4 ms·

That's awfully cynical

by rco8786 7y ago

gigatexal 7y ago
Probably but there’s likely a lot of truth in it. What else does Google have other than search ads?
- devin 7y ago
  flights, photos, maps, shopping, and a dozen other things?
  - dlkf 7y ago
    Which one of the examples you have listed can exist without SOTA search?
    - oblio 7y ago
      SOTA = ?
      - abj 7y ago
        SOTA means "state of the art"
    - devin 7y ago
      They all can exist without it, and they all benefit from it. I see your aim in singling out shopping, but let’s not pretend that other services don’t provide signal to influencing the outcomes on shopping or flight purchase or whatever.
- cmcaine 7y ago
  Good search is a huge engineering challenge and nowhere-near solved. Google's continued dominance is what makes their ad space valuable. If I were google, I would keep investing in improving search, and that would obviously include hiring machine learning and AI experts.
- gigatexal 7y ago
  I meant as in search revenue: something like 90% of revenue is from ad sales or sales around search
creaghpatr 7y ago
Not really, professional sports salaries often work the same way- teams who have a superstar can't afford to have the star play for the competition even if they could win without the star playing for their team.
- rco8786 7y ago
  Do you have an example of that actually happening? I follow sports pretty closely and can't think of any.
  - neutronicus 7y ago
    76ers signing Al Horford was probably as much about getting him off of the Celtics (because he's historically given Embiid problems in the playoffs) as it was about actually getting him.
- icxa 7y ago
  Yeah this is one of the biggest urban legends in sports. It's just not a thing. A team won't pay a player just to keep them from going to their division rival or whatnot, it's a nice fairy tail for the ESPN talking heads to keep repeating and it generates a nice bit of juicy controversy, but it just isn't a thing. Besides it doesn't pass the smell test. If you don't value the player or you think your chances of winning are better by spending that money elsewhere, why would it be a net benefit to your team to keep a player you don't want to pay just to stop him from going to another team? Do you think the Dallas Cowboys are really thinking to themselves "Man, we don't really value RBs like that, but we really got to stop Zeke from going to the Eagles"? Nonsense! Likewise if Google really doesn't want an employee going somewhere else to put a damper on their dominance, if it really was the goal of that employee to prevent Google's dominance, don't you think there are infinitely many other avenues that person could take? If you are paying for the knowledge, what is to stop this individual from creating a pseudonym and committing to an open source AI library on a separate laptop on their free time? The answer is nothing, and in fact that happens all the time, or the employee is busy creating their side business unbeknownst to the company, leaves, and waits out their non-compete. It's a silly conspiracy to think smart people will willfully stand by getting paid to do busy work and not pick up on what's really going on, and it doesn't make sense.

That's awfully cynical

gigatexal 7y ago

Probably but there’s likely a lot of truth in it. What else does Google have other than search ads?

devin 7y ago
flights, photos, maps, shopping, and a dozen other things?
- dlkf 7y ago
  Which one of the examples you have listed can exist without SOTA search?
  - oblio 7y ago
    SOTA = ?
    - abj 7y ago
      SOTA means "state of the art"
  - devin 7y ago
    They all can exist without it, and they all benefit from it. I see your aim in singling out shopping, but let’s not pretend that other services don’t provide signal to influencing the outcomes on shopping or flight purchase or whatever.
cmcaine 7y ago
Good search is a huge engineering challenge and nowhere-near solved. Google's continued dominance is what makes their ad space valuable. If I were google, I would keep investing in improving search, and that would obviously include hiring machine learning and AI experts.
gigatexal 7y ago
I meant as in search revenue: something like 90% of revenue is from ad sales or sales around search

creaghpatr 7y ago

Not really, professional sports salaries often work the same way- teams who have a superstar can't afford to have the star play for the competition even if they could win without the star playing for their team.

rco8786 7y ago
Do you have an example of that actually happening? I follow sports pretty closely and can't think of any.
- neutronicus 7y ago
  76ers signing Al Horford was probably as much about getting him off of the Celtics (because he's historically given Embiid problems in the playoffs) as it was about actually getting him.
icxa 7y ago
Yeah this is one of the biggest urban legends in sports. It's just not a thing. A team won't pay a player just to keep them from going to their division rival or whatnot, it's a nice fairy tail for the ESPN talking heads to keep repeating and it generates a nice bit of juicy controversy, but it just isn't a thing. Besides it doesn't pass the smell test. If you don't value the player or you think your chances of winning are better by spending that money elsewhere, why would it be a net benefit to your team to keep a player you don't want to pay just to stop him from going to another team? Do you think the Dallas Cowboys are really thinking to themselves "Man, we don't really value RBs like that, but we really got to stop Zeke from going to the Eagles"? Nonsense! Likewise if Google really doesn't want an employee going somewhere else to put a damper on their dominance, if it really was the goal of that employee to prevent Google's dominance, don't you think there are infinitely many other avenues that person could take? If you are paying for the knowledge, what is to stop this individual from creating a pseudonym and committing to an open source AI library on a separate laptop on their free time? The answer is nothing, and in fact that happens all the time, or the employee is busy creating their side business unbeknownst to the company, leaves, and waits out their non-compete. It's a silly conspiracy to think smart people will willfully stand by getting paid to do busy work and not pick up on what's really going on, and it doesn't make sense.