Hacker News Reader

Comment by eslaught | Hacker News Reader

When I was an intern at Google circa 2010, there was a guest lecture from a business professor who described exactly this process. At the end of it, he made a comment like, "Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative." But literally every single prediction of his came true, and I witnessed some of them happening in front of my own eyes even in just the months that I was there (and certainly in the years that followed, though I was no longer with the company).

View on HN

On paper, Google's throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks strategy (that has lead to a substantial Google Graveyard) seems like it was intended to allow for some parts of the company to innovate while keeping the core products stable and boring. In practice, many of those innovations (Google Inbox, anyone?) were not deemed profitable enough to keep around. Others were never given the resources to grow beyond an experiment. And even with a long leash, a big company project is never going to innovate as quickly as a startup.

This year, however, with the extremely deep cuts to Google's internal incubator (Area 120), it seems pretty clear that they've given up on this strategy, at least for anything that isn't somehow AI-related.

I mean that incubator was a total waste of money. No one did anything, everyone was a bser from the top, and 95% of the projects were total failures. I think there were maybe 3 "successful" projects.

Pretty standard rate of failure for early stage startups.

I think this is why these teams are really hard to have in a mature org. In reality maybe 5% of projects in one of these innovation orgs is actually great! But it’s impossible to evaluate and everyone else is thinking some variant of “this team is able to bs and show no value, while I have to hit real goals or risk being fired?”

I think the incentives would have to be much different for it to work (e.g. much lower base pay + higher rewards for success)…..but at that point just join a startup

Which 5% of projects are really great? In my experience, presuming you have tight filters such that all of your projects are plausibly potentially great, you really don’t know until you try. That’s the point of an incubator.

It’s not that hard to evaluate when something is working (ie the hard part in evaluation is false negatives, not false positives).

In Area 120’s case there was no coasting - if anything there was a hair-trigger standard to shut down underperforming projects.

3 successful projects can totally justify what you call waste of money.

I sometimes wonder what people expect innovation is. You try and try and try. One thing is good and you must know how to use it - it can make history.

If I understood right, chatgpt comes from one of such ideas.... so the question is also: who evaluates the ideas? How come that Google was not able to capitalize on that idea?

So yeah, instead of treating the cause they treat the symptoms, like usual.

Agreed, we are on ycombinator.com, after all. The patron saint of failed ideas.

I think these type of teams are a good way to give talented devs a break from the grind at bigger companies, even if the chances of a new product is low.

Not every company can afford these "paid vacations", but they do have some use at times.

I ran one of the successful projects in Area 120.

I joined Area 120 with huge skepticism. It was hamstrung and inefficient in its own ways. And I agree it didn’t reach its potential - largely because it was encased in Google 2020 instead of Google 2007.

But to my surprise almost all of the projects were impressive, well-conceived, promising bets. And the people in Area 120 were among the top 10% of Googlers I worked with in my decade at the company.

Google killed Area 120 because of bureaucracy and politics, full stop. Google is worse off because of it.

Somewhat spicy take - if the people in Area 120 were among the top 10% of Googlers you worked with, they probably weren't the right builders to start a new vertical.

Most of what makes people effective at large companies is neutral or negative value when applied to very early-stage companies.

That assertion applies to the middle 80%, IME. The top 10% are the people you can drop on to any project of any size and any org structure and they adapt quickly and deliver. They adapt themselves accordingly.

> That assertion applies to the middle 80%, IME. The top 10% are the people you can drop on to any project of any size and any org structure and they adapt quickly and deliver. They adapt themselves accordingly.

These are rather the top 10 % sycophants, not the top 10 % researchers or top 10 % programmers.

I didn't see that mentioned, perhaps I missed it. I read it as top 10% of performers.

You’re not wrong. They were among the top 10% of people I worked with in terms of passion, commitment, and creativity. They weren’t among the top 10% in terms of their skill in navigating Dilbert-land corporatism.

A significant number of the people in Area 120 projects were folks who were stifled and/or wasted in their previous Google jobs. One explicit purpose of Area 120 was to prevent the loss of these entrepreneurs to outside startups. Not incidentally, this was a form of cultural reinforcement - Area 120 burnished Google’s reputation as a good home for entrepreneurial mindsets.

"One explicit purpose of Area 120 was to prevent the loss of these entrepreneurs to outside startups"

So basically google had a shed where they hoarded talented people, to prevent competition? :)

I Don't think hoarding is necessarily the right word. They were using them to research potential new products or tools. The theory being that if only a few of the projects prove high value then it's worth it. That's not hoarding that's letting them flourish.

> So basically google had a shed where they hoarded talented people, to prevent competition?

That's a succinct description of why Microsoft Research was created.

Bill Gates explicitly said in an interview that rather keep people busy than losing them to the competition.

1) in the case of Area 120, this is one of the ways it was pitched to management. “Passionate entrepreneurs are leaving to work on new ideas; if you give them a place inside Google to pursue new ideas, it keeps them and their entrepreneurial energy at the company.”

2) in general, early Google used to hoard talent all the time. The founders would keep great people (or their friends) on payroll for ~ever just to have them stick around. That was most prevalent in the first decade of Google’s life, to my knowledge, and mostly applied to very senior people.

By the time Area 120 was pitched and approved (circa 2014), those days were largely gone. Area 120 was primarily filled with junior people (L4-L6) and constantly had to sing for its supper - it was not at all a sinecure.

I know you're not wrong, but it stings a little to see L6 referred to as junior.

>Google Inbox

Still so damn bitter about that death.

It’s weird that Gmail never reached that point. Even years later it’s still the same it was 10 years ago.

I think after inbox died I just gave up on it and moved to fastmail.

I understand what you're saying (I miss Inbox, too). But end users like sameness and "it just works." Normies prefer stability over innovation when they are trying to get stuff done.

Normies like sameness, this is why God gave us configs. You can default to normal but let the crazies customize.

Thing is, they quit on it too quickly; sure, a lot of people would stick with gmail, but others - and following generations - would adopt and grow up with inbox.

I think / suspect that many people develop habits of this type in their 20's and never move away from it for the next 60 years because it works. Example, people who still use vi(m) / emacs. Nothing personal, but as an example, they use it because they're used to it and have been for decades. And no editor that claims to be better will ever replace it for them.

Inbox was not deterministic. It's like a social media feed for your e-mail. I'd rather have my mails left as-is, and allow me to work with them the way I want.

You don't have to be a "normie" to appreciate simple or old fashioned things. Most of the e-mails I receive is not for quick-consumption, and I prefer the standard way over Inbox's way.

Maybe it was a solution trying to find a problem, IDK. I used it for 30 minutes tops.

Gmail settings still look like they were made in 2001. Any UX designer will want to pour Clorox into their eyes by just looking at it. Remarkable how Google can just totally ignore it, but then again - email is a very specific product. Once you grab your market share, we are locked in into our emails.

I miss Inbox features too. Shortwave is nice if you want something similar today.

It is the best email client I have ever used.

> at least for anything that isn't somehow AI-related.

If you can't innovate at the base level of app design .... how do you have any hope of innovating for AI apps that require research/engineering/product/marketing collaboration?

That's true. What they need is what they had started doing, i.e. breaking down Google into Alphabet and letting some companies within the conglomerate act like startups.

Why was this effort unsuccessful? Perhaps they were unable to get rid of middle management? I have had lengthy discussions with employees from several of their companies, e.g. Calico, and that seemed to be the case. This article only reinforces my view.

> Why was this effort unsuccessful?

i suspect that they are unsuccessful for two reasons: failure is not death, and success is not riches (for those who did the work).

I think you are talking about “innovators dilemma” great book by the way

It's worth noting that was a turning point: the "more wood behind fewer arrows" policy adopted by Larry [1] initiated the die-off cycle of Google products. Prior to that, as far as I am aware, they were much more tolerant of products staying around in a mature-but-not-wildly-successful state. Afterwards, it seemed as if they would only keep things that maintained a trajectory to become as successful as their core products.

Again, this was not entirely unpredictable. While I don't remember the details of that lecture, I remember the professor calling out these sorts of big shifts in cultural values as being typical of startups transforming into large companies. And Larry himself was part of the transformation, turning into (presumably, what he believed to be) what was needed to lead Google into its next stage as a large company.

[1]: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind-few...

What’s remarkable is that that phrase was already, at that time, notorious for having been a portent of doom at Sun Microsystems.

All the wood behind one arrow…

..and now all that's left of Sun is the wood on the back of the Meta sign.

Every time a socket is instantiated, Sun Microsystems comes alive; so too it is with NFS, and many other core technologies; there is lots that's left of Sun which still makes it live, even though it doesn't officially exist any more.

And any time 0xide Computer ships a cloud in a rack with the Helios operating system powering it, Sun Microsystems shines bright as a beacon of indestructibility due to quality.

And the Java/MaximeVM legacy, alongside some entertaining podcast stories.

It seems like the energy and creativity of Google Labs may have been lost rather than infused into all of Google.

If I recall past discussions on this topic correctly, it wasn’t just about profits. I believe the incentive structures are setup around launches and not maintenance. If that’s correct, then that would lead to people launching, collecting rewards (bonuses, promotions, etc) and then abandoning.

Microsoft today is more innovative than google IMO. They keep executing bold and controversial strategies, even though being older than google.

If we ignore the GUI civil wars for a bit, though.

At roughly similar points in their lives, Microsoft and Google initiated video gaming platforms. Microsoft stuck with Xbox through seven years (iirc) of still-unprofitable growth to what it is today. Google abandoned Stadia after three years.

Yeah, I think Google is looking more like an IBM in the long run, while Microsoft manages to innovate despite its age and size.

They made - and still make - one crucial error: you need to spin those projects that are simply viable out immediately after they take root. Otherwise you will end up with the brand advantage but there will always be the pressure to use the resources (people, mostly) more efficiently in terms of ROI. And so nothing ever lasts and slowly but surely your reputation as a reliable partner for new products is eroded.

You can use your main brand for the launch, but then you have to be willing to support the child.

In addition, I don't understand why they stopped them entirely, instead of spin them off as subsidiaries under e.g. Alphabet; make them financially self-reliant, have Google/Alphabet as the main shareholder, and give the people that worked on it (and whoever else wants to) the opportunity to continue working on the product.

Some wouldn't have been viable, sure. Others were probably too ingrained in Google's hardware/software ecosystem to be separated out (although I wonder if nowadays everything Google runs on its cloud offering, which would make it simpler, just change the billing).

Most of them were probably built on Google's core infrastructure in ways that make them difficult to externalize at sub scale. There's also compensation disparity - it's virtually impossible for a new startup / spinout to pay FAANG comp and remain profitable & nimble. This results in braindrain.

The reason is quite simple: why spend engineering headcount on a less successful product?

> Some wouldn't have been viable, sure. Others were probably too ingrained in Google's hardware/software ecosystem to be separated out (although I wonder if nowadays everything Google runs on its cloud offering, which would make it simpler, just change the billing).

Google Cloud is built on top of Google's tech ecosystem, not the other way around.

Because things need time and alignment of incentives between creators and consumers and if you interfere in that relationship all the time things will never ever succeed. The last thing any project needs is an investor with a majority interest that fucks up your plans all the time, can take your employees away at will and can axe the project at any time because it doesn't perform according to their metrics.

That's why VCs take a minority stake in start-ups. The trouble usually begins when the founders dilute to the point that they no longer have a majority.

Assignment: Consider Agilent, itself a spinoff from HP, also spun off four (I think) companies, because they were good businesses but distracted the management.

Is this the right strategy? I'm tempted to say Yes.

There was a really interesting interview [1] with Astro Teller, the head of Google's moonshot 'x division', in 2016. In terms of project selection, he focuses on trying to dismiss projects early on, by looking for reasons that a project might fail. And even rewarding employees for scrapping things early on. That doesn't sound particularly unreasonable, but it largely just amounts to a conservative planning process. So then what exactly is the difference between a 'moonshot' and a regular new project?

And so when you look at this sort of selection process it ends up being unsurprising that Google's 'moonshots' ended up being things like Waymo, Google watches, glasses, drone delivery, and so on. One of the largest companies in the world, with some of the deepest pockets in the world, and their 'moonshots' are things dozens of other companies are building as well. It seemed quite telling of the present and future of Google.

[1] - https://spectrum.ieee.org/astro-teller-captain-of-moonshots-...

Building the best self driving car in the world is amazing , come on!

At that time, others companies were not building most of those things though.

And those that were building were basically doing research, not refining a product that had achieved product market fit. The gp makes it sound like they were manufacturing widgets. The existence of others in the market is better described as “other people were also able to attract funding for the potential payoffs in that field.”

It demands that google’s mopnshots need to be something no other investor has considered.

The same comment translated to 1965 — “The US is trying to get to the moon? Well Russia is trying too. So I’d hardly call it a “moonshot” “

(Edited to change typo of “potential layoffs” to “potential payoffs”, possibly more fitting though)

Did Astro Teller have any successful project? A lot of money was spent, but what are the results? Looking at the wikipedia page it seems this whole Google X thing is a place where senior people have fun, while the rest of the company is undetstaffed. (E.g. no money for human customer service)

Everyone made fun of Google for self-driving and totally derided them for years.

It only feels normal now because they took the risk and pulled everyone else in the industry forward.

This is not accurate. Wiki has a pretty reasonable page on self driving cars here [1], but you can also look to what led Google to go for Waymo to begin with. [2]

Levandowski had already created a self driving motorcycle for a DARPA challenged in 2004. In 2008 Discovery contacted him for a show about it, but being unable to lend them the vehicle - he instead built a new self driving pizza delivery car for them. He asked Google if they wanted to participate in the show or get involved in self driving, but they were uninterested due to liability. After they show aired and went off without a hitch, they decided to get involved.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_self-driving_cars

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo#Pribot

https://www.wired.com/story/darpa-grand-challenge-2004-oral-...

I once noted that several of my coworkers and I had created a silent conspiracy to get a certain manager to clearly and concisely state her very bad ideas in front of the entire staff.

This was not news to one of the other two people. He confessed he was doing it “for sport” and thought we were in on it. Only sort of.

I think this statement might have been his little way to entertain himself.

can you give a few examples of what kind of bad ideas? like everyone should do all nighters or let's use email as the only login, no need for password for the first iteration, we will fix it later, or ... ?

It’s been long enough that I’ve successfully blocked a lot out, but it all kind of started because she put some terrible bullshit velocity graph up in a staff meeting that made our good weeks look like bad weeks and bad weeks look good. Derailed the whole meeting as people explained project management to a project manager.

Then the next staff meeting she put up the same graph. We explained five better ways to display the data.

All summer long, same graph, every meeting. At some point the relationship died.

oh, that seems like a rare breed. (at least in my comfy bubble.) thanks!

She seemed like a nice person one on one, at least as far as I could manage to connect, but something happened when she got into a room of people, and we didn't have enough rapport for me to influence her to be more on-message with the lead devs in private.

Mostly we talked about her marathons. As an ex-endurance athlete I could at least live vicariously and get her animated.

There’s a great book by the guy that wrote The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel that is out right now and I’m really enjoying it. It’s called Same as Ever.

Because what never changes is humans and our source code, our DNA. Expecting Google to not turn into IBM is like expecting wings to sprout from our back. The great delusion we tell ourselves is that each business is different, but each business is powered by the same human engine. That engine evolves at a glacial pace on an evolutionary time scale. When I read about the Dutch East Indian company or a guy in Mesopotamia that can’t get good quality copper from his suppliers and his servant was treated rudely, it’s all the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nāṣir

I don't think it's literally impossible to avoid the same mistakes as our predecessors. But I do think that the default position that "oh we modern innovative companies won't end up like those stodgy old companies" is a recipe for repeating history. As they say in AA: the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have it.

Because yes by default you will absolutely repeat history unless you acknowledge that those old timey crazy people were fundamentally no different than you.

> I don't think it's literally impossible to avoid the same mistakes as our predecessors.

Our predecessors didn’t make mistakes; they made rational choices that led to outcomes we don’t like.

We (for some subset of us that become business leaders) will make similar choices that those who come after us will view as mistakes.

They will rightfully think that we made the “same” “mistakes” because our rational decisions will be made in response to similar pressures.

For example, we are going to make short term optimal/long term detrimental decisions, just like our predecessors, because we are subject to the same demands from investors for short term gains and from our leadership to hit short term goals in exchange for increased compensation.

Don’t hate the players, hate the game.

But we have created new types of social institutions despite having the same DNA as our ancestors! Most notably the corporation and the nation-state.

Things tend to repeat but it's not completely impossible to have large and lasting changes. Ursula K. Le Guin used to say how people thought inescapable the divine rights of kings.

On the other hand, Google did change the world. Everything's just more mature nowadays. There's less blue ocean in its business segments.

I wonder if a company could stay "evergreen" by constantly finding new business areas and somehow spinning off old ones? Apple for example almost died in between before really coming back with the iPhone.

3M does something like this, with a rule that 30% of the company's profit must come from products introduced within the last 4 years:

https://hbr.org/2013/08/the-innovation-mindset-in-acti-3

Humans have great capacity to learn from our mistakes. Our source code or DNA have no encoding related to running business in a certain way. We mourn old google the revolutionary place, the likes of which could not have existed 100 years ago. But we forget that it was such a revolutionary place that its mere existence was an anomaly of sorts, and also that it spurned us to create several such new places, and that learning will continue us to create many more.

Seems like this is referring to Clayton Christensen’s Where Does Growth Come From? talk:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rHdS_4GsKmg

Thanks for sharing ! Spent the last hour watching it, it was illuminating.

> At the end of it, he made a comment like, "Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative."

Yes, but how did everyone listening fail to notice that he winked 3 times in a row, paused silently for 30 seconds and looked disappointed when no one seemed to catch on?

The drummer in the background forgot to do the "ba-dum tsss"

"Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative."

I would have had a hard time hearing that as anything other than sarcasm.

Absolutely. And I'm sure the talker had a "<wait for laugh>" in their transcript, which they had to quickly skip since people were taking it seriously.

I can see this happening. Same as how "don't be evil" was a joke outside the company (cause obviously an evil company would say this) but taken seriously by some inside.

To be honest Google scrapping the "don't be evil" mantra was quickly followed by Google beginning to behave substantially less ethically. In retrospect it's hard for me to argue that it didn't work.

"Present company excluded"

It's a polite fiction.

Exactly.

This is called Scumpeter's creative destruction (to be distinguished from other creative destruction) and why large companies may lose the ability to be innovative and compete

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

However. it's hard to see Google's core business dominance, search and ad, to be destroyed very easily. It's also super confusing that no other entity has been able to create a matching service and we do not have search duopoly similar to Visa Mastercard.

5 years ago it was hard to see , now I ampersonally using more chatgpt than Google.

Hard agree. Sold Google stock after realizing I'd more or less replaced Google Search with chatgpt...

Yeah, it's hard to go back to wading through SEO-optimized BS after just getting a decent answer (which, to be fair to the AI-sceptics, you do have to think about before using blindly).

It's an interesting mental shift - I wasn't googling because I wanted to find a web page, I was googling because I wanted an answer to a question. An AR or mixed-mode personal assistant is going to be a game changer.

This is also where the paid search engine comes into play. I get to pin Wikipedia so it’s always at the top whenever it’s relevant to my search, and there is almost zero SEO spam. And no ads.

I use a mix of that and chatGPT together depending on the specific thing I’m searching for, and it’s truly better than even the old Google.

Is that because ChatGPT returns better results, or because when it returns results, it wraps them in words that make you feel more comfortable accepting them as better

Personally it’s because there’s no ads. Google’s UX is to choke the user half to death with cookies, popups, reminders to use their app, login screens, and banner ads. And that’s before we even get to the content, which is padded with SEO and filler, dancing around the point before finally giving an answer written by who-knows-whom.

(And yes I feel justified in calling these SEO sites part of Google’s UX because this is exactly the behavior their algorithm and business model are encouraging.)

For me it's because ChatGPT ignores less of what I type than Google currently does, plus it doesn't return spammy SEO results.

Google has become a search engine for advertisements, "People also ask" snippets, shopping listings and SEO spam, in that order. The rest of results is just a bonus.

Even stupid things like searching for the Wikipedia entry of a movie or TV show has become super difficult with Google lately, because Wikipedia is often buried. Apple's Spotlight is better for that.

Just add Wikipedia to the end of your search pattern.

> Even stupid things like searching for the Wikipedia entry of a movie or TV show has become super difficult with Google lately, because Wikipedia is often buried

I'm always amazed to see claims like this, given it's not how my world works at all. Picking some random popular favorites: searches for (verbatim) "Loki", "Hunger Games", "Oppenheimer", and "House of Usher" all return a wikipedia entry in at worst the second spot (generally behind IMDB, though Oppenheimer and Usher showed the real man and the short story ahead of the films, not unsurprisingly).

I mean, sure, there are glitches with all products and nothing is beyond criticism. But "Google buries Wikipedia results" is just beyond weird. It really seems like HN is starting to develop an "alternative facts" syndrome, where the echo chamber starts driving collective memory.

I had the same problem. Less with missing Wikipedia results, but I was definitely getting the first page stuffed with crappy SEO results and ads. I switched to DDG a few months ago and I'm finding the experience much, much better. I tried switching a few years ago and found DDG's search wasn't as good. But since then either DDG has got better or Google has got worse. I actually suspect the latter.

OK, but this is the "alternative facts" thing at work. Grandparent claimed something frankly ridiculous, you say you had the "same problem", then you redefine the problem to be, well... not the same thing at all? I mean, of course there are "SEO" pages in search results, that's literally what "Search Engine Optimization" means.

And it's impossible to know what you mean by it without specifics: are you complaining that a top search result is a useless page of advertisement and AI-generated text (which would be bad), or just that e.g. "tutorialspoint.com"[1] or whatever is above Stack Overflow on some search (hardly a disaster).

Maybe you have some examples we could try?

[1] Or some other vaguely low quality but still legitimate site.

I gave this a go. I typed google.com into my browser. First thing: oh yeah, that's right, because I use a VPN google puts me through captchas before letting me search (and I'm currently logged-in to Google on my gmail ID, so it definitely knows who I am, which is even more annoying). One annoying captcha session later, I can search. (and ofc Google wants to know my location, despite knowing my address as part of my Google ID).

I tried "El Dorado" because I happened to have that boardgame on a shelf in front of me. Actually the results were pretty good - wikipedia, national geographic, IMDB, no ads. But yeah, not something there's going to be many ads on, so let's try something more adworthy.

So I switched to an Incognito window (many, many captchas) and tried "erectile dysfunction". Whole bunch of decent results, no ads until the bottom half of the page (and then it was solid ads of course).

I've got to say I was pleasantly surprised - it's not nearly as swamped with ads and shitty SEO as I remember. But that's the thing, isn't it? I only switched to DDG a few months ago because I was so fed up with Google's responses (and the endless captchas). I didn't dream that ;) But yeah, you're correct - the first page of Google isn't all ads and SEO crap. HN must be hallucinating that.

> I only switched to DDG a few months ago because I was so fed up with Google's responses (and the endless captchas). I didn't dream that

Well, that's the thing... maybe you did? I mean, clearly from context you live in a world awash in the kind of rhetoric we're seeing in this topic, with hyperbolic claims about the Descent of Google into Vice and Decay everywhere. And... it's easy to fit stuff into a frame if that's how you're already thinking. One bad result or one unexpected pop up ad can sway a *lot* of opinion even if it's an outlier.

Thus: "alternative facts". In the real world search results are boring and generally high quality because that's the way they've been for 20+ years (I mean, come one: it's a mature product in a mature market, you really expect it to change much?). But here on HN testimony like that gets voted down below the hyperbolic negativity, so what you read are the outliers.

HN, to wit, has become the Fox News of tech.

I can see how you got there from where you started, but I'm not sure it's accurate ;)

HN is useful but like all new sources and social media sites, it's not the unbiased pure stream of news and educated opinion that we'd like. Humans are weird.

I don’t like the “you’re remembering it wrong” defence

Google doesn’t publish a search quality report, or publicly index their results for the same queries over time, so you can’t objectively compare whether the quality has changed or not. Plus, the Google search signals and the product itself are constantly changing day to day and there’s no way to see those changes.

So if Google went through a spell of bad results, or their algorithm entered a degenerate state, or SEO figured out how to break through their algorithmic walls, or even their algorithm deemed you interested in something you aren’t, then “you’re remembering it wrong” because it’s fixed today, but at the time it really was worse.

I do agree though, people remember bad experiences far more than positive ones, there’s a definite bias in the human psyche there. But also, anecdotally, I’ve never been so annoyed with Google results as I have lately. I know I’m not alone, my low-tech wife even complains that Google has become useless for so many things. True or not, it’s a bad omen for Google because it’s very hard to rebuild a reputation.

One of the most annoying things about Google the last few years has been searching reviews, and they’ve just added a widget to combine product reviews which is nice to see, so they do seem like they’re working on these issues.

It's not a defense, just a postulate. I'll grant that sometimes search results are bad, that seems eminently plausible. But you'll likewise grant that echo chamber logic tends strongly to "create facts" by elevating outliers into assumed priors, right?

I'm just saying that right now HN has become an echo chamber of this kind of logic, with people writing and voting more for the visceral rush of anger against a shared enemy and not "truth", so much. Hence, the Fox News of tech.

That’s fair, and I agree.

Started using startpage.com for google results without the ads and its pretty good.

Try finding out if Walmart is closed tomorrow. Google results are all SEO spam even though Walmart themselves tweeted about it.

Did you try this? First hits are Walmart locations with hours. Followed by "People also ask" where the first item (with a correct answer) is "Will Walmart be open on Thanksgiving near me?". Followed by proper search results where the top two hits are, indeed, the two nearest Walmarts to me. How exactly would you improve that? Is there a better site to put at the top?

In Google's defence:

Twitter shouldn't be considered a proper source anymore. It's closed without an account and the access is severely limited. You can't see follow-up messages, questions, or whole threads.

Also I don't have Walmart here but it does show opening hours from Google Maps which is often better than official websites.

Some of the queries you gave me weren't so bad!

I specifically searched just now something I searched recently, "Scott Pilgrim Takes Off".

I naturally blocked ads, but it shows "Cast", "People also ask", the official Netflix result (good), "Trailers and Clips", "Reviews", "Episodes", "Top Stories" with some gossip, and then Wikipedia and IMDB.

However this is also not so bad! I will make sure to document all my problematic Googling experiences.

You can argue that those things are "noise that my brain should block" or that "they're actually useful", and that's entirely true. But Google is no longer returning the results I used to expect from it, and that's a fact. Maybe I'm not the target audience anymore? Well, that's not a big deal, there are other products. But my point still stands. Sorry but not sorry: Apple's Spotlight is still better for this and needs zero scrolling to take me to Wikipedia.

It depends on how heavily targeted the terms are. The two big objectively user-hostile lines I was watching and have seen crossed:

1. Removed the yellow background that easily distinguished ads.

2. Zero organic results above the fold.

Obviously #2 doesn't happen every day on every query, but I saw it during the crypto craze and I have seen it during the AI craze.

The movie example is an exaggeration (in my opinion). I find that mostly Google Search has issues with related ideas (Microsoft Project Silica) where there is not a direct article, yet a reference. Ex: [1]

There is also what I would call a phase delay. Google has a really bad issue with SEO, takes forever to get rid of it, but by the time you can check, its mostly resolved.

Finally. What you see as an end user is only partially Google. A lot of the page is farmed out to Real-Time Bidding (RTB) networks based on your user tracking. So its often difficult to correlate if someone else's user profile delivers wildly different experience. [2] You might get spammed by SEO and near constant TEMU ads, and others might get nothing.

Finally. Finally. 'Cause its spec.' I expect there are client side or man-in-the-middle viruses that mess with search results.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage

[2] https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Europes-hidde...

instead of Googleing and getting a forum post from 2009 where you have to read the whole thread and then interpret the results, ChatGPT just gives you the answer directly. ChatGPT could be shitty and rude about it and it would still be better because it's a direct smart to your direct question.

what's hilarious is the conversation that must have happened inside google about linking to pages vs giving the answer on the search result page, and now where we are with ChatGPT.

It's because ChatGPT isn't being monetized with ads yet. I use "yet" quite deliberately, mind you. The question isn't whether ChatGPT will eventually have ads; the question is how easily you'll be able to tell they're ads, or if it's going to be product/service placement worked into responses as seamlessly as possible.

What a long con nudge bubble will be woven, in the darkness to bind them.

You say that, but Google Search is still free after decades, whereas you can pay ChatGPT $20/mo for a membership right now.

If only Google offered the option to pay in return for no ads and other junk. But they would say it does not scale; they can't count that low. So people are flocking to chatGPT.

I suspect that by doing so they'd indicate just how much each user is worth to them in ads.

I suspect that folk who opted into this would be the ones getting lots of ads (hence the most valuable.)

If Google said "you can opt out for $99 a month" you'd freak out. But you're probably worth that (or more).

People aren't really flocking to ChatGPT though - not yet. Not at Google Scale. It's not like my mom will pay $20 a month when she just uses Google for free...

Given that I've moved to Kagi and chatGPT how much are they making off me now? They should have disrupted themselves when they had the chance.

Sure some are moving. There are always some moving. But despite the HN bubble effect its a tiny sample.

Plus folk moving now are folk who'll move back later when they get disgruntled there. (No disrespect.) First movers are not the loyal customer base. Movers gotta be moving..

(I say this as a general rule not making an assumption about you personally.)

It's like even everyone "left" Facebook for google+.

Person 1: "They figured out how much they could make off you and it was more than what you would pay."

Person 2: "Well, they pissed me off so I left completely and now they make nothing off of me."

Person 1: "They already knew you would move so they figured out they would make nothing off of you in the long run!"

Person 2: "..."

My churn would appear as a loss in their lifetime value model, so it would be detected by a long-term experiment. And I am reasonably confident they are performing long-term experiments for such things.

On the other hand, Google does exactly that with YouTube?

Good on them! I meant for search. They have other paid services.

Partially. They still harvest your data from YouTube to try to manipulate you with ads on other websites.

I say it because I don't think enough people are going to pay for LLM/GPT services for investors to get what they consider a sufficient return on their investment. I'm pretty sure no "pure AI" company is anywhere near a track to profitability as of yet, and there is only so long that VCs will be comfortable with that. (And while there might be AI "true believers" who don't much care about the profit horizon, ask OpenAI's board how that worked out for them last week.)

What kind of shallow, bland, inoffensive and disconnected items do you search for that a simple chatbot can spit out?

Work-related stuff, Google is for more personal stuff but even there 85% of my search is something like best running shoes Reddit.

I haven’t used Google as more than an occasional backup for years, and even less since I switched from DuckDuckGo to Kagi a few months back.

The more I eliminate anything to do with ads from my life, the better things get,

That's what the AI robots will use as an explanation when they have f*cked us up. :-)

I'm not sure what you mean by Visa/Mastercard duopoly, there's a lot of regionality so the picture could be fsirly different depending on what you have in mind.

To me Bing as a minority competitior in search, and facebook on ads for instance would be candidates to the same kind of duopoly.

People are already lamenting the lack of useful results in Google Search, and adverts aren't returning as much value as they used to, and there's been a rise in modified client apps without ads as a reaction to ads being spammed on certain services.

>> at Google circa 2010 ... a business professor...

sounds like Clayton Christensen

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com