Google’s Time at the Top May Be Nearing Its End
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
For the future of Google:
(1) Right, Google gets competition for eyeballs and, thus, ad revenue from Facebook, PInterest, Twitter, SnapChat, and any popular Web site/service that is ad supported. No surprise here.
(2) What the article misses is that search is a super big problem, issue, opportunity, and business. Why? Because (A) now there is a lot of content on the Internet, (B) due both to desktop and laptop computing and now due to smartphones that can generate content as text, audio, still images, video, and other data, the total amount of content is growing quickly, (C) finding the content really want is often super tough to do, and (D) so far Google is one of the best tools for finding content. So, Google gets lots of eyeballs and, as the content grows and, if Google's search technology improves, stands to get a lot more eyeballs and, thus, revenue.
For Web sites/services that can get a larger chunk of the ad revenue, in the larger scheme of things, the Internet is a better bet than anything like TV, and for that future Google has about the best opportunity and they seem to be trying to take it. And if some start up has something close to that future Google wants, then Google has plenty of cash to buy the start up, make it an offer it definitely will not refuse.
Google's doing fine and still looks like one of the best bets for the future.
The OP is standing on traditional formula fiction that tries to deliver an experience, vicarious, escapist, fantasy, emotional experience entertainment (VEFEEE), both as the content and the ads. Okay, that's their 1000 year old drama hammer that has a very long history from current TV shows, movies, novels, Dickens, Shakespeare, Chaucer, the Greek dramas, etc. Okay. That's long been the 900 pound Gorilla in media and remains the main hammer of the NYT and maybe most of the NYC ad industry and its $155 billion a year in ad revenue. Okay. But with that one hammer, the OP sees the Internet and Google as an appropriate nail -- it's not just such a nail, and that hammer is not all there is that is important or will be important in the future.
E.g., a lot that is there in mobile now is teenage girls, from the US, and especially in Japan, using their smartphones for what apparently teenage girls commonly have done for centuries, likely millennia -- gossip.
But, even if VEFEEE is the content someone wants, mostly they still need a search engine to find it.
For the OP and yet another NYT story, the main question I would ask is, where do they get that really strong funny stuff they've been smoking?
There's a lot of downward pressure on display ads also. The move to programmatic platforms will cut CPMs in half or worse. Google is not immune from this Trend either.
Googles popularity came from it's simplicity. The services Google started buying (looking at YouTube here) were gaining traction because they were the simple equivalent to their competitors.
Today? Not so much. YouTube has gradually become more alienated since 2009. Yesterday I was watching a video, and not a single video listed in the sidebar (once called "Related Videos") was actually related to the video I was watching. The uploader was a popular YouTuber with easily over a hundred videos (No idea how much exactly because I couldn't find that number) yet all the suggestions were music videos from my usual browsing.
Context switching is no more, because everything is being overengineered to keep you in your own content bubble. Yet, that stupid auto generated playlist in the sidebar that I've never clicked, keeps lurking there on every video, for days at a time, before changing into another playlist that is no more appealing to me than the previous one.
If all the effort of that huge datapool we are selling our souls to is to make advertisers happy, and the users don't get anything out of that effort but more abstraction and more generalized data science slapped onto a new UI every couple years, it's not a fair trade. And people won't put up with that forever.
Google is still going strong. The foundation that put it in its place, is crumbling. A big chunk of their business still relies on that, though, so I think these articles have a fair point.
Good observation! Google blew it!
When I go to YouTube, I don't see what you saw, but then I don't 'log in' to Google or accept cookies from them. So, the videos I see on the right are related to what I am watching at the time instead of whatever I've watched, searched for, etc. in the past.
I can believe that Google is doing what you describe, and this is a symptom of totally wacko data science and brain-dead recommendation engine construction. Where from, why?
One approach to recommendation is to try to say what a given user likes. So, look at all their activity, say, products they've looked at at Amazon, videos they've seen at YouTube, searches they've done at Google, Web sites they've visited as determined by following third party cookies, etc. Then my view is:
(1) For ad targeting, in the short term (that is, when displaying an ad only a short time after the data used for the targeting) maybe okay for effective ad targeting, assuming it doesn't offend the user.
(2) For content, nope, won't work and with your experience a solid example of why not.
Why? Here is a hypothetical example: I go online and search for flowers and chocolate candy and have them delivered gift wrapped; similarly for some things at Victoria's Secret. So, from then on I get recommendations for flowers, candy, anything chocolate, and women's frilly undies.
Ha! I'm a fully normal, heterosexual male and don't much care for distaff stuff! So, why'd I buy the flowers? Sure: As Valentines gift for my wife, once a year! The other 364 days of the year, f'get about it!
Or, I shop for some DVDs of some old Disney movies. Does this mean that I like old Disney movies instead of, say, movies about Tom Clancy stories? Nope! Instead I was just shopping for some DVDs to entertain the children of some of my friends my wife and I had over for a nice BBQ and beer on the back porch.
Or, as I see it, for something better, what a person likes at a given time should to be for some one of their interests at that time. Then the recommendation engine has to learn about that interest at that time.
A biggie is that that interest is likely some narrow thing, narrow in time, circumstances, etc. So, past browsing history, shopping, watching, etc. should be treated as, first cut, irrelevant or, in probabilistic terms, independent of what the heck the person wants in their present context.
BTW, with mild assumptions, probabilistically independent implies (statistically) uncorrelated, although in the usual treatments independence is much, much more general, say, is in terms of sigma algebras generated by some sets, possibly uncountably infinite, of random variables, and such a definition for uncorrelated is rarely or never given.
With high irony, likely search results at Google from the keywords/phrases someone enters are likely independent or nearly so of anything else Google knows about the person. Or, if at Google search type in
"I'm shocked, shocked to learn that gambling is going on here"
then should get back the script of the classic movie Casablanca and don't expect to get back results about flowers, chocolates, flimsy undies, and Disney movies, or Tom Clancy movies either.
It's possible to use butter, milk, eggs, flour, Kirschwasser sugar syrup, cheeries, chocolate, etc. to make a fantastic cake or a really big mess. Same for using data science.
Watch here on HN when I announce my recommendation engine (soon, currently mud wrestling with DVD burners) that will treat each user's interest as unique in all the world, have the best protections of user privacy, and do nothing with and have nothing on anything about the user before they requested their recommendation. When the recommendations come back, the ad targeting may have to do with just those recommendations but certainly not with some shopping for flimsy undies a week before Valentine's day.
Google's search engine is just terrific for a lot of the content on the Internet, and where Google is good my work will not be better. But as your experience illustrates, for some searches there is room for something better. My search engine has nothing to do with keywords/phrases; my view is that what I've developed stands to be much better for a significant fraction of the content on the Internet, searches people want to do, and results they want to find. But, again, for where Google works well, and sometimes it is fantastic, my work is not better.