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> That was a product decision, and a very bad one. I don't know that it's a bad decision, time will judge it. Also, we can expect the quality of the results to

> That was a product decision, and a very bad one. I don't know that it's a bad decision, time will judge it. Also, we can expect the quality of the results to improve over time. I think Google saw a real threat to their search business and had to respond.

Miraste 1y ago
Their "AI Overview" has not noticeably improved on its (many) failings for at least a year. In that time, Google's LLMs have gotten much better. They aren't implementing the advances they've made, presumably for cost reasons. Meanwhile, every single person I know has come to trust Google less. That will catch up with them eventually.
gambiting 1y ago
The threat to their search business had nothing to do with AI but with the insane amount of SEO-ing they allowed to rake in cash. Their results have been garbage for years, even for tech stuff where they traditionally excelled - searching for "what does class X do in .NET" yields several results for paid programming courses rather than the actual answer, and that's not an AI problem.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  SEO-wise (and in no other way), I think we should have more sympathy for Google. They are just… losing at the cat-and-mouse game. They are playing cat against a whole world of mice, I don’t think anyone other than pre-decline Google could win it.
  - Arainach 1y ago
    The number of mice has grown exponentially. It's not clear anyone could have kept up. Millions, probably tens of millions of people have jobs trying to manipulate search results - with billions of dollars of resources available to them. With no internal information, it's safe to say no more than thousands of Googlers (probably fewer) are working to combat them. If every one of them is a 10x engineer they're still outnumbered by more than 2 orders of magnitude.
  - anonymars 1y ago
    I understand what you're saying, but also supposedly at some point quality deliberately took a back seat to "growth" https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ > The key event in the piece is a “Code Yellow” crisis declared in 2019 by Google’s ads and finance teams, which had forecast a disappointing quarter. In response, Raghavan pushed Ben Gomes — the erstwhile head of Google Search, and a genuine pioneer in search technology — to increase the number of queries people made by any means necessary. (Quoting from this follow-up post: https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/)
    - anonymars 1y ago
      Btw this was the HN discussion, I realized, well, where else would I have come across that? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
  - h2zizzle 1y ago
    No, they made the problem by not dealing with such websites swiftly and brutally. Instead, they encouraged it.
  - zargon 1y ago
    Google isn’t even playing that game, they’re playing the line-go-up game, which precludes them from dealing with SEO abuse in an effective way.
  - lelanthran 1y ago
    > SEO-wise (and in no other way), I think we should have more sympathy for Google. They are just… losing at the cat-and-mouse game. I don't think they are; they have realised (quite accurately, IMO) that users would still use them even if they boosted their customers' rankings in the results. They could, right now, switch to a model that penalises pages for each ad. They don't. They could, right now, penalise highly monetised "content" like courses and crap. They don't do that either.[1] If Kagi can get better results with a fraction of the resources, there is no argument to be made that Google is playing a losing game. -------------------------------------- [1] All the SEO stuff is damn easy to pick out; any page that is heavily monetised (by ads, or similar commercial offering) is very very easy to bin. A simple "don't show courses unless search query contains the word courses" type of rule is nowhere near computationally expensive. Recording the number of ads on a page when crawling is equally cheap.
    - Miraste 1y ago
      > If Kagi can get better results with a fraction of the resources, there is no argument to be made that Google is playing a losing game. Google's algorithm is the target for every SEO firm in the world. No one is targeting Kagi. Therefore, Kagi can use techniques that would not work at Google.
    - thfuran 1y ago
      >A simple "don't show courses unless search query contains the word courses" type of rule is nowhere near computationally expensive It’s nowhere near good either. What about the searches for cuorses or classes or training?
      - lelanthran 1y ago
        Their current search already recognises mispellings and synonyms. Why would they drop that? It's not as if they have to throw away all the preprocessing they do on the search query. They can continue preprocessing exactly like they do it now.
  - rightbyte 1y ago
    Getting high SEO ranking is a lot of job. Some FTEs could just manually downrank SEO farms.
bee_rider 1y ago
They are doing an OK job of making AI look like annoying garbage. If that’s the plan… actually, it might be brilliant.
- weatherlite 1y ago
  I can't argue here, for me they are mostly useful but I get that one catastrophic failure or two can make someone completely distrust them. But the actual judges are gonna be the masses, we'll see. For now adoption seems quite strong.

Miraste 1y ago

Their "AI Overview" has not noticeably improved on its (many) failings for at least a year. In that time, Google's LLMs have gotten much better. They aren't implementing the advances they've made, presumably for cost reasons. Meanwhile, every single person I know has come to trust Google less. That will catch up with them eventually.

gambiting 1y ago

The threat to their search business had nothing to do with AI but with the insane amount of SEO-ing they allowed to rake in cash. Their results have been garbage for years, even for tech stuff where they traditionally excelled - searching for "what does class X do in .NET" yields several results for paid programming courses rather than the actual answer, and that's not an AI problem.

bee_rider 1y ago
SEO-wise (and in no other way), I think we should have more sympathy for Google. They are just… losing at the cat-and-mouse game. They are playing cat against a whole world of mice, I don’t think anyone other than pre-decline Google could win it.
- Arainach 1y ago
  The number of mice has grown exponentially. It's not clear anyone could have kept up. Millions, probably tens of millions of people have jobs trying to manipulate search results - with billions of dollars of resources available to them. With no internal information, it's safe to say no more than thousands of Googlers (probably fewer) are working to combat them. If every one of them is a 10x engineer they're still outnumbered by more than 2 orders of magnitude.
- anonymars 1y ago
  I understand what you're saying, but also supposedly at some point quality deliberately took a back seat to "growth" https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ > The key event in the piece is a “Code Yellow” crisis declared in 2019 by Google’s ads and finance teams, which had forecast a disappointing quarter. In response, Raghavan pushed Ben Gomes — the erstwhile head of Google Search, and a genuine pioneer in search technology — to increase the number of queries people made by any means necessary. (Quoting from this follow-up post: https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/)
  - anonymars 1y ago
    Btw this was the HN discussion, I realized, well, where else would I have come across that? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
- h2zizzle 1y ago
  No, they made the problem by not dealing with such websites swiftly and brutally. Instead, they encouraged it.
- zargon 1y ago
  Google isn’t even playing that game, they’re playing the line-go-up game, which precludes them from dealing with SEO abuse in an effective way.
- lelanthran 1y ago
  > SEO-wise (and in no other way), I think we should have more sympathy for Google. They are just… losing at the cat-and-mouse game. I don't think they are; they have realised (quite accurately, IMO) that users would still use them even if they boosted their customers' rankings in the results. They could, right now, switch to a model that penalises pages for each ad. They don't. They could, right now, penalise highly monetised "content" like courses and crap. They don't do that either.[1] If Kagi can get better results with a fraction of the resources, there is no argument to be made that Google is playing a losing game. -------------------------------------- [1] All the SEO stuff is damn easy to pick out; any page that is heavily monetised (by ads, or similar commercial offering) is very very easy to bin. A simple "don't show courses unless search query contains the word courses" type of rule is nowhere near computationally expensive. Recording the number of ads on a page when crawling is equally cheap.
  - Miraste 1y ago
    > If Kagi can get better results with a fraction of the resources, there is no argument to be made that Google is playing a losing game. Google's algorithm is the target for every SEO firm in the world. No one is targeting Kagi. Therefore, Kagi can use techniques that would not work at Google.
  - thfuran 1y ago
    >A simple "don't show courses unless search query contains the word courses" type of rule is nowhere near computationally expensive It’s nowhere near good either. What about the searches for cuorses or classes or training?
    - lelanthran 1y ago
      Their current search already recognises mispellings and synonyms. Why would they drop that? It's not as if they have to throw away all the preprocessing they do on the search query. They can continue preprocessing exactly like they do it now.
- rightbyte 1y ago
  Getting high SEO ranking is a lot of job. Some FTEs could just manually downrank SEO farms.

bee_rider 1y ago

They are doing an OK job of making AI look like annoying garbage. If that’s the plan… actually, it might be brilliant.

weatherlite 1y ago
I can't argue here, for me they are mostly useful but I get that one catastrophic failure or two can make someone completely distrust them. But the actual judges are gonna be the masses, we'll see. For now adoption seems quite strong.