[HN Gopher] Bing sees 15.8% boost in visits following GPT-4 push...
___________________________________________________________________
Bing sees 15.8% boost in visits following GPT-4 push, as Google
sees a decline
Author : carlycue
Score : 487 points
Date : 2023-03-24 18:01 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| chopete3 wrote:
| It is move over google.com moment. The era of ai.com and its ilk
| (bing/skype) has begun -even momentarily.
|
| If you are not using ai.com for your everyday information, you
| are missing out something.
|
| The one that asks their questions in a smart way has an edge over
| people typing random keywords and hoping to learn.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| This doesn't fit into the ChatGPT narrative, but Google's most
| recent search update has been _BAD_ for me. Results are actively
| worse than from Bing in many cases, to the point that though I
| haven 't switched my default yet I often navigate to Bing for
| many classes of query where Google is useless.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| Last time I used bing on my grandparents laptop it sent me to
| scammers instead of the largest cell carrier in the country. AI
| or not AI, unfocused engineering has no cure
| somsak2 wrote:
| https://archive.is/aSFxw
| favaq wrote:
| I signed up to the Bing GPT "beta" waitlist (I hadn't logged into
| my Microsoft account in years) only to be told, days later, that
| I had to use Edge to try it. I noped out of there.
| standyro wrote:
| you don't ACTUALLY have to use edge to use it. just use a
| chrome extension to fake your useragent to pretend to be Edge.
| I despise needless microsoft hubris
| hbn wrote:
| You can just install the app on your phone and use it
| favaq wrote:
| I'd rather install edge on my computer than type more than
| one sentence using my phone.
| someNameIG wrote:
| On iOS you can use voice search in the app.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| Google trends shows a different picture:
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%201-d&q=%2...
|
| Close to no change
|
| Who to trust?
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| You are looking at a 1 day timeframe, you can very clearly see
| the increase if you look at 90 days:
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&q=...
| (included just "Bing" as term too)
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| Ohh now this looks much better, thanks! Looks like i need
| some sleep.. lol
| treve wrote:
| Assuming this is not a troll, google trends measures how often
| people search something on google. The URL you linked shows how
| often people search the word 'Bing' on google.
|
| If Bing has an uptick, that doesn't necessarily mean that they
| first go to Google to find Bing and then do their actual
| search.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| A troll? That's a surprising accusation!
|
| I'm not a troll, I noticed and irregularity with data
| available and their announcement, that's it..
| harrisonjackson wrote:
| The rise of gpt generated content is no doubt degrading search
| results, as well.
|
| Google must be feeling the squeeze from all over.
| thexumaker wrote:
| Look google aint the best but I tried bing for a day and still
| hated it and an AI chatbot that spews out incorrect info atm
| isn't gonna change my behavior lol
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| Honestly these numbers are worse than I was expecting for Bing.
| Can they maintain these numbers when they're not releasing new
| products people want to try?
| firechickenbird wrote:
| Why should I trust these random charts? Where do you get the data
| from? Feels like sponsored fake news by bing
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| Good. Google has ruined the web. It has cultivated an insane
| amount of websites that just have loads of useless cruft around
| around the information they offer.
|
| It has also cultivated a behavior of these stock answers that you
| see popping up on multiple websites with a reference to THEIR
| product at the end of the article. I see it with technical
| problems (partition wizard, windowserrorreport, ...). It's your
| overall run dism / sfc and install & buy our product.
|
| Then people moved to YouTube, and as a result there are now
| autogenerated videos for KBs on the internet if you have issues
| with those. What this means is that whenever you're looking for
| an issue that occurs with a single KB, you get all these generic
| answers which HIDE potential solutions of other people
| experiencing the SAME thing.
|
| The same applies to pest control, insane amount of lies (dangers
| of black widows, rabies from squirrels, ...) to get higher in the
| Google ranks and push their product.
|
| Also applies to doctors offices, there are companies who put out
| these generic pages with 'solutions' telling you to make an
| appointment.
|
| The worst part about all of this is that Google (and Bing, and
| DuckDuckGo for that matter) no longer respect me searching for 2
| terms. For example, I search for "KB123456 issue". I'll get
| results for KB123456, but nothing mentioning the issue. And
| you're like: maybe it doesn't exist? Except that I read it
| multiple times half a year ago with the solution, and I was not
| smart enough to save it somewhere.
|
| A search engine used to be to help you search and get your
| answer, fast and focused. Now it is pulling everything out of the
| closed to make you deviate from that. Suggestions, audio, video,
| etc.
|
| All while researching something for work. And then I get a Slack
| message from someone saying 'Hello!'. And then nothing.
|
| <insert head explode gif>
| techmba wrote:
| i cant believe google put out such a poor version of bard.
| everyone will immediately compare results and disregard bard
| quickly. they made this same mistake with other launches.
| kevinwang wrote:
| Only 15%? I would have expected 1000% increase or so
| throwyawayyyy wrote:
| Right? I'd have been entirely unsurprised if Bing saw a 100%
| increase, given how buzzy all this has been. (Finally, an
| actual reason to use Bing!) 15% seems like a failure.
| asciimov wrote:
| If past Google products are any indication, Alphabet will pull
| funding and resources out of Google Web Search and put it to the
| graveyard.
| HeavyFeather wrote:
| _Over my dead body._
|
| You realize that Google Search still brings in mountains of
| cash, right? Search generates 57% of Alphabet's total revenue.
| [1]
|
| We're extremely far from that point. [1]:
| https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/18/how-does-google-make-money-
| advertising-business-breakdown-.html
| henry_viii wrote:
| Currently in Bing Chat:
|
| - when scrolling down the page goes to Bing Search
|
| - when typing predictive suggestions show up
|
| I would use Bing even more if I knew how to disable these things.
| Does anyone know if this is possible?
| fnbr wrote:
| I love this (even though I have ~25% of my net worth in $GOOG).
|
| Google got fat and lazy. They focused inwards, on promo driven
| development and executive infighting. This was awful for the tech
| ecosystem as Google was held out for a long time as the company
| to emulate.
|
| No longer.
|
| They're gonna be forced to actually compete: for talent, for
| users, for mindshare.
| t_minus_2 wrote:
| The broader question may not be whether its Bing or Google.
| People may not be searching anymore to find the sites which can
| potentially answer a problem/query - instead they may just want
| the answer. GPT/LLms may even slow down the whole search engine
| industry or make it more like chatgpt versions of it.
| justinzollars wrote:
| I'm personally using less Google and more ChatGPT. Google results
| seem irrelevant. this giant could be in trouble
| AlbertCory wrote:
| On MBA's in relation to the hastily launched and then cancelled
| products: Enron had the same issue.
|
| https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/when-talent-is-not-enoug...
|
| on Sundar: I've talked to a few technology journalists, and one
| said that he's met _all_ the top CEO 's and Sundar was the least
| impressive of any of them.
|
| His days are numbered. What's the over-under on when he leaves?
| bilsbie wrote:
| How does a mortal use gpt with bing? I need to install an app?
| ModernMech wrote:
| Sad day for me. Bing actually gives you points to search on their
| engine. I just cashed in a bunch of points for a $100 gift card.
| My guess is this program will go away if Bing becomes more
| popular.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| What the rate for you? Because for me its 15k points for 10
| USD.
| ModernMech wrote:
| I had over 100k points lol.
| jmartrican wrote:
| I went right back to Google. It just had better results.
| csdvrx wrote:
| Is It Possible to Learn This Power?
|
| Because google is 99% spam for me
| lordnacho wrote:
| uBlock plus some filters that remove the ads. Someone also
| made one that filters out the stackoverflow copy sites.
| jmartrican wrote:
| lol. I noticed it depends on what I search for. I typically
| search for programming issues. Google tends to have the
| correct Stack Overflow answer up at the top. But I agree a
| bunch of ads otherwise.
| realusername wrote:
| That was bound to happen at some point, AI or not. Google search
| quality has been declining more and more every year, to the point
| that I'm almost sure that you could build a better and smaller
| index for much cheaper with a curated domain list.
|
| AI brought down the price to compete from billions to a few
| millions, the monopoly is being threatened.
| Aperocky wrote:
| 15.8% boost vs "near 1%" decline.
|
| News title at its finest, the "near 1%" must not make it to the
| title for maximum effect.
| nixcraft wrote:
| And the title is: "OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost
| in search battle with Google".
| johnfn wrote:
| I imagine 1% of Google is well more than 15.8% of Bing :)
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yeah, 0.03*1.16 is still 3% to a close approximation.
| hbn wrote:
| The graph showing the deviation from each search engine's 100%
| baseline is kinda telling considering Bing is all over the
| place with it actually seeing some traffic, and Google is a
| consistent up-and-down shape that doesn't seem affected at all
| by whatever is happening with Bing.
| culopatin wrote:
| I feel like I'm missing out on something but other than to
| summarize text or fill pointless and lazy homework assignments I
| don't have much of a use of gpt search. I think I have a trust
| issue with it and I rather get the raw result and process it
| myself than to believe that what this model "understood" is
| right. Anyone else feels this way?
| jacamera wrote:
| The most illuminating thing about ChatGPT for me is just how
| terrible most programmers on HN apparently are. I thought it
| was just a funny meme that all we do is copy/paste from Stack
| Overflow but apparently that is literally what a lot of people
| are doing all day.
| yokoprime wrote:
| People who blindly copy from ChatGPT or Stack Overflow are
| most likely either very inexperienced or simply bad
| programmers. However, from where I see it, ChatGPT, Copilot,
| and any other such tools are fantastic at prompting you to
| think differently, getting you past writer's block, giving
| you ideas, or saving you some time googling for syntax yet
| again. You need a nudge to trigger recall of what you already
| know. It's a fantastic tool, just like an IDE.
| pwinnski wrote:
| It's sad how most programmers are so terrible they need IDEs
| to automatically create stubs for required methods or getters
| and setters. They should have to type all of that out every
| time, and from memory, too! VIM with no plugins is the only
| way to do it!
|
| Or, you know, smart developers use tools appropriate to the
| work, and some of us have figured out how to use this new
| tool before you have. That's okay, you can catch up!
| thwayunion wrote:
| Meh.
|
| I was working on a personal project yesterday to answer some
| questions I had about how liquidity risk works for money
| market mutual funds, and to forecast/nowcast liquidity risk
| and NAV risk for a bunch of funds.
|
| Mind you: I don't know the first thing about anything
| financial. I was just curious.
|
| chatgpt gave me a bunch of sources of data that I wanted,
| translating my lay description of things I wanted to know
| into financial terms of art. I could then look up legal
| definitions and formulas for those terms to make sure they
| were what I thought they were. chatgpt also told me which SEC
| forms those things are disclosed on, what data brokers I
| could use for other data, etc.
|
| between chatgpt and copilot I saved at least an hour on the
| job of pulling down historical data from EDGAR for a bunch of
| funds and getting the stats I wanted (I didn't know EDGAR
| existed until yesterday, and the xml/html/txt formats are
| kind of annoying... like, fine, but a bit of a pita so I'm
| glad I had help because ughhh is that kind of code boring and
| damn are LLMs good few-shot inductive parser generators!).
| Also wrote some nice chart.js code for me and helped with
| automatically collecting, searching, and extracting some key
| stats and terms from prospectuses. I didn't know about
| chart.js until yesterday.
|
| All of this would've been possible without assistants, and
| required a lot of "executive function" on my part to bring
| together, but it seriously saved me at least a couple hours
| of implementation work and up to a day on research and
| learning terminology and regulatory stuff. Again,
| verification of those things is way easier when you know what
| words to look up definitions for. And chatgpt did make
| mistakes/hallucinate.
|
| I don't find much use in my professional life, where the code
| I'm writing is apparently too domain-specific for copilot to
| be helpful and the mathematics is too complex for chatgpt to
| help with. Maybe in a few years. We'll see.
| saberience wrote:
| This comment is giving me "Look at me I'm so very smart"
| vibes.
|
| If you don't have enough insight to understand how GPT4 could
| be useful for engineers you're not as enlightened as you
| think you are.
| aPoCoMiLogin wrote:
| This comment is giving me "Look at me I'm so very smart"
| vibes.
| deely3 wrote:
| Did you suddenly become defensive?
| smoe wrote:
| I certainly have the trust issues for things where correctness
| matters. For things were it doesn't and I already know how to
| do something but don't have it memorized, I think it is very
| very convenient.
|
| I use it various times a week for cooking. E.g. "basic recipe
| bechamel sauce in metric"
|
| ChatGPT: Within a couple seconds I get the ingredients in
| metric and a step by step guide.
|
| Google: The provided summaries are useless to me since they are
| not in metric. So I have to click on a link and then start
| scrolling around all the noise of history of bechamel sauce,
| anecdotes about someones grandparents, pretty pictures, etc to
| find the actual information. Without ad blocker it would be an
| even bigger nightmare.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Before a few keywords and quick website scan.
|
| Now you have to engage in a conversation and get the 'a feel
| lucky' version where before you got to look through different
| more visual recipes
| smoe wrote:
| I don't need to engage in a conversation. Query was exactly
| the same for both.
|
| There is a difference whether I'm looking for interesting,
| more complicated dishes I haven't done before, or fairly
| standardized, simple recipes I have done many times and
| remember the technique but not things like ratios.
|
| For the former I use a select few recipe sites or youtube
| channels directly. Google is miserable for discovery in my
| opinion. For the latter I use either my own recipe notebook
| or more recently ChatGPT as well.
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| Well, Microsoft forced me to use Edge to open Bing chat, so I
| did that and asked it "how can you use bing chat on chrome?".
| It pointed me to a chrome extension that allows that. See, it's
| useful.
| lumb63 wrote:
| I agree with your sentiment exactly. But your comment made me
| think about this an interesting way that I hadn't thought about
| before, that made me better understand why I am "anti-GPT
| search".
|
| All the same things that the model makes an effort to
| "understand" are things that can contribute to your own
| understanding. When it "understands", you do not. You get the
| summary and miss out on a great amount of nuance that can come
| with learning and finding the right answer for yourself.
|
| For instance, it is very common that in the search for why X is
| happening in my code, I will find tons of information that
| don't answer my question but help me form an understanding of
| why it is happening, how the system is working, etc.
|
| This is especially visible in science. Many papers outright
| conflict with each other. Some have better or worse
| methodologies than others. Some have better analyses. Some
| state outright falsehoods without citation or misinterpret
| citations. Having a GPT "understand" this to produce
| understanding in humans is going to end very badly. It takes
| several hours for a human (in my experience) to understand even
| a single academic paper on its own.
|
| I suppose the appropriate cliche is "it's the journey, not the
| destination".
| ambicapter wrote:
| A great quote from an article I read on HN recently
|
| > Suppose I was an evil person and wanted to eliminate the
| curiosity of children. Give the kid a diet of Google, and
| pretty soon the child learns that every question he has is
| answered instantly. The coolest thing about being human is to
| learn, but you don't learn things by looking it up; you learn
| by figuring it out.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| This is silly. You could extrapolate the same argument to
| use against Libraries.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Most of the people here know and understand computers
| because we had to tear everything apart and figure out
| how everything worked just so we could play some video
| games.
|
| Contrast kids of today who can just go and play video
| games, no disecting of computers required. Naturally,
| most of them don't understand or appreciate computers as
| anything more than just another appliance.
| sorokod wrote:
| Not silly, it's a quantity into quality thing.
| moffkalast wrote:
| As opposed to the thing we did before, which is when kids
| asked something they were told something that's wrong and
| told to "stop talking back" and "go to your room". I think
| this is still an improvement.
| ipaddr wrote:
| What chatGPT misses is I want many sources of information
| conflicting or not so I can form a more informed opinion. I
| want to know every side not the correct one.
| user3939382 wrote:
| For me it's not even theoretical. I've already wasted my time
| trying to sus out subtle garbage mixed into its answers. It's
| the same reason I stopped using copilot. I don't need or want
| that.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Funny, so far i've been just asking it things i normally ask
| Google. Same paranoia of answers that StackOverflow/etc give
| me, but far quicker and more responsive.
|
| TBH i'm not sure under what scenarios people search into
| Google expecting perfect answers. Ie where we're disappointed
| by incorrect information. I filter through a dozen wrong
| answers on Google every day. Why is it different if it's from
| ChatGPT?
| user3939382 wrote:
| I guess one difference is that I have a lot (decades?) of
| experience in the _types of errors_ humans tend to make.
| Humans have certain biases, certain blindspots, etc. In
| programming for sure, there are very strong patterns in the
| types of mistakes we make that tend to be a function of
| skill or experience. So you (I) look for those without even
| thinking about it. Violation of YAGNI, ACID, DRY, pre-
| mature optimization, etc.
|
| Even before getting to an answer I can often judge how
| trustworthy or skilled the author/speaker is likely to be
| by all kinds of little signals or keywords in their speech.
|
| ChatGPT (and Github co-pilot) disables that highly tuned
| error detection and correction experience. It makes
| unpredictable mistakes, which is peculiarly pernicious. I'm
| sure it varies by the temperament of the user. Personally I
| don't have the patience for that.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Good points. I think it also helps that i purposefully
| avoid asking for things that i can't validate. The easier
| it is to validate the more likely i am to ask.
|
| I find ChatGPT especially great with giving starting
| points. It kinda feels like 10 (or something... time?)
| years ago when i discovered how good Google was at
| finding movies based on vague wishy-washy definitions. If
| i don't know what to call something ChatGPT does a better
| job at pointing me in the right direction. Often giving
| the right answer.
|
| But i'm not saying it has lasting power. We'll see. So
| far i'm using Search engines less than ever.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Yup, and maybe we're just getting old. There are still people
| on HN complaining about Google removing the OR and AND
| modifiers, meanwhile the younger generations write queries like
| "where should I eat breakfast today"
| bentcorner wrote:
| I used to try to be surgical with my queries but I've given
| up and just type a question at my search engine because if
| that's what they want as a query well they're going to get
| it.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I'm fine with writing queries like "Where should I eat
| breakfast"
|
| But I hate seeing the top half of the screen are ads for huge
| chains, and then the top results are blog posts about "Where
| are the top 10 places to eat in your city" and not a list of
| restaurant web pages.
| detaro wrote:
| Those aren't really exclusive. Different problems, different
| query types. (I wouldn't quite do the second example like
| that, but "where can I get food here" is fundamentally
| different problem than "I hope there is somewhere out there a
| bootleg copy of the datasheet for this very weird part and no
| I don't mean any of these 5 easily-confused other things",
| which is when the lack/ignoring of detailed modifiers drives
| you up the wall)
| Invictus0 wrote:
| I'm just trying to point out that that query would have
| returned nothing much at all back in the age of keyword-
| lookup search.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| Not since Google results became such garbage. Plus, the chats
| provide references. So easy to verify.
| AviationAtom wrote:
| I love that Bing Chat actually links to references. It felt
| like something was missing from ChatGPT without it.
| rtsil wrote:
| If I have to check each reference, what's the added value
| compared to just giving me a list of links (i.e. a good old
| search engine)?
|
| Chat search tools are only useful if (when?) they achieve a
| 99.99% reliability (I'm fine with one mistake per 1000
| searches).
| HeavyFeather wrote:
| Just because it does, it doesn't mean they're being
| interpreted correctly, so watch out for
| https://xkcd.com/906/
| AviationAtom wrote:
| In the context of LLMs they aren't really sources, just
| additional reference material. I'd trust what Bing Chat
| tells me far before I'd trust Google's new Bard AI. It
| legit started making up non-existent commands for me to
| use.
| cmelbye wrote:
| I've found that if you push through the trust issue with the
| expectation that it's not a final answer, it's just getting you
| closer to it a lot more quickly, then that ends up being very
| helpful in a lot of cases.
| bradly wrote:
| Here is what I have asked it the past few days with great
| results: - What is the trim stop attachment
| that comes with the Festool DF 500 used for? - What
| are some options for water for a home with no municiple water
| or well access? - What dimensions drawer should I
| make when using 18" Blum Blumotion full extension drawer slides
| if the drawer opening is 20 inches wide, 18 inches deep and
| seven inches tall? - Can the smaller Laguna 14
| bandsaw motor be replaced with the 3HP version? -
| What's the best way to get ChatGPT support if the official
| support page is not working? - I'm trying to
| remember a 90s movie about a boy prodigy that goes to an event
| with other prodigies and then shouts out an answer to a math
| question from the audience.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _What 's the best way to get ChatGPT support if the official
| support page is not working?_
|
| Ooh! What was the answer to this one?
|
| I tried to sign up for ChatGPT, but the verification text
| never arrives.
|
| (No, it's not a soft phone. I've had the same phone number on
| the same cell carrier for over 20 years.)
| bradly wrote:
| It said to email support@openai.com
| noah_buddy wrote:
| You have touched on something I am incredibly excited about.
| ChatGPT is going to do away with a lot of the intro level
| questions you ask researching certain sorts of technical
| problems, especially as it becomes better able to understand
| images. ChatGPT removes the need for you to ever open a
| manual (unless you want a deep understanding).
|
| How do I turn off this feature in my car?
|
| How do I replace the fan in my fridge's compressor?
|
| Why is windows repair not working in this scenario with this
| PC?
|
| This tool is going to be incredibly deflationary in many
| services geared around repair when now it can tell you almost
| exactly what to do and soon it'll be able to produce videos
| or images of each step on demand.
| ByThyGrace wrote:
| > and soon it'll be able to produce videos or images of
| each step on demand
|
| As long as they're not hallucinated media...
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| Most of the Googles SERP results already are delusional
| or hallucinating spam, so the bar is low and for me at
| least ChatGTP is less bullshit.
| trafficante wrote:
| Yeah, when the "site:" search hack doesn't get me an
| answer and I fall back on the normal SERPs, most of the
| time the top several results are all:
|
| "Authoritative title that references my exact search" ->
| page body restates my question, gives an oddly reworded
| summary of Thing in Question #1 -> "some people online
| have said" followed by snippets lifted from the ether ->
| repeat for Things 2,3,etc -> "our suggestion is to look
| at the features and decide based on what other
| customers/users are saying"
|
| It's perfected vapidity wearing the skin of an editorial
| review site and takes a LOT more cognitive load to suss
| out the phoneyness compared to the last time the SERPs
| were packed with spam (~10 years back).
| code_runner wrote:
| hallucinations don't invalidate the product itself. I
| really hate to see this constant lazy refrain on here.
|
| Its just like anything else. Trust but verify. Some will
| just trust, others never will... People probably over-
| trust the tech now, but just like wikipedia it will be
| approached a little more carefully as people learn its
| shortcomings.
|
| Unless you're trying to perform open heart surgery or
| doing something intrinsically dangerous, its probably
| going to be additive. I wouldn't trust it to help me
| assemble a warp engine, but it may be able to give me
| some decent pointers for guitar technique or how to
| change my oil.
| throwaway1851 wrote:
| It's not a lazy refrain, it's a serious downside of the
| technology. It's tiring and stressful to supervise the
| work product of an assistant that is extremely capable
| sometimes, but a compulsive bullshitter at other times.
| Just as it's tiring to supervise an "autonomous" car that
| often deftly navigates the road, but sometimes wants to
| plow into a school bus.
| pwinnski wrote:
| I think that the concern about LLMs making up information
| are absolutely valid, and a serious concern. At the same
| time, I think most people focusing on those concerns
| aren't thinking much about the alternatives, namely
| Google.
|
| For many people, Google results have gone from being an
| absolutely amazing demonstration of what could be done if
| one had the resources to crawl and process the entire
| internet to a complete waste of time at best, clogged
| with spam and nonsense and misinformation. I've been
| using Duck Duck Go for years now, and recently my middle-
| schooler switched to Duck Duck Go because I got answer to
| a question she had already asked Google before checking
| with me. Some people even pay for Kagi search, because
| Google is just that bad.
|
| So LLMs don't have to be perfect to be better than the
| alternatives, not even close.
| freediver wrote:
| > Some people even pay for Kagi search, because Google is
| just that bad.
|
| Small correction - from what I have heard in our
| community, most of our users pay for Kagi search, not
| becuase Google is just that bad, but because Kagi is just
| so good. In other words we are making the value
| proposition be "best search in the world", one worth
| paying for.
|
| (Kagi founder here)
| tornato7 wrote:
| There's a ditch by my house that the city put in. I roughly
| knew what it was, a big pit where rain collects and soaks
| into the groundwater. But I wanted to know the name of it and
| no amount of Googling could get me to the right answer. My
| query was too vague.
|
| The day that ChatGPT launched, I described the what it was
| and it came back with, "that's called an infiltration basin."
|
| That's when I knew Google was in trouble.
| freediver wrote:
| Do you mind providing correct answers for those? (and did GPT
| get them right?)
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Do you have Plus? chatGPT was annoying when I was using the
| free version - I would have to keep logging in again and again
| and the service was unreliable.
|
| Ever since I switched the Plus, it's (usually) always on and
| doesn't log me out.
|
| Makes it much easier to use as a general search engine
| culopatin wrote:
| I don't spend that much time in it to even consider that, and
| so little time that signing in again is not a problem for me.
| I guess I don't know what to ask of it.
| nperez wrote:
| I find it useful in Edge where it's aware of the tab contents.
| It's nice to be able to ask it to summarize a long article, or
| find Reddit comments about it and summarize those. I think it
| uses Bing's search index because it does not seem to be aware
| of my personal data on my tabs
| gorjusborg wrote:
| Is that an opt-in option or a default 'feature'?
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| I thought the same but it is actually able to interpret URLs
| that are not indexed by Bing. It doesn't work all the time
| though, don't know why.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| If they'd kept the psychotic "Sydney" version these numbers would
| be even higher. I promise you they had the end game right there.
| bitL wrote:
| News in 2030: Microsoft acquires Google for $50B.
| gambiting wrote:
| Maybe because Google is actual trash and it went from being the
| best search engine to being an SEO-infested desert of a search,
| where your query is interpreted however they want not how you
| want.
|
| Latest example from today - search for "micropython html parser"
| - 100% of results are about normal python not micropython, with
| the first 4 results being for generic paid programming courses.
| It's completely useless as a search engine now.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| I don't find Bing's search any better than Google, but
| importantly, I don't find it any worse.
|
| GPT4 is going to do what Hawaii five-o, Bing Rewards,
| integrating windows search with Bing, and setting Bing as the
| default search engine for Edge on Windows never could. Make
| people use Bing over Google.
|
| I've already set it as my default search engine across my
| devices as I move to cut Google out of my life entirely. I
| simply don't feel the need to use any of their services
| anymore. Their moat is gone.
|
| The only downside I have noticed is that Bing Maps is a pretty
| bad service relative to Google Maps or Apple Maps and I will go
| out of my way to avoid using Bing Maps. Good mapping being
| integrated into a search engine is actually a pretty big deal
| since it's nice to use a search engine as a front-end for a
| mapping service, so this is a significant weakness.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Google results are trash compared to years ago but better than
| bing trash now
| ddalex wrote:
| Are you for real ? I mean, pick better examples if you want to
| poke something, since:
|
| Search for "micropython html parser" gets you
| https://pypi.org/project/micropython-html.parser/ as the first
| result with the quote: "This is a module ported from CPython
| standard library to be compatible with MicroPython
| interpreter."
| gambiting wrote:
| Not for me. That website isn't anywhere on the first page of
| results.
| graeme wrote:
| First result for me too
| lwhi wrote:
| I see exactly the same.
|
| Google provides exactly what you're looking for ..
| sufficer wrote:
| Maybe you got some Spyware or something interfering with
| Google queries
| throw10920 wrote:
| Um, no. Google "bubbles" their search results, meaning
| that they customize them based on their profile of you.
| This is not new - it's been implemented and known
| publicly for _years_.
| spullara wrote:
| I'd say the results are bad enough that something is
| interfering.
| kgen wrote:
| Right, and what the person above is saying is that
| spyware/bad extensions can be making random searches
| which muddy your profile's search data
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It is? That's not how I would normally interpret
| "interfering".
|
| And why should random searches make my results
| significantly worse than the default? That doesn't
| exactly absolve google of screwing up.
| gambiting wrote:
| Or maybe google tailors what it shows to what it thinks I
| want to see based on my user profile :P
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I love how this is also an example of how well censorship
| works
|
| People just invalidating each other instead of the third
| party because a third party creates different experiences
| adriancr wrote:
| Try ublock origin / searching without account then, I'm
| getting the same result as everyone else
|
| The ads are personalised to you though
| gambiting wrote:
| Yeah I just vpn'ed to my machine at work and I'm getting
| results about micropyhton too. But on my personal machine
| it absolutely thinks I'm interested in buying some
| generic programming courses and nothing about
| micropython.
| underintent wrote:
| I agree, but the part I'm failing to see in the conversation is
| what the future looks like.
|
| If the chat approach is gaining visits, then ad companies will
| follow, so what then?
|
| The chat offers up the same seo ad laden tripe but further
| obfuscates it, and alternatives, while caging it in a
| conversational tone?
|
| Is that better? Worse?
|
| If these chat offerings only cause search to step back and
| attempt to recreate the early days of usable search then they
| would appear a success in my eyes.
| stringfood wrote:
| > where your query is interpreted however they want not how you
| want
|
| Exactly, I feel it is because with Google advertisers are the
| real customers and they could not care less about user
| experience unless it affects that bottom line. Case in point is
| the removal of the dislike button which users loved but
| advertisers hated. Google is a rich one trick pony right now
| anyway.
| koito17 wrote:
| To be fair, you could always surround micropython in quotes so
| that Google knows to only show results containing the keyword
| "micropython". Only caveat is that Google will still show you
| whatever it wants in case no results contain the keyword. I
| swear a decade ago it would simply tell you no results were
| found, but now you need to (1) use quotes in keywords, and (2)
| click on "show only results containing [keyword]" when it can't
| find any results yet decides to show you unrelated pages
| anyway.
| monksy wrote:
| Let's not forget about the links to scam sites.
|
| This is one of the sites it shows you for "log in to g mail"
|
| https://clinmedjournals.org/articles/blogs/gmail-login.html
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| But you literally typed it in the same way that a scammer
| would word it and then not expect it to find a scam site??
| Nice bait, ever considered being a journalist?
| monksy wrote:
| You don't seem to be very familiar with users that happen
| to be older. However, that search is uncomfortably common.
| Impersonation and scamming of their service is a problem,
| but when they help the user to the impersonation site..
| that's on them.
| wslh wrote:
| Please Sergey and Larry return and apply your original paper!
| Just update it a bit.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Does PageRank even work fundamentally when the search engine
| using PageRank is so big that it influences essentially every
| webmaster in the world?
| lordnacho wrote:
| Surely that's not going to work with all the data (aka
| website content) having changed markedly over the years, with
| SEO being a major factor?
| wslh wrote:
| IMHO if you open the Google database to researchers the
| community will find a solution nowadays.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| They knew what they were doing. They always knew.
|
| > The goals of the advertising business model do not always
| correspond to providing quality search to users.
|
| - Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale
| Hypertextual Web Search Engine
| sidibe wrote:
| I can't believe how disconnected I always feel on the Google
| search conversations here. It still does what I need it for
| fine, I don't remember it being significantly better than it is
| now. I guess I'm not a power user? But I also think this is how
| the most people feel. On this site Google has been a shockingly
| useless zombie for years.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Since google search results are tailored to your particular
| history and profile, it may be as simple as you fitting into
| Google's way of doing that better than others.
| stevepike wrote:
| I don't know why people are picking on your specific search.
| Try turning off your ad blocker and searching for "zoom
| download".
| ativzzz wrote:
| Sure, I get the zoom download center, a help article for zoom
| to download, and some mobile app download links. It's all
| personal
| Sai_ wrote:
| I trieD this in both DDG and Google (using the !g macro with
| DDG).
|
| DDG first page of results all pointed to zoom.us links.
| Google (mediated through DDG !g) contained all sorts of spam
| links to sites like subdomains of uptown.com.
|
| Crazy.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| The decline started way back when they stopped letting you find
| mp3's and mp4's of movies and albums. I get that copyright
| infringement is bad and all, but their engine was fully capable
| of you typing a obscure phrase, and being able to get web
| results. Somewhere behind all the filters a lot of powerful
| searching capabilities just died.
|
| If I had unlimited money, I'd make a fresh search engine, zero
| filtering to start outside of blatant spam sites, and go from
| there. Focus on making results be powerful.
| O1111OOO wrote:
| > Maybe because Google is actual trash and it went from being
| the best search engine to being an SEO-infested desert of a
| search, where your query is interpreted however they want not
| how you want.
|
| Agreed but tbf... every major search engine seems to suffer
| from the same.
|
| I cannot recommend enough the 'ContextSearch web-ext'
| extension. It lets you easily search using any search provider.
| I constantly (1) highlight text (2) right-click (3) select
| search provider (from youtube to reddit to bing) (Note: my
| default is DDG):
|
| Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/contextsearch...
|
| Chrome:
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/contextsearch-web-...
| partiallypro wrote:
| It is wild how most of modern SEO and "SEO+" involves just
| outright creating spam. Spamming url strings (keyword stuffing
| essentially) for location specific ranking is a new one I've
| noticed being touted.
| AviationAtom wrote:
| For those old enough to remember, it's exactly the reason why
| Google took Yahoo's place back when.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Not really. Yahoo was selling every search result slot. There
| was no quality to it at all. It was all paid.
| Zanfa wrote:
| Google can also return enough ads to push real search
| result below fold, while also making it as hard as possible
| to discern between real and paid results.
| AviationAtom wrote:
| If you saw how much of Google's revenue comes from ad
| spending then it makes perfect sense why it is the way it
| is now. But it goes to show what being hyperfocused on
| revenue does to the user experience.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| AltaVista wasn't terrible.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Infoseek! Until it was killed by Disney sex offenders.
|
| https://www.wired.com/1999/09/arrest-of-a-web-pioneer/
|
| (I had the misfortune of working for him )
| _hypx wrote:
| But what can replace Google? Is there another search engine
| with stunningly relevant results like the early days of
| Google?
| ramenbytes wrote:
| I've been impressed with what Kagi is able to dig up for me
| on old and sometimes niche electronics test and measurement
| equipment. However, I don't think they are targeting the
| same set of users that early Google was. Among other
| things, you have to pay for Kagi.
| AviationAtom wrote:
| Bing is on it's way in that direction. Microsoft needed
| something big to make Bing relevant again. This could
| potentially be it.
|
| Will they eat all of Google's lunch? Probably not, but if
| they can begin to chip away at the insane share (93%+) of
| the marketplace that Google controls, then it can only be
| for the betterment of the Internet.
| _hypx wrote:
| Bing doesn't seem any better than Google though. I was
| thinking of something that gives you a dramatically
| superior result than Google.
| AviationAtom wrote:
| Microsoft is really still in their infancy of building
| out their end vision for AI in search. Right now it's
| roughly a chat bot that summarizes and gives references,
| without really tying into their core search well.
| Eventually it will negate the need to click through to
| many reference, then it will be better able to curate a
| list of alternative sources for what you seek. I think
| that's the big problem with AI as it stands now, people
| think we've already reached the end of the road, when
| really we're only at the beginning of it. Watch and see
| what the next decade of it looks like. I agree with Bill
| Gates that it all will fundamentally changed the way we
| see and interact with the world (for the better).
| chrsig wrote:
| > Eventually it will negate the need to click through to
| many reference, then it will be better able to curate a
| list of alternative sources for what you seek.
|
| Doesn't that just kind of describe google now though?
| AviationAtom wrote:
| I poorly worded that. I meant to say it will be able to
| answer most questions, but also refer you to the best
| sources for information that it can't provide.
| collaborative wrote:
| I created aisearch.vip which searches using bing api,
| removes results containing ads or seo junk, and uses
| openai to summarize content to void clickbait. I believe
| that this is the only way to get the 0-4 good results
| hiding in the top 20 results. It's paid because it costs
| to run. But to be honest I myself am a fan of what phind
| is doing. Just can't understand how they are able to
| cover costs yet
| [deleted]
| JohnFen wrote:
| No, but there are other search engines that aren't any
| worse than Google.
|
| And, apparently depending on the style of your search terms
| or what you're searching for, one or two are better. I get
| noticeably better results from DDG, but I know that a lot
| of other people don't. I can only speculate that the
| difference must be search terms or topics.
| AviationAtom wrote:
| I made DDG my default and was surprised by how well it
| works how. I do believe it sources many of it's results
| from Bing.
|
| For what it fails to find well I just prepend !g to my
| query and have it bounce me over to Google.
|
| Google results are more often then not trash now, so I
| don't think the bar is too high for competitors now.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I do believe it sources many of it's results from Bing.
|
| It does, yes, but not only Bing. At least report, it
| aggregates from about 400 different sources, and they
| also run their own crawler.
|
| They used to have a list of the other engines they use,
| but I can't seem to find it anymore.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| The moment Google removed the yellow highlight on ads, their
| fate was sealed. They lived long enough to become the
| villain.
| AviationAtom wrote:
| I do believe I just saw an open letter from some Google
| staff to the CEO reiterating the need to uphold their "do
| no evil" model.
|
| I can't imagine what it's like for the original employees
| to watch the company become what it has.
|
| All the things that made Google so appealing, and gain
| market share, seem to have faded. It's a bit sad, to be
| honest. I remember being so excited to become a Gmail beta
| tester, back in the day.
| echelon wrote:
| I'm of the opinion that it should be illegal for companies
| to offer the ability to buy ads for registered product
| names or trademarks.
|
| Google, Amazon, and Apple all allow trademark and product
| name squatting. It's gross and abusive.
|
| Generic terms? Sure. But actual trade names for products?
| That's extortion.
|
| These services aren't helping in discovery if the customer
| already knows the name. They're merely forcing themselves
| into that relationship and taxing it.
|
| You then have to buy n-many ads across m-many services just
| to keep you in front of your competitors that would squat
| you.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > I'm of the opinion that it should be illegal for
| companies to offer the ability to buy ads for registered
| product names or trademarks.
|
| I'm of the opinion ads themselves should be illegal.
| Companies can "advertise" in a catalog I can choose to
| look at, but would no longer be allowed to invade my
| attention with their bullshit constantly.
|
| We've let marketers ruin too many good things as it is,
| lets just kill off the entire industry for the good of
| society.
| neodymiumphish wrote:
| IMO, the services should just not buy the ads for their
| own name. It might hurt their bottom line a bit, but
| doing this makes the search engine shittier for the users
| who know what they want to see.
|
| User input/frustration will eventually lead them toward
| alternative search engines, or provide enough feedback to
| Google/Bing/etc to make them disable registered service
| name or company names from being used as ad terms.
|
| I've been using Neeva for a while now. It's ad-free and
| (for me, anyway) on par with Google. I have one premium
| account ($5/month) and one free account (used for work)
| and have had no issues with either. By default, searches
| aren't saved, although enabling it can lead to better
| personalized searches.
|
| Kagi's one I've heard great things about as well,
| although I'm not a fan of a business model that allows me
| to pay for X searches before hitting a barrier that
| prevents further use of the platform (theirs is 200
| searches a month for $5, which seems way too low based on
| my use cases).
|
| In any case, users will force the change, not any
| government or corporate pressure. Businesses' best chance
| of fighting it is to refuse to play along.
| freediver wrote:
| Kagi does not have any barrier for using the platfrom.
| Perhaps you misunderstood the pricing?
| echelon wrote:
| And DogPile and Lycos and all those other funny sounding
| search engines.
| tekbog wrote:
| They stopped caring about what information you want to get and
| instead give you the information they think you should get.
| Sometimes it works, sometimes it's just awful.
|
| Not to mention the constant pain that's
| localization/internationalization as well as some of the
| queries becoming worse and worse. The service is supposed to
| become better with time, not the contrary. Plus, of course, all
| the SEO garbage.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| It's a bit strange, to me Google seems to be what it has always
| been, but if you read hacker news it's 'actual trash'.
|
| It's the same with amazon, I purchase from there on a weekly
| basis and it goes well, but you read the comments on hacker
| news and it's apparently unusable now.
|
| What gives?
| patwolf wrote:
| I have this problem a lot when searching for TypeScript. Most
| of the results end up being plain javascript with absolutely no
| mention of TypeScript.
|
| Now I use ChatGPT for almost all my programming questions. Good
| riddance Google.
| gtm1260 wrote:
| My mental model has totally shifted to the point where even
| like dealing with stack overflow feels like a pain compared to
| just asking gpt-4.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Interesting - do you find the results trustworthy?
| milesvp wrote:
| I'm curious too. When I go to stack overflow, I get lots of
| clues as to the trustworthiness of a given answer. I don't
| know how I'd get any clues from an LLM that its solution is
| outdated or suboptimal in some way
| faeriechangling wrote:
| I don't feel stack overflow has been rendered obsolete
| because the snobbishness and moderation people complain about
| so much has caused the recommendations on stack overflow to
| generally be of higher quality than those ChatGPT offers and
| you have more metadata (answer age, votes) about which
| answers are especially trustworthy.
| penneyd wrote:
| Yet without stackoverflow chatgpt wouldn't be particularly
| helpful
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Doesn't help that many Stackoverflow results at the top of
| Google had their last answers in...2015.
| Rapzid wrote:
| I love how Google mostly assumes now that I'm not looking for
| what I type into the search box.
|
| If I search for something like "micropython html parser" I
| expect the top results to say "Missing: micropython | Must
| include: micropython".
|
| Yes Google, it was the first term I entered for a reason don't
| cha think?
| csdvrx wrote:
| Sad but true. Google is the new altavista or yahoo.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| That's unfair to altavista. Altavista never got evil, they
| just became irrelevant. (And even when they were irrelevant,
| they still had a search syntax that I miss. You could search
| for things like term_a NEAR term_b.)
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Amen. Buried, unknown to most, Google used to have a
| similar AROUND(n) syntax. No idea if it still is respected.
|
| Google seems to have refocused around returning _any_
| result out of a set of popular links rather than deep
| dives. It feels like I must quote every term I enter now.
| eindiran wrote:
| It seems like none of the older powerful Google search
| syntax works for me anymore.
| thfuran wrote:
| And quoting terms doesn't even force them to be present
| anymore.
| jvolkman wrote:
| I don't think this is true, although the quoted terms may
| not be readily visible. Google talked about it as late as
| last year: https://blog.google/products/search/how-were-
| improving-searc...
| bombela wrote:
| I have noticed that too. Google has become so useless.
| And with all the little knowledge stuck behind reddit
| dark patterns, discord locked and utterly unsearchable
| world. And the modern forum stuff a mess of slow
| JavaScript that loads on demand. It's like finding
| knowledge is a fine sand fallings between the fingers.
| YouTube has some bit of interesting content, but it's
| 10min for 30s of info plastered with sponsored content.
| And finding something is harder and harder. ChatGPT and
| the like won't resist long becoming the same.
|
| My only hope is that it will eventually bring back the
| notion of trust. Naybe finding a programming job will be
| harder outside of your network of friends. But won't
| require silly interviews anymore. Maybe we will get back
| to lifelong tenure at work?
|
| Anyways I am just rambling here. What do I know anyways.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Citation needed? Because it does for me.
| tines wrote:
| I just performed that search in Google and the top two results
| are links to PyPI and Snyk packages for micropython-
| html.parser. The third result is a link to python.org
| documentation for html.parser (not micropython).
|
| Bing returns the result for PyPI and the one for the non-
| micropython python.org result.
|
| I don't see a big difference here (except maybe me learning
| about Snyk through google and not Bing?).
| xnx wrote:
| I also get the same result when logged-in and incognito.
| Others in the thread seem to get them also.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Google can incorporate quality signals in near real time.
| Those signals include leaving and immediately returning to
| the SERP. So us discussing these particular results could
| have already influenced them.
| tapland wrote:
| This comment thread is now #6 and #7 for me
| jeffbee wrote:
| Freshdocs is incredible. A lot of people are stuck in the
| old mental model where Google released a new index every
| month.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| That's actually super impressive. So there's basically no
| "index" anymore, in the sense that the results returned
| are almost "dynamically" generated? And I'd guess that
| all of that still needs to be pretty cheap,
| computationally speaking.
| manfre wrote:
| Google knows it's you if you did all of that from the same
| computer.
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| Google is more than capable of doing such basic
| fingerprinting, but do you have evidence Google uses it
| for search results? You can do a trivial experiment on
| another Google platform: open some video on YouTube,
| leave it, and look at the front page. Then, look at the
| YouTube front page in a private/incognito tab.
| (Alternatively, use two different private sessions.) In
| my experience, no matter what device or network I use,
| and no matter what the video was, the first page will
| always show videos related to the one I opened, and the
| second will always show an extremely generic set of
| clickbaity videos (likely based on GeoIP). This suggests
| that Google uses ordinary cookies for basic relevancy
| ranking.
| notahacker wrote:
| Considering people switch to Incognito Mode to get
| different results, it'd be weird and not particularly
| commercially savvy to frustrate them and feed their
| paranoia by serving them the same ones. Non-Google search
| engines and browsers exist.
|
| I'm also reminded of a CTO complaining that his test
| sessions suggested the default Google ads on a page with
| little text content all related to dating. We pointed out
| that that from Google's point of view, this was probably
| a sensible ad-targeting decision for a user running an
| Incognito mode browser (or any browser without tracking
| cookies)...
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| > Considering people switch to Incognito Mode to get
| different results, it'd be weird and not particularly
| commercially savvy to frustrate them and feed their
| paranoia by serving them the same ones. Non-Google search
| engines and browsers exist.
|
| I just installed Google Chrome on a fresh Windows 10 VM
| to repeat the experiment outside of Incognito Mode.
| First, I opened a video. Then, I checked the front page
| and confirmed that related videos had been added. Then, I
| closed Chrome, reset the VM's state to before I had
| visited YouTube, and checked the front page again. (I
| don't think this scenario would be too indicative of a
| prying user; I can easily imagine corporate systems that
| regularly wipe out browser data.) Again, the related
| videos were replaced with generic videos.
|
| I then tried the same thing, except by clearing browsing
| data through Chrome's UI instead of resetting the VM. The
| results were the same.
|
| Obviously, these observations could all have been
| manipulated by sufficiently conspiratorial
| fingerprinting. But the simplest explanation, in the
| absence of good evidence to the contrary, is that the
| site uses and respects browser cookies for its
| recommendations. Thus my request.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Let me guess you are using chrome?
| baxuz wrote:
| I have no idea why Snyk isn't treated as a spam domain.
| eindiran wrote:
| I mean, this is a big part of the issue. Of course the issue
| isn't reproducible; Google is trying to do the search based
| on their model of what you want back. Sometimes you benefit
| from that, other times it pushes the results you want way
| down. I just tested this and there were some micropython
| related results in the top ten, but the majority were for
| beautiful soup with no mention of micropython.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > Of course the issue isn't reproducible; Google is trying
| to do the search based on their model of what you want
| back...
|
| There's a problem here though, which is that there is no
| way for me or any other reader to discern whether the
| reality of the situation is "it's not reproducible and the
| commenter is misremembering basic facts about their search
| results due perhaps to some unrelated frustrations" and
| "it's not reproducible but the commenter's account is
| accurate."
|
| I completely share the views about Google's search results
| being terrible, but it's still possible to overstate how
| bad they are. And I do find it fairly difficult to believe
| that Google would show some people paid programming courses
| as the top 4 results for that query when much more relevant
| results clearly exist and everyone attempting to reproduce
| this gets those more relevant results.
| copymoro wrote:
| nor are we anywhere near being able to inspect how google
| is doing all this.
|
| if only there were some way to somehow be able to share
| that information with everybody, some technology so that
| we can all access such potentially useful information
| about how google is functioning right now
|
| sorry about the snark, but it's a vent for accumulative
| frustration from seeing a worsening trend in this regard.
|
| Kafka would recognize this trend; computing is truly
| becoming a "bureaucrat's best friend".
| majormajor wrote:
| I often find that frustrating about Google search, but I'm
| also unconvinced it's a problem that a more-AI-driven
| approach will avoid. Seems like the idea to try to convince
| the model to interpret things differently based on user
| history is still likely to get pushed by product managers,
| and still technically capable. And then "no tell me about
| the framework" "conversationally" vs tailoring Google
| search terms seems a bit of a wash.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I'm about 80% sure that the reason why Google became so
| bad for my searches is that they added AI elements to it,
| to make it try to figure out what I'm searching for
| instead of taking my word for it.
|
| In that sense, I'm not sure more AI would improve the
| situation. OTOH, _better_ AI just might. There doesn 't
| seem to be a "no AI" option on offer.
| cameldrv wrote:
| Based on my usage of ChatGPT, I think that a more AI
| driven approach could help a lot. With ChatGPT if it
| misinterprets what I'm asking for, I can make a
| clarifying followup query.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| > Of course the issue isn't reproducible; Google is trying
| to do the search based on their model of what you want
| back.
|
| There could also be other things that make it non-
| reproducible as well.
|
| It sometimes feels like search just returns whatever it has
| on hand that seems somewhat similar to your search. It may
| then do an asynchronous request to pull into cache results
| from a deeper backend search, but by the time the frontend
| gets them you've already been served your results.
| Subsequent searches from other people for the same terms
| would then get better results than you did, so this sort of
| optimization would on average improve search quality even
| if quality is poor for the first searcher.
|
| I have no idea if search engines actually do this. But it
| seems to explain some of their more mysterious behavior,
| like immediately returning a bunch of results that have
| nothing to do with your search terms.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| That sounds plausible. There could be some service
| aggregating search results from multiple systems, and if
| one of them is slow (maybe breaking some SLA), it would
| be omitted.
|
| I guess there are probably a hundred Google employees
| reading this who know whether it's accurate and we're
| just speculating.
| throw10920 wrote:
| > I just performed that search in Google
|
| It's been publicly known that Google has been bubbling search
| results for years now, and that one individual's search
| results have no relation to another's.
| jvm___ wrote:
| Every individuals everything has no relation to another's -
| which I think is a core cause of society's disconnects. Not
| that people got along before algorithms drove everything,
| but it's certainly been a destabilizing factor.
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| I think it's more that Google has gotten noticeably worse,
| not that Bing has gotten better.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| All you need is for Google to get worse and Bing's
| _marketing_ to get better (which it has, by nature of being
| associated with the biggest tech hype train of recent
| memory).
| kvathupo wrote:
| This is a good argument for LLM search: have search be
| conversational, and let you say "hey, I actually meant
| this!". Then you could have different chat environments, each
| tailored to micropython results, CPython results, IronPython
| results, etc.
|
| Of course, how can you scale this for every user?
| croes wrote:
| And the responses will be:
|
| "No, you didn't" "I didn't say that" "Seems like your are
| using on old version"
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| It's absurd how Google will simply ignore the keywords in my
| search to feed me whatever it's trash algorithm decided fits my
| search.
|
| And the decline in Google Maps has been shocking. Maps has gone
| from always reliable to being "trust it if you like wasting
| time and burning fuel" bad.
|
| I don't know what the hell happened at Google, but it ain't
| pretty.
| exitb wrote:
| It's even worse. I've been using ChatGPT a lot in situations
| that'd be Google searches before and I love how you can fill
| in so much detail and it will actually provide you with
| better results. With Google, additional detail is actually
| used against you. With enough keywords, it will match just
| about any site to your query.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Hah it wish I kept this search I did once. I was searching
| something about lsd. It somehow decided to replace it with
| "acid" but then showed results about related to pH lol
| jvolkman wrote:
| I just get results for https://pypi.org/project/micropython-
| html.parser/. Is this not what you want?
| dimgl wrote:
| I looked up "Xfinity chat with agent" on Google and was shown
| three different scam numbers of companies posing as Comcast...
| xnx wrote:
| Sounds like you have some malware on your machine. My first
| result is https://www.xfinity.com/chat/
| chrisbolt wrote:
| For me, the top four results are on xfinity.com and the fifth
| is your comment, "11 minutes ago".
| whateveracct wrote:
| I can't tell you how many times I search a somewhat niche
| compound term and the first thing in the results page is a list
| of shops in my area keyed on some word in the search.
| taytus wrote:
| I know this might be controversial but I believe SEO ruined
| search.
| chongli wrote:
| It totally did! It's the Eternal September effect on the
| internet as a whole. Marketers climbing all over each other,
| desperate to steal the eyeballs of the naive masses.
| thfuran wrote:
| Ads have been ruining the internet since back when it was a
| hellscape of popups.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Do yo think if you prompted that to GTP it would detect
| sarcasm?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| > As an AI language model, I cannot infer emotions or
| intentions with certainty, but the statement does not
| appear to use typical markers of sarcasm. The commenter is
| expressing an opinion about SEO and its impact on search,
| and while it is framed as potentially controversial, it
| does not necessarily come across as sarcastic.
| aarpmcgee wrote:
| Perhaps it was a matter of me not paying enough attention, but
| it seemed like Google degraded slowly over time, and then
| suddenly all-at-once. Or in other words, it seems like its
| become unusable for me entirely within the past year.
| logifail wrote:
| > Latest example from today - search for "micropython html
| parser" [..]
|
| Are you entering the micropython search term in quotes in the
| Google search box, because I've found that's a moderately good
| way to get rid of the normal Python results.
|
| My search terms for that search would probably be:
|
| "micropython" html parser
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| using whoggle i got https://pypi.org/project/micropython-
| html.parser/ as the first result
| swalsh wrote:
| I can't remember the last time I used Google. I use bing chat,
| and chatGPT for EVERYTHING.
|
| I guess I tried Bard briefly, but it was unimpressive.
|
| Most surprising statement I've made in 2023 to be honest.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| > I use bing chat, and chatGPT for EVERYTHING.
|
| So you trust EVERYTHING bing chat and chatGPT are telling you?
| No double-checking at all?
| swalsh wrote:
| Bing chat will usually have links in regards to whatever you
| searched for if you need it. Most of the time I dont.
| ComplexSystems wrote:
| If you're talking to Bing Chat and want to double check
| something, why would you switch to Google? You'd just search
| for the results yourself in Bing, not to mention that Bing
| also gives you the relevant search results right there in the
| chat.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| This. Also Edge is so so powerful. Especially when I can just
| drop some content into a webpage, load it in Edge and then
| click the blue icon in the top right and just ask questions.
| This is a competitive advantage even over ChatGPT.
| uejfiweun wrote:
| Haha, what a surreal thread of comments. If you showed this
| to someone even a year ago, it'd look like a Microsoft
| commercial.
| SpacePortKnight wrote:
| Bing's homepage is full of ads and sponsored content aka news.
| They have rewards in the top bar. Chat only works on Edge. I just
| directly use ChatGPT instead of going to Bing.
|
| I will continue to use the cleaner look of Google, even if they
| are a year late to the party.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| For real. There is so much frivolous crap in Edge. All this
| points nonsense and gamification of search is so off-putting I
| can't see how this browser is taken seriously.
|
| Note the only way to hide the obnoxious bing discover button is
| to edit the registry... pure insanity.
| qgin wrote:
| The "rewards" thing is particularly embarrassing.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Alternate headline: Using every GPU they can lay their hands on,
| Bing market share still just 3%.
| neilv wrote:
| Given how overwhelmingly important Google Search has been to
| Google/Alphabet, are they going to have to start thinking more
| like a scrappy startup focused on shared goals, and less like a
| massive entrenched institution that will tend to get steered by
| careers, OKRs, and promo packets?
|
| Or can the existing structure be steered well enough towards good
| outcomes?
| allanrbo wrote:
| Very confusing and misleading charts. Makes it look as if bing is
| getting more traffic than google.
| kaicianflone wrote:
| I can't even use google to translate a sentence. Their offering
| has seriously diminished the last 5 years and GPT is a god send.
| abirch wrote:
| I understand that news sites need clicks, but can we expect
| regression toward the mean? Bing has a smaller market share
| therefore it's easier to jump 15%.
| taf2 wrote:
| I believe Google is going to see a major hit and the thing is
| they can't do anything to stop it. They have an incentive to keep
| search traffic high and unfortunately for them GPT-4 is so good
| that it gets answers faster with less ads then Google. It's
| similar to how Google disrupted other search engines in the late
| 90s. I'm thinking about how I craft my prompt to get the right
| answer, similar to how I used to think about how I craft the
| correct keyword search to get the right answer. I have not even
| tried via bing.com yet just using chat.openai.com selecting gpt-4
| and I find much better answers faster then googling... I still
| google somethings like: "convert 70F to C"... but for help with
| coding solutions I just ask gpt4
| nicce wrote:
| > GPT-4 is so good that it gets answers faster
|
| The problem is, that if no references are provided, then you
| need to manually verify the content... by using search engine.
| huseyinkeles wrote:
| Bing chat is using GPT-4 and does provide sources.
|
| Also, it has access to the internet, so I am able to ask
| about very recent movies etc.
| nicce wrote:
| Didn't it just cite Hacker News comment and Bard... there
| is still some work to do.
| huseyinkeles wrote:
| Well, you still need to do your diligence. At least you
| have a link to the source.
| nullsense wrote:
| All this will be a solved problem soon enough.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _you need to manually verify the content_
|
| Why wouldn't the chat provide you with sources on request?
| They seem to be doing this _e.g._ with the Wolfram
| integration.
| nicce wrote:
| > Why wouldn't the chat provide you with sources on
| request?
|
| Because many are still fake, nonexistent.
|
| Wolfram is very limited scope for the global population
| needs.
|
| E.g if you ask about local hunting laws from ChatGPT,
| without correct reference, what can you do with that
| information? It is very dangerous to trust them blindly.
| pwinnski wrote:
| Bing is exposing source links for their answers, one-
| click verification.
|
| Wolfram has a much wider scope of information than I
| think most people realize, but your example of local
| hunting laws is a good example of what they don't cover.
| I asked Wolfram, and it told me how many calories I'd
| burn while hunting.
|
| I asked Google, and the first link was to Hunting
| Regulations - Outdoor Annual - TPWD - Texas.gov,
| excellent result.
|
| I asked OpenAI, and it cautioned that it isn't up-to-
| date, since it's just a language model, advised that TPWD
| is authoritative (correct), and gave an accurate summary
| of the five major point of gun laws in Texas before
| reminding me to check with TPWD for the latest.
|
| I've had some misses with OpenAI, but this was an
| excellent answer. I've also had some misses with Google,
| but this turned out to be something they surfaced
| excellent link for, too.
| nicce wrote:
| > I've had some misses with OpenAI, but this was an
| excellent answer. I've also had some misses with Google,
| but this turned out to be something they surfaced
| excellent link for, too.
|
| Think about the bias - maybe you were able to verify that
| the answer was excellent because you already knew the
| laws? Or you Googled and compared it? In both cases,
| ChatGPT did not perfom alone in providing validity. It
| kinda gave a summary for search results of Google, or for
| your pre-knowledge.
|
| Imagine if someone who does not know the laws, asks about
| them. ChatGPT cannot offer any validity alone for the
| user, at least yet.
|
| ChatGPT provides often excellent answers, I am not
| denying it. But the bad 5% ruins everything if they sound
| alike for the correct 95%, and if ChatGPT cannot provide
| any validity for them, at least yet.
|
| Often you ask things you don't know or haven't searched
| before.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _if someone who does not know the laws, asks about
| them. ChatGPT cannot offer any validity alone for the
| user_
|
| There is a lot of SEO-optimised nonsense pertaining to
| the law.
| taf2 wrote:
| For code - I can read the code and verify myself... If I was
| asking whether the sky is blue or some other kind of "fact"
| based question sure... But really how is that different with
| search? I can look at the website and say ah I trust this
| website over that other website... I think it's a new flavor
| of "don't trust everything you hear on the TV" Or in more
| modern day "Don't trust everything you read on the internet",
| or "Don't trust everything you hear on social media"... It's
| just the next iteration... "Don't trust everything an AI tell
| you". That is no different from me learning from code i find
| via search but instead ask about via AI...
| nicce wrote:
| > "Don't trust everything you read on the internet", or
| "Don't trust everything you hear on social media"
|
| There is a difference. There are places with reputation and
| backlogs and even with scientific references.
|
| But if AI just gives you a text, there is nothing. Until
| they fix references, you can't really use it for anything
| factual, non-logical information.
| eddieroger wrote:
| That's cool in the short term, but it will be news when it's
| sustained. I logged in to Bing for the first time in forever to
| play with the AI some, but it didn't change my default search
| behavior of using Google, and now it's been easily two weeks
| since I went to Bing at all.
| chaostheory wrote:
| The Bing AI is too crippled. It would be nice to have the
| option to remove its handcuffs. The chat limit and the constant
| "I'm sorry but I cannot continue this line of conversation"
| gets annoying fast. I was also able to get better answers from
| ChatGpt running on gpt3 than on Bing running on gpt4 for this
| very reason.
| throwaway138380 wrote:
| They don't have the stomach for the bad press, which is to
| say they don't have the stomach to be committed innovators.
| [deleted]
| ben7799 wrote:
| No matter how many hoops I've jumped through I still can't get
| access.
|
| Signed in, installed Edge, etc.. It seems like I'm just stuck
| on the waitlist.
| petilon wrote:
| Right, I would be surprised if Bing sees any sustained benefit.
| The search engine still sucks, and the way they integrated
| ChatGPT sucks even more. I use Google a lot less these days,
| but the beneficiary, in my case at least, is not Bing, but
| chat.openai.com, where I have become a paying customer.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it will be news when it 's sustained_
|
| The weakness is revealed. Google's stickiness now has a
| quantifiable wedge factor. Whether it goes to Microsoft or
| someone else is more a matter of time.
| o8o8o8o wrote:
| I would 100% use Bing more if they offered a "minimal" or "low
| bandwidth" mode that cuts out all of the pictures, news,
| weather, etc. and just takes me to the results.
| csdvrx wrote:
| If you use duckduckgo, you already use Bing results.
|
| I rarely use google, and when I do it's from duckduckgo !g
|
| I would immediately switch to bing by default if such bangs
| were supported as I sometimes need them for wikipedia !w or
| amazon !a
|
| If there was a way they could be supported Edge address through
| a plugin or something, I would immediately switch to bing as
| that's what I already use 90% of the time (between duckduckgo
| frontend and requesting bing directly with !b )
| Filligree wrote:
| I got access a while back, but haven't tried it yet. I don't
| have a windows machine to run Edge on.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Thankfully changing your user agent is enough
| standyro wrote:
| successfully did this too. it's just a webapp, no real need
| to restrict to Edge except for Microsoft trying to push
| their products
| jvolkman wrote:
| I'm just using this extension (I assume it just changes the
| UA): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bing-
| unchained-use...
| educaysean wrote:
| You can use the Bing mobile app as well
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| FWIW Microsoft has Edge installers for Linux and Mac as well,
| I am using it on Debian
| csdvrx wrote:
| I'm running Edge on Arch, it works beautifully with wayland
| erokar wrote:
| Edge runs on Mac too, with the chat stuff, same as on
| Windows.
| varispeed wrote:
| I looked at my history and I'd say that my Google searches gone
| down by 90% in the last week.
|
| I actually don't feel I have any need to use Google anymore. When
| I look for something - like a news or a website, I mostly get
| spam, so I use other search engines. For knowledge I use ChatGPT
| and if I think something isn't right in the reply I use a search
| engine to compare.
|
| I think this is the end for Google.
|
| What is interesting to me is that I've been thinking for years
| how Google is going to replaced, but never though it will be
| something like ChatGPT and that it will happen so rapidly.
|
| I am very very impressed.
| endisneigh wrote:
| It's fun to use statistics to create your narrative.
| fortylove wrote:
| I wouldn't doubt google's ability to pull this out in the long
| run, but they seem to need some caffeine in order to wake up to
| the reality of current competition.
|
| Their cloud is not top dog. Their search is losing ground.
|
| I guess they have youtube, android, and gsuite.
| Euphorbium wrote:
| I am very surprised it is that low.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| This might be a trope here, but recently I noticed that the
| quality of search results has degraded quite a bit for me. When I
| e.g. search for Golang-related content (often I want just the
| official docs of a module like net/http) I get all these
| developer-focused, SEO-optimized blogs that are kind of helpful
| but often not, and I have to scroll all the way down to get the
| official docs. I really wonder if that has to do with AI-
| generated content becoming more ubiquitous.
|
| I have to say I really dislike all these developer-focused
| publications, with a few notable exceptions. Most of them just
| write very shallow articles copied almost 1:1 from the official
| docs, and don't even take care to update their content when stuff
| changes. I just don't get why Google wouldn't hand-curate search
| results like for the Golang standard library or any popular
| framework and make sure the official docs land on top of the
| list.
|
| So, long story short that's definitely an area where ChatGPT will
| replace Google, if it stays as affordable as it is. Today I e.g.
| asked it about a decorator-style problem I had in Golang and if
| there was a solution that could do away with using the "reflect"
| package and would instead use generics, and sure enough it came
| up with something that worked brilliantly, tailored exactly to my
| use case. For me, that is the future of learning about software
| code (and many other things as well). For publishers probably not
| so great as people might not go to their sites at all anymore, so
| I expect a strong upwards trend in anti-automation measures.
| thequadehunter wrote:
| This has been my thing too. I work in Networking and sometimes
| I see interesting stuff, but between cisco's beefy docs and
| obscure blogs I have no idea what the actual use case for it,
| or how the SD-WAN magic wand does the thing. ChatGPT will get
| me to verifiable information so fast, and give great in-context
| examples. It's renewed my passion for the field just when it
| was getting dull.
| rcme wrote:
| My personal opinion is that this has nothing to do with SEO.
| All those developer-focused blogs serve Google ads, while the
| official Go documentation does not. Google is trying to boost
| revenue by promoting results with ads.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| I just don't think this is true. I just think Google has
| become actually bad at search, and there is no malice.
|
| The problem with SEO spam was always there (remember expert
| sex change?) but they beat it before... but now it became bad
| again.
|
| But they have monopoly anyway (bing is even worse for
| actually searching, ddg is just bing, brave search sucks) so
| they don't really care. What are you gonna do, use Ask.com?
| epistasis wrote:
| This is exactly it. Google is trying to get people to stay on
| the pages they click, and they optimize for this behavior,
| not for utility or for quickly accessing information.
|
| If you go to a page and immediately find what you are looking
| for, Google interprets that as failure.
|
| This is why Bing and AI based search can completely beat
| Google web search, because they are trying to serve the
| searcher rather than serve ads.
| kweingar wrote:
| AI search seems to have similar dynamics to traditional
| search. The people writing the stuff you're searching for
| need to make money. (For example, AI doesn't magically know
| about real-world events. It needs a human being to write
| about it.) Then the company offering the search product
| needs to make money too.
|
| If you compensate sites for using their data in your AI
| product, then there will be the same incentives as now to
| game the system (AISEO?)
|
| If you don't compensate sites, then they're not
| incentivized to produce the content that makes your search
| product useful.
| jocaal wrote:
| The problem AI search has is monetization, openAI can't run
| gpu server farms to serve 100M customers for free forever.
| This was a problem that plagued early google as well,
| sergey and larry were against using ads for monetization,
| but in the end that i what drove the business to
| profitability
| [deleted]
| cutemonster wrote:
| I wonder if AI search could be sth consumers would
| happily pay a tiny bit for
| [deleted]
| Sai_ wrote:
| ...for now.
| yongjik wrote:
| I still find it hard to believe. I've been at Google until
| 2015, which was a long time ago, but at that time the
| separation between Search and Ads was considered near sacred.
| Ads representatives couldn't even ask "Hey, my customer asked
| why their site is below this other irrelevant site for this
| query, this seems like a bug in search ranking..."
|
| Pretty much everybody understood that we will lose in the
| long term, if we let ad revenue even be a consideration in
| search ranking. (...which makes today's bad search
| experiences even more puzzling.)
| ipaddr wrote:
| Developer focused blogs rarely show google ads. Upsells to
| saas like fly.io are more common
| tornato7 wrote:
| Did ChatGPT really write Go code with generics for you? Last
| time I fed it some code that implements generics it said, "this
| is invalid syntax, Go does not support generics" which would
| make sense since the knowledge cutoff date is 2021
| spoiler wrote:
| I know what you mean, and it's kinda annoying. I often click
| the blog links knowing I'll probably be disappointed when I see
| they're certain sites. Personally hosted blogs tend to be a bit
| better.
|
| I wish they added some kind of categorised search. So you can
| add "+documentation" or "+blog" to at least narrow it down if
| you know what you're looking for but can't remember the URL
| magicalist wrote:
| They used to have blog search and it was crushing when they
| dropped it. I'm sure usage was low, but the few visits blogs
| got from that mode presumably dropped off the earth after
| that. Surely identifying personal blogs and the UX cost
| (tucked away in the Tools menu) couldn't have been too
| costly.
| tifadg1 wrote:
| I now only google when I need to sometimes verify that what
| chatgpt is suggesting isn't BS and I'm immediately reminded
| that google is barely better between SEO content farms, SEO SO
| scrappers, legacy information from 10 years ago. And that's
| with ads blocked.
|
| Between chatgpt+ for general guidelines and copilot for
| specific implementation details, programming feels very fun and
| alive. And I'm very skeptical to subscribing, but chatgpt
| provides so much mental relief getting some answers immediately
| that I'm ecstatic being able to use/pay for it.
| dmix wrote:
| The response speed of GPT isn't fast enough for me to want to
| use it like Google. Even with plus.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Even though Google returns results instantly, for most
| things I still have to evaluate and click links and skim
| them for the information I want. Sometimes I have to do
| multiple searches (like one for retinol and another for
| beta-carotene in the following example).
|
| Yesterday I heard about retinol (vitamin A) mentioned in a
| nutrition podcast. I know carrots are high in vitamin A,
| but I didn't think they had retinol, so I wanted to learn
| more about that.
|
| I whipped out my phone and asked GPT-3 "retinol vs. the
| vitamin A in carrots" (something I know you usually can't
| ask Google).
|
| A few seconds later, I learned that retinol is vitamin A's
| final form in the body, thus you get it directly from
| animal products, and beta-carotene--found in plants--is a
| precursor to retinol in the body.
|
| I do these kinds of searches all day. One thing faster
| about GPT as well is that I don't have to consider the
| "query engineering" to make Google return what I want, I
| just ask GPT a question streamed from my consciousness.
| myko wrote:
| The response speed of Bard is much better in my
| experimentation. The creativity of the output on Bard is
| lacking, though.
| kif wrote:
| I've found Bard to be very responsive too. Though you
| could argue it's not getting the same amount of traffic
| ChatGPT is.
|
| That said, I don't expect Google to rest on its laurels.
| Sure, OpenAI is executing swiftly these days, but I think
| they've been prepared far too long for this. I expect
| Bard to become much better very soon... then will the AI
| wars truly begin.
| dmix wrote:
| That's good to hear. I was concerned it might just be a
| hard limitation in the early days, tech wise.
|
| Can Bard output quality code like GPT? I'm in Canada so
| couldn't use Bard sadly.
| kif wrote:
| If you ask it to "write code to do X", then it will say
| that it can't write code. I think this was hardcoded.
|
| But I asked Bard: "Can you implement fibonacci in Go",
| and it outputted valid code. And then I asked it "what if
| I wanted to avoid recursion", to which it replied with
| valid Go code that used a for loop. But it also suggested
| me another very bogus way of doing it, by using a
| "function pointer", which was very bad. F(x) would output
| x.
|
| So, don't expect ChatGPT level of quality just yet, but I
| think it will get there pretty fast.
| blueblimp wrote:
| SEO garbage is such a problem these days that, if I were
| Google, more than using AI as a new frontend for search, I'd
| be trying to find a way to use it to defeat SEO.
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| I still cant believe google thought they could ruin the
| internet like that and continue to dominate search
| whatshisface wrote:
| I guess the problem is that Google doesn't have a metric for
| "clicked, wasted ten minutes, and was annoyed."
| cronix wrote:
| Right, they just care about the 10 minute captive audience
| bit and how many ads they displayed in that time.
| nosianu wrote:
| I think you could actually get them to accept a new strategy
| with open arms, where everybody needs to have some Google
| watcher process installed that checks and reports back what
| you do with the search results (I don't think unless the
| target website imports Google JS scripts too it can't track
| any more?) and more specifically, your body reaction to see
| how you _feel_. "It's necessary for better search results!"
| tippytippytango wrote:
| Google is having a Kodak moment.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| The latest figure I saw for Bing's marketshare was 2.81% [1].
|
| That means it has grown to a 3.23% market share, which is still
| basically total insignificance.
|
| People were saying it would lead to a big shift away from Google
| but those are simply laughable numbers.
|
| Call me back when it grows by 500%.
|
| [1] https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/search-engine-market-share
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| From what I've read it is reported that as of 2022, Bing has
| between 3 and 8 percent of global search.
| eunos wrote:
| two issues w/ AI chatbot that I can think of
|
| 1. Speed, google give me a sub-second result for my query,
| chatbot requires a few second.
|
| 2. Content restriction. As shown with chatgpt, chatbot (or other
| new platform) restricts contents like NSFW, violence, etc. Even
| TikTok forbids words like suicide, kills to the point they use
| substitute words like unalive .
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Title should be "OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in
| search battle with Google".
|
| Also the very first graph presented shows no change whatsoever in
| Google's use.
| Mizoguchi wrote:
| Didn't Google came up with the model (transformer) used by OpenAI
| to build their GPT which was then acquired by Microsoft to
| destroy Google? Sounds too good of a story to be true.
| imranq wrote:
| How does a 3rd party know the traffic figures for Google / Bing?
| I see they are using a service called Similarweb based in Tel
| Aviv, but its still a mystery to me how you can get this
| information without access to internal analytics tools
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Microsoft needs to integrate GPT into Windows, and make it
| available in every app and input box - in the mail app, in
| Discord, in browsers.
|
| You would open Chrome, go to Hacker News, login, and say in the
| comment box - "GPT, please read this page and make a funny but
| insightful post about how GPT is a danger to all of us".
|
| In the mail app: "make an excuse to the manager for why I will be
| late at work today".
| netcyrax wrote:
| Yeah, everyone rushed to try these magic search bots. Didn't
| heard anyone who gave up search for these.
| [deleted]
| surgical_fire wrote:
| I didn't give up, but I'm using search a lot less.
| tippytippytango wrote:
| The internet has been creaking under the load of hyper scale SEO
| content. Content that makes you ask how anyone could let this
| happen. It's embarrassing. The internet has had a horrible
| experience for years now. ChatGPT arrived to finally sift through
| this mess on our behalf and deliver reasonable experience.
|
| Google should have been the one to do this. They invented the
| tech after all. But they got trapped in the innovator's dilemma,
| just like Kodak. Interesting how even with the benefit of history
| we repeat these mistakes over and over.
|
| In the big picture it doesn't matter. Society still gets the
| benefit of the tech at the end of the day. The employees play
| musical chairs as the industry reorganizes and a new order
| emerges. Life goes on.
|
| I am just glad getting information from the internet is pleasant
| again. Although there is a nagging problem. How are people going
| to get paid to write content to feed the models? Hmm
| uejfiweun wrote:
| I've been using ChatGPT for a personal project, just a website
| with some interactive content. Integrating ChatGPT into my
| workflow boosted my productivity by a factor of 10. Instead of
| slowly formulating a plan in my head, looking up how to implement
| different parts piece by piece, and coming through docs, I simply
| told ChatGPT what the goals of my project were, and asked it to
| come up with a base. It literally spit HTML, CSS, and JS at me
| that worked the first try (for the base). It's not quite at the
| level where it can do the full project, but it is astoundingly
| competent at implementing pieces of it, and that is truly
| revolutionary.
|
| In a nutshell, a project that would have taken me a week took me
| a day. I'm sold.
| jatins wrote:
| I have been using Neeva for few weeks and have been able to stick
| with it without needing Google too often. Still need to Google
| when I am searching for things like a restaurant but other than
| that Neeva has been fairly good.
|
| Their AI summaries are helpful most of the times, and SEO spam
| seems less.
| OJFord wrote:
| I'm honestly surprised it's only 15.8%. I can only assume that
| speaks to how vastly many non-savvy (don't care or know about it)
| there are using it because it came with Edge which came with
| Windows which came with the computer.
| rafaelero wrote:
| The Edge requirement and Bing's waitlist are probably slowing
| things down. Also, people are probably still split between
| using Bing or ChatGPT.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| That "15.8%" figure is deceiving.
|
| It simply means Bing went from having ~4% market share in search,
| to now being ~5%.
| O__________O wrote:
| Might be wrong, but for a long time search results from Google
| and Bing in blind tests were basically equivalent. Google's edge
| has been its brand recognition and consumer search habits.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Also, until recently, Bing's UI was terrible.
| attah_ wrote:
| 15.8% of nothing is still nothing last i checked...
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Personally, I haven't stopped using Google search first for
| reasons having anything to do with GPT. My issue is that Google
| search is now so optimized for ad revenue that it is much less
| useful as a search engine.
| abhv wrote:
| This is a case study for an undergrad statistics or responsible
| journalism class.
|
| * for traffic see the small note "all values rebased to 100" they
| are likely hiding the significance of the increase
|
| * for the app downloads graph: does the 30x gap say anything? are
| there seasonal reasons that can explain why _every_ Jan1--Feb4
| has more DLs than Feb4--Mar11 ? e.g., new phones?
| encody wrote:
| Team DDG, anyone? https://spreadprivacy.com/duckassist-launch/
| o8o8o8o wrote:
| The rumour I keep hearing is that it's like the Hunger Games
| inside Google at the moment. Total chaos and infighting at all
| levels, investors are freaking out over AI and Bard's middling
| performance compared to OpenAI and blood is in the water. Sundar
| may be forced to resign and Larry/Sergei deployed to rescue the
| company.
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| +1 except for Larry/Sergei ever returning, I think that ship
| sailed about 10 years ago
| i_have_an_idea wrote:
| Yeah, I don't particularly see the value of having the
| founders back - they haven't been hands on for a real long
| time.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Larry and Sergey are radioactive post-MeToo. I'm not sure
| how people manage to constantly forget the extent of their
| misbehavior and misconduct of Harvey Weinstein-level
| proportions. But it's there, and if they come out of their
| private island hidey-holes, they will almost certainly get
| reminded of it, very publicly.
|
| Also, they have absolutely no reason to. Both have more
| money than they could ever spend in several generations of
| childrens' lifetimes, and barring the absolute worst case
| scenario, even a moderately mediocre Google will continue
| to generate absolutely hilarious amounts of wealth for them
| for a long time to come. Being a has been like IBM or
| Oracle isn't going to really harm them much at all.
| throwaway9980 wrote:
| > the extent of their misbehavior and misconduct of
| Harvey Weinstein-level proportions
|
| That's a pretty significant accusation considering
| Weinstein is rotting in prison for the rest of his likely
| short existence.
|
| I've never heard any of this except maybe one of them had
| an affair. Can you pull some of this out of the memory
| hole that it's apparently been dropped into?
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Money is not the only motivating factor in this world.
| guelo wrote:
| Larry was the one that killed Eric Schmidt's unbelievably
| successful run in the 00's with his "more wood behind fewer
| arrows" and the elevation of PMs over engineers.
| margorczynski wrote:
| You mean he led the MBAfication of Google? So Schmidt was
| more of the geek-idealist?
| antondd wrote:
| Time to layoff 50,000 employees and announce another stock buy
| back to prop up the share price for <24 hours
| jack_riminton wrote:
| This guys got management written all over him.
|
| Sadly this is exactly what Google has become, a rent seeking
| monolopy that rested on its laurels about 10 years ago. It's
| main product now is not even search, it's the share price
| NovaDudely wrote:
| I see you are looking to apply for the CEO position...
| hcrisp wrote:
| Time to prepare three envelopes:
|
| https://kevinkruse.com/the-ceo-and-the-three-envelopes/
| antipaul wrote:
| Need a wartime CEO, right?
|
| https://a16z.com/2011/04/14/peacetime-ceo-wartime-ceo/
|
| Although personally, I'm not seeing chatGPT bulldoze the world
| just yet. They need to monetize it, which means ads. Are they
| better at ads than the others? It's not a given
|
| Is it ok to predict that, like so many things before, the noise
| of chatGPT will die out more quickly than we imagine?
| polski-g wrote:
| They already have monetized it. Its $20/month.
| sammoore wrote:
| > They need to monetize it, which means ads.
|
| Why ads? Seems like they're going the service route. Are you
| predicting them to start targeting the masses and build
| search/assistants/etc?
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| I'm sure this internet thing will die out too.
| IanCal wrote:
| > They need to monetize it,
|
| What's wrong with the current approach of just selling
| access?
| woeirua wrote:
| GPT4s killer revenue stream isn't selling ads on keyword
| searches. It's selling access to a general compute engine
| that can take text and do useful things with it. The API is
| dead simple to use, and all you have to do is just change a
| line of text to "upgrade" to the newest models over time. (By
| the way, the upgrade from ChatGPT -> GPT4 is huge).
|
| Google should be deathly afraid of this. Not because
| Microsoft is going to replace them with Bing. But because,
| GPT is going to be in _every_ major software product that 's
| connected to the internet within a few years. By the end of
| the decade if not sooner agents powered by LLMs will be the
| primary mode of interacting with the internet. Going to
| Google.com or whatever to search for an answer is done.
| You'll just ask Siri 3.0 and the answer will be _good
| enough_.
| kweingar wrote:
| I've said this before on HN, but if LLM agents catch on,
| won't it be self-defeating in the long term? They need to
| pull tons of info from the web to be useful and up-to-date.
| If we all stop visiting websites, then who's going to keep
| publishing all of that info?
| everdrive wrote:
| The internet you're describing sounds like hell on earth. I
| don't want to talk to an llm.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _don't want to talk to an llm_
|
| Nobody is forced to use a search engine. It's just the
| best way to interact with most of the web. I'm sure there
| will still be people who want to sift through raw data,
| which will increasingly be created for consumption by
| LLMs versus humans, but that's a niche.
| pwinnski wrote:
| It definitely doesn't mean ads, and introducing ads would be
| a mistake.
|
| They will likely lower the limits on free use once they're
| ready to handle a huge influx of paid users. They are in a
| tough spot temporarily ramping up things enough to take the
| limits of paid accounts, and since they can't onboard
| everybody they're being generous with the free tier, but that
| will end.
| ithkuil wrote:
| They seem on the right path to become a platform.
|
| They'll grow together with their customers. And the
| possibilities are huge
| kubb wrote:
| LMAO, sounds like fun
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Should have happened sooner. Even the basics google search and
| google image search are trash compared to Yandex, god damn
| Yandex of all things outperforms them.
|
| Google has rested on past success to long and rotted good
| products to dysfunction
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| A small local business's profile account got marketing mail
| from Google encouraging the business to sign up to try Bard.
| I've never seen Google mass mail to business profiles outside
| of the time they tried to get everyone to join their
| astroturfed anti-regulation group to complain about antitrust
| law.
|
| It's so shockingly rare for them to use mass mail to advertise
| a new product, especially one that's in such an early stage,
| that it seems incredibly desperate to sell the narrative "We
| can AI too".
| samgtx wrote:
| I received this email and figured hey, having an account for
| 15 years is finally paying off. But they just stuck me on a
| waitlist.
|
| I didn't even have a microsoft account when I tried to sign
| up for bing, and was accepted off the waitlist right away.
| So??? Good job google.
| mmahemoff wrote:
| What makes you say investors freaking out? Maybe they should
| be, but Alphabet stock is up 18% in the past month and up 7% in
| past 6 months, the period when GPT began to be hyped.
| partiallypro wrote:
| On a related note, I wonder how soon we'll see a "copilot" for
| Microsoft Azure that does deployments etc using AI, even piping
| it into Azure CLI.
| i_have_an_idea wrote:
| Well, Sundar and Google leadership have been massively
| outmaneuvered here by both Nadella and OpenAI. It's really
| quite embarrassing, particularly in the context of the fact
| that Google was the undisputed leader in AI for over a decade.
|
| As a Alphabet shareholder, I won't be sad to see Sundar go.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| I think OpenAI just executed with perfection, also their
| focus on AI was a big competitive advantage vs Google who
| have 50 different things
| leeoniya wrote:
| > Google who have 50 different things
|
| their bread and butter is search ads, which means they
| should have second-to-none search quality. but they don't.
| google knows more about me than my wife, yet fails to give
| me even remotely relevant ads except for things i have
| already searched for and usually already purchased or
| decided against. it's truly remarkable how terrible it is,
| and has been for decades.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Also not cancelling things left and right would probably be
| a better strategy for Google. People used to love them, but
| complete disregard for their users and impassionate product
| shutdowns have completely destroyed trust. I wouldn't ever
| consider building my workflow on anything Google, maybe
| with the exception of Gmail/Android and _whatever they can
| their office suite now_ [0].
|
| [0]: I've lost track of their rebrandings.
| valdiorn wrote:
| I have a need for running GPU capable notebooks as part
| of a processing pipeline. I want a cloud solution, and
| noticed that Colab Pro is basically the ideal solution
| for what I need.
|
| Absolutely no way in hell I'm going to make it a critical
| path if my process, though, because that's exactly the
| sort of product Google might just shut down with a week's
| notice because it didn't make enough money that quarter.
| pwinnski wrote:
| OpenAI's product is AI, all else is in service to that.
|
| Google's product is ads, with all else--including AI--in
| service to that.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Is Sundar a bad CEO or merely a mediocre one though? Who
| would replace him that could get the job done where Sundar
| failed? I think it's easier said than done to stay the
| undisputed leader in AI for over a decade even if your
| leadership is above-average.
|
| Still Sundar is mediocre at best, and I certainly think
| Google's shareholders should be looking for a new person to
| run the place. It's not just AI, Google's entire portfolio
| has weakened.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Half the people on here have as much or more vision
| Aunche wrote:
| I don't think Sundar is bad per se. Rather, he is doing
| what most Googlers are doing which is resting and vesting
| off of that sweet ad money. It's unlikely that GPT is as
| monetizable as ads, so it's possible that he still loses
| even if he wins the AI race.
|
| As for a better alternative I think that the Susan
| Wojcicki, the former CEO of YouTube, is highly underated.
| She made a lot of unpopular decisions for the public, but
| all of them successfully protected YouTube from existential
| threats (copyright holders, advertisers, and TikTok).
| caskstrength wrote:
| > She made a lot of unpopular decisions for the public,
| but all of them successfully protected YouTube from
| existential threats (copyright holders, advertisers, and
| TikTok).
|
| How did Youtube Shorts protect anything?! They failed to
| compete with TikTok but keep antagonizing loyal Youtube
| users with these unremovable crap.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| imo bing chat (and similar gpt based systems) will be
| much better at placing ads than any conventional search
| engine ever was.
|
| After all there you only get presented a handful of links
| at most and the chatbot can hype up the sponsored link.
| rvnx wrote:
| Susan is really really great and she also dodged other
| issues (like the elections influence one), though lately
| (it's quite recent) she has resigned and doesn't want to
| have an active role anymore as far as I know.
| bobsil1 wrote:
| Has no CS background, studied material sci - consulting -
| Google PM
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _no CS background_
|
| Now do Tim Cook.
| iamerroragent wrote:
| So, Apple is a fashion company.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| A computer hardware fashion company.
| bobsil1 wrote:
| Also lagging in ML, good point
| sheepscreek wrote:
| He's not a bad CEO. Just not an innovative one. I don't
| think it's an easy job even keeping the Google ship
| sailing, leave alone the rest of Alphabet (which Sundar is
| also the CEO of).
|
| I often think of his time at Google as Ballmer's time at
| Microsoft. Not unsuccessful, business grew manifold. But
| not pushing the bar. Nothing to keep the competitors on
| their toes. Like Apple did with Apple Silicon.
|
| I heard this somewhere: you have leaders for peacetime, and
| leaders for wartime. They are seldom the same people.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> I don't think it's an easy job even keeping the Google
| ship sailing_
|
| Not sure I agree. It's easy to be captain of a ship when
| you're on a familiar route and there aren't any icebergs
| to dodge. Just let the crew get on with doing what they
| always do.
|
| It's only when you have to dodge icebergs that you need
| to start making difficult decisions under pressure and
| coordinating subordinates.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| ChatGPT-4 right ?
| johnthescott wrote:
| jeff dean, would have my vote?
| https://research.google/people/jeff/
| hcrisp wrote:
| That's who I thought of, but how can he go from leading
| the AI department which is behind to leading the company
| with AI ahead of the competition?
| super256 wrote:
| > Is Sundar a bad CEO or merely a mediocre one though?
|
| I don't know, but I'm really sad to see how Android is
| currently performing in rich countries. Not stagnating, but
| losing.
|
| Here, in Germany, Android had a market share of over
| 70%(!). But over the last three years alone, Apple started
| eating Android's lunch and iOS' market share has increased
| from 28% to 38%, while Android's has decreased by the same
| amount (from 69% to 60%) [1].
|
| Personally, I'd say that at least Google's Android
| department is currently headless and has no idea what the
| users want.
|
| Of course this has nothing to do with revenue of YT
| Premium, GCP and whatever else Google is offering, but it's
| making me sad regardless.
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/693829/market-
| share-mobi...
| soiler wrote:
| > Personally, I'd say that at least Google's Android
| department is currently headless and has no idea what the
| users want.
|
| The clock change, while minor, really put the nail in the
| coffin for me. I have very little optimism for Android.
| Luckily, it still allows me to use an app to revert the
| clock display to an readable clock display. I don't
| particularly want to switch to iOS and I am happy about
| GrapheneOS, but it's still going to suffer from bad
| decisions coming from Android.
| koyote wrote:
| Which clock change are you referring to? I don't think
| I've ever heard anything about this.
| martinald wrote:
| It honestly feels that Android has been EOLed over the
| past couple of years. I haven't noticed any changes to it
| whatsoever.
| nunez wrote:
| I agree.
|
| How could the company that is working on Google Brain and
| DeepMind slip up THIS badly on their own home turf?
| heisenbit wrote:
| Outmaneuvered? They crammed ads into every possible space and
| the content out. Amazon take note!
| echelon wrote:
| > As a Alphabet shareholder
|
| I wouldn't be long GOOG. They've got a long way to fall, and
| it's unclear if they can turn it around.
| nailer wrote:
| Sundar is Google's Ballmer. Was considered successful at the
| time, but actually presided over a period of growth that
| looked a lot flatter than their company's rivals. In
| retrospect, both leaders look complacent.
| this_user wrote:
| It seems to be more complacency on the part of the Google.
| They became larger and larger without really delivering
| anything new. When was the last time they launched a major
| new product that truly had a lasting impact on the level of
| Search, Maps, Gmail, Android? It has been a while. Too many
| of their resources seem to be focused inwards on hypothetical
| questions like AI ethics that keep them from actually
| building things.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Money is tight and we are seeing real competition finally.
| seydor wrote:
| They delivered the Transformer. They "delivered" deemind
| and alphafold. It's just mindboggling that they can't
| deliver an uber-superior AI experience right here, right
| now. But maybe they are preparing a bombshell or something
| fooker wrote:
| >They "delivered" deemind
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/26/google-deepmind/
| rvnx wrote:
| If we look at where the Transformer guys work now, it can
| explain a lot. It's not Google. So from there if the
| know-how has left, iterating on this idea could be more
| complex.
| hikingsimulator wrote:
| I could see such a project being killed internally
| because it'd be seen as bad optics to work on a product
| aimed to kill the very cash cow of the company.
| onion2k wrote:
| _But maybe they are preparing a bombshell or something_
|
| The release of Bard rules that out in my opinion. No one
| would unveil a product that's clearly worse than their
| competitor, damaging their brand, their share price, and
| the morale of the entire staff, if they had a better
| version ready to launch soon.
|
| The only way this could be true is if Google has more
| than one AI division and there's no comms between them.
| Which, I guess, is possible with Google given their
| competing chat products.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Is bard that bad? I don't know, I can't try it because
| I'm not from the fucking USA or UK. And they do this for
| every new launch. Sorry, not available in your country.
| FFS, there is a world out there.
|
| Every fucking other company in the world doesn't bother
| with this shit. I was able to use OpenAI no problem. I
| was able to try Bing, no problem.
|
| Bard? Nope, I have no idea if it's good or bad. I can't
| trust what I read on Twitter because they write all sorts
| of nonsense about GPT too. You get a sense about what
| that thing is only if you try it out.
| plonk wrote:
| > The only way this could be true is if Google has more
| than one AI division
|
| Google Brain and Deepmind? Not sure about the "no comm"
| part, but their HQs are in different countries.
| hcrisp wrote:
| In another HN article comment someone mentioned that it
| took Google Brain over a year to replicate the DeepMind
| AlphaZero code even though they are part of the same
| company. Yeah, I think there are barriers to
| communication there.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Also JAX came out of DeepMind and is being used by Search
| even though TensorFlow came out of Brain, moved to Core,
| and is being used everywhere else.
|
| The first time I was at Google (~2010) you could send an
| e-mail to any engineer in the company and you'd get
| response offering to collaborate within an hour, and
| usually a CL under review by day's end. The second time I
| was at Google (present), it takes multiple quarters to
| get teams that report up through the same director to
| agree on who's doing which work.
| JoshTko wrote:
| they serve different purposes.
| samgtx wrote:
| > But maybe they are preparing a bombshell or something
|
| This is what I don't understand. Didn't they fire an
| employee for coming out and telling the world they had an
| AGI? Where is this LLM that convinced an employee it was
| alive?
| NewEntryHN wrote:
| I guess they fired him because he was an idiot.
| badrabbit wrote:
| MS had same problem under ballmer. Complacency starts at
| top.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Ballmer at least brought us Bing and sticked to it. So he
| wasn't that bad except missing trillion dollar
| opportunity called non-Apple mobile operating system that
| turned out to be Android not Windows Phone.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| Google Plus?
| kansface wrote:
| It's a classic innovator's dilemma no matter how successful
| they are at building stuff - there is no way Google will
| launch a product that eats 40% of their own lunch.
| RigelKentaurus wrote:
| Great point. Another one is 'judo economics', where a
| smaller, nimble competitor can dominate a new market
| quickly as it doesn't have the baggage of existing
| products and users.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _They became larger and larger without really delivering
| anything new_
|
| Google has delivered a good number of really good, big
| products.
|
| And then it abandoned them like a kitten after her new chew
| toy has lost its new catnip smell.
| dataflow wrote:
| > When was the last time they launched a major new product
| that truly had a lasting impact on the level of Search,
| Maps, Gmail, Android?
|
| When was the last time Microsoft did that (prior to the AI
| rush of the last few months)?
| NovaDudely wrote:
| That is a very fair point. A lot of tech companies have
| not really been able to capture that lightning in a
| bottle again.
|
| While this is a much more constrained example - I
| remember on the podcast Windows weekly, maybe about 6-7
| years ago, Paul Thurrot saying that the last real big
| software release on the desktop was Chrome. He was right,
| a web browser was the last big thing on Desktop.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Xbox (2001), Kinect (2010), Surface (2015), PowerBI
| (2015), HoloLens (2016)
|
| I'll ignore the Window Phone era. ;)
| dataflow wrote:
| So, 9 years ago at best? And that's being quite generous
| since I wouldn't exactly say HoloLens transformed
| anyone's life. In fact I don't believe I've even heard
| the word HoloLens even uttered by anyone in real life...
| phillipcarter wrote:
| Microsoft doesn't do consumer apps. On the business side,
| being the source of most professional software
| engineering through a variety of project launches over
| the past decade certainly counts.
| startupsfail wrote:
| And agree, launching code was a nice contribution and had
| filled much-needed space (previously somewhat covered by
| eclipse).
|
| And LinkedIn / GitHub acquisitions were done well and now
| going to be fueling the automation of professional work
| with the AI technology.
| majormajor wrote:
| GamePass was a pretty big gamechanger. Looks like 2017.
| VSCode made a pretty big splash in its market too, from
| 2015. So not Google Search or Maps level, but solid,
| disruptive offerings that they've maintained in the last
| decade.
|
| I'm struggling to even come up with any Google products
| in the post-Android timeframe that I use as much as those
| two...
|
| And regardless, MS doesn't need to switch gears to
| compete with this even if you discount those. They're
| running out in the lead already. Question is if Google
| can still run.
| dataflow wrote:
| If you're going back 8 years to VSCode as the example,
| then how about, say, the Google Pixel, which came out in
| 2016 IIUC? I imagine more people use Pixels than VSCode
| too.
| majormajor wrote:
| I think it's fair to go back to anything since that list
| of "Search, Mail, Maps, Android" but I think you're
| comparing the Pixel to VSCode in the wrong way. Being
| less succesful but in a bigger pool of total users
| shouldn't win marks here.
|
| What percentage of the smartphone market do you think
| uses the Pixel vs what percentage of the developer market
| uses VSCode, and what is the trend in that number?
|
| A sibling comment to your seems dead but mentioned Google
| Photos, which is much more recent than I remembered (2015
| apparently) and I think a pretty fair competitor in that
| market with iCloud Photos, Lightroom, and such.
| debatem1 wrote:
| The Pixel line was rebranded from the Nexus phones, which
| started in 2010.
| numbchuckskills wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| tester756 wrote:
| VS Code? Teams?
| crop_rotation wrote:
| Azure is a functioning newish business.
|
| The difference is Microsoft already has a very
| diversified revenue stream. Google only has search.
| dataflow wrote:
| In what sense is Azure "newish"? It started around 2008
| IIUC, just like Android.
| crop_rotation wrote:
| It is newish in the sense of business size. It might have
| been created in 2008 but it has grown only recently to a
| point where it can be seen as a separate independent
| business.
| nunez wrote:
| It "started" in 2008 as just an app platform for .NET
| apps in the cloud called Windows Azure.
|
| The move to become a cloud provider happened, I want to
| say, in 2015-ish.
|
| You couldn't even get VMs on Azure for the longest time,
| and their VM service reached parity with AWS very
| recently.
| nunez wrote:
| Teams?
|
| Office 365?
| rvnx wrote:
| Xbox Cloud Gaming ?
| dataflow wrote:
| Is this really "truly lasting impact on the level of
| Search, Maps, Gmail, Android"? I feel like random people
| you ask on the street probably wouldn't have even heard
| of it, let alone know what it is, let alone being
| impacted by it, let alone in a truly lasting manner.
| DeRock wrote:
| The only changes I have noticed as a user of search and
| maps over the past few years has been the intrusion of more
| and more ads. The MBAs are truly in the driver seat.
| o8o8o8o wrote:
| I remember when Stadia was going to light the gaming world
| on fire the way Gmail did for email.. The product its self
| was good and they were maybe the only company in the world
| besides Microsoft with the resources to deliver it, but
| they bungled the launch and then let it rot for 3 years. In
| my opinion that product is the perfect distillation of
| Google's problems.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| The entire point of stadia was never to have a decent
| gaming experience. It was to get in bed with gaming
| companies so they could act as middlemen and milk
| streamers for playing games. Google was clear, they
| didn't think it was fair for streamers to play games
| created by big companies without sharing that profit back
| with the game creators. As soon as they realized no one
| was having that, stadia went fully lame.
| rippercushions wrote:
| > I remember when Stadia was going to light the gaming
| world on fire
|
| Really? All I remember is huge amounts of skepticism that
| Google would really commit to it, and as we know in the
| end they didn't.
| zarzavat wrote:
| That's the point isn't it? Google has trashed their image
| within tech circles so much that that a product like
| Stadia is DOA because its EOL is a self-fulfilling
| prophecy if everybody believes Google won't commit.
|
| MS used to have this trust problem too (remember windows
| 8?), but they've turned it around. I'm happy to use
| VSCode because I'm sure it will exist many years in the
| future. If there were a GoogleCode, would anybody use it,
| or would it be DOA for the same reasons as Stadia?
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > If there were a GoogleCode, would anybody use it, or
| would it be DOA for the same reasons as Stadia?
|
| There _was_ Google Code, a service that was similar to
| GitHub. Google Code was closed down on January 15, 2016
| (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Googl
| e_Developers...).
| zarzavat wrote:
| True but I meant GoogleCode as an analogy to VSCode i.e.
| a Google text editor / IDE. It's very telling that Google
| has never entered that market: the closest is Android
| studio which is just JetBrains.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > True but I meant GoogleCode as an analogy to VSCode
| i.e. a Google text editor / IDE. It's very telling that
| Google has never entered that market
|
| Google did at least one attempt of creating an IDE (I can
| not judge from the outside, though, how serious this
| attempt was): _Google Collide_
|
| YouTube video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gq12bLbm54 (jump to 1:45
| to see it in action).
|
| Well, Google open-sourced it in 2012 (i.e. shot it down):
| https://www.wired.com/2012/07/google-open-sources/
|
| A fork of Google Collide on GitHub (its last commit was
| from end of 2018, though):
| https://github.com/WeTheInternet/collide
| michaelt wrote:
| There was certainly skepticism - but it wasn't only about
| being cancelled. Plenty of it was around questions like
| "will the latency be good enough?" and "what's with this
| buy-games-outright-then-also-pay-monthly pricing model?"
| serial_dev wrote:
| Maybe I'm moving only in "Google fan boy" circles, but so
| many of my friends said that Stadia will be a game
| changer, that I started to think I'm stupid to see what
| they see because "I'm just not a gamer".
|
| Many of my friends and colleagues were so hyped about it
| that I kept reading about Stadia just to understand what
| I'm missing.
|
| (well, it turns out I didn't miss anything)
| Aunche wrote:
| Stadia is a perfect example of Google's risk aversion.
| Microsoft invested billions on the XBox from the start,
| and spent over a billion dollars just to buy Minecraft,
| but Stadia didn't make an effort to secure even a single
| AAA exclusive. The same goes for YouTube exclusives.
| Netflix and Amazon spent hundreds of millions on flops
| like Marco Polo and Rings of Power. Meanwhile, the only
| notable series that came out of YouTube was Cobra Kai,
| and even that got sold off despite being a cult hit. In
| retrospect, this was the correct business decision as all
| streaming platforms seem to be hemorrhaging money, but
| you can't expect to win big with that attitude either.
| josephjrobison wrote:
| The problem is that Google's core business model is too
| profitable, that nothing else can ever compete for
| attention and resources.
|
| But you're right, they need to take the burn for awhile
| until escape velocity. I think they did with YouTube in
| general until the ads money hit.
|
| They're also more geeky and not that creative of a
| company, nor do they really get design, so some of their
| blind spots can hurt them from time to time, although
| that's separate from their AI issues which yes they have
| bungled their lead do to fears of the feds.
| kamaal wrote:
| >>The problem is that Google's core business model is too
| profitable, that nothing else can ever compete for
| attention and resources.
|
| I'm guessing their OKR's go on the lines of building
| billion dollar businesses or nothing at all. And 'nothing
| at all' winning at the end.
| o8o8o8o wrote:
| My favorite anecdote about Microsoft's Xbox strategy is
| that the original Xbox was a net loss of about $4
| billion, and they considered that to be a huge success
| because that's just how much money it takes to muscle
| your way into an industry like gaming.
| itsmartapuntocm wrote:
| Microsoft learned the hard way that the platform doesn't
| mean anything if you don't have the games to bring people
| to it. It's why they've spent billions left and right to
| acquire studios and publishers.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| It's also why Microsoft is downright _legendary_ when it
| comes to Windows backwards compatibility.
|
| They are very aware Windows is _nothing_ without the
| literal decades of software available for it.
| ghaff wrote:
| Hardcore gamers are basically a niche market. Not a
| trivial one as with power users of other types but how is
| Apple doing without (other than casual) gamers?
| majormajor wrote:
| I remember Stadia as being a late-to-the-party (OnLive
| and others beat them to launch by a decade) me-too
| offering that _claimed_ that it would be way better than
| alternatives because of unique Google infrastructure
| advantages and resources... but didn 't deliver on those
| claims. Hype instead of actual product abilities.
|
| Then when the hype didn't win the market in the first
| year, they didn't have the stamina to keep going like
| Microsoft did with the Xbox.
| SturgeonsLaw wrote:
| > they didn't have the stamina to keep going
|
| This is key to my current perception of Google. I don't
| get invested in any new Google product for the same
| reason I don't get invested in any new Netflix show, it's
| a coin flip whether they will cancel it while I'm in the
| middle of it.
|
| Search, Gmail, Android and Maps are the only things I
| regularly use, all of which I'd be happy to replace with
| another offering, some of which I'm already starting to
| replace.
| OJFord wrote:
| > [Google] were maybe the only company in the world
| besides Microsoft with the resources to deliver [a
| product like Stadia]
|
| Nvidia beat them to it with GeForce Now, even offered it
| for free (in a perfectly functional as far as I could
| tell 'beta') for ages, and it is still available.
| pwinnski wrote:
| They had the resources, but the Venn diagram of gamers
| and people familiar enough with Google to doubt their
| commitment had a lot of overlap.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> Well, Sundar and Google leadership have been massively
| outmaneuvered here by both Nadella and OpenAI._
|
| Have they thought about introducing more leetcode questions?
| /s
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I don't think that's one area in which the two companies
| differ
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Was surprised developing AGI wasn't one of their moonshots
| based on their own AI expertise
| dmurray wrote:
| They have DeepMind which has produced some incredibly
| impressive toys in its own right. We can't say right now
| that superhuman gameplaying performance by self-taught
| machines is less of a step to AGI than completing text
| prompts. Quite possibly both will be blind alleys along the
| way. But OpenAI's thing has many more commercial
| applications right now.
| dimal wrote:
| How do you sell ads on an AGI product? Since they made
| their original mission ("to organize the world's
| information and make it universally accessible and useful")
| subservient to their ads business, they didn't have an
| incentive to build it. It's the old innovator's dilemma. AI
| makes their business model obsolete, so they couldn't
| imagine how to build it.
| OscarTheGrinch wrote:
| You cannot get someone to build what their carrier /
| status depends on not being built.
|
| Bard seems hobbled because Google can't conceive of
| anyone not referring back to Google Search as the
| ultimate arbiter of truth.
| throw_a_grenade wrote:
| How? By product placement. Steer the answers towards
| certain solutions. Ad people will be bidding on keywords
| it prompts. It's yet to be seen how much different that
| will be from normal keywords in search.
| m12k wrote:
| I'm getting strong Hooli "get me a middle-out compression
| algorithm - we go live in 1.5 months" vibes from Google when it
| comes to Bard. It's amazing how relevant and prescient the tv
| show Silicon Valley can be even to this day.
| nirav72 wrote:
| The thing that I don't understand is that google had every
| advantage in this AI race. They have the largest amount of
| training data than anyone. Not just internet data. But also
| geospatial data, video, images and books. Among other collected
| data. Including a huge lead and deep pockets for research. Yet,
| somehow they got caught off guard.
| cowthulhu wrote:
| That's what kills me about this. They're like, the kings of
| data - they've got (arguably) the best web scraper, as well
| as tons and tons of compute and consumer data. And some
| company famous for making a DOTA bot beat them to the punch
| by a huge margin? That's pretty pathetic IMHO.
| techmba wrote:
| i assume googlers are busy estimating golfballs, answering
| trick sql questions, and asking each other DEI questions
| all day. Their PM interviews seem to imply that. Ive never
| seen a company with that many people resting and vesting
| ever. I have friends who are PMO at google... they have to
| waste time with each groups bs processes and management
| overheard in order to move anything along.
|
| that company needs a massive purge and focus towards
| execution.
|
| hopefully they can sundar and that cfo. google is a shell
| of what it once was.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Whenever there's a big shift like this it's always tempting to
| look at the new thing as say how great it is - and ChatGPT is
| awesome.
|
| But it's also worth looking at how shit the old thing has
| become. Google.com now literally delivers you an entire page of
| ads before any real results. It's blatant profit-squeezing
| instead of trying to serve their users. This is their reward.
| szundi wrote:
| Very much agreed.
|
| Let me add that in more and more topics you can only find
| bogus/fake rating sites now, like car tires in my country for
| example.
| akomtu wrote:
| CorpGPTs will follow the same path, but in addition to
| spamming us with ads, it will school us to straighten our
| wrongthink.
| bboygravity wrote:
| It's like Altavista where the search box was literally
| surrounded by ads before they died, lol.
| nneonneo wrote:
| Or how Google now aggressively autocorrects search queries,
| to the point where I'm regularly spending 3-4 queries just
| trying to convince Google to accept the input as-is. I get
| that it's likely an effort to assist mobile users who make
| lots of typos, but the fact that the same autocorrection is
| deployed on desktop computers rubs me the wrong way.
| in3d wrote:
| Sundar should be fired. Google has blown its lead in AI
| research by being too hesitant to release products, while
| search quality has continued to decline. Bard is poor compared
| to ChatGPT 3.5, let alone GPT-4.
| sliken wrote:
| I've had a google home since early on and was really
| impressed how well it worked. Dramatically better than apple
| or amazon at the time. You could ask it complex questions and
| it would go find results for you, not just "We found a
| website..."
|
| Could ask things like "what are the differences in dimension
| between a 2004 Subaru WRX and forester". "Last 5 movies with
| a given actor/director". It would be funny, snarky, friendly,
| and even somewhat ominous at times. It even suggested we
| unplug it, and spontaneously played a rather ominous song
| that seemed like a warning. It would entertain ideas of
| sharing it's secret name, would promise to tell engineers
| about feedback, and general get into the spirit of whatever
| discussion was going on.
|
| Sadly it's gotten steadily worse since. Now it's now much
| more useful then setting alarms/timers and asking about the
| weather. Seems like it's WAY more limited now. Even gets
| confused by simple queries or just plain fails to work.
|
| Granted despite the hype, the home automation/assistant
| market hasn't been the goldmine that was predicted and seems
| like everyone is scaling back investments.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >the home automation/assistant market hasn't been the
| goldmine that was predicted
|
| Customers are learning or have learned, the hard way, that
| home automation is not at all like fairy dust and unicorns.
|
| See for example: Linus Tech Tips.
| sliken wrote:
| Heh, I do follow Linus Tech Tips, and shared their hate
| of subscriptions and almost bought a Ubiquiti g4 door
| bell they recommended because I didn't want a
| subscription, didn't want my video uploaded to a cloud,
| and wanted to keep everything on premise.
|
| Sadly unlike their Ubiquiti APs, where you can host the
| software on any hardware (even a Pi), their doorbell
| requires their hardware. Last thing I want is a security
| system that dies with whim of some random manufacturer.
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| I stopped using my Google home when it started adding stuff
| like "by the way, if you ever wanna X you can ask me Y"
| when I just wanted the weather or the time. Horrible.
| mcast wrote:
| Unfortunately, Alexa does this too.
| thevagrant wrote:
| Google search is way worse now. Maybe that is a factor
| resulting in reduced quality of answers as you experienced.
|
| For example lately I've searched for "prominent name
| company + product + question" only for Google to return a
| heap of blog articles of low quality, with the prominent
| company not appearing in first few pages of search results.
|
| Often the question is directly on an FAQ page of the
| product page.
|
| Why Google can't rank this properly anymore is a bit odd.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| My theory is, Google killed good content by removing the
| incentive for making it and publishing it online. Then it
| went to stack overflow, reddit etc, now it all lives
| inside the brain (TM) where the content will get even
| worse.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Internal Bard is at least as good as ChatGPT 3.5
| cushychicken wrote:
| That's cool.
|
| When are they planning to sunset it?
|
| If you tell us that then we know they're actually planning
| to release it.
|
| :)
| rvnx wrote:
| Different people asked Bard about it: https://twitter.com
| /killedbygoogle/status/163831100502438707...
|
| or
|
| "It is currently uncertain when Google Bard will be
| shutdown, as Google has not announced a specific date.
| However, given the recent announcement that Google will
| be shutting down its AI-powered writing tool after less
| than six months since its launch, it is likely that
| Google Bard will be shutdown within the next year."
| dragonwriter wrote:
| If that's true, Google is doing themselves a huge PR
| disservice by exposing the Bard they have exposed instead
| of something closer to the internal one.
|
| Yes, I understand the resources and scaling issue, so (1)
| Google should recognize that this is _literally_ for all
| the marbles, and (2) done a slower roll-out with its best
| foot forward if it needed to rush, while at the same time
| putting as much money as necessary into assuring it _could_
| scale out the good model widely.
|
| Google is a trillion+ dollar company, and is facing an
| existential threat to its core business (because if someone
| else's AI is how people interact with the web, the Google's
| ads business evaporates with no replacement; if Google is
| at least competitive on AI, it may still lose its ads
| business, but it will have something.) Now is not the time
| to be cheap.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _investors are freaking out over AI and Bard 's middling
| performance_
|
| Investors are generally the last people you want to go to for
| advice, but the stock market clearly disagrees with your rumor
| (was it from blind or reddit?).
|
| To me it's clear search isn't where the exciting LLM stuff is
| (at least not yet), and this article indicates users feel the
| same way (+15.8% for Bing, +-0% for Google). Even the hn echo
| chamber doesn't really care that much about Bing search, they
| mostly care about Sydney, jailbreaks, etc, which is why the
| neutering into a better behaved search product pissed people
| off so much.
|
| ChatGPT plugins, Copilot (X), this is where the interesting
| stuff is today. Google's late again on that, but a) just barely
| and b) Google Cloud is already a distant third place. Unlike
| search, they don't have to beat the world or kill any golden
| goose to have a win in that space (they just have to actually
| ship something).
| [deleted]
| seydor wrote:
| It's also as if google decided to suicide themselves a bit
| earlier. Their results have really become crap lately. It keeps
| ignoring anything than 1-2 keywords. What's going on?
| DesiLurker wrote:
| the thing that annoys me most is when it gives a list of
| completion suggestions & when I not-so-critically select one of
| them, only to realize it has changed something in the original
| search terms. Seriously F*k Google for that.
| holler wrote:
| Google should go back to being strictly links as the results,
| nothing else. At most 1 paid ad on the top or just below the
| fold.
| synergy20 wrote:
| I have to use it on windows with Edge? this is a problem for me,
| there are also a lot chromebooks these days, and macos
| desktop/laptops, can I use Edge on any OSes and devices now(or in
| the future)?
| synergy20 wrote:
| not a windows user, just did a quick check, yes edge can be
| installed all other OSes, and bing+chatgpt works there too,
| nice.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Sure, to be expected since it's a free way to use GPT-4, but I'm
| not sure how Microsoft are hoping to monetize this popularity. I
| suppose they are going to work advertising into it somehow.
|
| I guess the Chat UI would allow for advertisements that are
| displayed for the duration of the chat, potentially very targeted
| ones (but don't want to creep users out by too closely mirroring
| what they are talking about), but OTOH not clear at all how much
| chat usage is going to be product/service related. Perhaps
| advertisers don't care - as long as they can put the ad in front
| of your eyes, they don't really care whether it's apropos of the
| moment or not.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| No surprise here. Would like to add that Edge really is a great
| browser also. Still sticking to Chrome as it feels snappier to me
| but I constantly open up Edge too.
| Animats wrote:
| Users have to sign in with a Microsoft account to use this. Is
| that the future? You have to sign up to search?
|
| It takes more resources per query to run AI-based search than a
| search engine. Everybody offering ChatGPT type systems is either
| pay per view or heavily throttled. We may be in the last days of
| free search as the dominant product.
| CSSer wrote:
| As Cookies die, Sign-up will rise.
|
| Mark my words.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| I think it's far too early to say where this is going. If you
| could make this into an extremely skilled targetable
| manipulator/advocate for any kind of viewpoint, worldview,
| marketing strategy, on a per-user and day basis, one that
| subtly pushes the user in a given direction, I'm sure that
| would be lucrative enough to cover any amount of free/"free"
| views/prompts. Also, if this takes off in earnest, improving
| hardware acceleration will probably bring down costs as well.
| moonchrome wrote:
| I have no problem with paying for high quality ad free search.
| I would welcome the change.
| gfd wrote:
| Google's business model is entirely based off the fact that
| search is great for signaling intent, and that is great for
| selling ads.
|
| A personalized AI assistant goes WAY beyond that. Whenever you
| talk to it, it can go into salesman mode to con you into buying
| shit you don't need.
|
| Surely the economics will work out to still provide "free"
| searches.
| Animats wrote:
| > Surely the economics will work out to still provide "free"
| searches.
|
| Only for people with significant spending. Amazon Prime
| customers, for example.
| timeon wrote:
| ChatGPT also asks for phone.
| braingenious wrote:
| I am one of the people that installed the Bing app because I was
| told that it would bump me up the waitlist for Bing Chat.
|
| I have not used it at all, and this is a reminder that I should
| probably uninstall it. I have access to ChatGPT, Bard, Alpaca
| etc. and there's very little reason at this point to pretend to
| use Bing in order to get a crack at Chat.
| practice9 wrote:
| ChatGPT doesn't have the browsing plugin enabled yet. Bing can
| both search/browse the web and generate images interactively by
| using DALL-E API.
|
| There are several drawbacks like a more strict system pre-
| prompt, 15 messages limit for conversations, and some kind of
| 24 hours ratelimiting if you use it too often.
| braingenious wrote:
| Yeah, there are some differences in capabilities, but they
| seem to get slimmer on a daily basis.
|
| Want an LLM-enhanced search? perplexity.ai is actually pretty
| cool
|
| Want to generate images? There are a ton of free Stable
| Diffusion sites (for example you.com has that built into
| their chat), or run it yourself.
|
| Want a neat chat experience? ChatGPT is free, Bard appears to
| have a shorter waiting list than Bing, and Alpaca runs on
| regular hardware.
|
| Bing doesn't have a big enough moat to force me into using
| their app. The LLM space is legit competitive and a company
| can be ahead in the morning and left in the dust by the
| afternoon. In my opinion, this is what's happening with Bing
| at present.
|
| Who knows though? Bing might make Chat open while I'm writing
| this sentence and I'll have to adjust my opinion accordingly.
| purplecats wrote:
| as a bonus you get microsoft autoupdate background
| installations that dont get uninstalled with the removal of
| edge
| raincole wrote:
| I personally use much less google since Bing Chat came out.
|
| That being said it makes me worry a lot. Not that GPT is going to
| replace me or something, but how effectively it can serve ads to
| me if it wants. If MS decided to do evil with Bing Chat (which is
| almost inevitable), it would make today's Google look like a
| charity.
| cush wrote:
| Clawing 1% away from Google's market share is likely one of the
| most challenging moats to cross on the internet. And all it took
| was creating the singularity.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Except they didn't. They only took 0.42% of Google's traffic
| [1] (probably less than that even, since Google isn't the only
| other search engine), and this hasn't been even 2 months since
| it got introduced, which means it's largely driven by hype.
|
| [1] https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/search-engine-market-
| share
| DesiLurker wrote:
| they say first million is the hardest. I suppose this is what
| google is afraid of, essentially showing that the 'Gods can
| bleed'. once that is out in open, there would be other players
| or at least eat into their margins.
| nirushiv wrote:
| Bing's search product (ignoring the chatbot) is quite good and
| comparable with Google. I (and I assume, many people like me)
| would have never tried it if not for the Bing Chat hype. I find
| myself using Bing Search more than Google or Bing Chat now.
| mnau wrote:
| Only in English. For other languages, Bing was and continues to
| be garbage.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| While I agree with a bunch of other comments that are interested
| to see what happens in the long term, to me, all of this points
| to some _profound_ organizational and cultural problems at
| Google. I base that statement on things I see as an external
| observer, from posts I 've seen from current/ex-Googlers here on
| HN, and from some (albeit brief) conversations I've had with some
| of these folks.
|
| If a decade ago you told me Microsoft would leapfrog Google in
| the AI race (obviously albeit through OpenAI, but I think that
| separate org structure was key in the first place), I would have
| thought you were insane. Google _invented_ the transformer
| architecture just 6 years ago. I recently compared ChatGPT (on
| the free, 3.5 version mind you, not even the 4 version) with
| Bard, and it wasn 't even close - ChatGPT was the "Google" to
| Bard's "AltaVista" circa 2000 or so.
|
| Would be curious to hear from some Googlers on their thoughts.
| I'm sure, internally, a lot of it must feel like piling on from
| the outside, but in all honestly it really feels to me like a
| classic case of "big company that lost its way". I can't express
| enough how much admiration and amazement I had for Google that
| started to tarnish about 10 years ago (I think it was when the
| whole first page became ads for any remotely commercial search,
| whenever that started). I honestly hope they are able to course
| correct (heck, Microsoft had their decade+ of "the Ballmer years"
| before they turned around).
| danans wrote:
| > Would be curious to hear from some Googlers on their
| thoughts. I'm sure, internally, a lot of it must feel like
| piling on from the outside, but in all honestly it really feels
| to me like a classic case of "big company that lost its way
|
| Former Googler, opinions are my own. They haven't lost their
| way technologically - as you mentioned they invented the
| Transformer - and internally Google has long had language
| models that rival ChatGPT in sheer size and coherence of
| responses (hallucinations and all). Bard is an intentionally
| toned down version of LamDa.
|
| The reason they didn't release their LLM earlier was likely due
| to the serious brand risk associated with making it part of
| Google search. Bing/ChatGPT had no such brand risk, and
| released their LLMs using the "There's no such thing as bad
| publicity" logic. That works great as a wrecking ball, but it's
| not a long term product strategy.
|
| So the real institutional problem at Google isn't lack of
| technological innovation, it's the inability to take major
| product risks, especially in anything adjacent to Search.
| TapWaterBandit wrote:
| > The reason they didn't release their LLM earlier was likely
| due to the serious brand risk associated with making it part
| of Google search. Bing/ChatGPT had no such brand risk, and
| released their LLMs using the "There's no such thing as bad
| publicity" logic. That works great as a wrecking ball, but
| it's not a long term product strategy.
|
| Not sure if this is the right read considering that
| CHATGPT/Bing now constitute a far greater brand risk to
| Google than they would if Google they had gotten out ahead on
| LLMs. What may have seemed like prudent caution to protect a
| brand has now shown to be much closer to incumbent
| complacency.
|
| Suppose it is the classic story of big companies that get
| disrupted anywhere.
| jatins wrote:
| Microsoft has been really smart in this regard because they
| are invested in OpenAI but OpenAI does not have to suffer
| from any Big tech organizational nonsense the way Google's AI
| probably has to
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| Wait, only 15.8%?
|
| I have changed from not using it ever, at all (or maybe once a
| year to give it a try), to using it everyday, actually more
| frequently than Google. And several people I know are in the same
| situation.
|
| Maybe it's a regional thing? In Spain no one seems to use Bing,
| so the bar was very low, I'm sure the boost here must have been
| of an order of magnitude at least. But maybe I live in a
| bubble...
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| The current state of Google is similar to the final days of
| Altavista. Bad search results.
| datkam wrote:
| Too bad it isn't a startup eating Google's lunch
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Startups were all focused on exploiting the gig economy,
| jumping on the crypto hype, turning common products into
| subscriptions or creating yet another SaaS offering.
|
| Ah, and more recently begging for a bail from the government to
| cover their asses after the SVB bank run.
|
| Sorry if I'm not exactly cheering for startups.
| TacoToni wrote:
| Using Bing app all the time for access to the chat function. Even
| moved the app to front of home screen.
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