4 ms·

they have 200 employees on linkedin, many of whom are not engineers. How they can carry two such major and complicated projects(browser and search) with such he

they have 200 employees on linkedin, many of whom are not engineers. How they can carry two such major and complicated projects(browser and search) with such headcount?

slig 4y ago
Meanwhile, Twitter had 7500 and Dropbox, 3000.
jraph 4y ago
Can't say for search (it seems like massive work indeed - or maybe you can actually build a decent and comprehensive search engine with few people but with a massive amount of money), but for the browser they really provide a browser UI (and I'd guess most of it is actually built by Google too). It requires work, but it's not massive like a browser. There are many browsers out there, maintained by a few devs, sometimes in their free time. Konqueror, Gnome Web, qutebrowser, WebPositive... Whatever the SerinityOS is doing, reimplementing a browser engine from scratch for their browser Ladybird [1], is vastly more impressive. [1] https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Ladybird https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Ladybird
eitland 4y ago
search.marginalia.nu consisted of 1 Swedish engineer and 1 server last I heard and still managed to outclass DDG in a number of query types relevant to me. In fact, back when I used DDG I think I fell back to marginalia more often than I fell back to Google, partly because of my dislike for Google and partly because Google doesn't respect my queries - which of course is a contributing reason for my dislike for them. Let's say 100 of the Brave employees are engineers and 50 of them work on the Chromium skin, that still leaves 50 to work on search and related efforts. If 5 of them are as good as the marginalia guy and they are allowed to work with equally clear direction, lack of interruptions and more funding, I think that could almost explain a working search engine. Remember: In the first 20 years of Google existence (or in any 20 years of the semiconductor age until recently) Moores law had over 13 cycles. A lot of what used to be hard problems before isn't anynore.
- riku_iki 4y ago
  that niche engine looks like many magnitudes simpler problem than building competitive modern search.
  - eitland 4y ago
    Marginalia is a niche engine for now, yes, but what it does, it does correctly, unlike Google that has been silently rewriting my queries since before 2013: https://techinorg.blogspot.com/2013/03/what-is-going-on-with-search-results.html?m=1 https://techinorg.blogspot.com/2013/03/what-is-going-on-with...
    - riku_iki 4y ago
      someone in google according to some metrics decided it is something majority of users wants.
- jraph 4y ago
  > Remember: In the first 20 years of Google existence (or in any 20 years of the semiconductor age until recently) Moores law had over 13 cycles. A lot of what used to be hard problems before isn't anynore. The web also grow tremendously, and probably user expectations too (in the beginning of the century we were told in school not to speak to search engine like we would to a human, but with keywords and operators). We also do and search for many more kinds of things
  - eitland 4y ago
    If anything my expectations sunk massively between 2009 and the introduction of Kagi. To be blunt: for me, mainstream search engines Google and Bing very much feel like the things they replaced, Altavista and Yahoo, just with some fancy bolt ons like maps etc. I understand some people like to be able to write sentences to their search engines, but as long as the results have worse quality than they had 15 - 20 years ago, that "understanding" is just another fancy bolt on feature. The only things that exist today that could threaten Google quality is Kagi which has gone all in on quality and ChatGPT (and other similar solutions) which finally have produced a working "answer machine" instead of breaking perfect or at least working search engines.

they have 200 employees on linkedin, many of whom are not engineers. How they can carry two such major and complicated projects(browser and search) with such headcount?

slig 4y ago

Meanwhile, Twitter had 7500 and Dropbox, 3000.

jraph 4y ago

Can't say for search (it seems like massive work indeed - or maybe you can actually build a decent and comprehensive search engine with few people but with a massive amount of money), but for the browser they really provide a browser UI (and I'd guess most of it is actually built by Google too). It requires work, but it's not massive like a browser. There are many browsers out there, maintained by a few devs, sometimes in their free time. Konqueror, Gnome Web, qutebrowser, WebPositive... Whatever the SerinityOS is doing, reimplementing a browser engine from scratch for their browser Ladybird [1], is vastly more impressive. [1] https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Ladybird https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Ladybird

eitland 4y ago

search.marginalia.nu consisted of 1 Swedish engineer and 1 server last I heard and still managed to outclass DDG in a number of query types relevant to me. In fact, back when I used DDG I think I fell back to marginalia more often than I fell back to Google, partly because of my dislike for Google and partly because Google doesn't respect my queries - which of course is a contributing reason for my dislike for them. Let's say 100 of the Brave employees are engineers and 50 of them work on the Chromium skin, that still leaves 50 to work on search and related efforts. If 5 of them are as good as the marginalia guy and they are allowed to work with equally clear direction, lack of interruptions and more funding, I think that could almost explain a working search engine. Remember: In the first 20 years of Google existence (or in any 20 years of the semiconductor age until recently) Moores law had over 13 cycles. A lot of what used to be hard problems before isn't anynore.

riku_iki 4y ago
that niche engine looks like many magnitudes simpler problem than building competitive modern search.
- eitland 4y ago
  Marginalia is a niche engine for now, yes, but what it does, it does correctly, unlike Google that has been silently rewriting my queries since before 2013: https://techinorg.blogspot.com/2013/03/what-is-going-on-with-search-results.html?m=1 https://techinorg.blogspot.com/2013/03/what-is-going-on-with...
  - riku_iki 4y ago
    someone in google according to some metrics decided it is something majority of users wants.
jraph 4y ago
> Remember: In the first 20 years of Google existence (or in any 20 years of the semiconductor age until recently) Moores law had over 13 cycles. A lot of what used to be hard problems before isn't anynore. The web also grow tremendously, and probably user expectations too (in the beginning of the century we were told in school not to speak to search engine like we would to a human, but with keywords and operators). We also do and search for many more kinds of things
- eitland 4y ago
  If anything my expectations sunk massively between 2009 and the introduction of Kagi. To be blunt: for me, mainstream search engines Google and Bing very much feel like the things they replaced, Altavista and Yahoo, just with some fancy bolt ons like maps etc. I understand some people like to be able to write sentences to their search engines, but as long as the results have worse quality than they had 15 - 20 years ago, that "understanding" is just another fancy bolt on feature. The only things that exist today that could threaten Google quality is Kagi which has gone all in on quality and ChatGPT (and other similar solutions) which finally have produced a working "answer machine" instead of breaking perfect or at least working search engines.