3 ms·

My usage of Google has dropped dramatically in the last few months, with ChatGPT and Claude answering 80% of my questions with astronomically better answers now

My usage of Google has dropped dramatically in the last few months, with ChatGPT and Claude answering 80% of my questions with astronomically better answers now that it has context of what I’m doing. Google really really screwed up by missing this, now their clumsy catchup methods reek of desperation and internal chaos. Google is dead, now the decline and wither

simfree 2y ago
Google knowingly made their search results shittier and shittier for years in pursuit of improved KPIs, to the point that alternative search engines are better, and so are LLMs that occasionally hallucinate or outright crash.
- _boffin_ 2y ago
  What KPIs in specific?
  - j45 2y ago
    A primary KPI is revenue. Revenue comes from ads. So making paid ad results more relevant for the click, than ensuring high quality organic search. Maybe, the more valuable the paid ads, the worse the organic rankings.
  - taskforcegemini 2y ago
    my guess is they did something to cut costs by making each search less ressource intensive. I would pay to have google search behave as it used to. nowadays it seems to ignore most of what I try to tell it to look for, and instead shows what it "thinks" most other people probably mean.
- zingelshuher 2y ago
  > Google knowingly made their search results shittier and shittier for years unfortunately this extends to youtube too. now they have a new shitty trick. you click on the link and they randomly give you a completely different video.
verdverm 2y ago
ChatGPT and Claude are going to find it difficult to compete with Google, MSFT, and Meta longterm, who are rolling out their AI capabilities to billions of users. The aforementioned started from zero and we know most people will choose the default provided. With MSFT owning half of OpenAI, I suspect it is only a matter of time before ownership officially changes.
- j45 2y ago
  It's possible for sure, as the big guys flip too soon into commercializing, while the smaller or open-sized guys are becoming more and more efficient for similar results, they are also targets to be partnered with or acquired. Compute being a huge demand is a part truth, and also part PR. If we look at open source models, are many not improving.. and needing fewer and fewer resources (say compute) for better and better results?
  - verdverm 2y ago
    Google Cloud Vertex AI let's you run any of the open source models on Google infra, they even have Claude models available. MSFT likely has similar in their cloud. Where are people going to run their models? I for one will choose the cloud I already use. It has APIs for the big models and simple deployment of both open source and other proprietary models. This is completely separate from providing end users a service. How many people self host or run their own alternatives when there are managed services available? It is unlikely people are going to switch en mass to open source models, especially while there is a price war on SoTA models. It's becoming far cheaper to call a SoTA API than have an always on open source model. From my experience, running a small model locally was both slower (tokens/sec plus overall system slowdown) and had worse results. I switched to cloud based APIs and will likely not consider reversing this decision. Multiple orders of magnitude improvements would need to happen in both performance and quality
    - zingelshuher 2y ago
      > It is unlikely people are going to switch en mass to open source models It depends on the task at hands. For complex tasks no way personal computer can compete with giants data centers. But, as soon as software becomes available, users will gladly switch to local AI for personal data search / classification / summation, etc. This market is potentially huge, for private sensitive there is no other way.
dzhiurgis 2y ago
Bing, ddg, brave - all of them have better ui and serve same results minus obnoxious ads. Really no reason to use google search anymore.

simfree 2y ago

Google knowingly made their search results shittier and shittier for years in pursuit of improved KPIs, to the point that alternative search engines are better, and so are LLMs that occasionally hallucinate or outright crash.

_boffin_ 2y ago
What KPIs in specific?
- j45 2y ago
  A primary KPI is revenue. Revenue comes from ads. So making paid ad results more relevant for the click, than ensuring high quality organic search. Maybe, the more valuable the paid ads, the worse the organic rankings.
- taskforcegemini 2y ago
  my guess is they did something to cut costs by making each search less ressource intensive. I would pay to have google search behave as it used to. nowadays it seems to ignore most of what I try to tell it to look for, and instead shows what it "thinks" most other people probably mean.
zingelshuher 2y ago
> Google knowingly made their search results shittier and shittier for years unfortunately this extends to youtube too. now they have a new shitty trick. you click on the link and they randomly give you a completely different video.

verdverm 2y ago

ChatGPT and Claude are going to find it difficult to compete with Google, MSFT, and Meta longterm, who are rolling out their AI capabilities to billions of users. The aforementioned started from zero and we know most people will choose the default provided. With MSFT owning half of OpenAI, I suspect it is only a matter of time before ownership officially changes.

j45 2y ago
It's possible for sure, as the big guys flip too soon into commercializing, while the smaller or open-sized guys are becoming more and more efficient for similar results, they are also targets to be partnered with or acquired. Compute being a huge demand is a part truth, and also part PR. If we look at open source models, are many not improving.. and needing fewer and fewer resources (say compute) for better and better results?
- verdverm 2y ago
  Google Cloud Vertex AI let's you run any of the open source models on Google infra, they even have Claude models available. MSFT likely has similar in their cloud. Where are people going to run their models? I for one will choose the cloud I already use. It has APIs for the big models and simple deployment of both open source and other proprietary models. This is completely separate from providing end users a service. How many people self host or run their own alternatives when there are managed services available? It is unlikely people are going to switch en mass to open source models, especially while there is a price war on SoTA models. It's becoming far cheaper to call a SoTA API than have an always on open source model. From my experience, running a small model locally was both slower (tokens/sec plus overall system slowdown) and had worse results. I switched to cloud based APIs and will likely not consider reversing this decision. Multiple orders of magnitude improvements would need to happen in both performance and quality
  - zingelshuher 2y ago
    > It is unlikely people are going to switch en mass to open source models It depends on the task at hands. For complex tasks no way personal computer can compete with giants data centers. But, as soon as software becomes available, users will gladly switch to local AI for personal data search / classification / summation, etc. This market is potentially huge, for private sensitive there is no other way.

dzhiurgis 2y ago

Bing, ddg, brave - all of them have better ui and serve same results minus obnoxious ads. Really no reason to use google search anymore.