On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

Re:On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search ... by adevine on Thursday February 25, 2016 @01:23PM (#11176472)

If a small company could design a credible alternative to Google, I'm sure it would have been done - the incentives are too great.

Entrenched businesses are RARELY displaced from their top position. Instead, what usually happens is the world changes around them, and the entrenched business is ill suited to compete in the new world. Nobody ever managed to seriously challenge Microsoft for desktop/laptop OS dominance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste.... The issue is that desktop/laptop OS dominance is no longer as important as it once was.

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Re:On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search ... by vonklaus on Thursday February 25, 2016 @02:31PM (#11177087)

i started working on a model, i discovered memex-explorer after and they had apparently designed a slightly less decentralized model but had already implemented it however the project was suspended indefinitely.

memex-explorer + blockchain is the model. A company can not do it. A company can design a platform, and many companies can sell on the optimization & information marketplace to fix problem.

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Re:On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search ... by swe on Thursday February 25, 2016 @02:09PM (#11176896)

Search, or the quest for knowledge, is not going to be displaced or marginalized. If a small company builds true AI, Google is done.

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Re:On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search ... by hexagonc on Thursday February 25, 2016 @03:16PM (#11177448)

Depends on how they arrive at it. If they create true AI with lots of spare capacity then maybe Google is threatened, but what seems more likely to me is that true AI is achieved in some hodgepodge system that wasn't well architected to scale. An example of this would be a true AI that came about as a result of embodiment in a robot. Yes, it is true AI but that doesn't mean it knows how to read, let alone read and understand billions of webpages. Even if it could read a page of general text at the level of an average adult, that doesn't mean it can read it quickly.

[EDIT] And as an addendum to this fun tangent, even if the AI was capable, in principle, of reading billions of webpages fast and well, we don't know the power requirements would be for this. This hypothetical small company may have stumbled upon the right algorithms and the right training data to produce a true AGI, but they may simply not have the hardware or the engineering know-how to scale it up across multiple processors. Or scaling it up may require too much (i.e., more than the company can afford) data bandwidth if the robot is controlled. Again, it depends on the details of how they arrived at the AGI.

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Re:On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search ... by adevine on Thursday February 25, 2016 @07:25PM (#11178999)

And, more likely, if a small company does come up with a great AI, they're going to get bought be Google, not compete. Reason being you are still going to need the sheer hardware capacity (a LOT of it) to process so much data. I remember a good article about how YouTube would have likely hit serious trouble had Google not bought them. YouTube was starting to crumble under the exponential growth in load, and Google was perfectly matched to provide infrastructure support.

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