There are several meaningful difference between surfing Youtube and surfing the web. These include ownership, access, review, exposure, and more.
So if 95% of traffic/users/whatever metric are not using a web browser for those activities, is it really the web? It can't be called the web just 'cause they use HTTPS. It's gotta be a 'world wide web' experience, which I think a good proxy for would be using a web browser.
I got no horse in this race, just thinking out loud about it.
Agree YouTube and Instagram are probably mostly apps which puts them in the “Internet” category but not “world wide web”.
Another common phenomenon these days is that lots of businesses don’t even bother having a web presence - it’s all instagram, WhatsApp and tiktok accounts, mostly only accessible via apps (or worse, chat platforms like discord)
Honestly the web died long ago imo. Wikipedia and other wikis are the only places that feel like the old web to me now.
Google (and Facebook, a few other platforms) made it so that the vast majority of websites are never visited. ChatGPT further erodes the possibility of tying economic value to the production of that value.
Seems like we need a new framework around "intellectual property"
I just got back from a job where my tech used AI on his phone every time he needed to search for something. The results were hilariously bad, but if things keep improving one day they might not be. Google needs to be ready for that.
Do you?
> not the same sort of risky move
I don't see it as materially different. I also don't consider this to be an example of either of them being genius visionaries. I actually think it's an extremely straightforward tactic to cannibalize part of your business to break into another bigger market.
Apple didn't stop selling iPods, you know? I don't really get why it was more risky for Apple to market the iPhone than for Facebook to decide not to shut down Instagram once they acquired it.
The differences in the literal creation of the entity are immaterial to my point.
You don't see the difference between creating and buying?
> Apple didn't stop selling iPods, you know?
Read The Innovator's Dilemma. Apple launching the iPhone would be equivalent to Google, today, replacing a list of search hits with, at most, three answers.
E.g. for me, how much Google (and silicon valley in general) have enabled twisted ideologies to flourish. All in search of ad-dollars by virtue of eyeballs on screens, at the detriment of everything.
Considering the value of time, past consumer surplus is especially valuable now.
Sure, there are systematic flaws causing SEO to ruin the information provided: but it isn't clear what Google can do to fight the emergent system.
I'm not sure that Bing/DDG are any better.
I use search (DDG web, Google/Apple maps, YouTube) all the time and I am regularly given results that are extremely valuable to me (and mostly only directly cost me a small amount of my time some of my time e.g. YouTube adverts). Blaming SEO on Google seems thoughtless to me. Google appears to be the victims of human cybersystems as much as we are.
I'm not familiar with what you're referring to here. Happen to have a link?
With ChatGPT, I can give a thumbs up or thumbs down; this means that OpenAI will optimize for users thumbs up.
With Google, the feedback is if I click on an Ad; this means that Google optimizes for clickbait.
I am talking about relevance or returning what I asked. If I ask for reviews for SaaS product, Google will usually return a rival vendors’ biased review.
If ChatGpt search returns a review written by “the professional association of xxx developers” or another unbiased site, I will give it a thumbs up. I believe other people will do the same.
Heck, Google even promoted the `ping`[0] anchor attribute feature so they can log what link you click without slowing you down. (Firefox doesn’t support ping, which means when Firefox users click on a Google search result link they’re sent to an internal google.com URL first and then redirected for logging purposes)
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLAnchorE...
I can still search things, i get results but, they're an ordered list of popular places the engine is directing me to. Some kind of filtering is occurring on nearly every search i make that's making the results feel entirely useless.
Image search stopped working sometime ago and now it just runs an AI filter on whatever image you search for, tells you there's a man in the picture and gives up.
Youtube recommendations is always hundreds of videos i've watched already, with maybe 1-2 recommendations to new channels when i know there's millions of content creators out there struggling who it will never introduce me to. What happened to the rabbit holes of crazy youtube stuff you could go down?
This product is a shell of its old self, why did it stop working?
Yes. However, I found that https://scholar.google.com still works perfectly well. It feels just as the old Google without all the crap they've been adding in the last years.
I can’t imagine the cost this would have on scientific producivity in the West.
Oddly their biggest strength is being irrelevant to the decision makers, if the bean counters noticed the few million they are losing on running Scholar there will be ads + Gemini all over it.
right now, I download pdf and upload it to chatgpt to bounce ideas.
Even if you give it a paper directly I’d not believe it to be reliable. Maybe it could help search for papers, but that’s it.
If there are no sponsored links - the result is crap.
Google is good at searching, they just have no incentive to show you results.
“ to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful” was a nice mission while it lasted
YouTube search is also completely useless now.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=path+of+exile+2...
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ramen+restauran...
When I search these three things the first 5 results are exactly what I want.
What exactly are you searching of the time that it's "completely useless"? Genuine question.
Try searching for a particular video, one that is not super popular. What I want is a complete list of results that match my query. What I get is YouTube trying to recommend videos to me.
If you try to describe a non-popular video it just becomes a crapshoot on what to give you if there's no word/tag watching. You'd need some hint of the channel name or something. The volume of low viewership videos is incredibly high.
Can you give me a real example of something you've tried to do?
This is unfortunately not true. I have a little channel and there have been times when searching for the exact title of some of my videos did not return it in the results at all (searching with quotes or not). Cannot reproduce now because the search algorithm has now started liking me.
For example, searching for climbing comp videos and getting a completely unrelated video about some new tech gadget released within the last couple days from a random popular content creators makes no sense.
Clearly, it works for Google (content creators intentionally make click-baity thumbnails and titles because Google encourages it), but it's user hostile: it's designed to suck you into a vortex, which is not what the user was intending in the first place.
That said, all content platforms do this right now, so my intention isn't singling out Google. It's frustrating nonetheless.
Now that the JD Vance podcast is out, that’s the first result; then it’s all MSM. Wow.
The level of sponsored results for some queries is way OTT, and obviously any kind of search like "best laptop 2024" is never going to give you good results (probably because they don't exist), but other than that I'm still pretty happy with Google Search.
Genuinely interested: have you tried to spend a few weeks on an alternative?
I decided to try DuckDuckGo a few years ago. Not because it was obviously better, but to see if I could get used to it. After a few weeks, I had completely stopped falling back to Google when not finding what I wanted. I stayed on DDG for a couple years. Then same thing with Kagi: I just decided to try. It's been 1.5-2 years now and I'm disappointed when I can't use Kagi (which has my customizations, like some websites I ignore and some that I pin).
I guess my point is that it's not necessarily that you have to try something else when Google is unbearable. Maybe you can try something else and then realize (or not) that Google was not better.
I try to use OpenStreetMap as much as I can (I have a deGoogled smartphone and OpenStreetMap works well enough) but it is true that Google Maps is better (at the cost of privacy of course).
But in terms of search... I can't remember of a time where I tried Google because I couldn't find with Kagi and ended up finding something with Google. On the contrary with the Kagi lenses it's often a lot easier to get specific results.
1. Search Google for "ukrainian who shot his commanding officer" without quotes
2. Google serves me nothing but MSM articles of Russian this or that. The word Russian wasn't even in my search string.
3. Add the Google operator MINUS SIGN Russia
4. Results:
a) Policeman feared Chris Kaba would kill, court told
b) Media: Russian Repeated Offender Kills Five More His ...
c) President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and First Lady Olena ...
d) Ukrainian Galician Army
e) Article from 2017 entitled Killed Defense Intelligence Officer Was "The First Donetsk Cyborg"
f) Shots fired at car carrying Ukrainian President Zelenskiy's ...
6. It comes up on Yandex immediately with the original query
And its first two results are for a dead site and a deleted article, so fine user-experience reasons to exclude?
And the google results have a link to a reddit story such accident on the first page
First search (“products that do X”) got me a bunch of those comparisons sites, none of them containing the one I was trying to find
Second search (“ycombinator startup that does X”) got me a page of spam, but at least I found the product name
Third search (company name) got me an ENTIRE PAGE of ads and SEO optimized pages before the actual link to the actual product
If I search "Mullica Hill tornado" on yt itself, I get nothing but useless 1 min local news clips. If I search the same term on Reddit, I get first person footage of the tornado passing over people's houses—hosted on Youtube! Tornado enthusiasts still occasionally dredge up "lost media" of events like the 2011 Alabama outbreak that have been on the site this entire time, but are effectively impossible to view via the algorithm, even with the precise date and location specified.
Image search isn't great either but it still often gives me something close and that usually satisfies my image searching needs.
I still find YouTube recommendations quite good for me, but there are occasional ones I've watched already. I still go down its fun (and educational!) rabbit holes all the time.
However when they don't, it's invariably to push some alt-right slop down my throat. Video is about a comedian? Suggestion "feminist woke takedown compilation". Video about news? Suggestion "$european_far_right_party's channel says gypsies are subhuman". Video about economics? Suggestion is Jordan Peterson ranting about something. And so on and so on. It's pretty tiring.
This may make it better for the non-tech folks who search for things in unclear language, and likely make it worse for those who search with precision (i.e. much of the HN crowd).
Most importantly, they make their money off ads, and it probably makes sense to optimize for the non-tech folks. The ones that don't run ad blockers and accidentally click the barely differentiable ads.
In short - I suspect they're just using new tech to make more money.
It doesn't feel magical, and it particularly doesn't feel like a gateway to new and interesting places on the internet, like it used to.
But I still make hundreds of searches on google every day, so obviously it is working.
And on rare occasions now when I do search on Google I feel so happy I switched to DDG. To an extent that it does feel to me that Google has indeed stopped working completely for me. And yes I’ve stopped their search history, recommendations etc on YouTube.
Part of the answer is here - https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Yes it is hard to find some stuff in internet because it is filled with generated affiliate spam and walled gardens, Has Google stopped working for me? Nope It seems still alive and kicking.
Even if I type in 2-3 lines worth of nearly-exact lyrics that show up on multiple lyrics websites, it'll give me completely unrelated songs that match several words at most.
On that note, if anyone needs a good browser-based song finder, the "Aha Music Identifier" extension is pretty good. It's a life saver when watching Twitch streams that don't list the currently-playing song.
On the other hand, chatgpt 4o-mini and 3.5 will just make up source material which is amusing but not very helpful.
What the parent is referring to is favoring annoying ad-filled garbage over an equally relevant but straightforward result.
The hidden variable is that ad-riddled spam sites also invest in SEO, which is why they rank higher. I am not aware of any evidence that Google is using number of Google ads as a ranking factor directly. But I would push back and say that “SEO” is something Google should be doing, not websites, and a properly optimized search engine would be penalizing obvious garbage.
> Based on the elements you’ve described—eyes, a pineapple, a bucket of water, a house of cards, chess, and a time loop—it’s challenging to identify a single music video that encompasses all these features.
Has google ever indexed all the lyrics and scenes in a video to allow for such a weird search to be successful?
The very earliest form of page rank used a form of ML.
The question that remains unanswered is how google can do so without compromising customer revenue.
This especially happens after they dominate the market.
Take for example IE6, Intel, Facebook, IBM, and now Google.
They have everything they need to keep things from going off the rails, management however has a tendency to delusionally assume their ship is so unsinkable that they're not even manning their stations.
It becomes Clayton Christensenesque - they're dismissive of the competition as not real threats and don't realize their cash-cow is running on only fumes and inertia until its too late.
I’m not sure Facebook fits in considering they at least managed to get some other products along the way, and may get more.
I certainly don’t think Google fits the bill. Google is failing because they let their cash cow ruin everything else, not because they let it stagnate while they chased the next moonshot. Google Cloud could have easily been competitive with AWS and Azure in European Enterprise, but it’s not even considered an option because Google Advertising wouldn’t let it exist without data harvesting. Google had Office365 long before Microsoft took every organisation online. But Google failed to sell it because… well…
It’s very typical MBA though. Google has killed profitable products because those products weren’t growing enough. A silly metric really, but one which isn’t surprising when your CEO is a former McKinsey.
It couldn’t happen to a nicer company though, and at least it won’t kill people unlike Boeing.
* Boeing is a consequence of the "Jack Welch" effect - gutting the core in service of short term gains for stock-holders.
* The MBA type, typified by John Sculley at Apple is about calcifying the current offerings presuming market segments supported by historicals with predictable demand. This works well for defensives such as utilities, consumer products and health care but not for markets with dynamic consumer relationships such as technology.
* The Google Cloud example is the Xerox Parc phenomena. Xerox was organizationally structured for investment payoffs only characteristically similar to their mainline products thus they couldn't properly allocate resources to things, such as desktop computing, with different kinds of curves. This is similar to how the franchise retailer Blockbuster so slowly responded to the centralized mail-order subscription Netflix. The institutional structure is only-so-flexible. This is similar to Conway's Law.
* The "ruin everything else" is a generalized form of a "brand extension failure". Examples include Harley Davidson perfume, Bic underwear, McDonalds Pizza, and Heinz cleaning vinegar - an over-leveraged commitment to a wildly successful core offering makes other ventures impossible.
This is not that. It's yet something else. Abstractly it's "X is a wild success, let's make Y another X instead of working on X+1"
Organizations suffer from varying degrees of ailments and they can create codependencies making the unraveling hard. Often it devolves into politics of power brokers with the company's survival dependent on the competency of the influential instead of the influence of the competent. A brutal struggle to control a sinking ship.
The crisis of the third century happens every day.
can you name these products?
And now their VR products.
It is interesting to go back a decade and read the articles about Google's moonshots from then. There was even more "we're building the future!" hype than what Elon Musk or Sam Altman are currently pushing.
I know this is a predominantly white, upper middle class site (read: progressive), and people from that demo sure love to point out that "you can't say the leg is broken just because the foot is dangling at 90 degrees, you aren't a doctor!" ..... but at some point you surely have to start to trust your own eyes and use critical thinking, right??
It's not a conspiracy theory Google ruined their search to serve more ads. It's so obvious and happening for such a long period of time, anyone above certain age and with decent memory can see it. You don't have to "believe the reports", you don't even have to be smart, just use your eyes and your memory.
I think they prioritized large and fast incomes over long, steady incomes.
Also, there isn't just money that taints Google search results. It's also censorship and political motivation, which is mostly obvious in image search.
I'm wondering if they've seen the writing on the wall for a long time, and if diversification is going to save the day. I don't know that I've ever clicked on an ad in Google search results, but I happily pay them for a family account for Youtube and 2TB of drive storage, plus, you know, a flagship phone every couple years. :-)
Yes and no. Yes for the quality of search results. Google algorithm and user experience was simply better than AltaVista's, but Google had another advantage. It used a cluster of cheap consumer-grade hardware (PCs) as its backend, rather than the expensive servers AltaVista used, in fact, AltaVista started off as a way for DEC to show off its hardware.
As a result Google was not only better than its competitors at searching, it was also cheaper and scaled better, and this architecture became the new standard.
It is the opposite for these AI-based systems. AI is expensive, it uses a lot of energy, and the hardware is definitely not consumer-grade.
What it means is that barring a significant breakthrough, cheap ChatGPT-like services are simply unsustainable. Google don't have to do anything, it will collapse on its own. Ironically, probably in the same way that Google result became crappier by the year, but on fast forward.
This is the basic premise of Ed Zitron's article https://www.wheresyoured.at/to-serve-altman/ and others written around the same time. A lot of what he's written seems to be coming to pass, e.g. unfathomably large investments (~$100 billion) by tech giants in OpenAI and other AI startups to keep them going. That does seem unsustainable.
Can anyone make a counterpoint to this claim? I'd be very interested to hear what a viable path to profitability looks like for OpenAI.
I think it’s great that competition is driving both companies to improve, but I’m not seeing anything about this that screams “Google-killer”
Yes, Google has their own AI divisions, tons of money and SEO is to blame for part of their crappiness. But they've also _explicitly_ focused on ad-dollars over algorithmic purity if one is to believe the reports of their internal politics and if those are true they have probably lost a ton of people who they'd need right now to turn the ship around quickly.