In this case, name checks out. He carried his duty with full honor of the name both at Yahoo and Google.
WTH :D
Raghavan != Ravana
(Only relation is that they were on the opposite sides and that made pretty much the whole epic Ramayana)
Raghavan comes from "Raghu" (another name for Ram). Raghavan kinda means "from Raghu" or so like "His descendants" or so.
AFAIK
Also,Raghavan is most probably his father's name and Prabhakar will be his given name.
Search engines, especially with the resources of Google, could have developed at least basically functional natural language search decades ago. Instead they chose to rest on their laurels (pagerank even still plays a significant role!), and secure market control by anti-competitive behavior.
Google is certainly well on their way to becoming another Yahoo, but there's no extrinsic reason for it in the same way there was no reason for Yahoo to become what it became. In 100 years people will be searching the corpus of human writings (or whatever medium is dominant then) for information that's relevant to them. So there's in intrinsic reason for any search related company to just naturally die. It simply needs to keep innovating, or at least evolutionarily improving.
This is also the type of search that Google makes no money from.
The money is in searching for up-to-date relevant product information, where Google is the undisputed leader.
>Search engines, especially with the resources of Google, could have developed at least basically functional natural language search decades ago
Google is one of the major AI research outfits, and arguably the only one that continues to deliver consistently over the last 2 decades. Statistical Machine Translation/Google Translate, Adwords Quality Score, TensorFlow, AlphaGo, Attention is all you need (Transformers), AlphaFold all Google innovations.
You can't really blame the prevalence of SEO slop on Google. It's not the lack of want of trying, it is hard technically (see how long it took to develop modern AI capabilities), expensive computationally (as we can see with the unsustainable cost of test-time search in ChatGPT) and in terms of user-experience.
>Google is certainly well on their way to becoming another Yahoo
Really, it isn't. Google is in the unique position of being the closest technology company to achieving full vertical integration of their value chain, from silicon to software to data to end-users. They are also at the forefront of frontier AI, including productising the research output. I don't really get the Google hate on HN, apart from maybe the YC/sama bias.
Easy. Google is basically spyware. It's an advertising company, and their product is you.
>searching for up-to-date relevant product information
I realise I'm not a typical user, but I would never trust Google for any searches hinting that I'm looking to buy something, because the results are almost guaranteed to be inorganic. Someone will have paid Google money to be promoted for "best clothes dryer".
This is such a flippant and facile response.
Google isn't a advertising company, it is a tech company that gets the majority of its revenue via selling advertising. This can change, and also likely to change in the next decade or so.
The reason things are is that nobody was willing to pay for search - it's a product with a very low incremental cost. The market dictated this operating model, and nobody has been able to upend this model so far, not even OAI. The numbers just don't work out. Do you think OAI can continue to subsidise free ChatGPT queries with paid ChatGPT Plus subscriptions? Almost certainly not.
You can't eat your cake and still have it. If they refuse to develop an income stream that isn't related to advertising while using practices that use their dominant place in the market to buy other technologies or shut them down, then saying it isn't their fault that the revenue is only advertising is either disingenuous or naive.
And now that their core product is getting worse I am paying for search
It was an obvious way to create a better user experience but instead search today is comparable to, if not worse than, search 20 years ago - because at least 20 years ago companies were ahead of the SEO guys, whereas that relationship has long since flipped.
Also, what makes you think that NLP would solve the problem you're describing? Only LLMs has proven that it could fully understand and process the queries in the way you're describing, hence why I brought that up. However it is expensive computationally, and only recently was it even technically possible to do.
Poll only the subset of people that are actively aware of how to change their search engine and I suspect Google's dominance suddenly completely disappears. Remember, there was a time when Internet Explorer was the leading web browser across all age groups. Then Microsoft was forced to make it easier for people to change their default browser, and suddenly nobody was using IE anymore.
Actually for products, a lot of people just go to Amazon has a thriving ad business.
> Google is one of the major AI research outfits, and arguably the only one that continues to deliver consistently over the last 2 decades. Statistical Machine Translation/Google Translate, Adwords Quality Score, TensorFlow, AlphaGo, Attention is all you need (Transformers), AlphaFold all Google innovations.
The problem with Google is that they can’t produce good profitable products. Innovation means nothing for a for profit company if it doesn’t make money.
Seems logical to me, but then my 71 year old mother with doctorates in both science and literature pulls out her phone and trusts Google AI results without thinking twice.
there are so many factors to this, its the same issue when target stock drops 10% over a year and people are like "oh it's because they stopped selling plus size bikinis! the crowd has spoken!". you can attribute it to anything but you're basically always wrong if you're not attributing it to at least a dozen different things
In the early 2000s Internet Explorer had 95% market share.
> After working 14 years at IBM, he became senior vice president and chief technology officer at enterprise search vendor Verity in 2004.[16][14][12] In July 2005, he was hired by Yahoo! to lead Yahoo! Research in Sunnyvale, California.[17] At Yahoo!, he worked on research projects including search and advertising.[15][18] In 2011, he was appointed as Yahoo!'s chief strategy officer.[1]
> In 2012, Prabhakar joined Google after severe funding cuts in Yahoo!'s research division.[19] In 2018, he was put in charge of Ads and Commerce at Google and in 2020 his scope was expanded to include Search, Geo, and Assistant.[20] [21]
It sounds like you are either unintentionally spreading misinformation, or misinformed.
Please edit swipes out of comments on HN.
I absolutely agree.
One fundamental reason why Yahoo failed is that they prioritized short-term revenue from search partners, over long-term reputation. One of the key people behind that was Prabhakar Raghavan.
And now, Prabhakar Raghavan is at Google. Where he has proceeded to make the same mistake, with the result that Google Search quality fell off of a cliff.
If Google had been acquired by Yahoo, he would have been in a position to destroy Google earlier than he actually did.
See https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ for more.