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This is probably Google's Altavista moment, by making their results crappier by the year in search of Ad dollars everyone has felt that there is a potential for

This is probably Google's Altavista moment, by making their results crappier by the year in search of Ad dollars everyone has felt that there is a potential for search to be better and once that becomes available they'll be in a continious game of catch-up. Yes, Google has their own AI divisions, tons of money and SEO is to blame for part of their crappiness. But they've also _explicitly_ focused on ad-dollars over algorithmic purity if one is to believe the reports of their internal politics and if those are true they have probably lost a ton of people who they'd need right now to turn the ship around quickly.

thefourthchime 2y ago
Google's SEO almost killed the web, ChatGPT Search will finish the job.
- kylebenzle 2y ago
  We are still spending most of our time online on social media sites like Hacker News, Instagram and Youtube, right?
  - topaz0 2y ago
    That's not the web
    - Retr0id 2y ago
      Why not?
      - cryptoz 2y ago
        I'll take a stab at it. What is the web, really? Gotta be stuff you see and interact with in web browsers right? Sure, you can get to HN, YouTube and Instagram in a browser. But by traffic for example, how much of activity on HN, Instagram and YouTube combined is through a browser? I mean, gotta be pretty low...like 5%? Just a guess, but remember all the app usage and TV usage for those sites is pretty big. So if 95% of traffic/users/whatever metric are not using a web browser for those activities, is it really the web? It can't be called the web just 'cause they use HTTPS. It's gotta be a 'world wide web' experience, which I think a good proxy for would be using a web browser. I got no horse in this race, just thinking out loud about it.
        mulmen 2y ago
        What other way is there to access HN but the website? Agree YouTube and Instagram are probably mostly apps which puts them in the “Internet” category but not “world wide web”.
        echoangle 2y ago
        Technically there is an API and there are some client apps for HN. No way they make up 95% of traffic though.
        satvikpendem 2y ago
        WWW != Internet, yes. I would count mobile apps as part of the web too, they're simply another sort of "browser."
        herval 2y ago
        “The web” is, by definition, a collection of things that are loosely connected and accessible (searchable, etc). While the current internet is still “a web”, it’s mostly a web of 2-3 massive properties, entirely operated by the same 2-3 companies, completely devoided of public apis (and sometimes even web accessible content). The fact that sometimes they have an html version makes them “websites”, I guess, but not really a “web of nodes” the same way it used to be Another common phenomenon these days is that lots of businesses don’t even bother having a web presence - it’s all instagram, WhatsApp and tiktok accounts, mostly only accessible via apps (or worse, chat platforms like discord)
      - s1artibartfast 2y ago
        I think the idea is that those are websites on the web, which are distinct from the web itself. There are several meaningful difference between surfing Youtube and surfing the web. These include ownership, access, review, exposure, and more.
      - beowulfey 2y ago
        the web was the clicking of links from site to site. the interconnectedness of information. Searching the web was the start of browsing but it was not the only means of traversing. Honestly the web died long ago imo. Wikipedia and other wikis are the only places that feel like the old web to me now.
- hidelooktropic 2y ago
  How?
  - cowpig 2y ago
    How can an economy function if there is no way to get any value from producing anything? Google (and Facebook, a few other platforms) made it so that the vast majority of websites are never visited. ChatGPT further erodes the possibility of tying economic value to the production of that value. Seems like we need a new framework around "intellectual property"
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  In essence there is no “objective” algorithm. It’s a mish mash of random black box patterns that we hope delivers the right answer. It probably will most of the time but it will be gamed hard and it’s going to be hard to undo changes in gamified models.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
Classic innovator’s dilemma. The politics of Google make launching a search competitor impossible.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  Exactly. That’s why I never understood Gemini. It is in a zero-sum game with Search.
  - spauldo 2y ago
    Google is trying to beat potential competitors to the punch. They hold the search market, but if people start querying AI instead of searching they need a product in that space of they'll lose their lead. I just got back from a job where my tech used AI on his phone every time he needed to search for something. The results were hilariously bad, but if things keep improving one day they might not be. Google needs to be ready for that.
  - kyrra 2y ago
    They are embedding Gemini results at the top of search. How is that not integration between them?
- llm_trw 2y ago
  One thing I will always admire Apple for is being willing to essentially kill the iPod with the iPhone in 2007. No other company I've seen has been willing to kill their cash cow so thoroughly and so profitably.
  - bradjohnson 2y ago
    Eh, Zuck did the same with Instagram/Facebook: “If we don't create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will.”
    - krustyburger 2y ago
      Hate to break it to you, but Zuck didn’t create Instagram. Buying out a threatening competitor is not the same sort of risky move as what Apple did with the iPod/iPhone.
zo1 2y ago
Google, even with all the trillions in additional productivity it has added to the world, has left the world at a net-negative. We can't even quantify it, and every person will tell you a different way in which it has impacted the world negatively. E.g. for me, how much Google (and silicon valley in general) have enabled twisted ideologies to flourish. All in search of ad-dollars by virtue of eyeballs on screens, at the detriment of everything.
- olkingcole 2y ago
  I was just wondering what has come out of silicon valley since say 2003 that has been a net positive for humanity. Just because something is profitable doesn't mean it's progress.
- topaz0 2y ago
  Now we get to see how OpenAI will do similar harm, more effectively and at much greater environmental cost.
  - sethammons 2y ago
    I feel like we have an opportunity to break a feedback loop. SEO worked because of links. No links in my chatgpt discussions. Ah, but what about all the junk ai gen content you may counter, but that stuff only works because of SEO links. As more people abandon searching for links for discussions, the SEO usefulness diminishes. Maybe to the point where many parasites stop making SEO shite in the first place.
    - topaz0 2y ago
      I wasn't even talking about the information pollution -- I was talking about boiling the ocean. Not that I'm not concerned about the former.
    - topaz0 2y ago
      But to your points. I think the problem with your analysis is that it forgets that the real driver of the junk is the advertising environment. The SEO links were profitable because the advertisers were willing to pay a few cents for space on those pages. Yes, the incentives are changing for the teenagers who are churning out text and adding seo links to their stable of cheap websites, but the advertisers are going to find a way to manipulate consumers that's compatible with the new order. I don't know what that will be, but whatever it is will depend on information pollution just as much as the current one.
throwaway314155 2y ago
> if one is to believe the reports of their internal politics I'm not familiar with what you're referring to here. Happen to have a link?
- carls 2y ago
  There are probably several, but one of the ones that made the rounds a while ago is "The Man Who Killed Google Search" by Edward Zitron: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
  - astrange 2y ago
    Prabhakar Raghavan got fired (= promoted out of the job) last week.
rawgabbit 2y ago
For me the key difference between ChatGPT Search and Google is the feedback mechanism. With ChatGPT, I can give a thumbs up or thumbs down; this means that OpenAI will optimize for users thumbs up. With Google, the feedback is if I click on an Ad; this means that Google optimizes for clickbait.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  I have no doubt that Google’s search team is optimizing for the best results. The problem is their ads team is optimizing for revenue. You can’t optimize for two things at the same time without compromising (the optimum is the Pareto frontier).
  - hightrix 2y ago
    In my opinion, the issue is that the user's definition of "best results" and Google's definition do not align, including the Search team. Google's incentives are very different than user's needs.
    - janalsncm 2y ago
      I disagree, personally. I think the engineers there are human and they can see that the results aren’t good. Maybe some of them are in this thread. If I had to guess, I think there are a lot of sub-teams contributing scores to the overall ranking and optimizing for sub-metrics, and it’s too big of a beast to fix. In other words, a failure of leadership.
    - klabb3 2y ago
      Of course. But this will be true for OpenAI and all other AI players as well. During the honeymoon phase user needs matter, that’s how they get you. Comparing a company in the free-money phase with one in the value extraction phase is apples to oranges.
- nosbo 2y ago
  Is it optimising for all users? And assuming people thumbs up the correct info. I wonder what accuracy percentage we are looking at there. ChatGPTs responses are so confident when wrong I fear people will just give it a thumbs up when its wrong. (This is if how I understand the feature you mention is working)
umvi 2y ago
At some point it seems like Google switch to ML-based search instead of index based search. You can search for very specific combinations of lyrics and scenes: "eyes on me pineapple bucket of water house of cards chess time loop" and you won't surface a link to the music video featuring all of those things (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlzgDVLtU6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlzgDVLtU6g), you'll just get really generic results of the average of your query.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  I think this is a separate issue although it also exists. What the parent is referring to is favoring annoying ad-filled garbage over an equally relevant but straightforward result. The hidden variable is that ad-riddled spam sites also invest in SEO, which is why they rank higher. I am not aware of any evidence that Google is using number of Google ads as a ranking factor directly. But I would push back and say that “SEO” is something Google should be doing, not websites, and a properly optimized search engine would be penalizing obvious garbage.
- greenavocado 2y ago
  Has google completely stopped working for anyone else? I can still search things, i get results but, they're an ordered list of popular places the engine is directing me to. Some kind of filtering is occurring on nearly every search i make that's making the results feel entirely useless. Image search stopped working sometime ago and now it just runs an AI filter on whatever image you search for, tells you there's a man in the picture and gives up. Youtube recommendations is always hundreds of videos i've watched already, with maybe 1-2 recommendations to new channels when i know there's millions of content creators out there struggling who it will never introduce me to. What happened to the rabbit holes of crazy youtube stuff you could go down? This product is a shell of its old self, why did it stop working?
  - seanthemon 2y ago
    They do evil now
  - IshKebab 2y ago
kristopolous 2y ago
There's this tech pattern of letting the cash-cow stagnate and deteriorate while focusing on high risk moonshots. This especially happens after they dominate the market. Take for example IE6, Intel, Facebook, IBM, and now Google. They have everything they need to keep things from going off the rails, management however has a tendency to delusionally assume their ship is so unsinkable that they're not even manning their stations. It becomes Clayton Christensenesque - they're dismissive of the competition as not real threats and don't realize their cash-cow is running on only fumes and inertia until its too late.
- devjab 2y ago
  I think it’s what is the natural consequence of handing over management to MBA types. They can’t create new things. I don’t mean that they should be programmers, engineers or whatever they’re working with. I mean that they can only exact value from something that already exists. Which is always going to be a short term strategy because the only way to do that is to make “the it” worse. I’m not sure Facebook fits in considering they at least managed to get some other products along the way, and may get more. I certainly don’t think Google fits the bill. Google is failing because they let their cash cow ruin everything else, not because they let it stagnate while they chased the next moonshot. Google Cloud could have easily been competitive with AWS and Azure in European Enterprise, but it’s not even considered an option because Google Advertising wouldn’t let it exist without data harvesting. Google had Office365 long before Microsoft took every organisation online. But Google failed to sell it because… well… It’s very typical MBA though. Google has killed profitable products because those products weren’t growing enough. A silly metric really, but one which isn’t surprising when your CEO is a former McKinsey. It couldn’t happen to a nicer company though, and at least it won’t kill people unlike Boeing.
  - Eduard 2y ago
    > I’m not sure Facebook fits in considering they at least managed to get some other products along the way can you name these products?
    - 2y ago
bamboozled 2y ago
No it's not.
coffeemug 2y ago
Google is entirely to blame. It would be trivial for them to train a model to rank sites on a scale of SEO garbage to nobel laureate essay, then filter out the bottom 50%.
- azemetre 2y ago
  Why would Google do this when they make billions from SEO garbage? Those sites are serving ads after all.
namuol 2y ago
More competition is good, but I’m pretty sure the end result will just be, at best, a duopoly of products equally ruined by advertising for their “free” tier, and somewhat less ruined for the “premium” tier.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
fhdsgbbcaA 2y ago
The beatings will continue until moral improves.
Culonavirus 2y ago
> if one is to believe the reports I know this is a predominantly white, upper middle class site (read: progressive), and people from that demo sure love to point out that "you can't say the leg is broken just because the foot is dangling at 90 degrees, you aren't a doctor!" ..... but at some point you surely have to start to trust your own eyes and use critical thinking, right?? It's not a conspiracy theory Google ruined their search to serve more ads. It's so obvious and happening for such a long period of time, anyone above certain age and with decent memory can see it. You don't have to "believe the reports", you don't even have to be smart, just use your eyes and your memory.
DeathArrow 2y ago
> But they've also _explicitly_ focused on ad-dollars over algorithmic purity I think they prioritized large and fast incomes over long, steady incomes. Also, there isn't just money that taints Google search results. It's also censorship and political motivation, which is mostly obvious in image search.
space_oddity 2y ago
The internal politics and shifts in focus you've mentioned make it harder to believe that they're truly dedicated to that goal right now
linsomniac 2y ago
>Google's Altavista moment I'm wondering if they've seen the writing on the wall for a long time, and if diversification is going to save the day. I don't know that I've ever clicked on an ad in Google search results, but I happily pay them for a family account for Youtube and 2TB of drive storage, plus, you know, a flagship phone every couple years. :-)
- surajrmal 2y ago
  All businesses seek to diversify to reduce risk. That doesn't mean they have any reason to believe a cataclysmic event for search is more likely now vs before. ChatGPT to search feels like a similar situation of macos is to windows. It may take market share but the ecosystem around Windows keeps it by far in the lead in market share. Also Microsoft diversifying away from windows enabled that market share loss to not really matter all that much.
GuB-42 2y ago
> This is probably Google's Altavista moment Yes and no. Yes for the quality of search results. Google algorithm and user experience was simply better than AltaVista's, but Google had another advantage. It used a cluster of cheap consumer-grade hardware (PCs) as its backend, rather than the expensive servers AltaVista used, in fact, AltaVista started off as a way for DEC to show off its hardware. As a result Google was not only better than its competitors at searching, it was also cheaper and scaled better, and this architecture became the new standard. It is the opposite for these AI-based systems. AI is expensive, it uses a lot of energy, and the hardware is definitely not consumer-grade. What it means is that barring a significant breakthrough, cheap ChatGPT-like services are simply unsustainable. Google don't have to do anything, it will collapse on its own. Ironically, probably in the same way that Google result became crappier by the year, but on fast forward.
- PessimalDecimal 2y ago
  > What it means is that barring a significant breakthrough, cheap ChatGPT-like services are simply unsustainable. This is the basic premise of Ed Zitron's article https://www.wheresyoured.at/to-serve-altman/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/to-serve-altman/ and others written around the same time. A lot of what he's written seems to be coming to pass, e.g. unfathomably large investments (~$100 billion) by tech giants in OpenAI and other AI startups to keep them going. That does seem unsustainable. Can anyone make a counterpoint to this claim? I'd be very interested to hear what a viable path to profitability looks like for OpenAI.
  - levocardia 2y ago
    Probably "every major corporation pays them a gazillion dollars a year for enterprise-class AI services that outperform humans while running at 100x speed"?
jacobjjacob 2y ago
To be honest, this looks more like OpenAI playing catchup to what Google’s done since 2023. The fact is that ChatGPT, which people thought would kill Search, is falling behind Google in some ways. I think it’s great that competition is driving both companies to improve, but I’m not seeing anything about this that screams “Google-killer”

thefourthchime 2y ago

Google's SEO almost killed the web, ChatGPT Search will finish the job.

kylebenzle 2y ago
We are still spending most of our time online on social media sites like Hacker News, Instagram and Youtube, right?
- topaz0 2y ago
  That's not the web
  - Retr0id 2y ago
    Why not?
    - cryptoz 2y ago
      I'll take a stab at it. What is the web, really? Gotta be stuff you see and interact with in web browsers right? Sure, you can get to HN, YouTube and Instagram in a browser. But by traffic for example, how much of activity on HN, Instagram and YouTube combined is through a browser? I mean, gotta be pretty low...like 5%? Just a guess, but remember all the app usage and TV usage for those sites is pretty big. So if 95% of traffic/users/whatever metric are not using a web browser for those activities, is it really the web? It can't be called the web just 'cause they use HTTPS. It's gotta be a 'world wide web' experience, which I think a good proxy for would be using a web browser. I got no horse in this race, just thinking out loud about it.
      - mulmen 2y ago
        What other way is there to access HN but the website? Agree YouTube and Instagram are probably mostly apps which puts them in the “Internet” category but not “world wide web”.
        echoangle 2y ago
        Technically there is an API and there are some client apps for HN. No way they make up 95% of traffic though.
      - satvikpendem 2y ago
        WWW != Internet, yes. I would count mobile apps as part of the web too, they're simply another sort of "browser."
      - herval 2y ago
        “The web” is, by definition, a collection of things that are loosely connected and accessible (searchable, etc). While the current internet is still “a web”, it’s mostly a web of 2-3 massive properties, entirely operated by the same 2-3 companies, completely devoided of public apis (and sometimes even web accessible content). The fact that sometimes they have an html version makes them “websites”, I guess, but not really a “web of nodes” the same way it used to be Another common phenomenon these days is that lots of businesses don’t even bother having a web presence - it’s all instagram, WhatsApp and tiktok accounts, mostly only accessible via apps (or worse, chat platforms like discord)
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      I think the idea is that those are websites on the web, which are distinct from the web itself. There are several meaningful difference between surfing Youtube and surfing the web. These include ownership, access, review, exposure, and more.
    - beowulfey 2y ago
      the web was the clicking of links from site to site. the interconnectedness of information. Searching the web was the start of browsing but it was not the only means of traversing. Honestly the web died long ago imo. Wikipedia and other wikis are the only places that feel like the old web to me now.
hidelooktropic 2y ago
How?
- cowpig 2y ago
  How can an economy function if there is no way to get any value from producing anything? Google (and Facebook, a few other platforms) made it so that the vast majority of websites are never visited. ChatGPT further erodes the possibility of tying economic value to the production of that value. Seems like we need a new framework around "intellectual property"
dyauspitr 2y ago
In essence there is no “objective” algorithm. It’s a mish mash of random black box patterns that we hope delivers the right answer. It probably will most of the time but it will be gamed hard and it’s going to be hard to undo changes in gamified models.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

Classic innovator’s dilemma. The politics of Google make launching a search competitor impossible.

janalsncm 2y ago
Exactly. That’s why I never understood Gemini. It is in a zero-sum game with Search.
- spauldo 2y ago
  Google is trying to beat potential competitors to the punch. They hold the search market, but if people start querying AI instead of searching they need a product in that space of they'll lose their lead. I just got back from a job where my tech used AI on his phone every time he needed to search for something. The results were hilariously bad, but if things keep improving one day they might not be. Google needs to be ready for that.
- kyrra 2y ago
  They are embedding Gemini results at the top of search. How is that not integration between them?
llm_trw 2y ago
One thing I will always admire Apple for is being willing to essentially kill the iPod with the iPhone in 2007. No other company I've seen has been willing to kill their cash cow so thoroughly and so profitably.
- bradjohnson 2y ago
  Eh, Zuck did the same with Instagram/Facebook: “If we don't create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will.”
  - krustyburger 2y ago
    Hate to break it to you, but Zuck didn’t create Instagram. Buying out a threatening competitor is not the same sort of risky move as what Apple did with the iPod/iPhone.

zo1 2y ago

Google, even with all the trillions in additional productivity it has added to the world, has left the world at a net-negative. We can't even quantify it, and every person will tell you a different way in which it has impacted the world negatively. E.g. for me, how much Google (and silicon valley in general) have enabled twisted ideologies to flourish. All in search of ad-dollars by virtue of eyeballs on screens, at the detriment of everything.

olkingcole 2y ago
I was just wondering what has come out of silicon valley since say 2003 that has been a net positive for humanity. Just because something is profitable doesn't mean it's progress.
topaz0 2y ago
Now we get to see how OpenAI will do similar harm, more effectively and at much greater environmental cost.
- sethammons 2y ago
  I feel like we have an opportunity to break a feedback loop. SEO worked because of links. No links in my chatgpt discussions. Ah, but what about all the junk ai gen content you may counter, but that stuff only works because of SEO links. As more people abandon searching for links for discussions, the SEO usefulness diminishes. Maybe to the point where many parasites stop making SEO shite in the first place.
  - topaz0 2y ago
    I wasn't even talking about the information pollution -- I was talking about boiling the ocean. Not that I'm not concerned about the former.
  - topaz0 2y ago
    But to your points. I think the problem with your analysis is that it forgets that the real driver of the junk is the advertising environment. The SEO links were profitable because the advertisers were willing to pay a few cents for space on those pages. Yes, the incentives are changing for the teenagers who are churning out text and adding seo links to their stable of cheap websites, but the advertisers are going to find a way to manipulate consumers that's compatible with the new order. I don't know what that will be, but whatever it is will depend on information pollution just as much as the current one.

throwaway314155 2y ago

> if one is to believe the reports of their internal politics I'm not familiar with what you're referring to here. Happen to have a link?

carls 2y ago
There are probably several, but one of the ones that made the rounds a while ago is "The Man Who Killed Google Search" by Edward Zitron: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
- astrange 2y ago
  Prabhakar Raghavan got fired (= promoted out of the job) last week.

rawgabbit 2y ago

For me the key difference between ChatGPT Search and Google is the feedback mechanism. With ChatGPT, I can give a thumbs up or thumbs down; this means that OpenAI will optimize for users thumbs up. With Google, the feedback is if I click on an Ad; this means that Google optimizes for clickbait.

janalsncm 2y ago
I have no doubt that Google’s search team is optimizing for the best results. The problem is their ads team is optimizing for revenue. You can’t optimize for two things at the same time without compromising (the optimum is the Pareto frontier).
- hightrix 2y ago
  In my opinion, the issue is that the user's definition of "best results" and Google's definition do not align, including the Search team. Google's incentives are very different than user's needs.
  - janalsncm 2y ago
    I disagree, personally. I think the engineers there are human and they can see that the results aren’t good. Maybe some of them are in this thread. If I had to guess, I think there are a lot of sub-teams contributing scores to the overall ranking and optimizing for sub-metrics, and it’s too big of a beast to fix. In other words, a failure of leadership.
  - klabb3 2y ago
    Of course. But this will be true for OpenAI and all other AI players as well. During the honeymoon phase user needs matter, that’s how they get you. Comparing a company in the free-money phase with one in the value extraction phase is apples to oranges.
nosbo 2y ago
Is it optimising for all users? And assuming people thumbs up the correct info. I wonder what accuracy percentage we are looking at there. ChatGPTs responses are so confident when wrong I fear people will just give it a thumbs up when its wrong. (This is if how I understand the feature you mention is working)

umvi 2y ago

At some point it seems like Google switch to ML-based search instead of index based search. You can search for very specific combinations of lyrics and scenes: "eyes on me pineapple bucket of water house of cards chess time loop" and you won't surface a link to the music video featuring all of those things (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlzgDVLtU6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlzgDVLtU6g), you'll just get really generic results of the average of your query.

janalsncm 2y ago
I think this is a separate issue although it also exists. What the parent is referring to is favoring annoying ad-filled garbage over an equally relevant but straightforward result. The hidden variable is that ad-riddled spam sites also invest in SEO, which is why they rank higher. I am not aware of any evidence that Google is using number of Google ads as a ranking factor directly. But I would push back and say that “SEO” is something Google should be doing, not websites, and a properly optimized search engine would be penalizing obvious garbage.
greenavocado 2y ago
Has google completely stopped working for anyone else? I can still search things, i get results but, they're an ordered list of popular places the engine is directing me to. Some kind of filtering is occurring on nearly every search i make that's making the results feel entirely useless. Image search stopped working sometime ago and now it just runs an AI filter on whatever image you search for, tells you there's a man in the picture and gives up. Youtube recommendations is always hundreds of videos i've watched already, with maybe 1-2 recommendations to new channels when i know there's millions of content creators out there struggling who it will never introduce me to. What happened to the rabbit holes of crazy youtube stuff you could go down? This product is a shell of its old self, why did it stop working?
- seanthemon 2y ago
  They do evil now
- IshKebab 2y ago

kristopolous 2y ago

There's this tech pattern of letting the cash-cow stagnate and deteriorate while focusing on high risk moonshots. This especially happens after they dominate the market. Take for example IE6, Intel, Facebook, IBM, and now Google. They have everything they need to keep things from going off the rails, management however has a tendency to delusionally assume their ship is so unsinkable that they're not even manning their stations. It becomes Clayton Christensenesque - they're dismissive of the competition as not real threats and don't realize their cash-cow is running on only fumes and inertia until its too late.

devjab 2y ago
I think it’s what is the natural consequence of handing over management to MBA types. They can’t create new things. I don’t mean that they should be programmers, engineers or whatever they’re working with. I mean that they can only exact value from something that already exists. Which is always going to be a short term strategy because the only way to do that is to make “the it” worse. I’m not sure Facebook fits in considering they at least managed to get some other products along the way, and may get more. I certainly don’t think Google fits the bill. Google is failing because they let their cash cow ruin everything else, not because they let it stagnate while they chased the next moonshot. Google Cloud could have easily been competitive with AWS and Azure in European Enterprise, but it’s not even considered an option because Google Advertising wouldn’t let it exist without data harvesting. Google had Office365 long before Microsoft took every organisation online. But Google failed to sell it because… well… It’s very typical MBA though. Google has killed profitable products because those products weren’t growing enough. A silly metric really, but one which isn’t surprising when your CEO is a former McKinsey. It couldn’t happen to a nicer company though, and at least it won’t kill people unlike Boeing.
- Eduard 2y ago
  > I’m not sure Facebook fits in considering they at least managed to get some other products along the way can you name these products?
  - 2y ago

bamboozled 2y ago

No it's not.

coffeemug 2y ago

Google is entirely to blame. It would be trivial for them to train a model to rank sites on a scale of SEO garbage to nobel laureate essay, then filter out the bottom 50%.

azemetre 2y ago
Why would Google do this when they make billions from SEO garbage? Those sites are serving ads after all.

namuol 2y ago

More competition is good, but I’m pretty sure the end result will just be, at best, a duopoly of products equally ruined by advertising for their “free” tier, and somewhat less ruined for the “premium” tier.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

fhdsgbbcaA 2y ago

The beatings will continue until moral improves.

Culonavirus 2y ago

> if one is to believe the reports I know this is a predominantly white, upper middle class site (read: progressive), and people from that demo sure love to point out that "you can't say the leg is broken just because the foot is dangling at 90 degrees, you aren't a doctor!" ..... but at some point you surely have to start to trust your own eyes and use critical thinking, right?? It's not a conspiracy theory Google ruined their search to serve more ads. It's so obvious and happening for such a long period of time, anyone above certain age and with decent memory can see it. You don't have to "believe the reports", you don't even have to be smart, just use your eyes and your memory.

DeathArrow 2y ago

> But they've also _explicitly_ focused on ad-dollars over algorithmic purity I think they prioritized large and fast incomes over long, steady incomes. Also, there isn't just money that taints Google search results. It's also censorship and political motivation, which is mostly obvious in image search.

space_oddity 2y ago

The internal politics and shifts in focus you've mentioned make it harder to believe that they're truly dedicated to that goal right now

linsomniac 2y ago

>Google's Altavista moment I'm wondering if they've seen the writing on the wall for a long time, and if diversification is going to save the day. I don't know that I've ever clicked on an ad in Google search results, but I happily pay them for a family account for Youtube and 2TB of drive storage, plus, you know, a flagship phone every couple years. :-)

surajrmal 2y ago
All businesses seek to diversify to reduce risk. That doesn't mean they have any reason to believe a cataclysmic event for search is more likely now vs before. ChatGPT to search feels like a similar situation of macos is to windows. It may take market share but the ecosystem around Windows keeps it by far in the lead in market share. Also Microsoft diversifying away from windows enabled that market share loss to not really matter all that much.

GuB-42 2y ago

> This is probably Google's Altavista moment Yes and no. Yes for the quality of search results. Google algorithm and user experience was simply better than AltaVista's, but Google had another advantage. It used a cluster of cheap consumer-grade hardware (PCs) as its backend, rather than the expensive servers AltaVista used, in fact, AltaVista started off as a way for DEC to show off its hardware. As a result Google was not only better than its competitors at searching, it was also cheaper and scaled better, and this architecture became the new standard. It is the opposite for these AI-based systems. AI is expensive, it uses a lot of energy, and the hardware is definitely not consumer-grade. What it means is that barring a significant breakthrough, cheap ChatGPT-like services are simply unsustainable. Google don't have to do anything, it will collapse on its own. Ironically, probably in the same way that Google result became crappier by the year, but on fast forward.

PessimalDecimal 2y ago
> What it means is that barring a significant breakthrough, cheap ChatGPT-like services are simply unsustainable. This is the basic premise of Ed Zitron's article https://www.wheresyoured.at/to-serve-altman/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/to-serve-altman/ and others written around the same time. A lot of what he's written seems to be coming to pass, e.g. unfathomably large investments (~$100 billion) by tech giants in OpenAI and other AI startups to keep them going. That does seem unsustainable. Can anyone make a counterpoint to this claim? I'd be very interested to hear what a viable path to profitability looks like for OpenAI.
- levocardia 2y ago
  Probably "every major corporation pays them a gazillion dollars a year for enterprise-class AI services that outperform humans while running at 100x speed"?

jacobjjacob 2y ago

To be honest, this looks more like OpenAI playing catchup to what Google’s done since 2023. The fact is that ChatGPT, which people thought would kill Search, is falling behind Google in some ways. I think it’s great that competition is driving both companies to improve, but I’m not seeing anything about this that screams “Google-killer”