large software companies, but Microsoft has perfected it over the years. The way they turned open source and web technologies to further their goals is just another reminder. Many companies are now entrapped into Azure-related software that can only survive in a Microsoft world.

Right, I just wanted "new tab" to open about:blank -- doesn't seem possible. You get their news feed on every new tab.

How much better could the memory profile really be if they’re using the same rendering engine?

Can't speak for anyone else, for me I've mostly liked it. But I use a separate password manager (bitwarden) and disable most of the embedded addons (shopping, etc). So it's a bit mixed.

I've been using perplexity.ai for anything that's not a site/company/person name look up.

If I used the preferences of commenters here as a basis to make investments I’d lose all my money pretty quickly.

For almost all technical queries, I've found GPT-4 to be vastly superior.

Most of the time, my search queries are just to find websites. Like I'll search for "[movie] rotten tomatoes" or "[book] wiki".

I've found duckduckgo to be a good enough replacement for Google for such queries.

Arthur or Harvey?

I was able to use Google twice today so was able to offset your dent.

Boomer. The kids use reddit and tiktok.

The original redditors are the boomers of HN. The crowd has changed quite a bit though. Still lots of good stuff on there.

I actually just switched all our default search engines to Bing yesterday. Google is showing "Sponsors" that link directly to a full screen page with tons of warnings telling you to call some 800 number so you can get scammed. And that's after nearly downloading a fake Blender install a few weeks ago. I'm done with it.

I just switched to Bing about three months ago -- I haven't noticed any difference, to be honest.

People like to be predictors of doom before the hard evidence comes out.

you should look at all the blockbuster stores and Netflix's share of it. There's no dent. ~ Someone in 1997.

You should look at all CD sales and minidisk’s share of it. There’s no dent.

> You should look up global search volumes and Google share of it. There’s no dent.

"You should look up global search volumes and Yahoo's share of it. There’s no dent" was once a valid statement. Same for Altavista, MySpace, etc. You can go from on top to the bottom very fast in this realm.

Key difference is Google pays a FUCKTON of money to be default search provider. The US Department of Justice is going after this.

Once Google can’t pay-to-play in Safari and iOS they are in very deep shit. This is the classic thing with monopolies: eventually the “innovation” is just leveraging market power to deepen the moat by burning cash.

This is what happens when the CFO runs the damn company. Sundar has no vision, at all, and Ruth’s vision is the same boring Wall Street play book that put a hundred tech companies in the ground.

> Key difference is Google pays a FUCKTON of money to be default search provider.

Yahoo used to pay for that, and to package the Yahoo Toolbar pretty much everywhere. I remember when it used to try to install itself with MySQL. I'm sure it helps, for a while, until it suddenly doesn't.

People have no idea how quickly the house of cards can collapse. It’s a very dangerous path to juice profits by paying to be a default. Basically a self-made Ponzi scheme.

Same could be said when iPhone came out. Now look where Android is. The fact that something happened to others means nothing. Could go either way.

edit: typo

Well, it means it could go either way. Which with respect to Google and search is quite a novelty, as Google has been on top for 20 years, without a serious competitor for most of that time.

If AI assisted search gets larger it might be to Google what Google was to AltaVista

Google controls distribution on Web through Google Chrome. How would AI assisted search even reach casual web users? Word of mouth is not enough.

I switched to edge on all my devices (in hopes of getting early access to Bing Chat), and honestly there's a lot more features and it performs better, so they won't get anything from me except whatever they can milk from gmail. I haven't searched using them in over a year, used to use Brave Search, and You.com for awhile.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com