5 ms·

Google has never looked more tired and more prone to be overtaken.

by naillo 4y ago

VBprogrammer 4y ago
Honestly I was searching for something the other day and between displaying an excessive number of YouTube links (was not in a position to watch a video) and the adverts it was less useful that Yahoo! Circa 2006.
- eitland 4y ago
  I have long since switched to Kagi and I am a happy paying customer. I can adjust my results, block or prioritize, but I rarely do that. What I sometimes do however is I write a bug report whenever bad results sneak in. In a matter of hours a human looks at the results, verifies or ask follow up questions and in a few days or max < 1month a fix is out. No more having to deal with a search engine that ignores both doublequotes and the verbatim operator (that is both Google and DDG and Bing). Actually, the last few months before I got access to Kagi I used (and paid for) search.marginalia.nu . It was actually and honestly better for certain queries, especially things like arcane git knowledge or (I think) the nerdier parts of history.
pancrufty 4y ago
Which Google are you referring to exactly? With its many successful products, I don’t see Google being overtaken anytime soon. Ads are doing better than ever, Android is holding steady worldwide, Maps has a huge moat that Apple has yet to overcome (in over a decade), nobody really complains about Google Search except us nerds. I see them just coasting, but an overtake is unlikely in this decade. “The New Bing” sounds interesting but that’s not all that Google is about, it’s not 2002 anymore.
- reptation 4y ago
  n=1 but the built-in Maps on iphone seems to be fine these days. Doesn't steer me wrong, integrates with a car. Not sure what the moat here is other than name recognition or current popularity. Perhaps app integration or API consumption?
  - samtp 4y ago
    Accuracy of local business listings on Apple is still far behind Google. And Apple's new business admin interface is only slightly less trash than it's old one.
  - Reason077 4y ago
    Apple Maps, and the huge number of products based on OpenStreetMap are perfectly fine as maps. And actually, even better than Google Maps in many cases. But where Google Maps still dominates is in its unrivalled, global point of interest (POI) data. Accurate business locations, opening hours, photos, reviews, etc... nobody else comes close.
    - jimbokun 4y ago
      Yea, I'm planning a vacation, and using a saved lists of places in Google maps to keep track of all the places I'm interested in seeing. Clicking on one of the saved places brings up all the information you mention.
    - aniforprez 4y ago
      Honestly Apple Maps isn't even particularly good outside of the US and a few European countries. Roads are constantly out of date and can barely keep up and landmarks and businesses in tons of major cities aren't close to correct
      - pb7 4y ago
        Not to mention its complete inability to reroute sometimes if you take the wrong turn. It'll keep yelling to return to the route over and over instead of routing a turnaround somewhere.
        Reason077 4y ago
        This can happen if you've lost the data connection, perhaps? In my (UK) experience, Apple Maps is perfectly good at re-routing. Even if you haven't made a wrong turn, it'll sometimes suggest new routes anyway based on live traffic.
- croes 4y ago
  >nobody really complains about Google Search except us nerds. I know many non nerd complainers, but they don't know any alternatives.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    Neither do the nerd complainers, apart from scoping their search to a few trusted information repositories (Reddit, StackOverflow, &c). Nobody's cracked the "general search across the whole Internet" nut better than Google has right now. But that nut itself has encountered challenges in yielding value as of late.
    - eitland 4y ago
      Good news: kagi.com is mostly a shell over Google and Bings apis, but they do quality control and they are building their own index. I have paid for months from my own pocket and since I started using it, search doesn't drive me mad anymore. It is not perfect, but anytime I find a problem now a real human verifies it or ask for clarification within hours and a fix is made an pushed with a reference to my report. Also: for some narrow searches like arcane git knowledge or some niche parts of history etc, search.marginalia.nu is actually a lot better than Google and DDG and Bing. I am actually serious! Much less spam and you find results that could easily have drowned in between "top ten" articles in any mainstream search engine.
      - rubslopes 4y ago
        I'm not a Kagi subscriber, but I'll be. Yesterday I was looking for a pdf reader app with a specific feature. Nor Google nor Bing helped me; result pages were almost 100% ads (most by Adobe). I was giving up. My first try with Kagi gave me exactly what I wanted.
        eitland 4y ago
        Exactly. Can I guess it wasn't a result of keyword stuffing with every result but Google and Bing "forgot" some of your search terms to show you more thinly veiled ads/"content"?
- whatshisface 4y ago
  >Ads are doing better than ever, Android is holding steady worldwide, Maps has a huge moat that Apple has yet to overcome (in over a decade), nobody really complains about Google Search except us nerds. What you've just described are the conditions that, time and time again, have persuaded companies to cut R&D spending and set the stage for being overtaken in a couple decades. (After going 20 years without an engineering culture in management, would they respond to a threat by jumping on a real emerging technology, or a buzzword technology? That's why you can't cut your researchers and simply bring them back when your competitors are getting close.)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- robocat 4y ago
  And YouTube - although TikTok is winning in some segments: https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/07/tiktok-is-crushing-youtube-in-annual-study-of-kids-and-teens-app-usage/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/07/tiktok-is-crushing-youtube...
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Companies like Google don't really get "overtaken" per se. Rather, they become bricks in the wall: the kind of place where the firm is extremely unlikely to ever shut down because it's inextricably embedded into the business practices of major firms and governments, but it also has to run ads to get the next generation of employees to bother to go work for it.
smoldesu 4y ago
Google has been "just another company" for a while now, but I disagree with "prone to be overtaken". Yes, Google Search is a dead product. The moneymakers aren't, though: AdSense keeps on trucking, fuelled by billions of annual YouTube watch-minutes piling on top of each other. For a company to effectively displace Google, they need a lot of really well-made services priced more attractively than 'free*'.
- alasdair_ 4y ago
  Apple (and later Spotify) demonstrated that a better quality product can beat the free offering.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
kerpotgh 4y ago
[dead]
Silverback_VII 4y ago
It is the he/him culture who has corroded the giant from the inside.
- amichne 4y ago
  Any source for this? I would say the change towards “less exciting” is driven by risk-averse management. Even their latest “risk” (Bard) was driven by Microsoft’s Bing release. I would even argue that releasing Bard represents the lower-risk approach. The risk incurred by being silent is undoubtedly what moved Google executives to rush out a half-baked and even more poorly executed “demo”.
- astrange 4y ago
  Are you capable of guessing the gender of any given Chinese/Indian/African person by their name without being told?
- jocaal 4y ago
  What does this even mean?

Google has never looked more tired and more prone to be overtaken.

by naillo 4y ago

Google has never looked more tired and more prone to be overtaken.

Honestly I was searching for something the other day and between displaying an excessive number of YouTube links (was not in a position to watch a video) and the adverts it was less useful that Yahoo! Circa 2006.

eitland 4y ago
I have long since switched to Kagi and I am a happy paying customer. I can adjust my results, block or prioritize, but I rarely do that. What I sometimes do however is I write a bug report whenever bad results sneak in. In a matter of hours a human looks at the results, verifies or ask follow up questions and in a few days or max < 1month a fix is out. No more having to deal with a search engine that ignores both doublequotes and the verbatim operator (that is both Google and DDG and Bing). Actually, the last few months before I got access to Kagi I used (and paid for) search.marginalia.nu . It was actually and honestly better for certain queries, especially things like arcane git knowledge or (I think) the nerdier parts of history.

pancrufty 4y ago

Which Google are you referring to exactly? With its many successful products, I don’t see Google being overtaken anytime soon. Ads are doing better than ever, Android is holding steady worldwide, Maps has a huge moat that Apple has yet to overcome (in over a decade), nobody really complains about Google Search except us nerds. I see them just coasting, but an overtake is unlikely in this decade. “The New Bing” sounds interesting but that’s not all that Google is about, it’s not 2002 anymore.

reptation 4y ago
n=1 but the built-in Maps on iphone seems to be fine these days. Doesn't steer me wrong, integrates with a car. Not sure what the moat here is other than name recognition or current popularity. Perhaps app integration or API consumption?
- samtp 4y ago
  Accuracy of local business listings on Apple is still far behind Google. And Apple's new business admin interface is only slightly less trash than it's old one.
- Reason077 4y ago
  Apple Maps, and the huge number of products based on OpenStreetMap are perfectly fine as maps. And actually, even better than Google Maps in many cases. But where Google Maps still dominates is in its unrivalled, global point of interest (POI) data. Accurate business locations, opening hours, photos, reviews, etc... nobody else comes close.
  - jimbokun 4y ago
    Yea, I'm planning a vacation, and using a saved lists of places in Google maps to keep track of all the places I'm interested in seeing. Clicking on one of the saved places brings up all the information you mention.
  - aniforprez 4y ago
    Honestly Apple Maps isn't even particularly good outside of the US and a few European countries. Roads are constantly out of date and can barely keep up and landmarks and businesses in tons of major cities aren't close to correct
    - pb7 4y ago
      Not to mention its complete inability to reroute sometimes if you take the wrong turn. It'll keep yelling to return to the route over and over instead of routing a turnaround somewhere.
      - Reason077 4y ago
        This can happen if you've lost the data connection, perhaps? In my (UK) experience, Apple Maps is perfectly good at re-routing. Even if you haven't made a wrong turn, it'll sometimes suggest new routes anyway based on live traffic.
croes 4y ago
>nobody really complains about Google Search except us nerds. I know many non nerd complainers, but they don't know any alternatives.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Neither do the nerd complainers, apart from scoping their search to a few trusted information repositories (Reddit, StackOverflow, &c). Nobody's cracked the "general search across the whole Internet" nut better than Google has right now. But that nut itself has encountered challenges in yielding value as of late.
  - eitland 4y ago
    Good news: kagi.com is mostly a shell over Google and Bings apis, but they do quality control and they are building their own index. I have paid for months from my own pocket and since I started using it, search doesn't drive me mad anymore. It is not perfect, but anytime I find a problem now a real human verifies it or ask for clarification within hours and a fix is made an pushed with a reference to my report. Also: for some narrow searches like arcane git knowledge or some niche parts of history etc, search.marginalia.nu is actually a lot better than Google and DDG and Bing. I am actually serious! Much less spam and you find results that could easily have drowned in between "top ten" articles in any mainstream search engine.
    - rubslopes 4y ago
      I'm not a Kagi subscriber, but I'll be. Yesterday I was looking for a pdf reader app with a specific feature. Nor Google nor Bing helped me; result pages were almost 100% ads (most by Adobe). I was giving up. My first try with Kagi gave me exactly what I wanted.
      - eitland 4y ago
        Exactly. Can I guess it wasn't a result of keyword stuffing with every result but Google and Bing "forgot" some of your search terms to show you more thinly veiled ads/"content"?
whatshisface 4y ago
>Ads are doing better than ever, Android is holding steady worldwide, Maps has a huge moat that Apple has yet to overcome (in over a decade), nobody really complains about Google Search except us nerds. What you've just described are the conditions that, time and time again, have persuaded companies to cut R&D spending and set the stage for being overtaken in a couple decades. (After going 20 years without an engineering culture in management, would they respond to a threat by jumping on a real emerging technology, or a buzzword technology? That's why you can't cut your researchers and simply bring them back when your competitors are getting close.)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
robocat 4y ago
And YouTube - although TikTok is winning in some segments: https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/07/tiktok-is-crushing-youtube-in-annual-study-of-kids-and-teens-app-usage/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/07/tiktok-is-crushing-youtube...
shadowgovt 4y ago
Companies like Google don't really get "overtaken" per se. Rather, they become bricks in the wall: the kind of place where the firm is extremely unlikely to ever shut down because it's inextricably embedded into the business practices of major firms and governments, but it also has to run ads to get the next generation of employees to bother to go work for it.

smoldesu 4y ago

Google has been "just another company" for a while now, but I disagree with "prone to be overtaken". Yes, Google Search is a dead product. The moneymakers aren't, though: AdSense keeps on trucking, fuelled by billions of annual YouTube watch-minutes piling on top of each other. For a company to effectively displace Google, they need a lot of really well-made services priced more attractively than 'free*'.

alasdair_ 4y ago
Apple (and later Spotify) demonstrated that a better quality product can beat the free offering.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

kerpotgh 4y ago

[dead]

Silverback_VII 4y ago

It is the he/him culture who has corroded the giant from the inside.

amichne 4y ago
Any source for this? I would say the change towards “less exciting” is driven by risk-averse management. Even their latest “risk” (Bard) was driven by Microsoft’s Bing release. I would even argue that releasing Bard represents the lower-risk approach. The risk incurred by being silent is undoubtedly what moved Google executives to rush out a half-baked and even more poorly executed “demo”.
astrange 4y ago
Are you capable of guessing the gender of any given Chinese/Indian/African person by their name without being told?
jocaal 4y ago
What does this even mean?