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Comment by qwertox | Hacker News Reader

Makes me question why Google never bothered to create something like search sessions which could be enriched with comments/notes and would be located in a sidebar just like the chats in ChatGPT/Claude/Mistral are.

They really had the potential to do something interesting, but were just focused on their ad metrics with the "good enough" search box. What have they been doing all the time?

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the FAANG giants have been government assets for ~15+ years [0]. they don't have to turn a profit every quarter, innovate, or make their search any better because they no longer play by the rules a normal business does. they are a critical "too big to fail" component of the state's global surveillance system.

[0] https://static1.makeuseofimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/upl...

OpenAI is Microsoft. Microsoft is a FAANG giant.

How is that relevant? Microsoft bought OpenAI, didn't create it by R&D, so the assertion stands: giants don't do new things, for whatever reason.

The amount of fundamental breakthroughs at places like IBM, Bell, Xerox, all beg to differ with you.

In some fields of CS, places like MS research garner nearly 50% of all top conference publications.

Microsoft is literally not in "FAANG". But they are in MANGA.

Before FAANG the acronym was MAFANG, but due to too much closeness to a slang word, the political correct crowd change it to FAANG. Also, just as a side note, Microsoft is a trillion worth more than the "G" in FAANG.

FAANG or MAFANG or MANGA are still silly because they include Netflix which is completely unlike and smaller than the other giants.

The FAANG acronym was actually about growth rather than size, and their stock was performing like a tech stock for a while. But yes, they don't belong because they're actually a media "manufacturing" business, although a successful one.

Microsoft is their leading investor. They don't technically own OpenAI.

And technically Musk was not the wealthiest man in the world when he bought Twitter, because he didn't had that much cash laying around in his bank accounts. And yet, when wanted, or more precisely put in corner to do so, he did shit 50 billions and bought it.

OpenAI is Microsoft, technical details don't matter here, only money.

Cash isn't technically all wealth

Not just surveillance. Power projection. I wonder what impacts you can have on foreign economies by playing with quality of these tech giants outputs?

Linking the slide deck that caused Google to start encrypting the traffic between their own data centers running on their own fiber is perhaps not the most compelling argument that Google is a state asset.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/tech-companies-s...

You think it is so hard for the NSA to have a tap within Google's datacenters?

You think Google could say no to NSA if they were asking nicely to put a tap?

Encryption between datacenters is to keep away other state actors, not the US.

> You think it is so hard for the NSA to have a tap within Google's datacenters?

Yes

> You think Google could say no to NSA if they were asking nicely to put a tap?

Yes

> they don't have to turn a profit every quarter,

And, yet, aside from Aramco, they are the most profitable companies in the history of the world.

> they don't have to turn a profit every quarter,

What does this mean? Like, I work there and I’d be pretty annoyed if they stopped turning a profit as a collapse of the stock price would affect my compensation.

It’s interesting to hear this take because I’m used to hearing the opposite: that Google is too focused on increasing short-term profit at the expense of product quality.

I guess now Google's search stack is too complicated and not many engineers understand what to do in order to introduce a novel, big feature integrated into the full stack vertically and horizontally. And those few capable of doing so are probably completely out of bandwidth, so some random ambitious PM cannot pull their hands into uncertain green field projects.

Collecting people's data and making money from that.

Google doesn't make money from "collecting people's data", they show you ads.

If they're collecting data it doesn't even work; I make no effort to hide from them and none of their ads are targeted to me. Meta, though, they're good at it.

How do you think Google's ad business works?

For Google Ads, personal data collection alone is not as useful for making money like ordinary people imagine. And you don't really want to "sell" the data: why would you help your potential competitor to bootstrap their ads business for a discounted price? The real deal is the network and ecosystem itself, which is extremely hard to replicate. As a GP said, Meta is doing much better on behavioral targeting since they have a much better idea for each person's history though. And I work in the ads business, so you don't probably have to ask the same question again.

No data, no targeted ads. Simple as that. Whether some other dystopian company does it "better", does not matter. I asked them how they think Google's ad business works and you have not provided an answer to that question either, even though you state, that you work "the ads business". (At Google?)

No offense, but you stating, that you work in the ads business rather makes me doubt, that you are talking from an unbiased point of view and makes me suspect, that there are motives at play here.

Actually the statement, that Google doesn't make money from personal data is kind of ridiculous. If they didn't make any money from that in one way or another, they why would they waste so many resources on collecting that data in the first place? It is really obvious, that they do make money with that data. Their other products are failing left and right. It has become a meme, when Google kills yet another of their products.

You don't need targeting when you own a search engine; if someone searches for "buy PS5" you show them ads for a PS5.

> It is really obvious, that they do make money with that data.

Google doesn't have to care about making further money because they have an infinite money machine from their monopoly on ad auctions. It's better to think of them as just doing whatever Larry Page thinks would be cool.

They mostly don't collect it though, like they don't do targeted ads in Gmail.

Chrome did add a sidebar that shows search sessions (queries grouped with the pages you visited on that topic). Used to be called "Journeys". I don't think you can add notes. I never found it useful in the slightest and I doubt notes would have made it any better. Chrome has been adding random UI features like that over time, but I haven't found any of them at all useful in many years.

Can you tell me a bit more ? What do you mean by search session ?

Let's see, if I go to " ⋮ -> History -> Grouped History" on the top right of the Chrome browser, I see a "Search History" ( chrome://history/grouped ).

For example `8 hours ago: "autohotkey hotkeys"` with 4 links to pages which I visited while searching.

But this is a Chrome feature, not a Google Search feature. https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity does (sometimes? can't see it right now) have a grouping feature of all the searches made, but this is more of a search log than a search management feature.

So chrome://history/grouped is the closest to what I mean, but I can't pin or manage these history groups, enrich them with comments or even files, like pdf's which could then get stored in Google Drive, as well as get indexed for better searches.

oh I thought you meant something like commenting under search result links like youtube videos.

I might be mistaken but i think ff mobile does something similar of grouping search session

Doesn´t Bing Copilot provide this for free?

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