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What do you do when you have a product whose value will inevitably drop in the medium/long-term? Squeeze every penny out of it while you still can. There is no

What do you do when you have a product whose value will inevitably drop in the medium/long-term? Squeeze every penny out of it while you still can. There is no solution to the SEO arms race, like there was no way Yahoo's blandly curated portal could stay relevant in the era of social media. He's the right man for the job. Google search has been doomed for a long time. It is another Yahoo.

somenameforme 1y ago
LLMs have, for me at least, mostly replaced search. Because one of the most common things I search for is stuff like 'what is the function in [x] that does [y] in [z]'. Search for that on Google (or any other search engine) and your results will be complete trash. Search for it on an LLM and it's one of the few things they're nearly perfect at. Search engines, especially with the resources of Google, could have developed at least basically functional natural language search decades ago. Instead they chose to rest on their laurels (pagerank even still plays a significant role!), and secure market control by anti-competitive behavior. Google is certainly well on their way to becoming another Yahoo, but there's no extrinsic reason for it in the same way there was no reason for Yahoo to become what it became. In 100 years people will be searching the corpus of human writings (or whatever medium is dominant then) for information that's relevant to them. So there's in intrinsic reason for any search related company to just naturally die. It simply needs to keep innovating, or at least evolutionarily improving.
- starfallg 1y ago
  > Because one of the most common things I search for is stuff like 'what is the function in [x] that does [y] in [z]'. This is also the type of search that Google makes no money from. The money is in searching for up-to-date relevant product information, where Google is the undisputed leader. >Search engines, especially with the resources of Google, could have developed at least basically functional natural language search decades ago Google is one of the major AI research outfits, and arguably the only one that continues to deliver consistently over the last 2 decades. Statistical Machine Translation/Google Translate, Adwords Quality Score, TensorFlow, AlphaGo, Attention is all you need (Transformers), AlphaFold all Google innovations. You can't really blame the prevalence of SEO slop on Google. It's not the lack of want of trying, it is hard technically (see how long it took to develop modern AI capabilities), expensive computationally (as we can see with the unsustainable cost of test-time search in ChatGPT) and in terms of user-experience. >Google is certainly well on their way to becoming another Yahoo Really, it isn't. Google is in the unique position of being the closest technology company to achieving full vertical integration of their value chain, from silicon to software to data to end-users. They are also at the forefront of frontier AI, including productising the research output. I don't really get the Google hate on HN, apart from maybe the YC/sama bias.
  - encom 1y ago
    >I don't really get the Google hate Easy. Google is basically spyware. It's an advertising company, and their product is you. >searching for up-to-date relevant product information I realise I'm not a typical user, but I would never trust Google for any searches hinting that I'm looking to buy something, because the results are almost guaranteed to be inorganic. Someone will have paid Google money to be promoted for "best clothes dryer".
    - starfallg 1y ago
      >Easy. Google is basically spyware. It's an advertising company, and their product is you. This is such a flippant and facile response. Google isn't a advertising company, it is a tech company that gets the majority of its revenue via selling advertising. This can change, and also likely to change in the next decade or so. The reason things are is that nobody was willing to pay for search - it's a product with a very low incremental cost. The market dictated this operating model, and nobody has been able to upend this model so far, not even OAI. The numbers just don't work out. Do you think OAI can continue to subsidise free ChatGPT queries with paid ChatGPT Plus subscriptions? Almost certainly not.
      - Eisenstein 1y ago
        How else should someone take the statement 'that is the type of search that Google makes no money from' when someone explained what type of searches they do? If Google doesn't make money from it, they don't develop it for search apparently, which is why they haven't progressed in search beyond advertising. You can argue that it needs disrupting, but concluding that 'they make their money from advertising' when that was directly stated by you is not flippant or facile, it is deduction. You can't eat your cake and still have it. If they refuse to develop an income stream that isn't related to advertising while using practices that use their dominant place in the market to buy other technologies or shut them down, then saying it isn't their fault that the revenue is only advertising is either disingenuous or naive.
      - Melatonic 1y ago
        I think actually people probably are willing to pay for search - Google just did such a damn good job for so long it made it impossible for a competitor to pop up And now that their core product is getting worse I am paying for search
- Melatonic 1y ago
  This is exactly why I use Kagi - I can easily use an integrated LLM by adding a "?" to my search or just get the results I want quickly and easily.

somenameforme 1y ago

LLMs have, for me at least, mostly replaced search. Because one of the most common things I search for is stuff like 'what is the function in [x] that does [y] in [z]'. Search for that on Google (or any other search engine) and your results will be complete trash. Search for it on an LLM and it's one of the few things they're nearly perfect at. Search engines, especially with the resources of Google, could have developed at least basically functional natural language search decades ago. Instead they chose to rest on their laurels (pagerank even still plays a significant role!), and secure market control by anti-competitive behavior. Google is certainly well on their way to becoming another Yahoo, but there's no extrinsic reason for it in the same way there was no reason for Yahoo to become what it became. In 100 years people will be searching the corpus of human writings (or whatever medium is dominant then) for information that's relevant to them. So there's in intrinsic reason for any search related company to just naturally die. It simply needs to keep innovating, or at least evolutionarily improving.

starfallg 1y ago
> Because one of the most common things I search for is stuff like 'what is the function in [x] that does [y] in [z]'. This is also the type of search that Google makes no money from. The money is in searching for up-to-date relevant product information, where Google is the undisputed leader. >Search engines, especially with the resources of Google, could have developed at least basically functional natural language search decades ago Google is one of the major AI research outfits, and arguably the only one that continues to deliver consistently over the last 2 decades. Statistical Machine Translation/Google Translate, Adwords Quality Score, TensorFlow, AlphaGo, Attention is all you need (Transformers), AlphaFold all Google innovations. You can't really blame the prevalence of SEO slop on Google. It's not the lack of want of trying, it is hard technically (see how long it took to develop modern AI capabilities), expensive computationally (as we can see with the unsustainable cost of test-time search in ChatGPT) and in terms of user-experience. >Google is certainly well on their way to becoming another Yahoo Really, it isn't. Google is in the unique position of being the closest technology company to achieving full vertical integration of their value chain, from silicon to software to data to end-users. They are also at the forefront of frontier AI, including productising the research output. I don't really get the Google hate on HN, apart from maybe the YC/sama bias.
- encom 1y ago
  >I don't really get the Google hate Easy. Google is basically spyware. It's an advertising company, and their product is you. >searching for up-to-date relevant product information I realise I'm not a typical user, but I would never trust Google for any searches hinting that I'm looking to buy something, because the results are almost guaranteed to be inorganic. Someone will have paid Google money to be promoted for "best clothes dryer".
  - starfallg 1y ago
    >Easy. Google is basically spyware. It's an advertising company, and their product is you. This is such a flippant and facile response. Google isn't a advertising company, it is a tech company that gets the majority of its revenue via selling advertising. This can change, and also likely to change in the next decade or so. The reason things are is that nobody was willing to pay for search - it's a product with a very low incremental cost. The market dictated this operating model, and nobody has been able to upend this model so far, not even OAI. The numbers just don't work out. Do you think OAI can continue to subsidise free ChatGPT queries with paid ChatGPT Plus subscriptions? Almost certainly not.
    - Eisenstein 1y ago
      How else should someone take the statement 'that is the type of search that Google makes no money from' when someone explained what type of searches they do? If Google doesn't make money from it, they don't develop it for search apparently, which is why they haven't progressed in search beyond advertising. You can argue that it needs disrupting, but concluding that 'they make their money from advertising' when that was directly stated by you is not flippant or facile, it is deduction. You can't eat your cake and still have it. If they refuse to develop an income stream that isn't related to advertising while using practices that use their dominant place in the market to buy other technologies or shut them down, then saying it isn't their fault that the revenue is only advertising is either disingenuous or naive.
    - Melatonic 1y ago
      I think actually people probably are willing to pay for search - Google just did such a damn good job for so long it made it impossible for a competitor to pop up And now that their core product is getting worse I am paying for search
Melatonic 1y ago
This is exactly why I use Kagi - I can easily use an integrated LLM by adding a "?" to my search or just get the results I want quickly and easily.