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As an Android developer and early Glass explorer it pains me to say that I agree with a lot of the comments here. I was having a conversation with someone conn
by lgleason 5y ago
As an Android developer and early Glass explorer it pains me to say that I agree with a lot of the comments here.
I was having a conversation with someone connected to the upper execs there one time who explained this to me. They said that Google could generate the same amount of profit with a small fraction of the staff it currently has. The thing is though, the stock price would not be nearly as high and they have to keep the buzz going, by pushing out a lot of bets to pump up the stock. All that they need is enough perception of innovation to make wall street happy. So that is what they have done, and as a bonus a large part of salaries are paid with stock which allows them to keep the ponzi (my term not, theirs) scheme going.
Up until a few years ago most developers loved Google, but they have systematically done a lot of things to piss off a large number of them and you don't see nearly as much Google love these days. The big question is will that negative sentiment eventually affect the stock price? I know that I would personally like to see more competition in the search space (which is their bread and butter) and have less Google lobbyists in Washington DC. Also, great companies eventually do falter. The question is, will Google's fall be as fast as it's rise? Time will tell.
- azeirah 5y agoI think we're getting closer to a time where smaller players can start competing in the search engine space. Recently here on HN someone launched a search editor for small, niche, seo-free, old, content/text-heavy websites. It's useful because it serves a specific purpose, and can give you very different but useful results due to how it presents its results. Storage is getting cheap, scaling is a solved-ish problem, ML and AI make simple to empjoy intelligent search easier than ever. Of course, the solution is not to come up with a slightly tweaked google clone (like bing, duckduckgo, ...) but something that's more in the realm of reimagining what search means and does. I don't think it's wise to fight Google at its own game.
- dgs_sgd 5y agoI think this is the one you're talking about? https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/
- azeirah 5y agoYep, marginalia for sure! It's great. I will bookmark it this time :x
- nunez 5y agoThis might actually be one of the most exciting things about web3. A network of decentralized nodes whose maintainers get paid to operate (somewhat) is a big part of building a global-scale search engine. I'm still learning about web3 and might be wrong here.