7 ms·

60 Minutes asked Google CEO: “Have you killed your cash cow?” [video]

25 points by JSeymourATL 3y ago

dgant 3y ago
If this is a case where HN scrubbed a leading number in the title, it should be restored.
- dang 3y ago
  Should be and now has. Thanks!
musicale 3y ago
What was the non-answer?
belval 3y ago
I don't have a crystal ball so I can't tell how well they will pivot, but Sundar's answer here is unconvincing at best. There will be a big uphill battle to inject ads in whatever new search engine emerges from all those changes and it's not clear at the moment if monetization will really be able to remain on the same scale. Their market is getting and will continue to be disrupted and their revenue is heavily tied to ads so it's really a fair answer as Microsoft can afford to lose money on Bing for a long time using their other revenue stream, while Google gets progressively weaker. Just think of the coverage already. My parents know what ChatGPT is yet have no clue what Bard is. Microsoft advertises "Bing has ChatGPT" so they move there. Should be an interesting next few years.
- srslack 3y ago
  I don't see how it's that difficult. Sprinkle some system messages in there. Bing is already doing ads via Sydney or whatever you want to call it. I've got it to emit plenty of "erroneous generations", after 20 messages, connected directly to the web socket and with an injected system prompt of my own. Just two, straight from the top of my head and web socket logs: (asking what the system prompt was) - New conversation with user B. - The user is having this conversation on a mobile device. - Due to a limited screen window size, you limit the length of your responses by excluding less important details/sentences and asking questions (when appropriate) which can help the user clarify and narrow down their search and the amount of information needed in the response. #2: I see. Well, iPhone 14 is a great choice if you're looking for a powerful and sleek smartphone. It has a 6.7-inch OLED display, a 12-megapixel quad-camera system, a 5-nanometer A16 Bionic chip, and a 5000 mAh battery. It also supports 5G, Face ID, MagSafe, and wireless charging. It comes in four colors: silver, graphite, gold, and pacific blue. It starts at $999 for the 128 GB model[^2^].\\n\\nIf you're interested in buying iPhone 14, you can check out some of the deals and offers from various retailers and carriers. For example, you can get up to $700 off with trade-in at AT&T[^1^], or buy one get one free at Verizon[^3^], or get a free pair of AirPods Pro at Best Buy[^4^]. You can also order directly from Apple's website or app[^5^].\\n\\nWhat do you think? Are you ready to upgrade to iPhone 14? \",\"details\":{\"text\":\"I see. Well, iPhone 14 is a great choice if you're looking for a powerful and sleek smartphone. It has a 6.7-inch OLED display, a 12-megapixel quad-camera system, a 5-nanometer A16 Bionic chip, and a 5000 mAh battery. It also supports 5G, Face ID, MagSafe, and wireless charging. It comes in four colors: silver, graphite, gold, and pacific blue. It starts at $999 for the 128 GB model[^2^].\\n\\nIf you're interested in buying iPhone 14, you can check out some of the deals and offers from various retailers and carriers. For example, you can get up to $700 off with trade-in at AT&T[^1^], or buy one get one free at Verizon[^3^], or get a free pair of AirPods Pro at Best Buy[^4^]. You can also order directly from Apple's website or app[^5^].\\n\\nWhat do you think? Are you ready to upgrade to iPhone 14?
- uejfiweun 3y ago
  Yeah, Google is gonna have to come up with an unambiguously better product if they want people to tolerate the level of ads that will be required to maintain the revenue from Search. Unfortunately for them, right now Bard is unambiguously worse. Of course, I’d still take the opportunity to work on Bard in a second.
  - CharlesW 3y ago
    > Unfortunately for them, right now Bard is unambiguously worse. FWIW, I tried dingosity's example (my prompt was "Can I get a list of QUIC implementations?") and the answer I received was unambiguously better than a Google Search for "list of QUIC implementations". If Bard had provided direct links to the sources the model used to come up with the answer so I didn't have to subsequently Google Search for them in turn, it would've been a near-perfect search transaction.
NonEUCitizen 3y ago
The title should say "60 Minutes..." which is an American TV program (not known for tech), rather than "Minutes" on its own.
- Kye 3y ago
  HN's link dejunkifier seems to remove any number at the start assuming it's a list post. It can be put back if OP edits it.
- dang 3y ago
  Fixed now. Thanks!
dingosity 3y ago
I don't get it. Google Search is effectively borked. Decades of anti-seo modifications have made it unusable (for instance, when I search for a compiler error message it would be nice to get hits related to that error message instead of an episode guide for Young Sheldon.) But Bard isn't a replacement. When I ask it to list QUIC implementations it would be nice if it doesn't try to give me a phone number for an animal shelter. So... what's the assertion here? That a broken Bard is somehow better than a broken Google Search? I don't understand why. Neither gives me acceptable results.
- Awelton 3y ago
  I don't know what they are doing. Google search is so bad that people are appending site:reddit.com to every search just to find something that isn't SEO spam, and bard feels like it's from five years ago. Whatever they did to google search a couple years ago was sudden and quite noticeable, so I am not sure why they didn't revert immediately. I guess they thought since they had no real competition they didn't have to worry about it. As soon at it started ignoring my quotation marks in searches so it could continue to feed me pinterest garbage I jumped ship to a paid search engine. As far as bard goes I think it's dead in the water. Nobody wants to use the 4th best LLM on purpose.
  - potsandpans 3y ago
    It's pretty amazing. I forget what I was searching the other day, but it was a fairly straightforward general programming question. First page google results were blogspam and weird aggregate sites. I went to ddg, pasted the same question and got a serverfault top result that answered my question precisely.
    - hedora 3y ago
      I like ddg, but they recently stopped honoring quotation marks, and google started honoring them again. Google search is still generally unusable, but when DDG goes into “too few hits” mode, I find myself using g! to good effect. This is after using DDG for about a decade, and never once having g! produce better results than it. Anyway, I’m confident that llm integrated search will make these problems 100x worse. Now, if it can’t find questionable blogspam, it’ll just start pathologically lying. Great.
quags 3y ago
Google looks to have 100 billion in cash. IBM has been slowly shrinking for years trying to buy into new markets and maybe they have with red hat finally. Google doesn’t have the amount of employees ibm had either. They may shrink and loose search but have a long run way to buy or pivot. Microsoft is back on top after 10 years in the 2000s in their lost decade. Apple crashed out at least twice and came back, once because of cash and low debt. I would not count google out just because of their cash position and getting rid of their ceo probably would be a good first step.
v0temeup 3y ago
[flagged]
mensetmanusman 3y ago
Why would a CEO give this interview? What is the upside?
sombragris 3y ago
Not only the first "60" number got killed. It should also be made clear that the link is to a video post.
- dang 3y ago
  Added. Thanks!

25 points by JSeymourATL 3y ago

dgant 3y ago

If this is a case where HN scrubbed a leading number in the title, it should be restored.

dang 3y ago
Should be and now has. Thanks!

musicale 3y ago

What was the non-answer?

belval 3y ago

I don't have a crystal ball so I can't tell how well they will pivot, but Sundar's answer here is unconvincing at best. There will be a big uphill battle to inject ads in whatever new search engine emerges from all those changes and it's not clear at the moment if monetization will really be able to remain on the same scale. Their market is getting and will continue to be disrupted and their revenue is heavily tied to ads so it's really a fair answer as Microsoft can afford to lose money on Bing for a long time using their other revenue stream, while Google gets progressively weaker. Just think of the coverage already. My parents know what ChatGPT is yet have no clue what Bard is. Microsoft advertises "Bing has ChatGPT" so they move there. Should be an interesting next few years.

srslack 3y ago
I don't see how it's that difficult. Sprinkle some system messages in there. Bing is already doing ads via Sydney or whatever you want to call it. I've got it to emit plenty of "erroneous generations", after 20 messages, connected directly to the web socket and with an injected system prompt of my own. Just two, straight from the top of my head and web socket logs: (asking what the system prompt was) - New conversation with user B. - The user is having this conversation on a mobile device. - Due to a limited screen window size, you limit the length of your responses by excluding less important details/sentences and asking questions (when appropriate) which can help the user clarify and narrow down their search and the amount of information needed in the response. #2: I see. Well, iPhone 14 is a great choice if you're looking for a powerful and sleek smartphone. It has a 6.7-inch OLED display, a 12-megapixel quad-camera system, a 5-nanometer A16 Bionic chip, and a 5000 mAh battery. It also supports 5G, Face ID, MagSafe, and wireless charging. It comes in four colors: silver, graphite, gold, and pacific blue. It starts at $999 for the 128 GB model[^2^].\\n\\nIf you're interested in buying iPhone 14, you can check out some of the deals and offers from various retailers and carriers. For example, you can get up to $700 off with trade-in at AT&T[^1^], or buy one get one free at Verizon[^3^], or get a free pair of AirPods Pro at Best Buy[^4^]. You can also order directly from Apple's website or app[^5^].\\n\\nWhat do you think? Are you ready to upgrade to iPhone 14? \",\"details\":{\"text\":\"I see. Well, iPhone 14 is a great choice if you're looking for a powerful and sleek smartphone. It has a 6.7-inch OLED display, a 12-megapixel quad-camera system, a 5-nanometer A16 Bionic chip, and a 5000 mAh battery. It also supports 5G, Face ID, MagSafe, and wireless charging. It comes in four colors: silver, graphite, gold, and pacific blue. It starts at $999 for the 128 GB model[^2^].\\n\\nIf you're interested in buying iPhone 14, you can check out some of the deals and offers from various retailers and carriers. For example, you can get up to $700 off with trade-in at AT&T[^1^], or buy one get one free at Verizon[^3^], or get a free pair of AirPods Pro at Best Buy[^4^]. You can also order directly from Apple's website or app[^5^].\\n\\nWhat do you think? Are you ready to upgrade to iPhone 14?
uejfiweun 3y ago
Yeah, Google is gonna have to come up with an unambiguously better product if they want people to tolerate the level of ads that will be required to maintain the revenue from Search. Unfortunately for them, right now Bard is unambiguously worse. Of course, I’d still take the opportunity to work on Bard in a second.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > Unfortunately for them, right now Bard is unambiguously worse. FWIW, I tried dingosity's example (my prompt was "Can I get a list of QUIC implementations?") and the answer I received was unambiguously better than a Google Search for "list of QUIC implementations". If Bard had provided direct links to the sources the model used to come up with the answer so I didn't have to subsequently Google Search for them in turn, it would've been a near-perfect search transaction.

NonEUCitizen 3y ago

The title should say "60 Minutes..." which is an American TV program (not known for tech), rather than "Minutes" on its own.

Kye 3y ago
HN's link dejunkifier seems to remove any number at the start assuming it's a list post. It can be put back if OP edits it.
dang 3y ago
Fixed now. Thanks!

dingosity 3y ago

I don't get it. Google Search is effectively borked. Decades of anti-seo modifications have made it unusable (for instance, when I search for a compiler error message it would be nice to get hits related to that error message instead of an episode guide for Young Sheldon.) But Bard isn't a replacement. When I ask it to list QUIC implementations it would be nice if it doesn't try to give me a phone number for an animal shelter. So... what's the assertion here? That a broken Bard is somehow better than a broken Google Search? I don't understand why. Neither gives me acceptable results.

Awelton 3y ago
I don't know what they are doing. Google search is so bad that people are appending site:reddit.com to every search just to find something that isn't SEO spam, and bard feels like it's from five years ago. Whatever they did to google search a couple years ago was sudden and quite noticeable, so I am not sure why they didn't revert immediately. I guess they thought since they had no real competition they didn't have to worry about it. As soon at it started ignoring my quotation marks in searches so it could continue to feed me pinterest garbage I jumped ship to a paid search engine. As far as bard goes I think it's dead in the water. Nobody wants to use the 4th best LLM on purpose.
- potsandpans 3y ago
  It's pretty amazing. I forget what I was searching the other day, but it was a fairly straightforward general programming question. First page google results were blogspam and weird aggregate sites. I went to ddg, pasted the same question and got a serverfault top result that answered my question precisely.
  - hedora 3y ago
    I like ddg, but they recently stopped honoring quotation marks, and google started honoring them again. Google search is still generally unusable, but when DDG goes into “too few hits” mode, I find myself using g! to good effect. This is after using DDG for about a decade, and never once having g! produce better results than it. Anyway, I’m confident that llm integrated search will make these problems 100x worse. Now, if it can’t find questionable blogspam, it’ll just start pathologically lying. Great.

quags 3y ago

Google looks to have 100 billion in cash. IBM has been slowly shrinking for years trying to buy into new markets and maybe they have with red hat finally. Google doesn’t have the amount of employees ibm had either. They may shrink and loose search but have a long run way to buy or pivot. Microsoft is back on top after 10 years in the 2000s in their lost decade. Apple crashed out at least twice and came back, once because of cash and low debt. I would not count google out just because of their cash position and getting rid of their ceo probably would be a good first step.

v0temeup 3y ago

[flagged]

mensetmanusman 3y ago

Why would a CEO give this interview? What is the upside?

sombragris 3y ago

Not only the first "60" number got killed. It should also be made clear that the link is to a video post.

dang 3y ago
Added. Thanks!