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"In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete." Tr

"In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete." Transcribing this profound insight of Buckminster Fuller to the current debate: You cannot out-do google by inventing "smarter" search. You need to create a new business model that makes the old one obsolete. Is there any evidence that all this algorithmic magic is enabling new business models that are not based on adtech more likely? It would be a blessing (presumably, because things can always drift further into evil) but, so far at least, there is little to point to such an imminent disruption

mansoon 4y ago
I remember that hope.
karamanolev 4y ago
Search existed before Google. They also didn't invent adtech. Instead of a marginal improvement, they made it so much better that the previous option looked silly. If such a disruption happens again to the core technology (e.g. search through a ChatGPT-like entity), whether the financial backing is adtech will be irrelevant.
quadcore 4y ago
Is there any evidence that all this algorithmic magic is enabling new business models that are not based on adtech more likely? I think the revenue assumption here lies on the fact that GPT generates content when the web wait for the user to provide the content. Generates congent, for lawyers or hospitals for example - pardon my lack of imagination. So a basic business model would be to charge per request I suppose.
geoduck14 4y ago
I'm using GPT3.x to make money at work
svantana 4y ago
Exactly. Search ads are pretty much the perfect internet business model - if my biz is having a sale on lawnmowers, who better to target than people googling for "buy lawnmower"? If this is done right, everyone walks away happy and google makes a killing. ChatGPT is great, but it's pretty far from providing good answers to "where can I get a good deal on a lawnmower right now?" They might take over a decent share of esoteric, "school assignment" type queries, but they're not really a threat for the high-value searches.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  If ChatGPT had up to the minute crawl results and my Geo location, that'd be enough. "Help me buy whichever budget electric range Wirecutter recommends at the moment". > Okay, here's the store near your home that is selling the Frigidaire electric range that Wirecutter is currently recommending, at the best price. > Would you like to buy it online at roughly the same price or get the address of the store?
  - karpierz 4y ago
    You're saying if ChatGPT had a regularly updated search index, and was capable of effectively ranking webpages to duck around SEO (adversarial webpages looking to hack the rankings), it'd be competitive with Google? Can you explain how this is any different than what Google does?
    - sdrinf 4y ago
      Not GP, but, and this is a hypothesis, it seems to me the realtime scrape might be enough. GPT seems incredibly intelligent in figuring out the ranking(!), importance(!) constraint-search(!) and personalization(!) by itself. Meaning, if OpenAI can do realtime fine-tuning of the web on a daily basis, they _might_ have sidestepped ~25 years of R&D from Google, and be an order-of-mag better.
      - gremlinsinc 4y ago
        When I google, I have an internal dialogue about whether the results are shit to begin with, if they aren't, maybe the thing I'm looking for is more niche, so it's not in the top ten results. ChatGPT could for example just maybe try 5 google searches in the background, just glean data from the description, title, question asked, date, etc, and maybe use some of it's own scraping on the top 10 results to reorder them and give better summaries. E.g. imagine when you search via chatgpt. It googles : search phrase, search phrase + reddit, search phrase variation 1, variation 1 + reddit, var 2, etc... all in parallel almost then uses that to mini-tune an ai model to find the stuff that best matches what you're really wanting to find, and then scrapes top ten for results.
atdrummond 4y ago
While I agree with your post, it is somewhat funny that not one of Fuller’s ‘disruptive’ products ever made a commercial dent.
otabdeveloper4 4y ago
> You cannot out-do google by inventing "smarter" search. Pretty sure you can, because Google search sucks balls. (First and foremost because it ignores context. E.g., searching for programming API documentation is tuned entirely differently compared to searching for movie recommendations.) That said, Google is not in the search business, because there is no such thing. Google is in the context advertising business.
atombender 4y ago
Google beat their original competitors — Altavista, Excite, Yahoo!, and so on — with an incremental improvement, not a new model. At the time (2000-2003), their search was better and faster, certainly, but not several orders of magnitude better. In fact, Google was something of a reactionary model at the time, by rejecting the push for bloated, captive "web portals" and going back to the simpler, stripped-down user experience that Altavista had succeeded with originally. Given how bad Google's results have become, I think you can certainly outdo it. Anecdotally, it's amazing how often I find myself reaching for ChapGPT these days to find basic facts that Google can't. I think Google is right to be afraid.
- tinus_hn 4y ago
  Pagerank (TM) was a Google innovation and the reason Google had much better results than the others and it took many years for the SEO spammers to catch up. That revolution, combined with the philosophy of the speedy, focused homepage and the elimination of irrelevant results by always using the ‘AND’ operator was why their popularity exploded.
  - JPLeRouzic 4y ago
    At Voila, a subsidiary of France Telecom, a study around 2005 found that their search engine offered nearly the same answers as Google, while not in exactly the same order. Despite this objective comparison, in users' view Google's results were much much better. I remember a German CS professor telling me eyes in eyes with obviously a lot of schadenfreud "Google will kill you". And I answered "No they will become as us, big, fat and ugly".
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > At Voila, a subsidiary of France Telecom, a study around 2005 found that their search engine offered nearly the same answers as Google, while not in exactly the same order. Order is a pretty big part of tbe value prop of a search engine, so ”nearly the same” results but “not in exactly the same order” is not as much similarity as you seem to be implying.
mrtksn 4y ago
You know how better app for finding good restaurant can't find good restaurants of there are no good restaurants? Search is dead, spammers killed it and Google was happy about it because it has become an answer machine where they can say the answer is whoever pays the most. Greatly deteriorated experience from what it used to be. Now someone builds an answers machine with much much better user experience with all that data which Google can no longer surface. I don't know if Google can quickly match that function but even if they do, are they going to be able to replicate the experience if the answers machine choose the answers by a bidding war?
lazide 4y ago
Buckminster fuller was notoriously unsuccessful at changing anything, but was very successful at making it seems like he would have been successful if it wasn’t for all the conspiracies against him stopping his success. Taken in that context puts it in a different light.

mansoon 4y ago

I remember that hope.

karamanolev 4y ago

Search existed before Google. They also didn't invent adtech. Instead of a marginal improvement, they made it so much better that the previous option looked silly. If such a disruption happens again to the core technology (e.g. search through a ChatGPT-like entity), whether the financial backing is adtech will be irrelevant.

quadcore 4y ago

Is there any evidence that all this algorithmic magic is enabling new business models that are not based on adtech more likely? I think the revenue assumption here lies on the fact that GPT generates content when the web wait for the user to provide the content. Generates congent, for lawyers or hospitals for example - pardon my lack of imagination. So a basic business model would be to charge per request I suppose.

geoduck14 4y ago

I'm using GPT3.x to make money at work

svantana 4y ago

Exactly. Search ads are pretty much the perfect internet business model - if my biz is having a sale on lawnmowers, who better to target than people googling for "buy lawnmower"? If this is done right, everyone walks away happy and google makes a killing. ChatGPT is great, but it's pretty far from providing good answers to "where can I get a good deal on a lawnmower right now?" They might take over a decent share of esoteric, "school assignment" type queries, but they're not really a threat for the high-value searches.

unsupp0rted 4y ago
If ChatGPT had up to the minute crawl results and my Geo location, that'd be enough. "Help me buy whichever budget electric range Wirecutter recommends at the moment". > Okay, here's the store near your home that is selling the Frigidaire electric range that Wirecutter is currently recommending, at the best price. > Would you like to buy it online at roughly the same price or get the address of the store?
- karpierz 4y ago
  You're saying if ChatGPT had a regularly updated search index, and was capable of effectively ranking webpages to duck around SEO (adversarial webpages looking to hack the rankings), it'd be competitive with Google? Can you explain how this is any different than what Google does?
  - sdrinf 4y ago
    Not GP, but, and this is a hypothesis, it seems to me the realtime scrape might be enough. GPT seems incredibly intelligent in figuring out the ranking(!), importance(!) constraint-search(!) and personalization(!) by itself. Meaning, if OpenAI can do realtime fine-tuning of the web on a daily basis, they _might_ have sidestepped ~25 years of R&D from Google, and be an order-of-mag better.
    - gremlinsinc 4y ago
      When I google, I have an internal dialogue about whether the results are shit to begin with, if they aren't, maybe the thing I'm looking for is more niche, so it's not in the top ten results. ChatGPT could for example just maybe try 5 google searches in the background, just glean data from the description, title, question asked, date, etc, and maybe use some of it's own scraping on the top 10 results to reorder them and give better summaries. E.g. imagine when you search via chatgpt. It googles : search phrase, search phrase + reddit, search phrase variation 1, variation 1 + reddit, var 2, etc... all in parallel almost then uses that to mini-tune an ai model to find the stuff that best matches what you're really wanting to find, and then scrapes top ten for results.

atdrummond 4y ago

While I agree with your post, it is somewhat funny that not one of Fuller’s ‘disruptive’ products ever made a commercial dent.

otabdeveloper4 4y ago

> You cannot out-do google by inventing "smarter" search. Pretty sure you can, because Google search sucks balls. (First and foremost because it ignores context. E.g., searching for programming API documentation is tuned entirely differently compared to searching for movie recommendations.) That said, Google is not in the search business, because there is no such thing. Google is in the context advertising business.

atombender 4y ago

Google beat their original competitors — Altavista, Excite, Yahoo!, and so on — with an incremental improvement, not a new model. At the time (2000-2003), their search was better and faster, certainly, but not several orders of magnitude better. In fact, Google was something of a reactionary model at the time, by rejecting the push for bloated, captive "web portals" and going back to the simpler, stripped-down user experience that Altavista had succeeded with originally. Given how bad Google's results have become, I think you can certainly outdo it. Anecdotally, it's amazing how often I find myself reaching for ChapGPT these days to find basic facts that Google can't. I think Google is right to be afraid.

tinus_hn 4y ago
Pagerank (TM) was a Google innovation and the reason Google had much better results than the others and it took many years for the SEO spammers to catch up. That revolution, combined with the philosophy of the speedy, focused homepage and the elimination of irrelevant results by always using the ‘AND’ operator was why their popularity exploded.
- JPLeRouzic 4y ago
  At Voila, a subsidiary of France Telecom, a study around 2005 found that their search engine offered nearly the same answers as Google, while not in exactly the same order. Despite this objective comparison, in users' view Google's results were much much better. I remember a German CS professor telling me eyes in eyes with obviously a lot of schadenfreud "Google will kill you". And I answered "No they will become as us, big, fat and ugly".
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > At Voila, a subsidiary of France Telecom, a study around 2005 found that their search engine offered nearly the same answers as Google, while not in exactly the same order. Order is a pretty big part of tbe value prop of a search engine, so ”nearly the same” results but “not in exactly the same order” is not as much similarity as you seem to be implying.

mrtksn 4y ago

You know how better app for finding good restaurant can't find good restaurants of there are no good restaurants? Search is dead, spammers killed it and Google was happy about it because it has become an answer machine where they can say the answer is whoever pays the most. Greatly deteriorated experience from what it used to be. Now someone builds an answers machine with much much better user experience with all that data which Google can no longer surface. I don't know if Google can quickly match that function but even if they do, are they going to be able to replicate the experience if the answers machine choose the answers by a bidding war?

lazide 4y ago

Buckminster fuller was notoriously unsuccessful at changing anything, but was very successful at making it seems like he would have been successful if it wasn’t for all the conspiracies against him stopping his success. Taken in that context puts it in a different light.