Samsung considers moving to Bing as default search engine | Hacker News Reader

Samsung considers moving to Bing as default search engine

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This is basically Samsung asking Google to pay up. Google needs to pay Apple / iOS for Default Search Engine, and paying Samsung for staying on Android with Google Search.

Basically Google is being squeezed left and right. So the only way to increase revenue or profits to satisfy the money they spend on Apple and Samsung? More Ads on Youtube and Google Search. The more Ads they serve, the worse UX they have. All while completely fail to compete against AWS or Azure.

google still owns android

True, but Android is open-source and suppliers can replace default search engine - and other services - on it...

More precisely, Google makes AOSP, which is the basis for a licensed version of Android that includes a number of proprietary apps.

Two things are not likely to happen:

1. Samsung will not give up on licensing Google proprietary package of apps.

2. Google will not yank Samsung's license.

Google will absolutely tighten the screws on their future contracts to discourage these deals, as well as sweeping out crappy "customizations."

> as well as sweeping out crappy "customizations."

huh? Samsung OneUI features have been making their way into mainstream AOSP...particularly the tablet-focused stuff

there is no way Google will ever try to "strong arm" Samsung...Samsung is the Android market, the Pixel line is a rounding error and in no way a competitive threat

Hmm...

>40% of Samsung's net revenue is mobile devices.

Only ~56% of Google's revenue is from Search ads - <50% of that comes from Android - and <35% of that comes from Samsung.

<10% of Google's total revenue comes from Samsung devices >40% of Samsung's NET REVENUE comes from selling Android devices.

It's almost as if Samsung is a lot more dependent on Google than the other way around.

At the end of the day - the majority of people you default to Bing search are going to switch back to Google. Samsung will be lucky to get a meaningful amount of money.

MSFT can't outbid Google because they can't make as much money from the searches as Google.

> It's almost as if Samsung is a lot more dependent on Google than the other way around.

in a pinch, Samsung could just fork the AOSP project and continue forward without Google, it would be trivial for app makers to re-publish their apps in a Samsung app store (and many already do)

Someone in Microsoft is going to deserve a huge bonus if they can talk Samsung into making a successor to Surface Duo.

Except they tried this several times, and it hasn't worked.

> there is no way Google will ever try to "strong arm" Samsung...Samsung is the Android market, the Pixel line is a rounding error and in no way a competitive threat

They've been strong-arming every Android OEM since the start (Google Mobile Services agreement). ("Strong arming" being closer to Apple exerting control vs. the wild west of pre-2007 cellphones.)

It's finally starting to bear fruit with things like Project Mainline and Project Treble, but the political winds have changed and I expect various Gov'ts to claw back the control Google has on OEMs over the next decade. Whether Google can continue their efforts to ensure a stable Android platform is an open question after that.

I can't point to anything specific since I'm rushing this comment, but it should be fairly obvious that Google lets OEMs do things their own way until the dust settles and Google synthesizes the different approaches into the "official" AOSP way.

I'm not sure any actual code from OneUI has made it into Android, that would surprise me. Google really likes doing things "their way" in Android. The Android team takes UI inspiration from everyone, but most of their eyeball time is on Apple.

An extremely second rate phone platform compared to iOS where the customers don’t spend nearly as much money and they have minimal control over their hardware partners.

.. which owns 80% of the market. Maybe iOS users spend more on hardware & apps but everyone spends money online shopping

Then linux should be a second rate platform since no one spend enough money and there is zero control over what it runs on.

Android is also technically more advanced than anything Apple in pure versatility and user control. Apple execs might get nightmares if someone suggested giving more control to their user. I can stay in the walled garden or play outside with naughty apps and emulators. Android's safety model is not based on restricting what the user can do. Security by obscurity is the least one can do.

I understand everyone has a phone choice and some people prefer their phone less sophisticated or less feature rich or more basic.

But just because you prefer something so reduced in functionality that it's a waste of the incredible silicon powering it does not mean you can belittle something far more capable. Especially in a developer oriented website.

It does, and funny enough that Antitrust lawsuit against MSFT bundling IE in Windows may end up helping them here.

Most of Android is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. So while the word "owns" is true in a technical legal sense, there is nothing to prevent anyone from forking it and doing their own thing. Unlike with GPL code, they don't even need to license their changes under the same license as long as they abide the terms with respects to the original.

Personally I use GrapheneOS in order to "de-Google" without switching to the Apple ecosystem. No Google Play (you can install it but I choose not to), FOSS apps only. I don't recommend it for everyone but it made me not hate owning a smart phone for the first time since the "mobile revolution" passed my old grumpy self by.

I've been looking at it. Ironically, you needed a Google Pixel to run it last I checked, right?

Yup - Google made the best de-googleable phone.

They did and I bought a used pixel6 just to switch to graphene. The problem is that the next pixel will likely be much more difficult to do this with because google is going to not not be evil.

The Pixel 7 is also supported by Graphene OS.

I meant the next one to come out. The 7 was already out when I got my 6.

And a recent one that is. Almost as funny as having to buy a macbook to run linux.....

Yes that is ironic. As someone else said, Google made the best de-Google-able phone. But from what I gather they chose it because of the specific hardware features and they need to restrict what they support to keep the project manageable and maintainable.

I bought mine outright and wiped the Pixel version of Android and am pretty happy. To be clear, I wasn't trying to avoid giving Google money ... I just wanted a phone and operating system that I felt like I had control of, without having a ton of bloatware and spyware pre-installed by the vendor etc.

I trust Google's incentives to have secure hardware as much as I trust them to have disrespectful software (privacy).

> you needed a Google Pixel to run it

That's correct. It's my understanding that this is for two reasons:

1) google opened api/support for verified boot on the pixels (so you can tell if a border agent hacked your grapheneos phone, for example)

2) it's easier to support fewer phone models (given they are not a large team)

I bought a refurbished pixel 3a last year for a little over $100 and have been thrilled with my grapheneos experience. I don't run google play, but it is my understanding this can be done in a sandbox (allowing for more privacy than usual).

This doesn’t change anything about the comment that you’re replying to.

Really?! You mean that my offering additional information and context didn't magically alter the very nature of time itself, thus causing the characters that they typed to change representation in Hacker News' database? You don't say! (do I need a /s indicator?)

And what value, exactly, does your comment add to the conversation?

It seems like it does.

> paying Samsung for staying on Android with Google Search

> google still owns android

> Personally I use GrapheneOS in order to "de-Google"

It doesn't matter that Google owns Android if Samsung can make their own fork of Android that doesn't use Google stuff by default. Is there something that would prevent Samsung from creating their own app store?

Samsung already has their own app store (Galaxy Store) alongside the Play Store. Have only used it personally to download/update Samsung specific apps however.

Look how well Huawei smartphones are selling in the west (not well at all). And that's not because of lack of trying, I've been on a team where everybody agreed that supporting their phones had zero upside outside of the cash Huawei offered for a port of our apps. And we did it, only because they paid so much. And those were laughably unattractive apps (think yellow pages), I can't even start to imagine what they must have spent in other directions.

Huawei was selling well in the west until the US Gov't blocked them.

https://www.economist.com/business/2022/10/25/ren-zhengfei-h...

https://archive.is/YGPFT

Because they used to have Google's play store and other services. Parent commenter's point is that a manufacturer having the open source parts of Android isn't necessarily worth much on its own.

> Personally I use GrapheneOS in order to "de-Google" without switching to the Apple ecosystem. No Google Play (you can install it but I choose not to), FOSS apps only.

This is only valid for power users. Normal users would probably never accept a phone without Google Play Services running on it, with Amazon's devices being the exception (and don't ask me why, because I don't get it.)

> Amazon's devices being the exception (and don't ask me why, because I don't get it.)

IMO, narrow use cases and cheapness.

My impression is people buy a Fire Tablet because:

* They want to read/browse the web/use a few basic social media apps

* They want something for their kid

Fire Tablets are never a primary device, so it's okay to have trade-offs.

Of course this is true, that is why it's a real threat when a company like Samsung, with the resources and money to make these things convenient/unnoticeable to normal users is a real problem to Google

> Personally I use GrapheneOS in order to "de-Google" without switching to the Apple ecosystem.

GrapheneOS only supports Google devices like the Pixel though. It's the only reason I'm considering buying one.

Google have done a great job over the last ten years of making Android pretty unusable without Google's proprietary software on it. Don't have Google Play Services (Proprietary) then no access to push notifications, maps APIs etc etc. Yes, Vanilla Android works, but it's rough as guts. And who'd want to buy a phone where push messages for Facebook/Instagram etc don't work? Very few people.

What could they possibly do with that that doesn't violate an anti-trust law?

I’d bet Microsoft will gladly match all of Google’s offers here.

Just the payment to Apple would be significantly more than their 2022 search revenue. I wouldn't be shocked but it would be a pretty big gamble.

The gamble didn't work out well the last time someone tried it, which was Yahoo buying the default search on Firefox.

That’s more because it was a bet on the wrong horse. If you know how to install Firefox you probably know what search engine you are using and how to switch the default search engine.

Isn't installing Firefox the same as installing any other browser?

It's not the default browser on most devices. I think the parent comment is stating that if you're technical enough to install a 3rd party browser, you're technical enough to pick your own search engine. So people chose Firefox and chose away from Yahoo

I think Firefox users have now reduced to geeks and some 'real FOSS' enthusiasts etc. I still use Firefox as my primary browser, but I haven't seen any non-tech person installing it for a long time now. They all just search for Chrome and download, install that. So in today's times if someone's installing Firefox I'd say they'd mostly know their way around.

Probably, though taking the lower offer from Google means no change for end users, and thus probably less risk for Samsung.

If Samsung is smart, then they ensure that their users gets access to new Bing as default, which means that even if people switch back (read get their nerdy friends to switch them back) they will find that Google is missing quite a lot.

Why? Google makes a shit ton of money from Search, Microsoft doesn't.

The whole Bing AI stuff is already a huge money sink for them, how much can they afford to throw into this pit before investors start being worried?

As far as investor buzz is concerned, Microsoft has a lot of positive sentiment compared to Google.

Perhaps ironically it’s because Google’s search tailors it’s results to show me those results that paint MSFT in a positive light.

I can also see Generative AI providing some real amazing features with near OS level integration. Imagine being able to quickly draft business emails from your mobile device?

I don’t think Apple will have anything that amazing anytime soon so us iOS users will be stuck with using 3rd party apps, but I could see Samsung trying to distinguish their handsets with additional software capabilities not found in Android.

Google makes a shit ton of money from Search, Microsoft doesn't.

If Bing had more users the Microsoft would make more money from it, and vice verse for Google. Their respective sizes are a reason for Microsoft to grow Bing, not a reason to turn Samsung away.

Microsoft are investing $10b in OpenAI partly to make Bing better. That is not a sign they're happy with Bing's market share. They're coming for Google, albeit with an oblique strategy rather than competing directly.

how much can they afford to throw into this pit before investors start being worried

A lot, for a really long time. Microsoft have plenty of money and a history of playing a long game successfully. Have a look at Xbox if you want an example of Microsoft spending a lot of money for a very long time and coming out ahead in the end.

So what changed? Why didn't they before?

In the past Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, etc. have frequently gotten outbidded by Google for similar deals.

Probably because those provided subpar user experience.

Pure speculation—MSFT probably nailed the demo and impressed Samsung execs.

Google's offers to Android OEMs often mix search revenue, app store revenue, and ad revenue... a tying nightmare. Google is now under significantly increased scrutiny for how they manage these deals, they've gotten in trouble for destroying evidence and will now have even more incriminating evidence for future arrangements... it's a great time to press Google for a better deal because their hands are tied.

Is GCP really a failure? I think the product is OK and they seem to have some big customers. They're maybe #3 in the space, but you can make a lot of money without being #1.

Yes, we all hate their support structure (it goes through SADA), but the price is right. At my last company with 4 engineers we were paying AWS ~$1000/month for support. At my current company back when we had a cloud service on GCP, we got weekly calls with support for $0/month. Folks at Google also seemed to approve my weird resource requests (tons of GPUs in the midst of a GPU shortage, etc.) without me going through any back channels. I didn't find it terrible to work with at all, and it was much cheaper than AWS.

I'd call being half of Azure's market share today a failure. Hell, they were better-positioned than Amazon to offer an AWS-like product when AWS itself came out.

Honestly, with any vendor not named AWS, it's incredibly difficult to parse their actual "cloud" revenue. I believe Microsoft bundles in their Office 365 revenue just as Google does Docs. IBM stuffs in all sorts of seemingly unrelated stuff to make their numbers sound bigger. It's actually difficult to compare apples-to-apples because of all the gamesmanship.

Companies think they are simplifying things by using Azure since they already rely so heavily on MS software. That's pretty much the only reason Azure is more popular. GCP is a far better platform.

Not so sure about that. Their infrastructure is highly customized down to the PCB. They were designed in-house for Google's workloads, AFAIK.

Did Amazon have the same constraints?

Apparently not. According to Steve Yegge's letter about Google+ (copy at https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611), one of the mandates Jeff have asked is to ensure that "All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.", while on the same letter his impression of Google is basically on the other side of Amazon's spectrum, even describing how bad Google's documentation at the time compared to Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft.

I am curious why you find it cheaper than AWS. Are you sure the application didn't change and was at the same scale?

In my experience, GCP and AWS are within a tiny % of each other.

Its way easier to define exactly what kind of instances you need in GCP in my experience. Need more RAM? Just add a bit more RAM, don't need to completely double it along with double the CPU and double the networking and what not. Just need one more CPU core? Done.

Then the reliability of GCP is a good bit higher. gp3 has 99.8% durability. I've seen several EBS volumes just disappear. Not deleted, just become permanently gone due to hardware failures. Compare that to 99.999% durability on GCP. You're spending several times for extra redundancy and complexity per gig on AWS just to come close to the durability to GCP.

If I have a choice between AWS and GCP, and unless I've got some specific product need for AWS, I'd probably go with GCP every time. It's such a better product IMO.

> Yes, we all hate their support structure (it goes through SADA)

SADA (and their competitor DoIT) are just resellers. Support doesn't inherently go through them. That's a decision your company makes. It's generally not a great decision either, in my opinion, as those resellers add a lot of opacity between you and your cloud provider. Google recommends them because it's easier for them.

The frenemy status of Google-Samsung is once again on display. Samsung probably hasn't been happy with the Google's continued Pixel phone push :p

But why is Google paying Apple to be the default search engine on iOS devices?

It seems a waste of money as Apple would be stupid to default to any other search engine given the lower search quality results. End users would notice if there was a result degradation and likely switch their default. Google seems to be playing the "Intel Inside" part without reaping the marketing benefits and only paying the traffic acquisition costs.

Apple may not consider any other default search engine only in the absence of a search engine other than google offering a pot of money to be the default search engine.

so without a default search engine what happens when you type some words in the address bar like every user has been trained to do?

The first time, you're presented with a prompt to choose your default search engine.

Or they’d ask users which search engine they’d prefer. Likely a non small amount would prefer chat-Bing just to try it out

If Samsung really wasn't happy, they wouldn't be manufacturing Google's phones and providing custom silicon. I think the Pixel phones are a blip on Samsung's radar in terms of competition.

Samsung also tried to push their own mobile OS for a long while after android become dominant. Samsung is large enough that it's hard to tell overarching strategy though.

Apple could spin up a better search engine than Google in a swirley. The big question is why haven't they!?

They already have one -- it's the iOS spotlight Web search

> in a swirley

What does this even mean?

Because they can't do it "in a swirly." It took them many years and a tremendous amount of money for Apple Maps to not be laughably bad.

They can absolutely build a solid search engine with enough money and time, but what would be gained? It's better to just collect Google's checks.

Why can't they do it? A tiny boot strapped company like Kagi has already made a much better search engine than Google. Are no good engineers working at Apple, or what is missing in the equation?

> but what would be gained?

People needing to buy an Apple device to reap the benefits of the internet, as Google continues to sink into their SEO-optimized malware swamp.

Siri can’t even find anything useful on my phone…

You realize that before google paid, microsoft actually did it and bing was used in Siri even, right?

When I saw the title it reminded me of the 20+ years we'd see almost bi-annual news articles about how Dell was considering adding AMD chips to their line-up.

They'd do that, Intel would offer them a discount, and that'd be the last we'd hear of it for a year or so, until that discount would be expiring.

IIRC someone at Intel once said that Dell is the “best friend money can buy” in an internal email that came out when Intel was being investigated for anti-competitive practices.

Google is losing its competitive advantage in the search space. DDG and Bing are very strong competitors for the typical web search usecase.

External forces of economic and technical nature are not in their favor. Internal forces from politics, leadership and management issues are surfacing.

This does not sound good for Google. Almost like it will implode.

> This is basically Samsung asking Google to pay up

True, but Samsung isn't known for user-friendly phones, and they often come with a lot of bloat. At some point, it drives more and more users to Pixel.

I moved to Samsung from Apple and that wasn't my experience at all.

There's a separate Samsung version of every core Google Android app, a separate Samsung account system to sync everything, and a Samsung launcher. Mind you, I personally use none of it (except launcher), but that's basically the definition of Android bloat.

I'd expect bloatware to be unnecessary software. To a user who is not familiar with google's offering, the bloat doesn't exist, they don't see two different softwares. Samsung phones don't have two messaging apps, gallery, or phone app

Not including google's version doesn't equate to bloat. In fact, the opposite is true.

If I have to resort to dev mode to remove things I don't need, then to me it's bloat. Those things aren't there in vanilla Android.

I'm still using Samsung hardware and I like it, but it's got a little bloat goin on

Samsung is known for adding a more user friendly version of everything that comes from stock Android.

(Personally, I disagree, but this seems to be almost unanimous. Even for people that don't buy their phones.)

I guess one man's trash is another man's treasure. I like Samsung Health application and use it daily. I even had purchased something called RunKepper but stopped using it in favour of Samsung app.

That hasn't been my experience at all. If anything, they are more userfriendly than other phones I have used. One thing in particular that is very nice is that everything is accessible on the larger screen sizes, action centers, call logs, messages, everything is designed to be accessible when holding your phone with one hand without having to awkwardly reach the top.

Except Samsung sells orders of magnitude more phones than Google does.

I don’t like the Samsung inference either, but millions and millions of people don’t just like it, they prefer it. They buy the phones specifically because they know how to use it. They aren’t loyal to Android, they are loyal to the Galaxy line.

Can confirm, having used several android phones across the last decade I can tell the most consistent Android experience is delivered by Samsung

Try a Pixel. None of the Samsung bloat and most importantly, no Bixby constantly getting in the way of the vastly superior Google Assistant already baked into android.

I have a recent Samsung Galaxy and haven't once accidentally triggered Bixby. Long press on home button is google assistant. I'm sure I disabled some Bixby settings when I set up the phone but at this point I don't know how to open it even if I tried.

Must have changed in the years since I had one. They had a dedicated Bixby button that you couldn't assign to anything else and updates to Bixby would constantly mess with settings related to activating Google Assistant. Good to know things have gotten better.

Samsung is consistent but with bloats. Pixel is somewhat inconsistent with very few bloats.

Pixel is known for amount of bugs and issues after the release. Also they release them in a handful of countries. It's not realistically viable alternative to Samsung when most of the world can't get it officially...

That used to be the case almost a decade ago, but everything is the past 5 years has been good in terms of user experience and little bloat.

They can go ahead and put an extra gig of basic apps on there as long as they keep making models with microsd slots.

> AWS or Azure

I was recently in the market for a basic VPS, and Azure is absolutely awful for this use. The most bloated complicated signup and setup process I have experienced in a long time. Google was tolerable. Of the three amazon lightsail was the best, but even that loses to something like digital ocean

I often see products optimise for the "get-started-quick" part, which is often 0.1% of the total experience. For example, reviews of operating systems often focus more than 50% of the content on the upgrade or installation process, even though that's actually a rare operation.

Azure focuses on Microsoft's large enterprise customers. They want guard rails, separation of responsibilities, policy, compliance controls, etc...

Nothing to do with the process required to get 1 VM up and running from scratch, including signing up. Their bread & butter customers have enterprise agreements in place already for Office and Windows licensing!

I always thought that Google made a big blunder by not encroaching upon Microsoft's turf more aggressively. They should have tried to make a better desktop OS (just buy Canonical or something) and then eat into Microsoft Office market share by releasing Google Office for Desktop. Wait for an opportunity to emerge and then pounce.

This is precisely what Microsoft did to Google. They had Bing running in the background for years losing truckloads of money. Now that AI has upset the applecart, they can use Bing to choke off Google's airsupply.

One of the reasons for Google getting so good early on was that they had oodles of usage data to test and improve their search functionality forming a positive feedback loop. Now, with deals such as this, Microsoft will have more data to tune their engine while Google is left on the sidelines.

Let's just hope that the AI driven search revolution does not produce a monopoly.

ChromeOS and Google Docs?

> just buy Canonical or something

Canonical doesn't really make any things that are considered part of a desktop OS. Ubuntu is just a package (and some argue a bad one) of things made by other people.

There's very little value in the Linux desktop and I don't see that changing anytime soon. You're probably best re-inventing the wheel if you want a Windows competitor, like Google did with ChromeOS.

They surely do, its reason to fame is being the best distribution supporting OEM devices without religion regarding open source drivers.

They're using a package manager that a lot of people are comfortable with, they give away their packages without subscriptions and they work with some OEMs.

But in reality, the hardware support is in the kernel, so any distro with a more up2date kernel would fare at least as good. As for the software Canonical produces, I'm not great friends with anything. Snap is crap, Netplan is just a renderer to systemd-networkd or networkmanager, MAAS is a pile of garbage, Juju never caught on, upstart failed, Unity failed etc...

We're running a lot of Canonical at work and I'm not particularly impressed.

Nope in what concerns proprietary drivers and FOSS drama.

There is a reason why Canonical was the first option when Microsoft introduced WSL.

A canonical engineer did fix a kernel bug that prevented my laptop from booting on newer kernel versions. And they do develop their own software, too. Saying that they are "just a package" is not giving them enough credit.

> There's very little value in the Linux desktop

There's a tremendous amount of value in the Linux desktop. It's used to do amazing things every day.

What you mean is that it's very hard to turn it into a business model, which I'd agree with. But these are not the same in the world.

To you and me, sure, there is value in a linux desktop.

To the average user, linux is not in any state to be a useable, daily driver desktop. Where it works, it is the exception, not the norm.

Taking linux and turning it into a business model can be done - see valve and the steam deck. Granted, that is gaming-only but it can be done. The #1 problem with the linux desktop is that there is no single linux desktop and things break far too often.

> To you and me, sure, there is value in a linux desktop.

"You and me" is actually not a small or meaningless demographic. It includes my thousands of colleagues at Mercedes-Benz who use Linux desktops to do engineering work, and millions of other developers. It means a lot of scientists, for example at NASA and CERN. It means a lot of school students and government employees in educational and other municipal deployments.

A lot of the places where Linux is used is for roles that act as multiplicators, e.g. in the development and production of end-user products, or research/science/RD that will lead to new ones, or in educating the people who will one day make new ones.

All of this is a lot of value if you sum it up. There may be no single shining CEO and his shareholders getting rich off of the Linux desktop in the way we're used to fawning over in the tech hustle news cycle. But the world at large almost certainly is. I submit that's a fine success metric.

> To the average user, linux is not in any state to be a useable, daily driver desktop.

For many users it's today more reliable than contemporary Windows. Ten years ago, the Linux desktop experience for a non-technical user was death by a thousand papercuts. Today there are still some gaps in HW support that can create unsolvables, but if your machine is well-supported, things work just fine.

What's mainly keeping it back is many other factors, from channel availability to software availability.

> see valve and the steam deck

:-) I worked on the Steam Deck as CTO of one of Valve's contractors on the project. Glad you like it.

In 2023, Linux on the desktop is merely death by a hundred papercuts instead of a thousand. Progress!

You may be snarky, but it is actually meaningful progress.

My first attempt on Linux was 20 years ago, before I was a technical user. It was a nightmare. Getting my mouse to work was impossible. Even figuring out how to turn the computer off so I could reinstall Windows was a pain.

I came back to Linux some 8 years ago, already as a Developer. Installed Ubuntu. Everything hardware worked well, no need to tinker around. Usability was good and somewhat intuitive, but it took me some time to adjust. I enjoyed it for programming, but not being able to play most games I care about limited my use, and I kept Windows in dual boot.

Nowadays I use Linux Mint as my only OS. It's objectively better than Windows in every way. For regular usage I don't even need to tinker with anything. Although I like the terminal and prefer using it, I can totally see how an average user can get by without touching it at all. I need only to tinker a little to get certain games running, and that's all.

> -) I worked on the Steam Deck as CTO of one of Valve's contractors on the project. Glad you like it.

Not who you're responding to, but I am extremely grateful for the work that was put to make gaming on Linux possible.

I may not own a Steam Deck, but it's development allowed me to switch entirely to Linux without looking back.

> To the average user, linux is not in any state to be a useable, daily driver desktop.

I've switched about a dozen average users to Linux from Windows, and they have all been happy with the change and have not switched back.

Based on that, I say that Linux absolutely is usable as a daily driver desktop. The only place I can see where Linux might not be the right choice is with a certain class of gamer -- but those gamers are not "average users".

> The #1 problem with the linux desktop is that there is no single linux desktop

That's a strength, not a weakness. For the user want a windows-like desktop? Done. Does the user want something more to their style of working? Done. Not being locked into the desktop means that if your objection to desktop linux is the UX, there's probably a different desktop that will make you happier.

If it takes someone to show you how, it is not there yet. I know many technical people who can't be bothered to deal with Linux on the desktop due to driver issues et al

For it to be ready to be a mainstream desktop, it needs to just work.

> If it takes someone to show you how, it is not there yet.

How many average users install Windows by themselves? Most people just take their Windows laptop to a store/service provider for maintenance, buy a new PC because "the old one is slow now" or have their nerdy fam member once a year remove mal/spy/adware and run a reg cleaner. And yes, show them things.

Like OP, I've converted many family members over the years to Linux desktops, and as the resident nerdy family member, the amount of maintenance and assistance I need to provide has gone down very decently vs. supporting family Windows sytems.

My 70+ mother in law has no problems using a Linux desktop to run her book club and other things she needs to do, but is far less likely to accidentally install malware. I used to come back to these systems a year later and find a system tray full of 20 new icons, a stack of 5 new browser toolbars, ad popups and "install new version" popups galore and other horrific stuff that needed hours to clean up or required a wipe and reinstall.

There's a lot of Windows users on the fence about Linux that absolutely underestimate how technical they are and how much active and passive maintenance they do on their Windows systems. Are you a tech user who reads The Verge or Ars Technica and knows in advance about that bad new option in the new Win11 update that you will switch of day 0? Do you have your mental laundry list of five settings you change in every new Windows system you acquire? Most Windows users are and do not.

The truth is, a lot of people have a working body of knowledge about how to admin and keep alive a Windows system, and a Linux switch requires re-learning and re-acquiring similar knowledge at times. And it's absolutely fine if you don't have the time to do that. There's value to that existing body of knowledge, and there is a switching cost. Some people have better things to do than installing Linux. But Windows is not magically maintenance/upkeep/difficulty-free.

> If it takes someone to show you how, it is not there yet

Installing Windows is a more complicated and confusing job than installing Linux. The people who have to be shown how to install Linux also have to be shown how to install Windows.

The fact is that I don't really show them how to install and configure this stuff -- it's really very easy. What I do is hold their hand to get them past the fear of the unknown.

Valve turned it into a business model just fine. Their long-term goal is to not be dependent on proprietary OSes and this is why Linux is installed on Steam Deck by default.

> There's very little value in the Linux desktop and I don't see that changing anytime soon

Only because no-one has disrupted the market. Typical case of “Who would pay for a Mantis open-source bugtracker”, then Jira appear and companies purchase it.

What you mean is, who would pay for Ubuntu. But I’d pay for an open-source macOS, with online backups, video editing and SSO for my IT fleet, anything that doesn’t look like Ubuntu.

I see no value in the Windows desktop. For my tasks.

> better desktop OS

> Google

It wouldn't be an OS, it would be a casino full of flashy ads. The worst company for anything business critical. Ads - yes, email - ok, anything else - never. They get away with Android because it's mostly a consumer market.

Did you use Windows recently? https://uk.pcmag.com/migrated-3765-windows-10/132748/how-to-...

Was about to post the same thing. Windows is infuriating for me not because I dislike ads per se, but it triggers all sorts of ADD behavior in my brain -- try to open an application, and "ohh, what's Tom Cruise up to today?!".

Windows is already crapped up with flashy ads; it's a pretty damn low bar.

Having deployed Chromebooks into corporate and education, there's less ad content there than on a Windows machine... by oodles. In fact, the only place a stock Chromebook has ads is on websites, in the browser and I believe on a personal install it tries to sell you a subscription to Google's cloud service for extra storage. Once you start installing apps, well, your mileage will vary.

Having used Android as my daily driver since Android 1.3, again, the default experience is pretty much ad-free. I've even used Android in "desktop mode" where you connect a display, keyboard and mouse and used windowed Android apps. When you start installing apps, or if you buy a device with non-default apps installed (i.e. the mobile carrier install as infested crap). In that case you can disable or uninstall that app and move on.

> The worst company for anything business critical. Ads - yes, email - ok, anything else - never.

While Google does have a history of cancelling some well-loved products (like Reader), Google Apps (Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Presentations, etc...) has been solid for a decade. The live, multiuser, real-time editing and versioning is a wonderful feature for collaboration. Also, Google has been very reasonable on pricing, and after six years of running three companies on Google Worplace/Apps, I'm very impressed with the reliability of Google Workplace (what they are now calling Apps).

Have you actually used Chrome OS? It's not like this at all. I would imagine the same approach would be taken on a fully featured OS.

Ironically Windows is the OS that is full of shit ads these days, not Google's OS.

Desktop market share moves very slowly. A 1% shift per year is a big move last I looked. ChromeOS is doing about as well as possible gaining share.

ChromeOS is only in the market because they have cheap laptops that schools bought up. And not a single student I know would ever use one outside of school.

Which is kind of depressing. I get public schools have budgetary needs and I suppose Chromebooks are perfectly appropriate for Elementary and (maybe) Middle Schoolers (my kid has one, he's in 2nd grade and its fine) but they should really consider supplying real laptops to the High Schoolers so they learn on hardware and software used in the real world.

cornering the market on educational computers is nothing to sneeze at.

Also "worst gaming device" is a feature, not a bug in that market.

Where do you see ChromeOS and Google Office as falling flat in that regard? Desktops are pretty smaller in market size compared to laptops these days.

Desktop = Laptop

God, I wish that were true.

Ask me how many times I've effed up the battery and sleep configuration upgrading Linux on a desktop vs a laptop.

Relative to desktops, laptops tend to be quirky little things because the heavy constraints of form factor, power, and weight result in engineering trade-offs and outright hacks that aren't necessary in the desktop ecosystem.

Okay. You’ve immediately alienated all but the smallest minority of users to draw a distinction that most people just flat out don’t experience.

It's not invalid though. Those are the reasons I stopped trying to use Linux on a laptop.

Linux is not relevant to the discussion.

By desktop app they don't mean an app that runs on desktop computers only. They mean an app that runs locally and not web-based. Office 365 desktop vs Office 365 web portal. Google doesn't offer anything but web based.

I'm not sure that would have changed anything, though. Their main loss is that ChromeOS isn't marketed as 'business-oriented' but that's probably because you can't market it to businesses when tons of legacy software doesn't run, and accountants still tend to prefer Excel over sheets (in my experience). But when businesses do use GWorkspace products, it's not an issue that it all happens within the browser.

You haven't been in a business environment then. Almost all of the users whine about having to use Google's Web Apps and prefer the desktop version of 365. Microsoft absolutely dominates in the enterprise environment. We have both, just because department will not use the Google Apps. They'll accept Gmail but that's it.

You are misattributing the cause. It’s not because they’re web-based, it’s because they aren’t *really^ Word, Excel, etc. I’ve shot myself in the foot one too many times with the web-based Office suite. There’s a reason there’s a nice big button to bounce you to the desktop applications - for when you need to do something they didn’t bother putting in the web version.

Eh... I think it's both. A lot of end-users don't understand understand what a web browser is. The older crowd is completely weirded out about running an app in their browser.

It could just be my circle of influence which is mostly SWEs, but nobody complains about Google and most prefer it. Maybe it's because doing anything on the web version of M365 is hell on earth if you have the audacity to be signed into more than one account at once.

You think the chief users of Office apps are software developers?

I don't think software developers are a good measure. They're not heavy users of any sort of word processing.

And as an an Admin, GMail is awful. Microsoft knows what admins need and give them to tools to do it. There is so much that can't be configured with GMail, and they don't even provide a proper cmd tool like Microsoft does with their powershell modules. The only option is "GAM", a third party not supported by Google project [0].

Another example, the default routing rules page in the admin console defaults to only showing 10 rules. Every time you add a rule, the pagination is reset, so you get lost where you are and can't even see the rule you literally just added.

And as an identity platform, Google is nothing compared to Okta or AAD. Whilst it's wonderful that Google login is everywhere now, I can't for example, request the user do 2FA for particular apps.

Even the admin console only requires 2FA once a month, it's ridiculous.

And don't get me started on "groups" still being attached to distribution lists out of the 60s [1]. Or the inability to have shared mailboxes.

No one should ever choose Google Workspace over Office 365.

[0] https://support.google.com/a/answer/10014088?hl=en

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35070618

Yeah I agree. You shouldn't have to use 3rd party tools to administer Google Workspaces. I find myself using Advanced-GAM and BetterCloud far too often.

I'm trying to talk my boss into dumping Gmail and switching to Outlook. It's such a waste running 365 and Google.

I've specifically been using Azure as my "source of truth" because I think it's more likely we'll dump Google than we'll ever dump things like on-prem AD or Azure.

>and accountants still tend to prefer Excel over sheets (in my experience).

And it isn't because they didn't try Sheets. Lol. Nobody I know likes Google Sheets.

They basically copied the UX of Office 2003 and did nothing to improve upon it since it's initial release over a decade ago.

It's awful.

Shit, it still doesn't have the concept of tables like Excel does and you need to manually paint rows, manually find the hidden filter creation option for cells and manually refresh the table because the fitlers are kludged such that they don't automatically re-filter when you edit a row.

Even Mail Merging is awful. https://developers.google.com/apps-script/samples/automation...

Like, you don't need a programming degree to mail merge in Office but you do for Google Sheets because it's a script instead of built-in feature.

I love Google Docs and Sheets and hate Word and Excel.

You're probably in the tech field so you're not a good measure of the average white collar office worker.

> They basically copied the UX of Office 2003 and did nothing to improve upon it since it's initial release over a decade ago.

> It's awful.

On the contrary, sounds marvellous.

> Shit, it still doesn't have the concept of tables like Excel does

Sounds utterly weird. Spreadsheets already are tables, so WTF is the use of a “separate concept of tables” within your tables? Seems to be geared towards creating confusion.

(Or are you just taking about some newfangled moniker for named ranges?)

Laptops are desktops.

In regards to ChromeOS, it hardly matters outside the US school system and Googleplex.

For me, one of the things that has stopped me from even trying ChromeOS is that is/meant to be 100% cloud which means no local storage and since I code for a living having things locally is a must for me.

It makes 100% sense in Schools and other places where you want to be able to reset the OS constantly and stop people from breaking it. I think for facebook machine's it would do well too but again I think alot of people will want to have local storage.

> For me, one of the things that has stopped me from even trying ChromeOS is that is/meant to be 100% cloud which means no local storage

I've had a Pixelbook for 4.5 years -- a Google product, so arguably as it's "meant to be" -- and it has 128GB of local storage, and I believe you can get them with up to 512GB. Coding locally using Linux VMs/containers is actually pretty pleasant IME (albeit I don't do frontend work).

Chrome OS deals decently with local file. This is the same way Chrome deals with local stuff anywhere else.

I think people underestimate what ChromeOS can do by a lot. There's the android subsytem coming with it, along with an optional linux subsystem, so all in all it covers a lot of ground.

That said, it's still limited a lot by Google not going the full length and having half baked support for a lot of things. Access to the bluetooth stack is pretty random for android apps for instance. Then Chromebooks are mostly low power machines, so the linux substack only helps that much.

Tablet mode support is too weak to take full advantage of the different form factors. ChromeOS isn't configurable enough to alternative keyboard configs, system wide shortcuts etc.

All in all, it has so much promises, only half delivered. But the half we have now is still pretty decent IMHO.

>I think people underestimate what ChromeOS can do by a lot. There's the android subsytem coming with it, along with an optional linux subsystem, so all in all it covers a lot of ground.

First impressions are everything.

ChromeOS's first impression was that it's Chrome in OS form with no local compute whatsoever; everything is done via the internet, aka the cloud.

That is not strictly the case anymore, but changing first impressions simply is not trivial.

Higher end Chromebooks also rival low- to middle-tier Windows laptops in price, and if you're paying top dollar why not buy the latter and have access to the much more capable Windows ecosystem instead?

Android and Crostini are only on some flagship devices.

And even in those, the lilliput SSD sizes make them hardly workable versus w regular laptop for the same price range.

That's not accurate, my device a Lenovo Chromebook S345 supports linux containers & android apps and is absolutely not a flagship. You'd struggle to run windows on a similarly priced laptop (cost me £150 a year ago).

It definitely is for the random devices being sold on German stores, usually with repeated discounts until finally someone takes them away.

Most of the time it is not possible to enable it.

On the SSD size, it's often the RAM that's really limiting for the linux subsystem. It's the same issue as on cheap windows laptops, only a tad better as ChromeOS is more frugal and orchestrates resources more aggressively.

Most cheap Windows devices come with 512GB.

Chrome being frugal, that is interesting. Maybe Electron devs could take some tips from ChromeOS.

Chrome OS devices have local storage. Premium ones (which are not even that expensive, in the $500+ price tier) have a 256GB SSD for local storage. This at least has not been my issue with Chrome OS.

For that price I rather pay for a proper OS, with at least a 512SSD and hardware not constrained to Web API capabilities.

Google docs/etc are totally eating into Microsoft Office's market share. I can't remember the last company I was at where they expected us to use Microsoft office products. But we used Google docs,sheets,etc constantly.

For big corporates, it is still 100% Microsoft Office and 0% Google Workspace. Email is still 100% Microsoft Outlook/Exchange. That said, for small to medium, Google must be eating into MSFT, but I don't have any visibility.

As someone that works at an IT company, not a software company, Almost every customer that started with google is switching to o365. Nearly 99% of our clients are on o365 or are switching from on-prem exchange to o365. I can see maybe the bubble of silicon valley might be more oriented toward google, but the vast majority of businesses continue to migrate to o365.

O365 is really starting to get tons of traction even with the mid-sized companies.

M365 the far superior solution to many business problems. As a long-time paying gmail customer I'm also moving away. It looks like Google didn't improve UI in their admin menus for at least a decade.

Some people would pay extra to not have the UI change every couple of years. As someone who no longer regularly uses Windows it drives me nuts to try to find anything in their web apps or settings interfaces.

Do you prefer it, or is it simply a cost saving measure? GSuite is substandard even compared to Open Office.

The only benefit, and it may be a big one, is real time collaboration and document sharing.

O365 has the same real time collaboration and document sharing. I worked at one company they were originally on Google had to share the enterprise plan by the parent company for “money reasons”. People just kept using Google until the account was closed 12 months after migrating. When I left they were going back to Google.

My current employer is pushing us to Office 365. We have a lot of meetings that center around a shared document. The syncing in Word is extremely slow and in Excel we gave up on it entirely because we got constant merge conflicts with no clear way off fixing them. Outlook web is very slow and sometimes stopped fetching new emails till you reload. Meanwhile outlook for Mac silently doesn't show more than ten all-day events which lead to massive confusion during the holidays with our shared OoO calendar.

I understand that some might see offline storage and editing as advantages, but I've only seen it create chaos. It makes the file save dialog much more complex and I constantly have non-technical users mail files around like it's the 90s because they don't understand how to share it properly.

I'm very confused to see people pushing O365 as a viable alternative to GSuite for collaborative documents. It's not even close.

It’s really not that hard to find data on GSuite vs Office market share that isn’t anecdotal

https://www.saasgenius.com/blog/why-office-365-is-overtaking...

The only "data" I see there is a couple survey results from 2016.

Major enterprises are not going to GSuite.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3637079/as-google-move...

> Google grew its share of the productivity software market to 10.3% in 2020, according to research from Gartner, taking about 2% from Microsoft. Microsoft is still the clear leader however, with 89.2%. Overall, the productivity software suite market grew 18.2% during 2020.

My point wasn’t about the market share, it was that you decided to be condescending about not having relevant data, and then you also failed to provide any :)

For a business environment, Google Office is terrible compared to MS Office.

The features and functionally of Google office are very limited, especially when you compare Sheets to Excel

This is the only part they aren't on caliber in most cases. I rarely hear Slides or Docs isn't as good as PowerPoint or Word (even though, at least on paper, Word and Powerpoint have more features).

It seems that the sticky moat is Excel (and to a lesser extent but gaining somewhat rapidly, the Teams integration into 365. Google has blown it on being the enterprise chat solution).

Seems Google could chase this to close this, but Microsoft Excel is just absolutely sticky

Word is too, at least for lawyers. A whole generation of lawyers has spent 20 years learning the intricacies of cross-references, page/section numbering, styles and formatting. While some of that is possible in Google Docs, it's clumsy and uses much different conventions.

Just to clarify, I do know that Word fills some niches better (through both feature set and inertia). I know there are universities that still send their post doc writing standards out as word templates and they don't always translate well to Google Docs either.

That said, I think Excel is the exponentially higher case and hardest to replace. The niches filled by Word that Google Docs can't fill readily are pretty small comparatively. Excel has grown to mean so much more than just spreadsheets. Its pretty much a first line database to a huge amount of the business community, and still relied on across entire industries to do work, from wealth management to accounting to payroll to inventory etc.

I have, upon thinking about it as well, to hear any raised point about PowerPoint vs Google Slides where PowerPoint does something so niche that Slides doesn't and its a deal breaker, actually.

Or <null> to Visio. Visio is huge where I work. Being able to cut and paste technical diagrams into complex Word documents is a really important for our uses.

I have replaced visio with drawing.net for 90% of use cases

I can't tell if your sarcasm is top notch, but isn't Chromebooks and GSuite (docs, sheets, slides) exactly the thing you describe?

That's a stripped down OS running only a web browser and a bunch of webapps, not a real OS. Another one of those Google fantasies that failed to understand normal people.

What do you think Joe Sixpack runs on his computer these days? There are tons of people out there who do nothing but browse websites and use the "apps" as provided on those sites. They have no use for native Windows apps nor all the extra baggage that comes with it.

I wonder if it's more the fear of needing a desktop app one day again that you haven't started in years than the actual need for desktop apps.

That's a stupid over-generalization. There's always one shitty app you need for some weird use case which is not in the official stores. And to rule that out 100% by purchasing a chromebook is a hassle people don't want to worry about.

Yeah, most people shouldn't need more, but you're right. For example, to update the maps in our minivan's navigation system, I need to install some (crappy) Windows-only desktop application, "Garmin Express."

ChromeOS runs mobile apps from the Play Store, and Linux in a container.

Besides gaming people, I know very few people who need more. And gaming with webgl goes pretty far too. I think it works quite well; I don’t like it, or rather, actually hate it; I like optimal software against the hardware, but that is such a niche now. So just running everything in a browser is simply realistic and enough for most of the population. I think it sells quite well as well. I have a Chromebook which was cheap but it works very well. With GitHub spaces I am not sure if I will go back for many of the stuff I do; if I drop a pot of tea on it, it’s a short trip to the shop to get a new one and I will be back to work 30 min later.

Android and iOS work like that too of course. So maybe they should just switch to something like Dex instead as now you can run android apps in chromeos, so what’s the difference?

Windows is hopelessly overkill for most people.

Even gen-z still build their own PCs. It isn't as niche as often said. They would laugh in your face with the worst insults a 16 year old teenager can come up with if you offer them a chromebook. They would sell it to their wine-aunt (who happens to not run non-emulator windows emulators on Linux).

Sure, they also play Pokemon Go... although partially because they are not sitting in front of their PCs. Large market by volume, but more so for alternative situations.

Based. The kids are all right.

This is interesting insight. So Chromebooks aren't cool? I guess I can see that when every school is issuing Chromebooks to the kids these days. I remember Mac computers being uncool when I was a kid because that's what we had in the school computer lab in the 1990s, and they were locked down enough that it wasn't easy to do fun things on them.

"Wine-aunt" is new to me too, and funny (after looking up what it means).

I wouldn't say they aren't cool for them, but they too want to have powerful devices that do not lock them in too much.

Tell that to the scores of kids that have come up not understanding a filesystem because they just…haven’t needed to, in large part because they grew up using Chromebooks, happily.

Stop conflating yourself with a “normal person”. It’s quite clear from your comment that you’re anything but.

That might have been true years ago. It's currently leagues ahead of any other OS outside of Windows and Mac. It's still limited and quirky, but pretty much covers the basic needs of "normal" people.

> It's currently leagues ahead of any other OS outside of Windows and Mac.

Is ChromeOS really leagues ahead of Linux on the desktop? And other than Linux, how many other desktop OSes are there?

It heavily depends on what you do on linux, if you completely customized it to perfecfly fit your needs and only work with a stable set of programs, ChromeOS doesn't stand a chance.

For more "standard" users though, ChromeOS is very simple, has excelent touch support, battery management, a half baked but functional tablet mode, covers a lot of its ecosystem issues with the android subsytem, is fast to learn yet gives access to more power user features (including linux VMs). And it's of course very forgiving, as every regular apps are sandboxed. In that respect I see it succeeding where linux has been struggling for so long. TBH I was hoping Google made a decent iPad pro competitor based on ChromeOS, but I'm not holding my breath.

It's of course not perfect, far from it, but it's a pretty good computer experience IMHO. Linux has progressed a lot, but I still don't see the simplicity, versatility and forgiveness trio in a linux machine anytime soon.

On the other OSes, I didn't see it as desktop only, and iOS could have been a nice alternative, if Apple could have bothered (same for android and DEX). I actually think ChromeOS is a better choice than windows for light computer users, assuming Google doesn't throw the towel..

ChromeOS has for years supported a full linux shell in a chroot, with full X support. And even before that, it supported quite a bit through android apps. Your information is about ten years out of date.

Why hasn't Canonical been acquired yet?

maybe shuttleworth is not interested in selling?

>google

>making any product that lasts

that's a tough chance for OS.

it wouldn't hit growth targets after n-th year and would be remotely disabled by google worldwide.

>Google Office for Desktop. Wait for an opportunity to emerge and then pounce.

Microsoft Office has a lot of network effect surrounding it. Organizations use MS Office because the people who pay them (e.g., government or large corporations) use MS Office. I've tried switching away to LibreOffice or Google Docs/Sheets/Slides, and those are very likely to mangle layout and formatting when saving to DOCX/XLSX/PPTX. Not worth the hassle trying to troubleshoot why my government program managers aren't seeing what I'm seeing on the document I sent them.

> They had Bing running in the background for years losing truckloads of money.

Maybe a nitpick, but I think Bing has been profitable on its own for a while now.

(2015) https://time.com/4084975/microsoft-bing-search-engine-profit...

Yeah, Bing has been consistently profitable for a long time.

People mock it because its not bringing in obscene amounts that google search does, but it's revenues have consistently been growing for years: https://fourweekmba.com/bing-revenue/

$11.59B is pretty damn good revenue for a 'laughing stock'. Especially Consider that gaming 'only' was $16.23B.

That link shows revenue not profit.

They kinda did that with ChromeOS + Google Docs with offline mode. The problem for Google is that while it was a solid investment for MS to persue cloud services to compete with Google, I don't think it would have been a good investment the other way around. Chrome is really the only desktop product that makes sense for Google because it pushes people into their ecosystem online. Creating something like a standalone OS or a standalone office software would have gone in the "wrong direction" for Google, taking people off their site rather than taking people there.

Also on a total sidenote, if you told me 5 years ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google I would have a laughed.

> Also on a total sidenote, if you told me 5 years ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google I would have a laughed.

If you had told me 3 months ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google, I still would have laughed. That's how much impact the ChatGPT integration had for Bing -- overnight.

Well that and a 10B investment right?

I’ve used bing with gpt and it’s way worse than ChatGPT idk what you mean. I’d just as well use Google tbh. It wasn’t impressive.

The thing is: Google is threatened for the first time in its decades of history. It might not be better, yet, but it definitely is a real and existential threat to Google.

Google is threatened by MS and OA, OA is threatened by Stable Diffusion and MiniGPT-4. We are wondering if there will still be developer work in 10 years. Everyone is threatened.

If anything we will have more work because we will have more people capable of churning it out at a predictable rate.

Eh. Remember when Google was threatened by DuckDuckGo and other privacy search engines? Google is always being "threatened" by something or the other.

I just can't get over the ugly visual design and haphazard UX on bing.com.

For instance: That Microsoft Rewards counter? Ugh.

I think chatgtp itself with access to search / wolfram / apps etc is a more serious competitor than Bing.

I was not at all surprised, to be honest. ChatGPT took over about 90-95% of my what I would previously resort to Google. Since Microsoft was dealing cards at OpenAI, it was just a matter of time...

How do you manage the hallucination problems, or do you not seem to be having them?

I’m blown away by the competence of the language model but its willingness to make up facts makes me leary.

> its willingness to make up facts makes me leary

I see you haven't met humans

We can downvote human comments and proposed solution (on stack overflow, hn, etc...) and also I don't expect colleagues to lied to me when I ask them about a feature or how to do xyz in a language or library or framework.

Bing, IIRC, has a way to provide feedback, not sure how useful it is for today's users and if it will be able to solve hallucinations one day.

I try to always give Bing+ChatGPT chat or search results a thumbs up or a thumbs down. I am using the service for free, so it seems fair for me to take a moment to provide feedback.

Humans are actually quite reliable. Wikipedia is that trust manifested. Also a human liar knows they are lying, AI doesn't know it's saying something wrong.

That's why we call it hallucinating rather than lying. Confusing the two is conceptually unhygienic.

Humans can also give wrong information without realizing it.

The average human is going to give me the wrong answer to a question I ask him.

But I'm generally not interested in asking an average human. I'm interested in asking someone who knows their butt from a hole in the ground in whichever topic I'm asking them about.

When google sends me to a website, I can at least judge the credibility of a website.

When ChatGPT tells me something, I have no idea if it's paraphrasing information gathered from Encyclopedia Britannica, or from a hollow-earther forum.

Which is why you use one of the AI search engines that makes it cite its sources.

phind.com has been incredibly good for me.

This is a real question, so I apologize if it comes off as sophistry:

Is the work of judging the accuracy of a summary not just the work of comprehending the non-summarized field?

For example, a summary could be completely correct and cite its facts exhaustively. Say you're asking about available operating systems: it tells you a bunch of true info about Windows and OSX, but doesn't mention the existence of Linux. Without familiarity with the territory, wouldn't verifying the factuality of each reference still leave you with an incomplete picture?

At a slightly more practical level, do you actually save any time if you've gotta fully verify the sources? I assume you're doing more than just making sure the link doesn't 404, as citing a link that doesn't say what it is made out to be isn't exactly a new problem, but at that point we're mighty close to the traditional experience of running through a SERP.

Finally, even if you're reading all the links in detail, isn't that still a situation prone to automation bias? There's a lot of examples of cases where humans are supposed to check machine output, but if it's usually good enough the checkers fall into a pattern of trusting it too much and skipping work. Maybe I'm just lazy, but I think I'd eventually get less gung-ho about verifying sources and eventually do myself a mischief.

I'm asking because I've been underwhelmed by my own attempts at using LMs for search tasks, so maybe I'm doing it wrong.

> When ChatGPT tells me something, I have no idea if it's paraphrasing information gathered from Encyclopedia Britannica, or from a hollow-earther forum.

Or it's something it just hallucinated out of thin air.

Citations! I never trust Bing Chat's answer. The links usually quickly tell you if the answer is hallucinated. Basically: treat it as a search engine, not an answer engine. Follow the links like you would on any other search engine. Those links will still be more relevant.

It happily made up citations for me. In a follow up, I asked it not too, and to please use only real papers. It apologized, said it would not do it again, then in the same reply made up another non-existent but plausible citation.

Checking the links is a good practice.

I feel like we just created an interesting novel problem in the world. Looking forward to seeing how this plays out.

Sounds like you should be doing the research yourself but are relying on an untrusted source to feed you answers? I don't think we're there yet...

On the contrary, I was doing a calibration, asking about something to which I know the answers very well. To see if it was trustworthy.

Are you talking about Bing Chat, which cites actual web pages it used to make the summary, or ChatGPT, which is a very different beast and relies on built-in knowledge rather than searches?

Good call. I was using ChatGPT.

Phind gives you citations and even let’s you ignore certain sources.

https://www.phind.com/

Not any use to me (not a developer), but it's cool there are niche search engines for stuff like this.

Ignore the tagline, it's a general purpose search engine with some features for code.

Yeah that seems an unnecessary tagline - it works great for everything in my experience

95% of what I search for, I can independently confirm once I have it in hand. For the other 5%, I avoid ChatGPT.

Reminds me of Knoll’s law of media accuracy:

“everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true, except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge”.

Humans are pretty good bullshitters too!

Bing generating snippets of text from websites isn't going to generate hallucinations like you think it is.

It totally would, if Bing doesn't return relevant results.

I've asked BingGPT about myself and it gave me three answers. One was more or less on-point (it found my linkedin profile), and the other two were hallucinations. What happened was Bing found two unrelated pages and GPT has tried and failed to make sense of them.

Either that, or I am a prince whose name means "goose" in Polish.

Newspapers print their errata though. Does ChatGPT ever admit to making a mistake?

It can pick up on inconsistencies, especially when pointed out, and can say it was wrong, and try to reconcile the information.

Errata are extremely rare. Gross misrepresentations and errors are not, unfortunately.

All the time, but only when prompted. You have to have a conversation with it and provide more detail which exposes the flaws in its previous answers, then it will happily apologize for its mistakes. (For me, this usually looks like me pasting an error message that its code caused.)

I really hope they find a way to have it apply context from future conversations such that when it learns the error of its ways it emails you a retraction, but that's probably a ways out because humans can't be trusted to not weaponize such a feature into sending spam.

But it doesn't learn its error, that's the whole problem. It only responds to 'accusations' from user in the most common way, which is 'apologies-like'.

The weight of phrases like "you are wrong" is in fact so strong, that it fools the chatGPT to apologize for its 'mistakes' even in the scenarios where its text was obviously correct - like telling it 2+2 doesn't equal 4

Well yeah, it's an imperfect tool, and you have to treat it as such. Probably there's a lot to be discovered about how to use it most effectively. I just don't find that it's more problematic than the other tools in my box.

Sure, grep has never flat out lied to me the way chatGPT does, but it's a statistical model, not a co-worker, so I don't feel betrayed, I just feel... cautioned. It keeps you on your toes, which isn't such a bad state to be in.

Problematically, they're much better bullshitters than ChatGPT. And if you used Google to find them, they're probably either selling you something, or you had to navigate a minefield of people who are in order to find them.

It’s great too when you don’t know exactly what to search for, especially for acronyms.

What I've found is that until you see it really hallucinate like mad on a subject you know well you don't realize how crazy it can be.

Especially when I talk to it about fiction and ask questions about - for example - a specific story and you see it invent whole quotes and characters and so on...it is a masterful bullshitter.

Hallucination problem is easily solved by using it as a code/config template or starter, and actually vetting its output. It's still a huge time-saver, even with the vetting time involved.

Cold War strategy. Trust but Verify.

Let the car drive itself, but do all the work of driving anyway so you can take the wheel when it screws up.

That was a problem for ChatGPT3. Not so much for ChatGPT4. I also switched to ChatGPT4 for most of my searches. I only use Google now as a shortcut for navigating to specific website.

> leary

Leary is a rare variant spelling of leery.

I mention this, because you seem to care about correctness.

Is this really a problem?

What could be more 2020s than a post-truth search engine?

GPT4 got a lot better at avoiding hallucinations, in my anecdotal experiences. But it ain't free yet.

Leery

How are you dealing with it just manufacturing answers it does not readily have? Or is that pretty much the same as SEO spam and easy to filter out?

GPT4 is much better at it. So far, I haven't seen it hallucinate. GPT3 hallucinates terribly, but not that often, and it's fairly predictable in what kinds of questions it's more inclined to hallucinate.

90-95% of your searches don't require information more recent than September 2021?

bing actually uses search results as part of the llm context window.

it solves a lot for hallicination and current event problems you have in chatgpt

in my exp. bing even hallucinates the sources. I use chatgpt and bing side by side instead of the average google, then resort to google with those both fail.

i find chatgpt 3.5 answers better than bing. Also ive had bing end conversion with me on more than one occasion without saying anything offensive

That sounds about right for me. When I'm searching the web for information, only rarely does that information have to be newer than that.

That said, I'm not a fan of using these tools for search. For me, anyway, they don't even come close to doing what I want when I'm searching the web.

No. In few cases where there is time sensitivity, it's not an issue.

I'm using it to help me with a library integration, for example. I noticed it was recommending deprecated methods. So I copy/pasted the latest source code, asked it to update itself, and voilá.

It's super smart and learns literally in a second. Just drop recent information at it and ask what you need.

Can you give examples of the average pre-ChatGPT Google queries you were doing, that ChatGPT can fully handle?

Personally — and having not tried ChatGPT for this — I don't think ChatGPT would do well with resolving the kinds of queries I consider Google "good at."

To me, the place where Google wins over Bing, DDG, etc. is when I know there must exist some page that uniquely talks about some extremely niche overlap of concepts; but I don't know any specific "natural key" keywords to refer to the that overlapped-set-of-concepts, and instead only have a "cloud of highly-correlated keywords for the individual concepts involved" to throw into the search box.

For example, if I'm trying to conjure from the aether a discussion people are having about an issue I'm facing with some buggy behavior in an API — where that buggy behavior doesn't spit out any distinctive error message to use in the search.

I could see ChatGPT being good at a limited version of this problem, where I could give it e.g. several definitions of a word (= correlated keywords), and it could tell me the word that fits those definitions.

But the full version of the problem — pointing you at (or regurgitating) the one unique conversation that most highly correlates with your keyword cloud — essentially implies an Internet-scale "language model": one where there are unique vertices for every unique URL. Which, if you think about it, is what a traditional search engine's index is: a very dumb, but very large correlational language model, where that "dumbness" is a valuable constraint meaning that queries are able to be run map-reduced across many nodes.

Is there something I'm missing here, that makes Bing+ChatGPT better at these types of queries than Google is?

Or are the advantages ChatGPT is bringing to the table here, in areas that have nothing to do with making search engines better at the things they're already "the best tool for the job" at, and instead are in solving problems that could be solved any number of other ways (e.g. querying a search assistant such as Siri/Alexa; or pulling up an encyclopedia article or textbook relevant to the subject and just reading it) such that a search engine wouldn't necessarily be the first tool you'd search for?

There are several engineering tasks that I've just found explained better by ChatGPT than scouring Google for out of date documentation or abandoned forum posts. For example a while back I needed to encode some AAC audio frames into the ADTS format. In the work I've been doing recently, this isn't a hard task given you have the spec. The problem was I couldn't find the spec on Google - arguably it's not well supported either.

No problem for ChatGPT however which was not only able to write the code, but write it in Rust - the target language Iw as going to. Now I've just found it easier to ask ChatGPT first then go go google.

I had an example recently: I wanted to learn more about how certificate-based WiFi authentication worked. In the past, I would have used Google to find some resources on it, probably find that the relevant standard is called 802.1x, used Google to find the relevant Wikipedia article, skimmed that, etc. But instead of doing that, I just asked ChatGPT the specific questions I needed the answer to.

When you're asking generally about a pretty basic topic which you just happen to not be very familiar with, ChatGPT is not too dissimilar from having an expert in the field you can chat with and ask questions to. I find it to be a very effective way of querying the huge database of information that is its training dataset.

Surprisingly, the one thing it's really terrible at but which I would've expected it to be okay at, is writing config files. I sometimes ask it how to write, say, a systemd service file which does a particular thing, and it usually shows me something which looks roughly sensible but doesn't actually do what I wanted. Its nature of fancy autocomplete with no understanding really shines through in those cases. Its biggest downfall is that it has no way to recognize when it doesn't have an answer and is making stuff up.

Doesn't that leave you wondering if the answer it gave you for certificate based auth is accurate? How do you verify?

> In the past, I would have used Google to find some resources on it, probably find that the relevant standard is called 802.1x, used Google to find the relevant Wikipedia article, skimmed that, etc.

And apparently you didn't quite notice the particular inefficiency there...

> But instead of doing that, I just asked ChatGPT the specific questions I needed the answer to.

Yeah, sure, if you want to vet hallucinations in stead of just getting the facts.

Just go directly to Wikipedia instead.

But that's the thing. I can't ask Wikipedia targeted questions. I have to read through the whole article or try to skim to the right points, if the article even covers the exact question I have.

A) Wikipedia articles have chapters with headings.

B) Your browser (most probably) has a search function.

Over the weekend I wanted a recipe for a dish I wanted to make and the first recipe I found required an important ingredient I didn't have. I thought I'd give ChatGPT a shot and asked it for the same recipe but not including that ingredient to see if it could come up with an alternative formulation.

I'm sure that recipe exists somewhere on the internet but ChatGPT gave something to me in a very succinct format with none of the usual bullshit you deal with when looking through search results. ChatGPT also thankfully did not include the usual recipe backstory.

I’m not the person you’re replying to, but I had been asking this question for a while but now I’m a convert. Here are some of my most recent uses:

how to create a multi line string in a bash script. I needed to encode a human-readable JSON string in a curl call and didn’t know how. Google game me crummy tutorial sites, GPT gave me instructions, and when provided with the target, did all the formatting too.

I found it also understands git well. I use git at work, but I almost never use anything beyond push/pull/commit so crazy rebases or merges and stuff I still have to search for instructions to remember them. Now GPT can just explain to me the steps for my particular case. When I googled things, I’d search for keywords and stuff based on my knowledge and piece together the steps myself.

On a counter example, I recently had an intern who botched their config on VsCode and didn’t know what settings to fix. I found it was easier to google search how to reset things than use GPT. Ymmv.

I was a skeptic, but it's very useful and not hallucinatory for small and specific coding questions.

For example, today I asked ChatGPT how to write a class method in Ruby and to explain the class << self idiom. Super simple stuff, but it gives accurate answers and it's way more convenient than Google.

For this class of simple queries there's a lot of overhead to do a Google search and then try to filter out bullshit and padded results vs a super simple prompt to ChatGPT.

Almost anything related to programming.

Geographical information about a region.

What is the name of a song I have in my mind.

Virtually anything else. I'm studying architecture and read about associations of feelings that cardinal points transmit in a house (north, south, east, west). Like, east is associated with youth because of sunrise. At first it wasn't obvious why, so I asked ChatGPT and it explained everything brilliantly to me.

It takes me an order of magnitude less time to educate myself on ChatGPT comparing to Google.

I'm very curious what will happen when seo spammers come after chatgpt.

I'm sure they'll use ChatGPT to come up with solutions.

Spammers will, too, and since OpenAI has access to what they're asking and can easily flag their questions, they can feed misleading guidance to spammers.

Google has spent the last 10 years ago making Google worse. They achieved this in large part by making the whole Internet worse [0], but a search engine with results of the quality of Google 10 years ago would be a serious competitor.

[0] For example, Google used to have a fairly strictly enforced rule that indexable content had to actually be visible to an unauthenticated user. The current crop of sites that have apparently useful content in snippets but that hide it when loaded would have been penalized, possibly severely.

They really have a flywheel of internet destruction. The fact that they own the entire display advertising business + search and ping pong people from a 50% paid search listing to a CPM arbitrage SEO website and back is just gross.

It’s almost if there is a downside to treating your users like shit. Google is such a weird company.

It’s an advertising company. Their destiny is to reach parity with Clear Channel Communications in terms of ethics and quality.

I've been using DDG and Brave for a few years now, and I went back to Google yesterday because its the default for Chrome on my phone. I was startled at the difference in quality, especially with Brave vs Google. Brave typically prefers long-form writing and the quality of the articles is typically a lot higher than what I found using Google.

Brave Search is like Google from 2005/6.

this comment got me to switch from google, thanks

They really feel like they've reached a 'Microsoft of the late 90s' phase.

I'm afraid we're not there yet.

After 2016, Google went on a crusade to save the universe by stamping out all misinformation and seems to have highly deranked all forums and blogs in favor of mainstream sites. This has made Google unusable for any political or controversial subject matter. This has also made their LLM efforts too cautious as they can't handle the political controversy of an LLM and can't verify that it will never return anything that offends anyone.

It does seem like Larry and Sergei are finally back trying to fix the excessively politically sensitive and overly cautious culture. Larry, having disappeared to Fiji for several years, must have been pretty bored or annoyed with running it.

It’s not just Google.

Yesterday night I was trying to recall the name of a particular SCOTUS case that I had (semi-incorrectly) thought was connected to the 14th Amendment.

Bombed out on the SERPs two or three times, so I started looking for an very old article by Thomas Sowell that randomly introduced me to the case a few years back. I knew it was something regarding the unintended consequences of the Civil Rights Act.

Neither Google nor DDG gave me ANY useful results for 3-5 variations on “scholarly critique of the Civil Rights Act”. I eventually remembered the Sowell connection and even adding his name in quotes only got me to a page deboonking the article I was searching for!

I’m very far from being a right winger or whatever so I’ve never really experienced this sort of thing before, but my god is the “no no, you don’t REALLY want to search for THAT” silent censorship out of control. Millions to billions of people use these search engines daily and assume they’re mildly biased but otherwise shining portals to the sum total of human knowledge.

In hindsight, I suspect I would have immediately found the SCOTUS case with my initial search on 2010 era Google. Very much seems like my starter queries were triggering the Bad Think Detected algorithm.

> deboonking

*debunking

Original spelling is intended, a purposeful and humorous misspelling introduced by a meme.

Aha, thanks.

Yandex seems to have a bunch of links to what you're looking for. Sadly, Yandex is the only decent search engine I've found for these sorts of topics.

https://yandex.com/search/touch/?text=scholarly+critique+of+...

While I have many reasons that Google made the Internet worse (AMP, censoring search, forcing localized search results, privacy, etc.) I don't think the hidden content is their fault but rather that of publishers.

Publishers blamed Google for declining revenue since they had to make their content openly accessible and therefore free in order to be visible to users on search. The EU tried to make Facebook and Google pay publishers to account for this. I think allowing paywalled content was a compromise to prevent this legislation from passing.

That being said, I agree with the publishers especially since hypocritically Google and Facebook strictly don't allow scraping of their services and litigate those who do.

Google could easily fix this by putting a symbol or label on paywall-related content so you know not to click it.

Huh, do you have a source for the EU issue?

People are acting like Bing has created some big market success and Samsung is running to them because the tech is better. But the alternative explanation is simple: vendors are always looking for reasons to (threaten to) put mediocre non-Google search as default on their products, so they can extract more money from search engine providers. Samsung sees the current hype around Bing/Google/AI as a convenient negotiating point, since the media will portray this as “Samsung switches to awesome AI search” rather than “Samsung forces its users to use crummy Bing.”

I think the problem is Google is also pretty crummy. Ai is in a golden age without poisoned data right now. But wait until Bing gets popular and blackhat seo types start poisoning chatgpt. It will stop being useful, and I suspect in a way that will be unfixable since these language models are so hard to wrangle.

There's another side to that medal: At the moment nobody takes any issue with OpenAI doing filtering and curation in deciding what is part of their training data set, aside from perhaps the anti-bias crowd. "AI neutrality" is not yet a topic. Yet.

I've already seen that several times with image generation. Most recently was an article commenting on how the American smile was polluting generated photos. People can't decide what they want. Do they want licensed, curated commercial photos in the database or do they want search engine style neutrality? You really can't have both.

> People can't decide what they want.

You mean, so that you can satisfy everybody at the same time?

No, sorry, the world doesn't work this way.

Musk was on the air this week talking about how the current AI is biased on the left as he promotes his new AI company

Lets laugh and watch him make the "truth social" of AI, hopefully setting fire to another few billion in the process.

People laughed at paypal, tesla and spacex. Now he owns twitter.

Being the richest gives someone a lot of power to make others look foolish

It's always nice to hear Mr. Musk has not given up his cannabis habit.

…or maybe he has!

> without poisoned data right now

It already seems poisoned to me. It's popularity over correctness, because LLMs don't know semantics.

The users who pay attention to search quality aren't impacted by the default search option. They will just go back to Google or whatever alternative they wish.

The users who the default engine really locks in are the ones who just mostly click ads and have no idea they are ads. When they use Google they are mostly clicking ads anyways, so the search result quality will appear about the same with Bing. Maybe even better if there are fewer ads.

For Microsoft, getting more users on board means higher ad volume which brings more advertisers who are going to spend the time to manage Bing ad campaigns. You can bet they've done the calculations for how much money they can spend at what price. Ultimately that leads to higher monetization and then Microsoft can pay other companies (like Apple) to switch the default engine.

Google is a multi-trillion dollar attention tax that just sucks money from the global economy. They've been wildly mismanaged since Eric Schmidt's CEO tenure ended. It's been a long time coming, but the timer is running out of sand for Google fast. The revenue may take a long time to peak and decline but when they start missing their quarterly earnings it will be a bloodbath for Google's employees.

Your tone subs like you're contradicting a point, but your actual comment is completely in like with the idea that Google has been caught by surprise that Bing is good enough (as measured by market sentiment) to be a credible threat.

>If you had told me 3 months ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google, I still would have laughed.

Every day I enter a few difficult queries on both Google and Bing to see if Bing gives me something better. I'm still laughing that people think Bing is a serious threat.

Are you comparing Google to the "new A.I. powered Bing, only in Microsoft edge" or to the normal Bing search engine?

The Bing search engine not the chatbot. Is there some v2 Bing search engine? A quick Bing search didn't reveal anything about it.

The Bing chatbot searches the web for you, it doesn't just spit out answers like ChatGPT. There's no clear distinction between the Chatbot and a search engine.

I just asked it about something in today's news and it answered it and provided links to 6 news articles on that topic.

It's unfortunate that it requires logging in to Edge with your Microsoft account because I'm just not going to do that. I don't sign in to browsers.

Maybe my queries are not difficult enough. Do you have an example?

Ok here's one: "why did capote and vidal hate each other"

Answer from the Bing Chat feature (no edits):

Truman Capote and Gore Vidal were two American writers who had a long-standing feud with each other. The feud began when Capote wrote an article for Esquire magazine in which he claimed that Vidal had been thrown out of the White House after making a pass at a member of President Kennedy's family². Vidal took Capote to court for libel, where the two traded insults². After the pair settled out of court, their feud continued – even outliving Capote².

I hope that helps!

Source: Conversation with Bing, 4/17/2023(1) The A-Z of Gore Vidal | Gore Vidal | The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/01/the-a-z-gore-v... Accessed 4/17/2023. (2) Why Did Gore Vidal and William Buckley Hate Each Other? - Daily Beast. https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-did-gore-vidal-and-william... Accessed 4/17/2023. (3) Feud sensation! Why Vargas Llosa thumped Márquez. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2007/mar/13/feud... Accessed 4/17/2023. (4) A life in feuds: how Gore Vidal gripped a nation - The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/14/gore-vidal-gri... Accessed 4/17/2023. (5) ‘Just a couple of fags’: Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, and celebrity feud. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19392397.2015.1... Accessed 4/17/2023. (6) Truman Capote’s unhappy ending | PBS NewsHour. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/truman-capotes-unhappy-e... Accessed 4/17/2023.

Not a very satisfying answer because it doesn't answer why Capote would slander Vidal in the first place. Indeed the feud existed before the Esquire slander took place so it's incorrect/hallucinatory for Bing Chat to say "The feud began when...".

Oh, and references (2) and (3) seem to be hallucinated and are unrelated to the question and response despite being cited inline. The other ref links are valuable but well then it's just a search engine with more noise.

Maybe I'm using a different Bing because I access it through Duck Duck Go, but it doesn't seem better than Google. I often have to add a !g to technical searches because DDD doesn't return the right results. Google has them in the very first links. I'll try to use Bing directly.

Raw ddg or google are awful for technical searches. But at least having ddg as default lets you have !whatever for specific topics.

Did ChatGPT even make Bing a threat?

Bing has only 10m+ downloads on Android. Not even a top 200 app.

Samsung switch too Bing will hurt Samsung more than Google.

“Only has 10 million downloads” wow

Or that someday Apple would be the most valuable company in the world

I moved to Bing a year ago, as 1) Google became a senseless SEO swamp 2) they don't allow VPN.

I think we still have a long way to go before people are actually saying "Bing it." Then it's a serious threat.

I suspect some people google for things on Bing.

Man I haven't used Google in 10 years yet I still say I "Googled it." It's just a saying at this point, not an endorsement.

I have a friend who started saying "let me just bing that" to get people to laugh. Now I've started saying it at work... originally for a laugh, but I find I'm using DDG and Bing more often than Google now. (Alas how I miss AltaVista) So it may be sooner than you think. I mean... my data set is only two people, so maybe it will only be 2 hours sooner than you think.

Even though I have invested heavily in Apple's sandbox world, I am very impressed by ChromeOS and inexpensive Chromebooks by 3rd parties. I have close to the cost of a car invested in Apple gear, yet, if I had to I could do all of my writing and coding on the very inexpensive Lenovo Duet Chromebook I bought a year ago. The Linux container support is OK, and I usually use remote servers anyway.

For search, Bing + ChatGPT is now my driver for search. I still use Google and Duck Duck Go occasionally, but usually I am OK with waiting a short while for Bing + ChatGPT results.

> I usually use remote servers anyway

Sorry for the OT question - do you use slime-tramp? And if so, do you have a way to use M-. (slime-edit-definition) without having to re-compile files using the remote paths?

I usually use Mosh (instead of SSH) and have a nice Emacs setup on remote servers. If I am using an iPad Pro instead of a laptop, I have Emacs on remote servers configured with Mosh to accept virtual mouse clicks (by tapping the iPad screen) to jump around source files and scrolling with screen gestures. This might seem awkward, but it is not.

For Common Lisp, running Emacs on a remote server instead of slime-tramp has always been good enough. Would you suggest I try slime-tramp?

> I usually use Mosh

Mosh as in "mobile shell"? https://mosh.org/

> Would you suggest I try slime-tramp?

I don't know yet, I've just started trying it out.

What made me want to try it was that I could use GUI Emacs to connect to emacs running on a different machine and still have full access to all the emacs keybindings.

So far, the downsides that I have encountered are that M-. and C-c C-k (slime-compile-and-load-file) don't quite work. The work-around would be to visit each file using the remote path and re-compile them so that the running Lisp image can map what's in the image to a path tramp recognizes. Then M-. and C-c C-k should work.

To recompile, select all then compile (X-c X-p C-c C-c) works, or I think C-c M-k also works. Not a great solution if there are a lot of files, though.

IIUC the problem boils down to M-. eventually calling (xref-find-definitions) which is an emacs built-in, and I think that's why the tramp paths aren't translating until a re-compile is done.

They used to ship a Google Drive app for Windows that adds it to Explorer similar to OneDrive. They killed it, as with everything else.

Edit: I'm wrong!

No, backup and sync was rebranded to Google drive for windows

Very well, I stand corrected.

Somewhere some shareholders are whispering to stage a culture revolution in the G.

>One of the reasons for Google getting so good early on was that they had oodles of usage data to test and improve their search functionality forming a positive feedback loop

???

PageRank. It was PageRank, and the fact that they didn't rely on the lies put into <meta> tags. There was no feedback loop at that point.

I created AISearch.vip but honestly I am now going to open source it and make it a locally run stand-alone AI search engine because it's absurd having to call OpenAI APIs in the backend when I can let the user run it with their own API keys

There's no moat in anything AI, but MS gets OpenAI access at a discount and therefore will win

> Now that AI has upset the applecart, they can use Bing to choke off Google's airsupply.

It's more like Google has to change from optimizing for next week's revenue numbers to optimizing for user experience. People have been saying for years that their search results are trash. That we haven't seen a response from Google may be an indicator that they aren't able to return useful search results.

'People have been saying for years that their search results are trash'.

Have they? I hear people say this on Hacker news but i've never heard it anywhere else, people seem to be using the internet just fine with Google as there main search engine, what is the alternative? Bing? It's still trash and Bing Chat is like a worse version of ChatGPT, I don't see it replacing Google currently.

Bing Chat was better but after three months of very hard work Microsoft successfully managed to remove all the good parts.

How naïve of Microsoft! They clearly didn't have enough experience to know that they have to remove the good parts and make it bland in order to make the product viable.

FWIW, many of the non-tech people I know gripe about the same user facing issues that come up on HN, including poor Google search results. They just don't post about it on the internet and might not even know that there are alternatives.

I would bet that a good chunk of users don't know that you can change the default browser or search engine, or at least don't think to do so. They might not like the UX, but they have other things occupying their focus and muddle through a bad experience with their phone or PC, just like they do with many other mediocre interfaces throughout the week.

They've been pretty good about making some results on the first page be better than competition still, and with niche search features IME.

If I want to find artists, lyrics, locations, results of sporting events, other special events... I'm not sure all the things, but DDG doesn't even compare.

We will only see a monopoly if there is protectionism. Regulations, licensing, do not compete patents, etc.

>They should have tried to make a better desktop OS (just buy Canonical or something)

Ah yes, Canonical, land of people attempting to fork the Linux ecosystem and getting shot down by everyone and doubling down.

Would be a perfect fit for Google.

> They should have tried to make a better desktop OS

Desktop OS's are not the long term future of computing, is it? But they were astute in acquiring Android. Meanwhile, Microsoft thought that a mobile OS is just a desktop OS squished onto a smaller screen.

> I always thought that Google made a big blunder by not encroaching upon Microsoft's turf more aggressively.

I've always been shocked that Google didn't face antitrust action over using their internet video monopoly to kill Windows Phone. They wouldn't create a Youtube app for Windows Phone, nor would they allow Microsoft to create one themselves.

I had a Windows phone and android simultaneously - I actually liked the UI on the windows phone but I think I may have been the only person on earth that did because I virtually never saw another one. From that perspective, I can understand choosing not to build for the platform.

I can understand not wanting to build an app yourself, but when you hold a monopoly on internet video and you won't allow your platform competitors to build an app on their own dime, that really should have triggered antitrust action.

I can remember Google taking similar actions to lock out Amazon's Echo Show.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/26/16371292/google-youtube-a...

If anything, Google has been too aggressive.

Is this really about AI and ChatGPT? Google search just sucks now. I actually get better results from Bing and Duck Duck Go.

> then eat into Microsoft Office market share by releasing Google Office for Desktop

With their inferior products? Not a chance. Google's apps are so far away from even competing with Microsoft's it's not even funny. Google Sheets doesn't even have proper tables. I wouldn't even be surprised if they cancelled it.

The fact that big corps have moved to Gsuite always surprises me and credit to Google salespeople. But they will never meaningfully breach Office, people at Microsoft fight tooth and nail when renewals are up and Google is in the picture

As someone who's worked at both gsuite and office shops, I would pick gsuite every time. After the first place where I used gsuite I used to try to figure out which I'd have to use before applying somewhere new.

Depends on use case, I regularly use sheets with 20k+ rows, experience is night and day

A Google desktop OS wasn't going to win against Windows in PC gaming compatibility. Nor was it going to displace MS Office + Active Directory at the enterprise level.

With ChromeOS, they took the route available to them, which was to enter the school market and try to build something from there.

Google's whole raison d'être was internet computing - computing at scales never before seen. Think "BigFiles" and the original Google search. They were able to leverage that technology in creating AdSense, which is their huge money-maker. Google's challenge has been finding ways to monetize their internet compute technologies. But now that it's 25 years later and more and more people have internet-scale computing available to them it appears Google is losing their edge. What used to be their "special sauce" has now become a commodity. It's a story as old as business.

Increasingly people don't need this kind of special sauce to run a big Internet service. Everything that's challenging has been outsourced to public clouds. Just pay more and those special sauce comes to you.

Admittedly Google still has some special sauce left, but in my opinion those special sauce only improves efficiency; it doesn't enable one to do something that's impossible otherwise. (I've been reading about some public research reports about Google's special sauce: they range from special user space networking to new congestion control to custom TPUs etc.)

I'd say it another way - everything that's challenging has been commoditized and is available from your choice of public cloud providers. You've identified new special sauce opportunities for Google, the question is can these new opportunities generate as much revenue as they'd been enjoying?

> They should have tried to make a better desktop OS

Wouldn't office suite be a better target? Everyone uses it. Lots of low hanging fruits. Easy to win the heart of geeks. Ample opportunities to integrate with other enterprise services.

If Microsoft's 48-year history has shown anything, it is that they can produce subpar products, experience numerous failures, make poor investments and acquisitions, and even ruin products (e.g., Skype), yet they remain resilient and successful!

As for Google, I am uncertain whether they were prepared for this competition because, firstly, the business terms offered by Microsoft might have been quite strategic, and secondly, the Google search engine has not experienced significant innovation or improvement since PageRank, at least from a user experience perspective rather than complexity. I will regale my descendants with stories of a time when I searched for something and found at least one relevant result among the top 20.

That to me is the big difference between Google and Microsoft. Microsoft is willing to slowly build on something for years before it goes anywhere. They maintain their products for incredible amounts of time, such as how IE11 was only killed off like a decade after its release.

Google on the other hand is always chasing the next big thing. It just doesn’t have the institutional attention span to do anything really big. If a project isn’t an explosive hit right away, Google moves on to the next big idea.

> ...Google Office for Desktop

They did one better and made Chrome so good that its the OS for most, for all intents and purposes, now.

What would a Google office for desktop do that the current Google docs doesn't?

Even MS is moving office to being cloud based, so it's not clear business users value local document availability that much - rather the opposite, I've worked in places that like cloud services because locking out their data from a disgruntled or departed employee is one button away.

There are worlds of difference between MS Office and Google Docs in terms of features and abilities. There’s actually a risk for MS to lose their edge by moving to the cloud with a reduced feature set.

Would Google Docs have more features if they had to maintain more platforms? I'd expect the opposite.

Have people used BING lately? It's still not good - but maybe it will improve.

Google search has just gotten worse and is more ad prone. It's still better, but not golden age google - not even close.

Google did encroach. Google office/docs is much better than Microsoft. Chrome OS is a better OS for most non-tech jobs. The browser is the operating system for most people, and Chrome is leading in that. They won on mobile as well with Android. Google Workspace, in my opinion, is much better than Microsoft.

It's their outdated search bringing everything else down it seems.

Google Docs is not anywhere close to as powerful or as performant as Microsoft Office. I don’t really see how someone familiar with both forward suites could think that is the case.

Pretty much the only notable advantage MSO for my use is excel, which is better for "advanced" spreadsheet workloads. For collaborative work and 99% of documents and spreadsheets, Google docs is the superior option.

I haven't opened a MS product in years and my life is better for it. Their Mac product lineup is particularly lackluster.

Maybe an unpopular opinion but it feels like Google is near useless anymore. Between results containing outdated or broken links to empty discussions, and ads being their main priority as well as "fuzzy search results" where you can search for one thing and get something completely unrelated because Google decided you also meant to search for something else that is possibly contextually adjacent, I can't really get good results from it anymore.

I mean, I can still get answers for simple questions but when it comes to anything unique or complex I usually just get frustrated and go to duckduckgo or something else. ChatGPT now adays mostly.

Sure ChatGPT can hallucinate but Google's results rely on some random person somewhere to have properly answered something. The reality of that is so many of the "answers" I find are discussions on forums between a bunch of random people who have no real credentials or factual answers but instead just opinions based on something else they read on Google. People google something, read the google blurb about it at the top of the results, then go answer other people's questions.

I honestly think Google is losing favor at this point. I've even been considering moving away from Android because the OS just feels like the Walmart iOS now adays. It features the same problems but in a way that nothing is polished versus iOS.

Google needs to stop just following everyone else. Everything now adays feels like the ol Google+ move. "Ah, successful product someone else made, let's remake it and name it google something!"

> Sure ChatGPT can hallucinate but Google's results rely on some random person somewhere to have properly answered something.

i don't know about your experience with chatgpt, but to me it's been untrustworthy. so much so that every answer i get needs to be double checked against google and that "random person".

That's fair I can definitely agree that but my point was more that neither is a very trustworthy source anyway. It's the same way I'd double check one source versus another. It's just easier to start with GPT at this point because at least I know it'll just answer based on what it has been trained with versus special interests. One example I've used is the question "Is Fix A Flat ok to use in tires?" the results are from the company that makes fix a flat saying basically "Yes obviously" while you then see tire companies and repair shops giving you mixed responses. Then you have the third group being just people who have heard from one of the first 2 groups. People are worried about AI degrading the quality of information over time, learning from itself. We're basically there thanks to people caring more about being right than being correct and never doing their own leg work.

I think Reddit has a golden opportunity here, considering how often I prefix searches with "site:reddit.com" to filter out SEO bullshit and usually get an answer from a subject-matter expert in the top ten results. They could even tie an LLM into it and regurgitate the highest-voted comment, and it would likely be more effective than Google or GPT.

Stackexchange, yes

But IME most reddit comments are the opposite of professional.

I've been saying it for a while, you could basically replace entirely google with a 10k websites index and get above their quality of results 90% of the time.

It's hard to explain how bad the quality dropped.

> Sure ChatGPT can hallucinate

For the non-ML crowd out there, in the AI world:

          to hallucinate <=> to lie

You're absolutely correct but it's fair to also point out that people do this constantly as well. Try googling any controversial topic.

People as a whole say a lot of things, correct and incorrect. But ChatGPT is a single thing that has a fairly impressive rate of reliability on information, but if you get into certain levels of details on certain topics, it'll just spit out false information that's indistinguishable from the correct stuff. I wouldn't expect a human to do that: trick me into thinking they're an expert with an encyclopedic, verifiably correct knowledge of a topic, but then confidently start lying about that same topic in that same conversation. It's much harder to vet, or know when you need to vet.

Google is optimized for shopping and commercial sites at all other costs.

It's really become an impossibly frustrating tool. They've sucked for years and this was bound to happen.

I find that forums are often some of the most useful results. The posts are typically written by genuine people, many of whom are passionate about the subject matter.

Reliability can be an issue, but the medium at least provides a number of context clues to help. Seeing how individuals write and interact is helpful when judging how much weight to give to their words.

Converting those forum posts into a generic and overly confident interface strips away useful information.

Yes, but maybe 5 times out of 10 the forum has your question, but not your answer. Add to this that guy on the Apple support forums, who has destroyed millions of lives by repeating the same answer to every thread opened for the last 15 years.

What's Sundar's goal for Google? They seem to be aimless since he took the helm.

He will be fired very soon

Hopefully. I can't think of a single product that has grown because of him so much as in spite of him.

How is that different from everything after Google Search. Alphabet is even structured around the idea of not being able to pick winners. I can discern some long term strategy in Android Automotive and Waymo, but nothing is sacred when it comes to cutting off products that are not growing.

It's one thing to say that Sundar hasn't led Google to innovate much in his tenure (I agree there), but to say Google hasn't picked any winners since Google Search?

- Gmail (largest email service at 1.5B users)

- YouTube (by far the biggest video sharing platform)

- Android (most used operating system in the world by number of devices)

- Google Maps (maps service with the largest userbase)

- YouTube TV

- The whole Google Drive Suite

- Chromecast/Android TV

- Chromebooks (made huge inroads in the k-12 education space)

What I mean by "not picking winners" is that Google admits they can't foresee, for example, the acquisition of YouTube turning into a first-tier social network. Just like they could not foresee Orkut and G+ not becoming successful social networks.

Fair, though it seems more like Google just got in their own way with G+ by keeping it invite only for waaaaay too long.

> Just like they could not foresee Orkut and G+ not becoming successful social networks.

They put minimal effort into their products and prematurely sunset them if they don't perform well enough. Their organization is either so fragmented or toxic that they launch products that are competing against eachother.

It really does seem like there are only morons at the helm. A company with as much resources as Google should not continue to fail so badly. My suspicion is as Jobs said of Apple during his time away, the company is being totally run by the product guys not the engineers.

>They seem to be aimless

I would argue for 95% of Google's existence they have been pretty much aimless.

Then please provide your argument.

Right. They develop services, see which ones attract a large audience, and close those that don't. https://killedbygoogle.com.

I like it, personally speaking. Google has a lot of power, and it's an approach that minimise the use of that power to push people around.

A little bit of everything until they figure out what to do.

Samsung and other OEMs get a lot of crap for how they handle android. But they are really the ones driving innovation here.

That's exactly what I think. I personally also find him very uninspiring, it looks like he's basically just 'maintaining' the company on auto-pilot mode. No out of the world new ideas, and now the company is losing on the very field they were seemingly far-far ahead than the rest of the world.

10 years ago, Google was one of the most exciting companies in the world to me, culminating in that amazing Google Chrome comic https://www.scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/

Their products and software seemed genuinely inspiring. Now, it seems to just be maintenance or death. Seemingly happens with all once-loved tech companies to some degree. It's quite sad but I guess time moves on. Totally self-inflicted for them though, they decided to stop moving forward

DeepMind's stuff has all been impressive.

1) where can I use it? Compare this to what’s come out of OpenAI in the last two years. It’s like science fair vs. a company making actual tools.

2) how is it helping Alphabet’s bottom line? I haven’t seen it helping here either.

Alphafold is open and seems fundamentally transformative in the science space. GPT is nice but it’s a smart meme-generator at the moment. I don’t disagree with the impact on G’s bottom line, though.

Gonna have to disagree about GPT. I’ve been using it as a tutor to learn ML on the side, and it’s literally the best tutor I’ve ever had.

Sure, I agree they are useful. My objection is it’s more in the tool category than science, while Alphafold is both. There isn’t convincing evidence that GPTs are pushing what we know; rather, they make it easier to process/search what we already know. You could hire an ML expert to be your tutor without GPTs and you’d get equal or better tutoring, though at a higher price. You can’t hire people to predict protein folding better than Alphafold. It’s very convenient that GPTs exist and they can provide tons of value, but they’re essentially the next version of mechanical turk or a domain expert you’d hire for contract work except more scalable. The net impact of GPTs may also be higher due to how often we use text, but I’d rather see a society curing disease, etc. than one generating fake books, etc.

I see what you're saying. However, I'd argue that the zero-shot learning capabilities of the latest GPTs, if continually improved upon, could potentially offer a path towards a generalist "scientist" agent, one that could perform its own research and take over R&D for humanity (aka, the singularity). But yes, I absolutely agree that the current gen capabilities of GPTs are nowhere close to this hypothetical situation.

Of course, the models from Alphabet don't really fit this bill either. I do wonder how many "protein folding" style problems there are out there, for these narrow superintelligent AIs to solve.

> where can I use it? Compare this to what’s come out of OpenAI in the last two years

If you are using OpenAI stuff you are using it.

> how is it helping Alphabet’s bottom line? I haven’t seen it helping here either.

I guess I wasn't talking about "bottom line" impressive. Oracle might make a lot by squeezing current licensees in an unimpressive way, for example.

True but they are quite independent of Google from my understanding.

No stapler for you!

That was even 15 years ago (September 2008, time flies...).

The very nature of how people search is changing. Personally, I'm LOVING phind.com, it hits all my buttons of what a modern AI inspired SE should be. IMHO someday soon, Google will just be the Youtube company. That will be their primary thing, and maybe that's good so they can make that better so it doesn't fail too.

Meh - using phind a few times so far :

  - regurgitates stuff it hits on a shallow search as authoritative response (communicating uncertainty would be a great improvement for GPT models but I'm guessing that's not going to happen because of shallow RHLF preferences)
  - search index is worse than google (eg. I've tried a search where google lands on a good solution, phind hits official docs and offers suboptimal solution)
  - produces results slower than I can read source 
  - I still need to go to the source for full reference or do follow-up (but again it's slow)

Not seeing the value tbh. If it was gpt 3.5 fast with 4 quality now we might be on to something.

I thought Microsoft was well dead, but hey…here we are.

I agree, and on top of that Google products used to be, in my experience of top notch quality. But over the past couple of years I'm seeing more and more bugs in Google maps, chrome, and android. I think they've really let the quality bar slip. They were/are in such a dominant position it's taking a long time to crumble, but crumbling they seem to be, slowly but surely.

Seems his main goal was avoiding getting anything on the record.

Or, if it got on, deleting those records after 24 hours.

If gods of chaos decide give a future where google completely gets broken up a chance, I'd be massively pissed if someone doesn't detach google reader and bring it online just to make a point.

Well, blogs are dead so bringing back reader won’t be all that useful.

There are plenty of good RSS services now. In fact I’d argue there is more choice and higher quality now than when Reader was around. I use Newsblur as my aggregator and either net news wire on my Mac and Unread on my iPhone and ipad. I’m glad Google got out of the RSS business.

I know, that's why I said they should revive it just to make a point, not that people would prefer it anymore.

Sundar is a McKinsey consultant who is very pleasant and agreeable and can keep a boat steady while maximizing shareholder return. Unfortunately there isn’t much innovation happening . Google needs a Larry Page or Musk like character back at the helm.

> while maximizing shareholder return.

That's not maximizing shareholder return.

That's locally maximizing shareholder return.

"That's locally maximizing shareholder return"

As shareholders jump from ship to ship, there is nothing beyond short term shareholder return.

Many long term Apple investors view things differently.

I bought Apple, nvidia, google, amd, intel, and motorola in 2005.

Apple smoked all of them.

"Many long term Apple investors view things differently."

Apple long term investors are a string of short term investors.

Of course there are people with a long term view or institutional investors who buy and keep their stock for years.

But most investors, if Apple stock drops enough will sell, and new investors will buy at the new level.

maximizing returns while minimizing risk.

> Sundar is a McKinsey consultant who is very pleasant and agreeable and can keep a boat steady

Yep. In fact, he was specifically chose to step in as CEO for his meekness : voted most likely to preserve brand value by best distracting folks from the evil turn the company had taken.

> while maximizing shareholder return.

Nope. He's a 100% static CEO, and he's therefore squandering huge amounts of capital and human resources.

That's not what I'd call "maximizing shareholder return".

> Google needs a Larry Page or Musk like character

These are not the same kind of character.

They are both highly opinionated founders who are not afraid to make unconventional choices on how to run a company.

I'd rather have a Jobs than Musk

Page is much quieter and more private than Musk. Beyond that they're pretty similar in a lot of ways.

Sundar is a caretaker who got credited for simple inertia: The momentum in place before he took the reigns were predestined to grow earnings for years, but suddenly Pichai gets to pretend it's all him.

Especially compared to Nadella, who shows that someone not from the the founders’ circle, a corporate ladder climber, can lead an IT company with great vision too.

Microsoft dealt with with the too-rich-to-work problem and the founders-and-earlies-lost-interest problems in the 80s and 90s. "FYIFV" (despite being a bit of a tech urban legend) and "Quietly Vesting Disease" (QVD) and all that. They're an actual grown up company that knows how to build and vet leaders.

Google is not a grown up company - it runs the way a 2nd generation dynastic family runs their businesses - haphazard and sloppy and entirely surviving because of a cash cow and nothing else. Plus, they have a fairly substantial crew with "rest and vest" as a mantra at least for the folks I knew there prior to 2008..

Google hasn't done jack in terms of innovation since he took over. They did close out a few moon shots. but nothing to note.

It's werid to me that no one has made the self-evident comparison: Sundar is like Steve Ballmer was for Microsoft.

Coming in right after the founders and trying to raise the moats of the exisiting products instead of creating new moats. Google Stadia is a similar failure to Ballmer's late Windows Live initiatives.

Bad comparison. Ballmer launched Azure, Surface, Bing, Xbox and Office on iOS and Office365. He was also the one go all-in on the cloud and to start the shift towards embracing Open Source. Pretty much everything that people attribute to Nadella either launched or started under Ballmer.

Maybe finally the board will wake up and find a replacement for Sundar this year. I thought Googlers were internally very unhappy about Sundar for a long time now.

To maximize shareholder value which he’s done. He’s the balmer (but worse) of our generation.

Not sure. The real question is what the Google founders and board want and expect. Sundar is just looking after things for them. The reason he got the job is that he was never going to do more than that. But you might legitimately ask at this point if that's enough. And he's been there long enough that he could be replaced without anyone losing too much face. Surround it with some corporate euphemisms and get some fresh blood in and move on. I would not be surprised if they are already looking around.

It worked for Microsoft obviously. This is quite a coup for Satya Nadella. And he got that one on merit. MS has no stake in Android (they declined to get into that after killing Windows Phone). Also, he hit the ground running after Steve Ballmer was retired. Not that hard of course after Ballmer but he did a few decisive things early on that all seem to have mostly worked out. The Linkedin acquisition; fixing .Net, re-establishing MS as a bonafide OSS player with the Github acquisition and VS-Code. And then making a smart investment in OpenAI which they are now riding to success. All great moves.

I'd say, Google is in the same boat right now. Lots of obvious potential, an extended period of a bit rudderless performance, missed boats, and no clear direction or vision. Fix that and it could go somewhere else again. Doing more of the same isn't going to be anywhere near good enough. They seem to be stuck playing a game of whack-a-mole in terms of strategy and ever responding to what others are doing and never quite catching up with that instead of initiating things themselves and leading.

The same job as every public company CEO: Keep their job by prioritizing the stock price, board happiness and keeping activist shareholders from causing problems

1) "It will reportedly be known as Project ‘Magi’ and is said to provide a far more personalized experience than the company’s current service."

That is super creepy. Google knows a lot about you, and now it is using that knowledge to really put you in a filter bubble. Imagine this plus engagement metrics.

2) So much for that monopoly a lot of people thought Google had. Turns out they're still as exposed to market pressure as they ever were.

The last thing anyone should ever want from a search engine is different results from the next person over.

I strongly disagree. I would love for a search engine to, intelligently, cater the results based on my previous search history and patterns.

I would love for that ability to be easily determined visually, and easily toggled on/off. A big "personalized" and "generic" toggle switch at the top would be useful.

I don't think the ability to serve up specialized content is the concern here. It is the fragmentation that results when we no longer have a shared reality or a consistent set of results in the population. Results specific to any one person is terrifying in some of its implications.

That's how you create bubbles.

Not all bubbles are harmful. I’m in a regional bubble when I search for “restaurant”. I’m in a programming language bubble when I search for coding issues.

Tune it to be less bubbly with controversial topics, perhaps.

"Everyone should get the same search results." is really just rightspeak for "Everyone should be in my bubble."

part of the issue with 'bubbles', as I see it, is that you don't know you're in a bubble. a big huge honking option of "keep me in the bubble" and "show results outside my bubble" would make it a lot more obvious (and manageable) to many people who are oblivious to the notion that they live in an information bubble. won't stop people who only use one source of news, but in a search aspect, it would be useful.

Any time I use a Google product, I know I'm in a bubble.

Interestingly, Google themselves seem to be at least somewhat aware of this - though it may just be an accidental side effect of trying to drive user engagement on YouTube.

I’ve been noticing an occasional “Show me something new to me” prompt showing up in my YT feed. It has literally never provided anything I was interested in watching, but I appreciate that they’re trying to burst bubbles.

Youtube sometimes recommends that, but if you scroll the topics bar all the way to the right, you can access it at any time.

I'm actually not entirely sure about that. For example, if I know a lot about a particular topic and the search engine knows that I know a lot about that particular topic, then when I search for something, it should give me a condensed result and not introductory-level material. Or if I have certain preferences for the format of material I'm given. For example, if I prefer college-level outline material versus eighth-grade reading level text, for example.

So it seems entirely reasonable to me that you would get different results.

If I had a personal assistant that was performing the search for me, I would expect customized results from them. I don't know why I should not expect the same from a machine.

The next person over cares about sports and boobies. By which I mean spectator sports and, uhm, spectator boobies.

Is the last thing I'd want really results different from my neighbour?

For the same query?

Depends on the query. Fact based queries should have the same answer.

If I'm searching for Python, I'd expect to see more about the programming language than the animal.

> If I'm searching for Python, I'd expect to see more about the programming language than the animal.

Which is different from what most people would expect. You see the problem.

Yes. I like that Google seems to surface programming results in the language I use. In the case of “boobies”, if I’m a bird expert it might give me info on blue footed boobies first.

Or if you're a programmer and are looking for that paper written by Professor Firstname Lastname, you might prefer results about the CS professor, not about the eponymous person who undresses for a living. Or plays baseball for a living.

I like arthouse films. ∀ arthouse ∃ approximately eponymous porn film. I can't say I dislike porn, but if the search engines were to treat me like my neighbour I'd never get any arthouse results. Too niche.

Query results are more diverse than you might expect. I once worked in a startup whose name we thought was unique, but in actual fact there were nine other similarly-named companies in the same city, not to mention names of non-local companies, organisations, products, objects…

That’s not true. If I, a software developer, search for “pandas,” Google should probably show me the Python data library near or at the top. If my friend who’s not an engineer searches for “pandas,” they’re probably looking for the bear.

That might be true in concept, but I don't think it's true in reality. When people search for something online, they want the first result to be whatever they had in mind. If I search for Python, I want the homepage for the programming language. When somebody else searches for Python, they might be looking to learn about the animal.

You could argue that we should just ask for exactly what we want, but that puts more work on the user and reduces the effectiveness of the tool. I don't want to type more than "python", I just want the link!

Search engines provide very little personalization even today. I'm almost surprised a competitor hasn't popped up with a product that tries to fill that niche.

> Search engines provide very little personalization even today. I'm almost surprised a competitor hasn't popped up with a product that tries to fill that niche.

Kagi seems to be that.

https://kagi.com

What about a child who used to be interested in reptiles but is now interested in programming? I get frustrated when Google starts acting "smart" and changing queries or hiding results. I've started to use Bing image search because I'd like more than 20 results, the way Google used to be. If they start acting like that even more, I'll use them even less!

Google's model is the only viable one long term. With growing amount of information, the only way to find you something useful without making you enter a growing amount of terms is to maintain a context of what you are interested in.

No child will be confused if they look up a programming language that they already know have the exact same name as reptile and get reptile first.

People are different, I get it, but I don't want a search engine that tries to second guess me all the time. If I'm a programmer and I'm interested in the actual animal, I don't want to have to fight against the product. I'd much rather use my knowledge to craft my queries intelligently so that I get exactly what I want.

But then when it comes to technology, I'm a bit of a control freak.

What you mean is that you don't want a search engine that guesses wrong.

If you happen to get a search engine that is correctly giving you the right result every time because it happens to know what you want, I am guessing you will not have a problem with that.

I would have a problem with that, because for a search engine to know me well enough to know what I actually want despite what I typed in it would have to know a lot of information about me I wouldn't trust the company behind it with.

I spend most of my browsing time in a browser configured to clear cookies, cache, and history on exit.

I'm not sure why most people are okay with companies gathering tons of data about them and trying to use it to manipulate them into buying products they don't actually want or need (among other uses), but I'm not one of them.

Now if I could only get a search engine to not ignore query terms because it thinks it knows what I want better than I do, I'd be even happier.

"I'm not sure why most people are okay with companies gathering tons of data about them and trying to use it to manipulate them into buying products they don't actually want or need (among other uses), but I'm not one of them."

It takes a ton of work to prevent it and it's more or less futile anyways. It's not so much that people are okay with this, rather it's a part of modern life and it's exhausting trying to mitigate it. And impulsively buying products due to ads is a personal failing.

Have you ever told someone to "just Google it?" Well, repeatable results are the underlying expectation broken by over-personalization.

Results are already different based on your location, so unless you're very near each other, you already don't have that. You mightn't notice it too much because it's only noticeable on queries where it might matter. Could be similar for personalization.

Here's another example taken from my experience a few years ago. I once googled "pro tour results" and was, as expected, presented with an info box about the results of the recent Pro Tour in Magic: The Gathering.

Some months later I was visiting family for a few weeks and wrote the same query on a family-member's PC. It gave me something about golf which I couldn't care less about. But I got the right results on my phone. I'm sure if I added "golf" to my query on the phone it would have given me info about that tournament instead. While it disturbs me how much I'm being tracked, I'm still happy with the practicality of the implied context being aligned with my interests.

I can type at 100 words per minute. Typing "programming language" after every search will cost me maybe two seconds per search. The savings are trivial. The costs, however, are not trivial. I have on several occasions spent half an hour trying to make a search engine handle a query that I know worked in the past. And that's when I find what I'm looking for at all. They have optimized the happy path but made failures worse and more frequent.

What really bothers me is that no one asked what I want. These companies replaced my tools behind my back. I have seen literal fistfights between machinists over people messing with their tools. This is at least that bad and probably worse. Software is central to how I make sense of the world. Software is not just part of my livelihood; it is how I make sense of the world. Changing my software behind my back is like "upgrading" my eyes while I sleep. Why do we accept that such a central part of our world is completely out of our control?

Totally agree. I want to be surprised by a new UX in a software tool about as much as I want to be surprised by a new UX on my chainsaw. Nobody would put up with this in the physical world, I hate that it has become accepted in the software world.

A lot of major UX changes have resulted in immense outrage, so it's not like everyone is fine with the churn. My best guesses on why it's accepted are:

1. Most big tech companies have monopoly power and get away with not caring much about their users. Maintenence work is famously under-rewarded at many companies, incentivizing changes even if they are net negative for users.

2. People get browbeaten about security concerns. Actually useful security updates often get bundled with UX changes.

Not "anyone": only mature searchers that worry about privacy, filter bubbles and artificially buried/censored good results.

Advertisement buyers, on the other hand, benefit greatly from carefully controlling who sees their ads. For example, child care related products for female teenagers that are one year too old for their school class, or lawyers for young adult males from bad neighborhoods; I'm sure everyone can think of something more creepy and offensive.

For the unsuspecting computer nerd, a search for latex back at the dawn of search technology was briefly something that could truly open the unprepared mind to unsuspected vistas.

Boy did that one get fixed fast.

But let us spare a moment of thought for the subsequent searchers for interesting items of latex clothing, and how they felt about being exposed to interminable details about an obscure word processing system.

It really depends. If I want to search coding related stuff, I want this to be personalized as much as possible, with always having the option to extend the search for non-traditional topics.

Or when searching for places to go, it would be nice to get recommendations which consider that I love to ride bicycle.

Then there's DuckDuckGo on Firefox for legacy search if you're paranoid.

What do you think an American tourist overseas wants when they ask for [football scores]?

Do you think an ergonomics engineer logged in from the office and a musician in their studio might want different things when they search for [keyboard reviews]?

How about a 16-year-old male native Texan versus a 62-year-old female immigrant with a degree in fine arts who search for [nearby movies]?

this is might be a great example of the difference between what people think they want being completely at odds with how they actually behave

Microsoft is a shark and they smell blood in the water right now. While I hate their products, I have to admire their decision making. For example, I think they see the threat that SteamDeck poses (Linux gaming becoming feasible) and are already working to head it off at the pass: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/04/handheld-mode-for-wi...

I'm not sure that's a great example of quick-pivot defensive decision-making on Microsoft's part. It was just a leaked slide deck of a hackathon project done by a few employees. If the project actually gets greenlit and shipped, that's another thing.

Microsoft has often been good at the Vaporware / stall approach. If a competitor/underdog looks like they're getting traction, announce something similar even if it isn't available for a long time (or ever). If you can stall adoption for a few quarters you can catch up to or kill a competing product. Sigh.

How is that going to help Microsoft here? You can build games that work with both windows and the steam deck. Why wait for Microsoft's handheld device?

Microsoft has always been a shark in the water. Maybe it was slightly less capable of killing blows during the Ballmer days.

I've been using Bing for a few weeks now it is not all the way there yet but so far the experience is more gratifying than Google. The results seem to be better and there is less ads on top the search results. Their AI integration is also well accomplished. No complains there...

Anecdotally, their actual search results have sucked for me. For example, I searched for “narrowest cars with 6 or more seats”, and Bing’s results were terrible and irrelevant. The AI version gave me some acceptable results but very few. Google returned pages of relevant results from different years.

When I try that search string on DuckDuckGo, I see what looks to be pretty decent results, FWIW.

DDG is backed by the bing index

Only partially.

Also, even if it were just a Dr front for Bing, it doesn't change that I got perfectly reasonable results for the search string said to return unusable results from Bing, so

Not partially, totally now. They used Yandex before, but they stopped using it after the war I believe.

You probably tried on balanced mode, that is shitty. Tried now on Creative and seems... very good?

https://imgur.com/a/xekxNAh

I'd use Bing's chat feature if it wasn't only available on Edge... I can't seem to get any Chromium browsers working well on my Fedora install. I already want to use Microsoft's search engine, why do they need me to use their browser too?

When MS switches on bing chat on chrome it will be a huge blow to google

Doubt it. Not enough people even know about it or will discover it to be a "huge blow" to google

There’s an extension that enables it for all browsers

There are addons/extensions for that!

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bing-chat-for...

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bing-chat-for-all-...

Last I checked you can just use a user agent switcher plugin to say you're using bing FYI.

That's exactly what this is doing, but only on the bing.com domain

https://github.com/anaclumos/bing-chat-for-all-browsers/blob...

Didn't realized that. My currently employer is MS-stack based so I have been working with Edge and to be fair, this was also surprising. I would probably rather work with Firefox but the browser is not that intrusive and provide the same level of support and tooling I get with FF. I think one the reasons I decided to stick with Edge these last few weeks is the extremely poor support I get when working with the SharePoint implementations that are for internal use, seems to be a issue with the way FF interacts with Windows Authentication.

Blind advice: it may be related to kerberos authentication. Firefox needs to whitelist the domains against which kerberos authentication can be performed.

You may try configure network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris and network.negotiate-auth.delegation-uris

There's a plugin for both chrome and firefox that allow chat to work within.

They both work for me at least on MacOS and Windows; haven't tried any linux distos yet, but worth a look.

I use bing via duck duck go and it's total dog shit but I don't want to use Google so I just suffer through it. And even Google's 1st page results are pretty useless nowadays

except you cant use the AI function without using Edge.. That's a huge complaint from me.

Half the time I enter a prompt it spits back regular search results without any chat response.

I've been using it for about 4 years now. Occasionally, I'll try Google when I'm having difficulty finding something with Bing. It's usually something where I have only a vague recollection of what I'm looking for and I'm starting by using search to find other keywords to eventually get to my true search terms. But it has yet to work out that Google has provided better results in those cases. Indeed, the results are often worse and I doubt I'd be able to make any progress with Google anymore.

And now, with ChatGPT integrated with Bing, I have found it makes very, very short work of those sorts of vague, barely remembered searches.

A lot of words without a lot of source or data.

The only source linked in the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/technology/google-search-...

It's probably the only source at all, as every number in the sammobile article is also in the NYT, like the 160+ people working on Magi.

As the sammobile article doesn't appear to do anything but regurgitate what is in the NYT article without any apparent validation on their side, the link should be changed to the NYT IMO, whose article seems at least based on actual internal messages from Google. I understand that the title isn't as attention grabbing though ("Google Devising Radical Search Changes to Beat Back A.I. Rivals").

I don't know how Bing is any better. I tried Bing today and the results are awful! The search results page is very bloated and there's too much going on everywhere. Too much irrelevant information. What surprises me is that they managed to make content look like ads, irrelevant and noisy.

Comparing the screens to Brave Search, I'm surprised how good Brave Search is. Not only are the results much better, but the UI is super-clean! There's only digestible information and no bloat.

Yah, it is really hard to imagine Bing cleaning itself up. No way users don't backlash on Samsung the moment they notice the gunky search results. And holy smokes, Teams, it's falling apart every new release. Once users have enough of that experience they're really going to wonder why they dove in head first.

>Teams, it's falling apart every new release

I've never used Teams, but it is weird to me that non-tech people seem to really like it while tech people hate it. Is it simply that the tech people are comparing it to slack but the non-tech people are comparing it to email/skype/etc.?

In the crevices of search space, I get more duplicates with Bing than with Google. But, I do get duplicates, with both, which is insanely infuriating.

This may be a Myspace moment for Google. The competition is now better.

There's another huge issue. Google is an ad business. That meshes well with search, and not so well with question answering system on mobile. What's ChatGPT supposed to say? "But first, this word from our sponsor?".

A big change in the ecosystem is coming. These next generation systems are being set up as walled gardens. Bing FAQ: "You’ll need to use the Microsoft Edge browser and sign in with your Microsoft account to access all the capabilities of the new Bing." Google is talking about limiting the number of users of their chat system, which implies they are tying usage to login.

This is a huge change to the business model. It's going to be about owning the customer relationship, not serving ads.

Is it better? It's flashy and interesting, but I don't think ChatGPT brings any actual value to the search use case. Other stuff, sure.

It does on phones, where content has to be slimmed down.

Too busy asking people to invert binary trees and not looking for people that know how to make products that make money.

Actually if you have been really looking at Google's management, just the opposite has happened.

Eric Schmidt, who is an exceptionally rare talent understanding engineering, business and politics at the same time was changed to a person who just want to show more ads (the product that makes money) with 0 engineering background.

I think you're both right. Change comes from above and reflects from below. "We hire the best" has become "we hire the best at passing a generic set of tests" because they want hiring to be a thoughtless, automated process.

I have been there and seen the destruction (all meetings were about political correctness, we weren't able to discuss anything that was really important).

The best are / were there before they quit to create companies, like OpenAI because it was easier than changing management.

Also I bet Sam Altman would be able to reverse a binary tree (it's a trivial recursion) even if he was never at Google: it's just part of being a professional programmer.

FAANG really only asks how to mirror a binary tree in interviews?

no, its a joke because the creator of homebrew couldn't do it and didn't get the job at google, despite making something immensely useful.

There's also this gem of how google wanted one of the creators of C to take a C test https://www.theregister.com/2010/04/21/ken_thompson_take_our...

And it’s disgusting, the amount of ads on YouTube now is gross. I recently wasn’t logged in and saw how many ads I had to watch to see a minute long video. I wouldn’t use the service if it wasn’t for YouTube Premium.

Do you find it is worth the money? It costs twice what most streaming services costs, and there are no bundles: I pay for Google One and Google Music, but that counts for nothing.

100%, but I put a high value on experience and my time, and I don’t have a lot of other subscriptions.

To train and productionize large-scale AI you need people who are good at algorithms and data structures.

This sounds similar to Walmart saying they'll stop taking Visa. Samsung would be dumb not to at least threaten moving away from Google, even if they had no intention to change. It's a negotiating tactic, one that has more teeth in recent months because Google's competitors are finally showing a real challenge.

They'd only be moving away from Google search not GMS. In my recent experience, Google Search is mediocre at best and perhaps worse than Bing most of the time. So it's not a massive gamble.

A gentle reminder that there is no proof of the “Google in shock“ assertion. The fact that an anonymous source maybe claimed it to someone at the New York Times has essentially zero credibility.

Until an attributed source at Google says something like “we were shocked“ or “we were gobsmacked, etc.“ that’s all just third-hand information reported fourth-hand.

From my use of Bard, I think it’s main issue is poor alignment due to lack of RLHF dataset. Open AI has been curating its data set for years as it aggressively pushed to productization. Google never cared about getting its models into the hands of the public so is having to scramble. I think Google will catch up eventually, but not before doing major damage to its market share and partnerships.

Some interesting dynamics at play here if true. Google basically maintains Android to get people to use Google services on it, so Samsung switching to Bing would eliminate Google's incentive to develop Android. Samsung is also by FAR the largest Android OEM and holds almost as much power over the platform as Google just from the sheer amount of Android devices that they ship.

> Samsung switching to Bing would eliminate Google's incentive to develop Android

They still have quite some apps on Android that they can use to extract data from users and send ads, e.g. youtube, gmail, maps, etc.

Pretty interesting when put that way. Why DID google develop android??? Oh yeah.

Samsung has done this before, and Google has multiple times made various offers and incentives intended to "encourage" Samsung not to. Because a huge portion of the Android monopoly will leave Google Search when this happens. Stuff like OEMs getting a cut of Play Store revenue are mechanics done to avoid this.

There's a pretty good chance Samsung is just negotiating for better terms, kinda like carriage disputes for TV networks.

Yeah, for Google this is existential, for Microsoft it's not. Google will go a lot further than Microsoft will to keep Samsung on their side.

For comparison, Google pays Apple an estimated $15 billion a year to be the default engine on Safari.

https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/25/analysts-google-to-pay-apple-...

Indeed. Though for Android OEMs, "paying" for Google's app suite is considered part of the equation. It's less of an incentive for Samsung though since they have their own replacements for most Google apps ready to go.

Now we have Kagi and Magi, lovely.

Btw Magi was already a search engine - magi.com and it seems it is suspending services now, wonder if domain is being bought by Google?

A quick note to say that this article is mostly a rehash of the New York Times article it references as its source. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/technology/google-search-...

If Bing will manage to pull it off then the only conclusion to draw from this will be: never bet against Microsoft, lol.

Up until ChatGPT, Bing was meaningless to me; Google Search served all my needs. I never had a reason to look over to Bing. The only contact I had with it was when something embedded their maps.

But now, with the AI integration, even when I tried it and left disappointed, Bing is starting to sound interesting.

Then there's how they are starting to integrate AI into their other products and putting a lot of good effort in visual design. Their products look modern and polished, while Google is "still the same old" with their Material Design.

I know they are the most capable engineers and that behind the scenes they are building the best quality soft- and hardware, but if they don't start to focus on the user again they will no longer be the titan they used to be.

> But now, with the AI integration, even when I tried it and left disappointed, Bing is starting to sound interesting.

When I try a new feature, and am disappointed, I think marketing overhyped it and lose interest. Why do you think ChatGPT + Search is a good combo, even after you were disappointed when trying it?

They are showing that they have a strong interest in including it. Sure, it still isn't where I'd like it to be, but what does Google have to offer?

Bard is US-only, so not reachable for me, I don't even know how or if it is integrated into Google Search. They'd have a bigger potential in enriching their search with AI features, better search, probably a better AI. At least from what they have been publishing during these past two years, they seem to have gathered a lot of experience with AI.

In regards to Bing, I felt like you.com had a slightly better AI integration.

What ChatGPT lacks are links to related websites. For example, give me a links to the documentation of the `.into()` trait [0] instead of "only" explaining it to me.

[0] https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/convert/trait.Into.html

> What ChatGPT lacks are links to related websites. For example, give me a links to the documentation of the `.into()` trait [0] instead of "only" explaining it to me.

In the recent announcement for plugins they showed off a web browsing plugin that allows ChatGPT to search the web, read content, and return results with sources cited.

https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-plugins#browsing

As an advertiser, it occurs to me that google severely dropped the ball. I've been waiting to hand them money, but they refuse to be sufficiently organized to onboard new, non-megacorp advertisers.

At first glance that makes sense: prioritize onboarding large businesses with large budgets. With a second thought, this approach seems foolish: their ad network is an ecosystem, and the X00,000 businesses like mine that are excluded would be an enormous boost to ad bids, ad targeting, and ad quality – 3 of the 4 things that Google breathes (the fourth being traffic).

If google screwed this up, what else are they screwing up?

Don't hand them money. Ads only makes sense for companies with money to burn (mega corps)

Love to see a title like this. Would love to be a fly inside the Google execs offices right now. I do wonder if they are confused, why are their factory workers, i.e. leet code solvers not able to innovate?

I find this hilarious and positively validating. Building a tech product is not about being able to memorise an algorithm or knowing how to sort an array in the fastest way possible. They are stuck in the past.

You will not ask a today's Software Engineer how does a bootloader function, yet the big tech companies keep asking irrelevant questions blown by time and progress.

The problem with Google is very simple: they have become entirely incapable of creating new products (specifically: stuff that people actually want).

Most of the tech. that underpins OpenAI's stuff has been invented at Google, and quite a long time ago.

They've been sitting on it, not doing anything with it, and even when their most direct competitor comes to take a huge pound of flesh out using stuff they created, all they manage to do is put out a lame subpar competitor (bard).

Things this situation evokes for me:

   - Google plus

   - Kodak

   - Xerox

But Microsoft can create new products?

Both major search engines are utterly useless when compared to the Google of years ago, but anecdotally I do find Bing more reliable lately for actually finding what I'm looking for.

This is hardly surprising. I never normally use Google, but was asked to check some SEO using Google search the other day. The results were a dumpster fire of sponsored content, “other people also search for” and stuff that was largely irrelevant. I had to go onto the second and third pages to find anything even remotely close to what I wanted.

It must depend heavily on what you are searching for. There are a lot of things I dislike about Google, but their search results are consistently better than Bing in my experience.

> Google Magi’s initial launch will be only in the US, with a maximum of one million users. Later, by the year’s end, it will expand to 30 million users.

It seems they never learned from the failed launches like Google Wave or Google Plus. Where you couldnt use them and by the time you and your friends got them the hype allready wore off.

Soon we have a Microsoft more power full then ever but less controlled and constrained by anti monopoly regulation then ever.

- after google search degraded for a while bing is competive

- MS has much influence and stack in (not really open) OpenAI

- MS has with LinkedLn a relevant social network, sure it's work focused but increasingly used for non work usecases

- MS controls 2 of the 6 relevant gaming platforms (XBox, PC -- the others are Switch, Playstation, iOS and Android), they happen to also be 2 of the 3 AAA gaming platforms (XBox, PC -- the other is Playstation)

- MS owns a lot of game production

- MS has the go to email solution for companies Outlook as part of Office365

- MS has what some call the best Calendar/schedule Meeting app, also part of Office365

- MS has the go to online meeting platform for companies (teams as part of Office365, through it succks)

- MS has a competitive company chatting platform

- MS competes with Google and Apple in the Cloud

- MS has a not so competitive ad platform

- MS has a semi competitive voice assistant which if integrated with ChatGPT tech could very well become very competitive very fast

- MS doesn't have a phone OS, but a lot control over phone through MDM features integrated into teams/outlook etc.

- MS has one of the main browsers (edge) with a lot of people happily explicitly opting for it or being coerced or tricked into using it (they lost that in the past but regained it). While it pains me its likely more relevant then Firefox by now.

- MS sells PC/Laptop like hardware successfully, but not that competitive

- one of the best standard consumer ergonomic keyboards is from MS

- they still have one of the most widely used presentation and note taking applications

- their database system is still around and sells, not sure why

- they control both of the some of the most widely used IDEs (VS and VSCode)

- they have some experience with AR/VR through I'm not sure about the competitiveness of current products from them

- they made some of the main reasons why people tried out Linux go away by having WSL

- .... I most likely forgot a lot

I.e. all in all: MS is EVERYWHERE with constant faster growing power and control all through the tech space. If it keeps up that way MS will soon be both more powerful then Google and then it ever have been. If they had managed to properly land their phone OS things would be really scary now.

And they've invested billions into the development-scene, especially lately. Noteworthy;

- Github with its new Copilot API to multiple IDE's (incl. third party)

- Typescript and standards management

- NPM, locking into the entire web2 ecosystem

Oh damn, NPM too?

lol. MS owns my ass and I can't even do shit about it

Soon you will be owned by Clippy, and the way it's going, you will become a paper clip. No joke.

From my list of my daily usage offenders which also include VS Code, you forgot Github and TypeScript I think.

Microsoft's effort to corner the developer productivity software market has surprised me with how successful it's been. Github has solid vscode integration, WSL works well enough, copilot is seeing use. They've really solidified themselves as the enterprise productivity software company for all stacks other than creative which adobe still dominates. Wonder if they plan to expand there next?

- MS complies with Chinese laws so they operate in China. That's a huge population Google is missing out on. If other countries start to enact similar laws, MS would eagerly comply to get into that market.

Some would consider the fact that Microsoft "competes with Google and Apple in the Cloud" and "has a not so competitive ad platform" and "has a semi competitive voice assistant" and so on is evidence they don't have a monopoly, rather than evidence they do.

they don't have a monopoloy but they are not far away from having more power then when they had a quasi monopoly

the mono in monopoly is in the end irrelevant, what matters is the power and ways you can abuse it. In the past you mainly got that with being a monopoly or duopoly but by now you can archive it by being "just" competitive with the best in a sector, and doing so in docent of areas and slowly integrating all of that into each other

Yes, you forgot github, typescript and NPM. They acquired most popular dev platform along with code editor, watch what you do and will automate that.

Apple used this tactic to put pressure on Google:

2013: Apple Makes Bing The “Default Search Engine” For Siri

https://searchengineland.com/apple-makes-bing-the-default-se...

2017: Apple switches from Bing to Google for Siri web search results on iOS and Spotlight on Mac

https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/25/apple-switches-from-bing-t...

Hard to know if the AI features of Bing are the key factor here for Samsung, or just a handy excuse for Samsung to renegotiate pricing with Google.

I have begun to find bing search invaluable. It's annoying to use google although I don't even like the bing user interface for AI search. Much too hard to get to. I don't want a single extra keystroke.

People want LLM leveraged search, and Google isn't delivering.

I think majority of "ordinary" users just what the search results when they need them, not really caring about the technology beingb used behind the scene.

And here bing is still often interior to b Google, LLM add some fun factor but factual quality actually goes down as GPT is known for making up facts

I think that Search Engine Optimization as we know it is also going to change forever as well.

Don't be surprised if we start seeing ads like "If you don't appear in Bing/GPT, you don't exist;" we are now in the era of AI-based Search Engine Optimization, or whatever term you want to put it on.

The end result is that the BigAI must know about you and talk about you. You must position yourself in the mind of ChatGPT or similar.

EDIT: How about "Prompt Search Term Optimization" (PSTO)?

With the aim of making premium margins from hw/sw products better than Apple without Microsoft, the partnership of Google, Mercedes-Benz, Sony could go far with top cover and Nintendo's superpower patience and as a key point of difference promise to re-supply parts without short fast fashion half lives. I fail to understand how Microsoft gets away with huge market monopoly without correction from parliamentarians confining them to one third or two of industry dominance.

I think the smarter move would be to integrate GPT-4 into Bixby. That's what finally got me to use Bing... it could probably get people to use Bixby too.

Bixby, the first key I disable, the first thing I adb uninstall on any samsung device.

I cannot imagine every wanting to talk to any computing device.

all we need is a programmable voice assistant to which you can add custom voice commands that run your own programs.

I can imaging Apple mulling about the same for iOS. Microsoft is on a roll and they have the money to challenge Google’s default place in our pockets.

With AI search, you won't have to go to the referenced page to read the content, which will kill the display ad business.

How's google going to get around that?

Bing embeds ads, so no problem there.

Apple should do the same thing now, twist the knife.

There’s 15 billion reasons they won’t.

Is Google paying Android phone manufacturers for having Google as default search engine similar how they are paying Apple?

Samsung has been trying to push that bixby thing on me but if it 's bing instead, i d gladly change

This is a very Samsung move: making their premium product feel cheap and cynical to users for easy money.

Edit: looks like I'm wrong, see IceWreck's reply below.

Original comment: my understanding is that this means Google will deny their customers access to Google Play, Photos and other first party Google apps. Samsung has replacements for some of these but not all of them.

Nope, to access play services you have to add the powered by android logo and preinstall a minimum set of required apps (including the google search app), but afaik nothing saying google has to be the default search engine.

Perhaps that will change in response to this.

But that would be anti-competitive, right?

I agree. Probably. Microsoft got hit for this, although of course changing browser is almost as easy as changing search engine.

The question is: why isn't it anticompetitive to have Bing as the default?

Seems unlikely. Samsung would justifiably paint that as anti-competitive / monopolistic and the last thing Google wants is more scrutiny from various government regulators right now.

Android's early commercialization actively encouraged OEMs to "customize" Android for at least two reasons: Android product maturity was questionable, and what else are phone OEM product managers going to do?

Now that "Google experience" is generally cleaner and better than OEMs' customizations, Google is struggling to put the toothpaste back in the tube. It is very damaging to Android as a product because OEMs are slow to issue updates and won't continue updates beyond three years, in most cases.

I doubt Google will strong-arm Samsung over this. They need Samsung more than Samsung needs the Play Store and other "Google experience" apps.

Pixels hardly get much more updates, despite Google.

That's one reason I like Pixels. The camera software is better than other phones, too. Unfucking a Samsung phone's default set of apps is annoying, though I admit I have not had to do that in a while.

I can't tell if this Magi project is supposed to be an iteration of Bard or something new.

Google should respond by charging Samsung a healthy licensing fee to use Google services and receive security and OS updates. They should also re-evaluate their Android licensing model and make it free for non commercial applications only.

Could it be that Google is pissing off Samsung with their garbage Android releases whose most visible effect is that of actively ruining the user experience?

I can imagine that creates work and headaches for Samsung, and other vendors.

Wait, people actually use the android search box?

It's usually the first thing I remove

Normal people just use the defaults, the idea of choosing a web browser or changing the default search engine is completely alien to most.

You can't even change the browser on iOS. Apple forces all browsers to use the same rendering engine under the hood.

How do you search on your phone? Open the web browser, navigate to google.com and enter your query?

Not GP, but I open the browser (in my case Vivaldi) and type my query in the address box.

My default search engine on Vivaldi is DDG, it issues a query to DDG.

Do you actually use the default google shit widget to do web searches?

Opening the widget is useless because it shows the result in the Google app (a 350MB monster) and when you click to open a result it opens in app.

You can't have your browser's features, You can't open multiple results in multiple tabs you need to go back each time.

A better option is to add the browser's search widget on the home screen, it takes you straight to the address bar where you can enter your query. All modern browsers support searching from the address bar, no need to go to google.com

It makes sense, though. Google search is terrible. Bing isn't great, either. But Bing probably charges less, and if there's no real quality difference between the two, why pay more?

You've got the flow of money inverted... Phone manufacturers don't pay for the right of getting to set a search engine as the default. They expect to be paid.

Ah, right. My brain farted.

Looking at how Google managed to "launch" Bard, I do not see how they will convince Samsung from a tech perspective.

Does anyone remember Bard? I hardly see anyone talking about it.

I think Samsung will mostly care about money here

Microsoft Windows survived thanks to Apple on proprietary OS front by not licencing OS separately and Google on open source OS front by not pursuing desktop ChromeOS

For me that would be a reason to avoid buying Samsung from now on. Can't stand bings UI overloaded with visuals that only distract you.

I mean it is kind of nuts. I didn't have "pretty much switch entirely to Bing" on my 2023 search Bingo card, but here we are.

My computer literate but non-technical wife just noticed yesterday that google searches are a waste of time compared to ChatGPT. Over the course of about six hours it went from this thing is amazing to this stupid thing knows I'm on a Mac but still refers to F11 keys.

She even got ChatGPT to re-enforce she was on Mac and didn't have an F11 key but never got a substitute key to use for Mac users. (F11 is volume down on my Mac keyboard.)

What does F11 do?

I dunno but in a mac kb you just press fn (down left) while the special function keys, to have them act as regular -ol f1--12 keys

Like I say it's volume down on the Mac keyboard. Why she was interrogating ChatGPT I don't know. I know she started using it to get multi-state reading correlations... then she was talking about get it to excel work.

After that I imagine ChatGPT told her to use the F11 for something and she noticed she didn't have one. I believe at that point she started to try to get ChatGPT to tell her which key was the F11 on a Mac. She told it she was on Mac and didn't have an F11 key. ChatGPT agreed she was on a Mac and didn't have one.

I believe that is far as the conversation went. It was interesting to me becuase it is commonly available information but the answer just couldn't happen.

Bingo… I see what you did there…

I wouldn't be surprised if they do that, Sammy already forces us to live with MS related bloatware on their phones and tablets.

Good. Samsung is removing that blogspam of a search

This article seems a little hyperbolic since I assume the default search engine will simply be the highest bidder...

Time to shower Samsung with cash.

Google needs platforms. platforms only need to browse web. platforms wear the pants.

Employees being both arrogant and lazy is quite a corrosive dynamic for a company.

It's going to be wild when Bing Maps is superior to Google Maps.

Bing still gives me poor results when I am in science search mode.

How does this happen for me when I use Chrome on my Samsung phone?

How are people pronouncing "Magi"? Same as GIF?

Do you mean are people going both ways? I don’t think gif is settled. I’m in the soft G camp on gif.

I think magi is already an English word with soft G, so I don’t know if there’s any room for controversy on this one.

The gif debate is over, it's pronounced like gin or git.

The inevitable result of years (decades?) of rest and vest

lol I'm officially moving off of samsung if this happens. No way in hell I'm using a shitty bing browser

Could this be because of GPT at OpenAI(MS).

Google got too corporate and played things too safe for too long. Imagine if Google released Bard 1 year ago.

Magi? What happened to Bard?

Out of the frying pan, into the fire!

They will become the next Nokia.

Google constant failure astonish me. How a company with so much money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine? I kept reading news about Google's AI programs, how the hell was Microsoft with OpenAI that came up with the biggest hit in AI?

Also, how does Google want people to use their new services if they keep closing them down after their "failure" (a.k.a Google completely forgeting about them and proceeding to close them down).

It was a google paper that open ai is based on, no?

that makes it even worse, doesn't it?

The knowledge being out there is better, how we will use it has a not so good history. As for google, maybe it was out of their control and the researchers had explicit rights to publish their work

> How a company with so much money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine?

It’s like the curse of oil. Google found a revenue stream early on that was so massive it covered up all their other sins. They dealt with their problems belatedly at best.

Now that revenue stream is under attack and they are scrambling. To put it politely.

Continuing with the oil analogy, I wonder if they'd have done better if they did something similar to what Norway did with their oil wealth (i.e. only spend a small percentage on the interest earned from oil). Perhaps they could've spent less on all of their moonshots and focussed solely on AI. Hindsight is 20/20 I guess.

Google absolutely could spend 10-20% of what they currently do and just have absolutely massive margins. The problem is they'd get regulated.

> so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine?

I get the essence of the comment and agree somewhat, but also feel;

There are plenty of other areas driving big revenue like adsense, youtube, play store, cloud and pixel.

I dont feel its fair to compare revenue to these in the same level of search. Search was a true unicorn business and took over the world, there only so many businesses that will ever reach those heights. If any of these businesses were stand alone they would be impressive. Its like looking at that photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger standing next to Andre the Giant, Arnie is a big guy, but there he doesn't look too significant.

I think, the bigger worry is their chrun and burn is going to limit take-up of future products. They need to do something like run new products in a lab type environment, not put the full weight of the weight of the brand behind them til they earn reasonable thresholds, then make them so they can be split out if teams want to take them independent should they decide to close.

Taking another approach: Google is proof that having great engineering doesn't matter without competent business leadership. For all their failures, this is where Amazon and Microsoft excel -- they both have incredibly talented businesspeople with long-term focus and a focus on delivering real value, rather than pursuing the latest fad passion project.

> For all their failures, this is where Amazon and Microsoft excel

Amazon isn't doing all that well recently, though (check $AMZN). And I'd argue that the product design on their biggest product, the e-commerce bit, is terrible. I know so many people, me included, who no longer buy entire categories of goods on Amazon because you simply can't trust the quality/authenticity of the goods anymore.

Amazon's biggest money maker is AWS, so even if the storefront is slowing down in growth they're still doing fine.

AWS’s market position is deteriorating rapidly. They’re now at just over 30% of market share compared to 50% in 2018. Meanwhile the trend right now is big companies pulling their core infra out of the cloud and into their own datacenters. They also haven’t managed to launch a game-changing best-in-class service or feature in 5 years outside of maybe custom lambda runtimes.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this AI wave pushes azure into the forefront.

They're not doing fine as evidenced by the loss of value in their share price. AWS on its own isn't big enough, nor still growing enough, to justify a massive valuation anymore. And the web storefront is suffering too. Amazon simply isn't doing that well at the moment any way you look at it.

Don't forget also Google's consistent bad treatment of customers (or rather victims as it often feels like) across all their businesses.

Not trying to be snarky, but what good business has MS done recently? Windows 11 is a shit show, ads in the start menu, milking Office and SQL, OpenAI is just an investment.

I don't follow that closely so I might have missed something.

> There are plenty of other areas driving big revenue like adsense, youtube, play store, cloud and pixel.

YouTube is still estimated to be barely above break even, GCP is losing money and if you look at the estimated Pixel sells annually of around 5 million a year is about how many iPhones Apple sells in three weeks.

I think it all comes down to the culture of rewarding shipping new things, but not maintaining and iterating. If Microsoft was like Google they would have shut down Bing years ago.

It's all a shortcoming of management and incentives. They have plenty of smart people, plenty of amazing tech, but they are 100% failing to deploy the right people on building the right products for the right customers.

They also don't give enough polish to their products.

For example, the Nexus 5 (2013!) had a bug - if you took 7 photos in quick succession, it wouldn't save photo 3 and 4. For example, you're photographing someone doing a dance, and you want a photo on each beat, so you tap the shutter to the beat of the music.

On a 2022 Pixel 7, 10 years on...... The exact same bug.

>They also don't give enough polish to their products.

Well yea, Google copied old-Microsoft's incentive structure of working on new features for promotions.

In some cases it's even worse and they are outright hostile to certain groups. Google Maps has been crippled for years for anyone using it outside of internet service. One of the most basic features, saving a point on a map, is completely broken. Route finding and offline maps are unreliable in rural areas.

I get that people who rarely leave major cities are Google's favorite and most profitable user demographic, but there are still many millions of people outside of that group. Google can get away with sneering at them while they have a profitable monopoly, but once they breaks up they are in deep trouble. Their culture of half-baked and frequently shuttered projects is so ingrained at this point it's going to be enormously difficult to change.

> ...how the hell was Microsoft with OpenAI that came up with the biggest hit in AI?

Microsoft is just an investor that got access to a product that OpenAI has been working on for the last 7 years. OpenAI has a single purpose and doesn't have to worry about displaying ads.

If Google's CEO were really visionary he'd invest 10 billion and half his engineers to support Claude and that AI company's trajectory, because deepmind seems a bit lackluster lately, or maybe they just have their own research agendas that aren't in line with industry demands or something.

The latter. DeepMind people have always been highly impressive but their focus was things like winning at video games, protein folding, etc.

Google is not going anywhere and they will easily replicate anything OpenAI does. Its not that magical.

Why they still rely on search/advertising is well known - Replacing a 150 Billion $$$ source of revenue is not a simple thing.

Its like trying to replace everything ppl do in a midsized rich country with something else.

And compared to Facebook which is still 99% dependent on Ads, Google is much more diversified (total revenue is north of 250 billion). They have cloud, youtube, docs, google play, all the alphabet experiments etc. And most importantly half the worlds online advertising (exchanges/ auctions etc) uses Google ad tech. So Google is not going anywhere.

They just look at the world through a very different lens due to their size. I am guessing they dont see the point of keeping businesses that produce a few hundred million in revenue running, cause they really need businesses that produce a few hundred billion to keep all their free stuff (search, email, chat, chrome, android, video, r&d for other stuff etc) afloat.

Decrying the imminent death of Google is ridiculous, but what you’re doing is also ridiculous. Google has fragile legs. They are not diversified enough, and a blow to their cash cow could severely hurt them. Losing advertising dollars in search could even hurt the YouTube revenue stream, since it’s the same advertisers for both products.

Google could be in deep trouble in five years.

> they will easily replicate anything OpenAI does

... not if it threatens their cash cow they won't. It's not a technical challenge, its a business model challenge

>>Why they still rely on search/advertising is well known - Replacing a 150 Billion $$$ source of revenue is not a simple thing.

You just described The Innovators Dilemma. You'd hope Google, considering how everyone reveres how well run it is would find ways to avoid it, but they didn't not. You know who used to avoid the Innovators Dilemma amazingly well? Apple. You know who does it really well now? Microsoft. They literally killed their OS revenue to grow the company. That's the equivalent of Google killing their search revenue for something new. It's hard to do, but you have to do it in tech.

>>And compared to Facebook which is still 99% dependent on Ads, Google is much more diversified (total revenue is north of 250 billion). They have cloud, youtube, docs, google play, all the alphabet experiments etc.

In 2022, Google was 80%+ directly dependent on Ads for revenue, and 10.3% indirectly dependent on it. Sure, Google does a lot of things but 90.3% of the actual money that keeps the lights on is advertising. Their revenue mix is extremely similar to Meta.

They rely on advertising sure, but the part that comes from Search is ~150B $ (out of 250 B $).

People kind of dont realize a large chunk of their Ad Tech is not Search related. Its the tooling for the Publishers to sell ad real estate on their sites. Its the tooling for Advertisers to target that real estate based on data collected. Its the ad auctions. Its the ad exchanges. There is ton of shit of going on that no one on the planet is anywhere close to replicating.

> In 2022, Google was 80%+ directly dependent on Ads for revenue, and 10.3% indirectly dependent on it.

I assume the 10.3% is "Google Other". That's things like YouTube Premium, Play Store and hardware. How is any of that even indirectly dependent on ads?

I pay for youtube premium so that I dont see ads.

> YouTube Premium is dependent on ads because YouTube as a product is dependent on ads. Without ads, YouTube Premium wouldn't exist. I think the vast majority of that 10.3% is YouTube Premium, YouTube TV, Play Store and their hardware. But I still think most of those are in service to their ad engine.

That just circular reasoning. "The company wouldn't exist without ads, so I will consider all this subscription and hardware revenue to actually be ad revenue, and then complain that they're too dependent on ads".

OpenAI has been gobbling up Google AI talent for years now. The difference between ChatGPT and Bard is just comical. The part that you seem to be missing is that users will gladly jump ship if something better comes along and it's kind of coming, and people are already jumping ship. Google hit the ceiling, which is awesome, but now, there is nowhere for them to go except back down. They're an AD company fighting against tech companies, they will do everything to protect their cash cow while people continue to innovate and move way past keyword search.

>Google is not going anywhere and they will easily replicate anything OpenAI does.

They've had a while now, and all they've come up with is Bard.

> Google is much more diversified (total revenue is north of 250 billion)

Over 80% of that revenue is still just ads though, not really very diversified. And even with GCP they are in a distant 3rd to AWS / Azure.

> Google is much more diversified (total revenue is north of 250 billion). They have cloud, youtube, docs, google play, all the alphabet experiments etc.

Do read their 10-K: https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q4_alphabet_earnings...

The only thing that realistically brings in money is ads. All other things are just subsidised by them.

For example Google Cloud (which includes both GCP and workspace offerings aka docs)? Well, it lost 6 billion dollars.

> cause they really need businesses that produce a few hundred billion to keep all their free stuff

The only such business they have is ads.

What makes them "wonderful engineers"? The vast majority are very smart, and obviously can code 'leet code like no tomorrow, but that doesn't make them wonderful.

Remember when the person who created homebrew couldn't get a job at google. That person created software used by a lot of people. He saw something that "needed fixing" and he fixed it. He fixed it so well a bunch of other people started using his fix. That's a wonderful engineer. Created a project used (and loved?) by many people. That's the kind of person you want helping to create products at your company.

Google puts so much emphasis on (coding) skills that aren't needed for the majority of the work done, and doesn't emphasize selecting for the ability to create things that people want to use. I also find the coding skills selection kind of amusing since they had to create a simplified programming language (Go) because so many of their 'leet coding new graduates couldn't handle C++ correctly. Perhaps being able to 'leet code in your sleep doesn't really make you a "wonderful" engineer either.

Ignore the engineers for now, Google is chock full of product manager. What the hell have they been doing?

Messengers.

Good product people have always been visionary, lead by a strong sense of design and understanding of how to meet the user needs.

Product Managers are the modern day bureaucrats created to reduce the individual impact on product and make PMs hot swappable like engineers (who I also think are better when they they have the aforementioned skills).

Google should be considered in object lesson in the problems of trying to bureaucratize product creation.

This nails it (I used to be a PM, now I'm an engineer) The PMs job has become so much about process, that any 'product sense' is completely disregarded because it can't be measured objectively.

Truly great products e.g. the original iPhone, rarely have PMs

The original iPhone did very clearly and famously have a product manager. It was the same person that was also responsible to paper of CEO.

Ken Kocienda one of the first engineers working on the iPhone disagrees with you on that https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1529521111104299008?s=20

Did any innovative product, at its inception, come from a 'product manager'? (especially at google)

They have their place in the org, but I don't see much creativity from them.

Trying to figure out what to rename Google Workspaces too. It's been two years, time for a new name. Also working on the next version of instant messenger to replace google meet since it is also a few years old. Maybe we'll see Google Hangouts 2.0.

Perhaps it's overly reductionist, but I think a lot of The Google's issues come down to their self-image. To this day they're stuck in the year 2006 when everybody and their grandma saw them as "cool", "innovative", "not Micro$oft", and "not evil." Most average joes don't believe those things anymore and just see The Google as the default thingamahoozie for looking up stuff on their phone. The Google believed they could grow rapidly and structure themselves with ordered-chaos because they were the chosen ones. Their road has yet to have become bumpy enough that they get knocked down a peg and forced to look at themselves in the mirror. Their hubris has allowed them to believe that they have no serious competition; just because your competition isn't actively competing now doesn't mean they won't be down the road when you're weak.

In regards to engineering, the quality of engineering is largely overrated and isn't even that well understood in the first place. Most systems are poorly engineered, and many engineering teams are inefficient, not because of the years of experience of the engineers or even so much their talent but because of bad management. Senior and lead engineers can massage a junior writing l33t code into only submitting PRs that are competently written. But if management gives engineering lip service while undermining their ability to write quality code, and the engineers who actually care end up leaving as a result, then all you're going to get is endless duct-taping and half-assed projects. Worse yet, you get almost nothing but makework projects that go nowhere because project manager #8,592 needs to look important to save their job.

I have generally found that people don’t take project managers very seriously, sort of like a human interface to a spreadsheet. Where are you that they are actually creating projects?

I think there's something to this. Another perspective might be Apple vs Intel, where one of my friends worked (at both) in fairly senior roles 5+ years.

The problem is that companies get really good at solving yesterday's problems. In Intel's case, that was making great CPUs for desktop PCs and servers. I have no doubt that the absolute pinnacle of desktop PC CPU engineering, was done at Intel in the last ~10 years.

The problem is, the world changes. Growth shifts from PC to mobile. People in datacenters start worrying more about cost and energy efficiency and build their own ARM parts. The landscape shifts, and the company is still fighting yesterday's battle. But it doesn't matter anymore-the basis of competition has shifted.

I think it's very difficult to pivot a company's core "basis of competition", or as you've elegantly put it, "self-image". What are we best at? Why are people getting promoted? Who's in leadership roles? The answers to these things need to shift over time, but most companies can't. This is why companies rise and fall.

I think a big problem with Google overall, is that their self-image isn't really customer-oriented. It's more inward-looking, "we're great engineers", "we're not evil", "we build the best distributed systems". The meta lesson is perhaps, orientation around serving your customers is the only thing you can fix, long-term. Amazon gets this. The problem is, it's way more nebulous and hard to pin down, than some of the more specific things Google has anchored on for the past years.

Their self-image is VERY customer-oriented. It's just that we're not the customers.

Riffing on this: another aspect of how business-life is harder for Google is, who actually is the customer?

For Amazon (at least in the classic retail sense), the customer is clear and obvious: the person buying a thing from your website, who wants good-selection, cheap and fast/delivered to their door. It's relatively easy to orient your entire company around the question of: "but is this actually good for The Customer?" That is, until you feel you've established your business model well enough, that you no longer need to focus on creating customer value, and instead turn towards growing your business value (i.e. the shift of 3p sellers going from "gee this is a cool way to expand selection for customers beyond what Amazon 1p offers by itself", into "wow this is just a cesspool for fakes and fraud, but who cares since they all pay fees to Amazon").

For Google, with the nature of the search business and the fact that it is their primary cash cow, the incentives are "mixed" to put it mildly. The true customer of Google is not the users, but the advertisers. The users are simply an ingredient to be fed into the advertising engine -- any decisions you make to benefit the user, are only from the perspective of, not pissing them off so much that they leave your platform (and even that, is a sliding scale depending on the viability of alternatives -- Bing along wasn't very viable, but Bing + ChatGPT might be...).

In a twisted way, maybe comparing Google to Amazon is more like this:

- G's search users = A's warehouse workers

- G's advertisers = A's shoppers

How well does Amazon treat its warehouse workers? Only as well as needed to achieve 2 goals: not break employment laws too egregiously, and not churn through the entire employable labor pool too quickly.

Bell Labs and like we’re throwing money at a wall too without a clear customer and yet they still invented the transistor, the PC, digital video cameras and so on.

Wtf is Google doing? They don’t make good products and they don’t invent that much useful stuff. They’re like the rich kid with a bunch of money trying random different things without focusing on one thing to get good at it.

I’m sure at this point Google is just a system to finally pay engineers a lot of money so they can retire earlier. Everyone that I’ve ever known that wants to work for Google is doing it to cash out, myself included.

All good points, and it's even worse for Google: the websites providing ad inventory are another important customer. And their needs (more traffic) are in conflict with end users doing a search (get answer quickly).

Watch Google Talks on youtube - it's really striking. Every single one contains at least one Googler commenting on how smart Googlers are. Stuff like "Everyone at Google is so smart".

> The problem is that companies get really good at solving yesterday's problems. In Intel's case, that was making great CPUs for desktop PCs and servers. I have no doubt that the absolute pinnacle of desktop PC CPU engineering, was done at Intel in the last ~10 years

Had Intel maintained its competency in designing and manufacturing CPUs, their situation would have been much better.

They surrendered the process technology lead to TSMC, and let Apple make far superior laptop CPUs without a good response for years.

They failed in what was supposed to be their core competency.

And, of course, in anything outside CPUs and Chipset, Intel is comically bad.

The take isn't exactly wrong.

There is a lot of stuff that you see come out of google and you have to wonder. Why is this successful in this environment? They have a lot of people that I would say it's fair to claim they're high IQ, but low on experience and the ability to build something wonderful. (Which is why it's frustrating to see their arch [and AWS for the matter] build weird components and force their practices in the industry)

What would be great to see.. foster an engineering culture based on experience there. Encourage their engineers to contribute to the world. (Rather than waiting and spinning out large projects like K8s)

Eh. Yes and no.

Homebrew may be a wonderful product, but that doesn't make the creator a wonderful engineer. Useful things can be poorly created. And this is not to shit on either Homebrew or Max Howell. I personally do not know if Howell is a wonderful engineer or not. He's obviously competent enough to ship working software. That's not nothing.

And everyone has an idea on how to improve everything. Sometimes we're right, sometimes we're wrong. And even when we're right, it doesn't make us right all the time. You can't really select for "the ability to create things that people want to use". No one's track record is flawless. It's very nearly a crapshoot.

Basically, you're putting Howell on a pedestal, in much the same manner you're accusing others of doing so with Google employees.

I think traveler01 does have a valid question. Essentially, with all of their engineers, why is Google so limited? And I don't think it's a matter of not being able to ship stuff that people use. Google Drive, GMail, etc. They just don't seem to be able to monetize beyond ads. Maybe their fault isn't in pure engineering.

And to be fair to the hiring process at Google at the time he interviewed, Google was an "all yes" kind of place. If anyone had any sort of hesitation, that could cause a candidate to be rejected. Their philosophy was that it was better to reject a good candidate than hire a bad one. So all he had to do was have one off hour, and that could have killed his entire interview. I personally don't think being rejected by Google's hiring committee is a mark against anyone. To get even that far requires a certain level of skill and/or talent.

> I think traveler01 does have a valid question. Essentially, with all of their engineers, why is Google so limited? [...] They just don't seem to be able to monetize beyond ads.

Google's non-ads businesses are about $60 billion / year revenue. That seems like quite a lot!

To put it in context, that non-ads business would be in the top 20 for all tech companies by revenue. More than e.g. Oracle or Cisco. Roughly the same as IBM or HP. A bit smaller than Intel. Those are not small or unsuccessful companies (e.g. Oracle has 140k employees).

It actually seems pretty amazing that what HN thinks is Google's failed side hustle is comparable to the entire business of what would have been considered tech giants a few years ago.

And that's a fair response to the question.

But it is true that the vast bulk of their revenue does come from ads. So it gets complicated.

If you were to take away their non-ad revenue, Google would be fine-ish. If you were to take away their ad revenue, Google would be in serious trouble.

Compare with Microsoft. Their biggest revenue source is Cloud services. And that's only about a third of their total revenue. And it also includes "server products".

Why is Google unable to diversify to the level of Microsoft? The products are ostensibly there, they just can't make money from them. Or the only money they can make from them are by virtue of selling ads on them.

Diversification takes time. In 2011, their non-ads business was about $1 billion / year. That revenue has grown by 60x in 11 years, so about 50%/year growth for more than a decade. For most businesses those numbers are an amazing success story. It's only in comparison to the once-in-a-lifetime search ads business that this would look disappointing.

Microsoft already had diverse businesses 40 years ago, and have "just" needed to maintain that. They're now diverse by default as long as not too many of those existing lines of business fail. No matter how successful a new business of theirs is, it's really hard for it to grow fast enough to threaten that diversity.

> It actually seems pretty amazing that what HN thinks is Google's failed side hustle is comparable to the entire business of what would have been considered tech giants a few years ago.

Because it all pales in comparison to what actually powers Google: ads. To the point that there are persistent and growing rumours that GCP may be if not on the chopping block, but greatly de-prioritised (it's part of the 26-billion Google Cloud).

It's also weird to me that people always look at revenue only. As if net income doesn't matter.

For example [1], non-ad business may have brought in 60 billion in revenue, but what it is I see: "The increase in other cost of revenues from 2021 to 2022 was primarily due to increases in data center costs and other operations costs as well as hardware costs." And that cost is 77 billion.

Guess what Google's the non-ad businesses are: "Google other revenues increased ... from 2021 to 2022 primarily driven by growth in YouTube non- advertising and hardware revenues", "Google Cloud's infrastructure and platform services were the largest drivers of growth in Google Cloud Platform."

So a large chunk of that revenue is eaten by the costs of generating that revenue. Google cloud lost 3 billion, other bets lost 6 billion etc.

Meanwhile all other costs of revenue are a 49 billion, compared to over 200 billion in revenue from ads.

So how do those businesses inderectly depend on ads? Ads business subsidises them. Despite the size of those other businesses very few, if any, are successful (as in: actually earn money).

[1] All quotes and numbers from Google's own 10-K: https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/20230203_alphabet_10K.pd...

From the outside, Alphabet seems to do a very good job when it comes to engineering. They have very little downtime, fewer embarrassing security moments than most, youtube is far better technically than the competition, etc.

It's just that they aren't building things that people want to use, but that's a failure of management and incentives.

Thing is, they actually are building things people might want to use, they just don't focus enough on it. Stadia for example, was way ahead of Microsoft in image quality, fluidity, etc. After a year or two of trying to push it to customers they killed it for no reason whatsoever.

I even recall watching some comments of sad people who would need another gaming streaming service because they used Stadia for their gaming needs. It was a ridiculous decision that nobody understood why. They also screwed up game devs who were porting their games to Stadia, which will for sure have repercusions in future services.

Just to clarify on the Go point - that was all made up BS from Rob Pike.

Moving from C++ is the most reasonable choice ever. It is very complex and 20 developers who use it could come up with 20 solutions given freedom. Standardizing on a simple language is just good for collaboration.

>Remember when the person who created homebrew couldn't get a job at google.

That tree reverse meme?

he made it up

Go isn't replacement for C++, and no one can handle C++.

Yeah, I agree with this. Odd comment about Go being C++ with training wheels. I don’t think that’s the case.

Go is a great first-class language on its own merits.

>How a company with so much money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine?

Because they lack product management at the executive level downwards. With no goals set for current and future products, the engineers downstairs are allowed to play....a little too much which means the company as a whole flounders.

Watched the 60 Minutes interview with Pichai last night. He’s really… unimpressive. He shouldn’t be doing MSM interviews if that’s the tenor of his performance.

Google is supposed to be a technical firebrand and their cloud isn't dominant, and their AI product and market position got punk'd by Microsoft... and he's out there saying things like AI will be a bigger discovery than fire. Which calls into question: so why isn't Google a leader in AI, or seem to be?

It's a bad PR thread for Google, and he lacked any Q factor in those interview clips.

> He’s really… unimpressive.

That's putting it mildly

> He shouldn’t be doing interviews

He should not be running Google at all, period.

he's a good choice for "Good Times"...when the money is rolling in and you're on top, it is okay to have an inoffensive friendly supportive type in the CEO chair

those times are gone though and Google definitely needs someone more proactive and focused

> Google is supposed to be a technical firebrand

They used to be, but they haven't been that for a long, long time.

I imagine they have some AI solution in reach.

I wouldn't want somebody to give presentations as a head of Google. On the contrary, I hate when people produce vapor.

Microsoft bought their AI solution. We will see if they can successfully integrate it. I am not yet sure about that. I hardly call that innovation though.

"Embrace, extend, extinguis" was Microsoft's way to address widely used standards in its early quest to be a monopoly [1]. What they're doing with their AI solution seems like a similar case.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

I can't help but feel like Google is going through their "Steve Ballmer CEO Phase". I wonder who will be the next CEO to fix things.

He comes off to me as someone in a funk, or stupor, or depression. Like he's out of touch, out of grasp with realities, and I think changes and things at google have probably hurt their culture quite a bit over the years. The best engineers in the world will churn out shit, if they aren't inspired to at least do exciting things sometimes, and I think Google's lost that thing that made them excite developers.

Google Cloud revenue (which includes Workspace revenue) was $26B in 2022. That's only 10% of Google's total revenue, but to put it in perspective, all of Salesforce did $31B.

Revenue is nice, but is Google Cloud profitable?

I can generate huge revenues selling $100 bills for $95.

It's incredibly rare for any company to produce one golden goose. It's even rarer for them to produce more than one. Google is the norm here.

Chrome and Gmail are homegrown but Maps, Youtube, Docs/Drive, the display ad business (ie DoubleClick) and Android are all acquisitions.

Think of it this way: if your ad business generates $100B/year, how do you justify spending billions on something that will generate a farction of that, particularly to start? How does that effort ever compete for resources internally?

And if you are successful it reaches a point where your two efforts can become competing interests.

Well Google keeps putting out new products. And I hear you get promotions when you release a new product.

Good products come through refinement.

But every time you use most Google stuff, it feels like it’s still version 1. When compared to competitors’ products that they’ve been improving time after time, it just falls flat.

Lack of Product sense. Not an engineering problem.

> Google constant failure astonish me. How a company with so much money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine?

I have a slightly different answer than most of the other replies, which is that Google just got too big. I worked there for 10 years (left a year ago for a smaller company) and the amount of inefficiency and waste due to having too many layers of middle management with no real visibility into what was going on was just astounding. Over that decade they paid me millions of dollars in total, while canceling whatever I was working on almost exactly every 18 months like clockwork. Typically due to management issues or corporate politics rather than for any real technical or business reason.

This has been described in many variations on HN, what puzzles me is why the early, loyal, employees didn't point out this dynamic developing.

Or if they did internally, why the Board decided to ignore the most loyal and proven.

Googler #1 to #1000 were clearly not fools, and by the 2010s they very likely had enough credibility to be taken seriously if several dozen of them said this.

all those individual contributor people got rich and left the company.

I can believe half of them did, or maybe 2/3, but that still leaves hundreds of original Googlers who could speak up.

how old are you? have you ever tried to get a group of 10 people, forget about thousands, to do something in a way that you think is "correct"? especially something worth millions and millions of dollars?

this is beyond the plane of rationality and the social forces take on a life of their own. it's not a math problem.

> have you ever tried to get a group of 10 people, forget about thousands, to do something in a way that you think is "correct"?

Yes I have actually, several times.

It's not easy, and of course it gets exponentially harder as the group grow, but these folks also have access to exponentially greater resources and exponentially greater motivation to do so. (Assuming their desire is to remain loyal shareholders of the company for the long term)

I was there early on (not in the first 1000 though), and some people did try to point it out, but it was very hard because there's no way to say "maybe we can't hire more people without becoming less elite" in a way that sounds non-asshole-ish. So such sentiments tended to be voiced in private. Also it's just so vague. What is the right size for a company like Google? How many people should you hire for projects like AI or self driving cars? And finally, it was totally against the founder's and top executives self image. They felt that the potential of the company was nearly unlimited, that they would never run out of ideas. So they just kept hiring, over and over again, without any connection between headcount and need.

> but it was very hard because there's no way to say "maybe we can't hire more people without becoming less elite" in a way that sounds non-asshole-ish.'

Hmm this sounds like the concern was badly communicated because this phrasing is both unnecessary and not quite correct either. (since it is possible to keep recruiting to a very high standard even during exponential growth via spending exponentially more resources)

The straightforward logic of:

linear increase in organization size = exponential increase in organization complexity = exponential frictional losses

would have been much clearer.

>> since it is possible to keep recruiting to a very high standard even during exponential growth via spending exponentially more resources

Since when? You're assuming the pool of employees available to recruit is infinite which is clearly not true.

It's clearly larger then 1 million worldwide, which is what matters to a company of Google's size.

It will breakdown if the company wants to run multiple Manhattan Projects simultaneously, but anything short of that is technically possible.

Is that clear? How did you arrive at that number? Just because people exist and have some skills doesn't mean a company can find them and hire them. There are lots of reasons why that might not be the case. Even when I first joined the company very early on, they were struggling to recruit in the USA despite spending vast resources on the effort, and this was what pushed them into international expansion.

> Just because people exist and have some skills doesn't mean a company can find them and hire them.

I claimed it's technically possible with 'exponentially more resources', not that any private organization could feasibly possess the resources or cachet to, in practice, hire a million top notch people.

Maintaining the literal same average quality with Googler #1001 to #10000 would probably have required spending 10x more per hire, compared to hiring #1 to #1000.

Google produces other products than search - Android for example. Waymo is the best self-driving car company (but the problem is self-driving cars won't work for a long time, if ever).

The problem is all Google's products use the free-plus-advertising model and this has caused them to drift to serving the advertisers rather than serving the users. And that makes it hard to switch gears to offer more benefits to users.

The main problem is Google shifted from making search better for their users

Management. The a company grows, top management becomes risk-averse, and middle management cares more about their carriers than the company future. They will kill anything perceived as even slightly risky coming out of engineering. And guess what, anything good and new will be controversial and risky.

Their search engine doesn’t make money. Ads do.

> I kept reading news about Google's AI programs

Technology is not a product. A product that uses technology to solve a number of clearly defined real problems is a product. When Google was saying AI this AI that, I had yet to see any product.

This is a pet topic of mine to think about - so my (probably over-long) two cents below...

For context, I worked at Google for ~4 years, and have also been at two other FAANGs, as well as done time at VC-funded startups. I'd like to think I have a good gamut of experiences to compare against both in the realm of smaller companies and massive megacorps.

Google's problems are (from most severe IMO to least severe):

- Poor senior management. Other posts touch on the middle-manager-heavy ranks of Google, but IMO that misses the forest for the trees. A bloated middle management layer is but a symptom of a sclerotic upper management. To add some color to this:

- Google has a fundamental ethos that I haven't seen described in other writings and lacks a good term for it. In my head I call it the hypothesis of the free-range engineer. The foundational belief is that upper management's job is to get out of the way of the top talent they've hired. Product ideas should come from the bottom of the company - and even more importantly, they should succeed through intra-company competition. This is probably the singular most impactful organizational cultural belief at Google, and it informs how the entire company is structured. My position: the entire hypothesis is crap, and is a huge part of what holds the company back.

- The net result of Google's culture is that upper management sets very little product direction, in favor of letting individual teams set their own priorities and ship independently. This means a lot of duplicative products and a lot of products that don't integrate with each other (see: Workspace account sign-in and... literally everything). Upper management has a light touch and is extremely loathe to mandate standards, resulting in a really mind-blowing level of product fragmentation. Much of this seems to be a deathly allergy that the company developed after the total and utter failure of Google+, where upper management did exert direct influence over product. The lesson they took from G+'s failure wasn't "have a better top-down product strategy next time" and was instead "top-down product strategy bad".

- Upper management turnover is excessive. All big companies suffer from re-orgs, but Google practically makes re-orgs a sport. In addition to upper management being extremely loathe to give product direction, upper management (by this I mean Director-and-up) rotates alarmingly often, and each time it's accompanied with a re-org where projects are killed or deprioritized. I don't think in my entire time at Google I ever saw a multi-year roadmap actually executed to completion - each and every time some senior leader is replaced and the entire roadmap and strategy rewritten.

- Google has poor product strategy overall. The company tends to swing for a lot of home-runs but structures these endeavors poorly. There are a lot of ambitious PMs advocating for huge multi-year megaprojects that end up being total failures. Upper management is credulous and doesn't demand proof of viability prior to sinking a ton of resources over multiple years into a thing (this feeds the turnover problem above - where inevitably when a multi-year thing flops heads roll, when the real problem is that upper management did not exert scrutiny over the project sooner). Big, ambitious goals are good - but viability needs to be validated quickly and continuously throughout the development process so that requirements can change (and yes, so that the project can be killed expediently if the fundamentals aren't there). Again, a failure of Google's upper management.

- Continuing on that theme, Google's upper management is naive and credulous when it comes to product forecasts. PMs seeking to have their projects approved (especially big megaprojects) will make up absolutely bonkers projections for fundamental success metrics, and are often not seriously challenged on them. Senior leadership is ready to believe numbers that are facially absurd, and then are surprised when the product fails to live up to the unrealistic expectations. This phenomenon also drives the turnover/re-org problem above - since when the product whiffs the metrics by a mile somebody has to get the boot - but the real problem was believing the bad projections to begin with!

- Promotion-driven development is a problem. But unlike most prognostications about Google I don't think it's their main problem. Leadership is at the core of Google's problems and promo-driven development is just an exacerbating factor IMO. But there is a serious problem with how Google structures incentives for ICs and middle management. The biggest concrete effect of this is that after launching, engineering teams empty out rapidly as people sense that no promos are forthcoming for working on the product, and look for greener pastures. This exacerbates the effects from above, where -- through an array of leadership failures -- the product was already on thin ice. The collapse of the engineering teams on it further buries the product and sends it on a death spiral.

Anyway, this is already running way too long. At this point I think there needs to be a fundamental change to how Google pursues product if they hope to turn this boat around.

>Google has poor product strategy overall. The company tends to swing for a lot of home-runs but structures these endeavors poorly.

I wouldn't say so; I mean they like to experiment a lot but their product strategy is good in the long term e.g. Google Search, Google Mail, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Chrome, Android etc. If 5 experiments fail and 1 succeeds and brings billions of dollars in revenue that's win in their book and in my book too.

Basically what Google is doing is building its family of apps to capture more attention and sell more ads. The same thing Facebook does with its family of apps e.g. Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. The goal is to capture as much attention as they can and then sell ads because that's what their business model is all about. Zuck even tried to acquire Twitter back in the day plus Snapchat as well. I doubt he liked the products or the people behind it, he just wanted to get rid of competition which was stealing attention or screen time from his family of apps. The same thing is with Google, that's why they are constantly pushing new apps and services (to gain market share and user attention and then to push ads).

> "Google Search, Google Mail, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Chrome, Android etc."

This is a vindication of Google's M&A department and an indictment of Google's actual product orgs. Out of this list of 6 major Earth-shaking products only 3 came from Google itself. YouTube, Android, and Maps were all acquisitions.

And of the homegrown successes the last one of note (Chrome) was released 15 years ago. In other words: Google has been completely unable to produce a mega-hit product for 15 years by itself.

> "If 5 experiments fail and 1 succeeds and brings billions of dollars in revenue that's win in their book and in my book too."

Yes, and this is how all other tech companies operate as well, the problem is that Google experiments incompetently.

Take for example the recent and total failure of Stadia - they sunk truckloads of money into developing the underlying technology, which is legitimately impressive. And then they slapped a substandard (let's be honest, less than substandard) go-to-market strategy around it. And after it predictably floundered they walked away from the thing entirely.

Meanwhile on the other side of the fence Microsoft developed basically the same product, but with a better go-to-market strategy has now carved out a niche for themselves in streaming gaming.

Both companies experimented, one got the product to stick, the other flailed around before declaring the experiment a failure - even though within the competitive landscape it was obviously viable.

Or for something more currently topical - Google literally invented LLMs but failed to productize it. They put in the money and failed to get the result where another company did.

The list goes on and on. The claims of "see what sticks" is a superficial mantra and its practitioners often forget that how you go about experimentation affects your odds of success. Google has IMO one of the worst experimentation processes (or really just what other companies call product strategy) in BigTech.

Google has taken the notion that you can swing at multiple balls that are tossed your way and generalized it to mean that one doesn't have to be any good at hitting the ball, because given a sufficient large N pitches you're gonna get a hit anyway. This is poor business strategy and it's showing.

>Out of this list of 6 major Earth-shaking products only 3 came from Google itself. YouTube, Android, and Maps were all acquisitions.

They tried to compete with YouTube, it didn't work out but hey we have deep pocket, let's buy them. Successful investment because they bought YouTube for $2bn and last year YouTube generated $30bn in revenue. All done and lifted to sky by Google. Android was pre-emptive acquisition against Microsoft and its mobile Windows OS and its search engine Bing. Today Android is the most used OS in the world and it comes with Google apps preinstalled. Also all done by Google because as far as I understood, they built modern Android OS from the ground up with the Linux kernel ofc. I'm not sure about Maps but I bet there was also some long term vision/strategy there as well. You don't have to innovate all the time if you have strong core business and deep pocket for acquisitions, innovation happens elsewhere.

Also turning acquisitions into successful businesses and money making machines is a difficult task. Not every company can do it and some companies even go bankrupt because of acquisitions that gone bad.

>Take for example the recent and total failure of Stadia - they sunk truckloads of money into developing the underlying technology, which is legitimately impressive. And then they slapped a substandard (let's be honest, less than substandard) go-to-market strategy around it. And after it predictably floundered they walked away from the thing entirely.

Stadia was too early in the game, something like Altavista to Google. Cloud gaming market needs to mature and eventually some successful cloud gaming company will pop up. I also don't think they really cared that much about cloud gaming because let's be honest they jumped on the bandwagon of cloud gaming just like they are jumping now on LLMs hype.

>Or for something more currently topical - Google literally invented LLMs but failed to productize it. They put in the money and failed to get the result where another company did.

Too early to judge. We will see in the next couple of years.

Who cares? People will quickly setup their own default search engine. And I guess it will be Google. Google is a household name. Nobody in the "real" world cares about this AI crap.

Shame not DuckDuckGo.

DDG uses Bing under the hood

>DDG uses Bing under the hood

Bing is just one of many sources DuckDuckGo utilizes

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

> When people search, we believe they’re really looking for answers, as opposed to just links

I believe this as well for most people and most searches. I, however, am not most people. The vast majority of the time I want a link to sites that have what I am looking for. This is my biggest gripe with search engines and has been for a very long time. I used to be really good at finding pages I wanted by punching in the right words in the search. At some point in the mid 00's Google changed everything and I have failed to adapt fully.

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