If some of you say they're focusing on "revenue" and "ads" then I don't think that is it. The reason I don't agree with it is due to being a short-term focus. If your search results are bad, people will start trusting you less over time and look for answers on platforms like Reddit or other search engines, therefore you can't show them relevant ads and you lose money over the long term.
Let's be honest, google is not a search company. They're an ad company and their current goal is not to organize the world's information but to pick the best ad for the user. Ads are bad we all know that, I get it but they also pay the bills and we can't live in an ideal world. So ads are fine, I'm not mad at ads. Heck, if ads are relevant to me I'm cool with it.
In my opinion, search results and ads are not mutually exclusive, they can't and shouldn't live without each other. Both need the other to survive. But I think the management at Google has forgotten that. They're trying to optimize for ad revenue, they think it's working. And it is, companies pay tons to rank their content. But I think it'll all crash and burn eventually as they realize their stuff isn't shown in the SERPs because people now append "Reddit". Or maybe I'm just completely flat-out wrong but I can be sure about one thing - their results are going to get worse if they don't switch to a user/product-focused mindset.
Also, the CEO sucks. He's not a tinkerer, he's a bureaucrat. He's like a shitty caretaker that doesn't care about the users or the product.
Sorry for the rant, I'm just concerned.
LLM's are choking the web with slop and were you insane enough to actually write something useful and publish it you'd just be feeding the LLM's to directly compete against you with your own regurgitated work.
The web's dead in the format we've all known it, its corpse just hasn't hit the floor yet.
If LLMs need the publication of useful writing to compete with it, then they won’t be competitive without it. In other words, there is always incentive to publish writings that aren’t something you would otherwise be able to get from an LLM.
In addition, LLMs don’t necessarily pick up on a single publication. Their training is more shaped by patterns and concepts espoused by a large multitude of publications. This also incentivizes the publication of novel original thoughts.
The web isn’t dead at all. The web — HN being a great example — is also an entirely different way of content discovery than prompting an LLM.
Seems it's the age of social, 1:1 subscriptions like substack, patreon -- creator economy.
That's fine, but in this ecosystem, there's no need to publish things publicly, right?
Public publishing is for search discoverability. If the end game for search is instant answers, then both the engines and the content creators dont benefit one another. To your point of it only mattering in the aggregate training sense.
So public content discovery by index is dead.
I'm gonna say, yes, it does at which point there's no incentive for the original author. That's of course assuming the user actually searched at all or went to the LLM directly instead in which case the original author of the article has no chance at all.
>If some of you say they're focusing on "revenue" and "ads" then I don't think that is it. The reason I don't agree with it is due to being a short-term focus. If your search results are bad, people will start trusting you less over time and look for answers on platforms like Reddit or other search engines, therefore you can't show them relevant ads and you lose money over the long term.
Short-term thinking is a candidate for the biggest problem of our time.
We had a couple decades, prior to that, when there was a business trend to be 'customer focused' which closely relates to long-term thinking: win good-will from your customers, from your suppliers, from your community... even from your competitors.
To whatever extent the customer-focus trend managed to saturate, it seems to have died with the success of FA*NG companies around 15 years ago.
Why bother making products that last when Apple makes billions with irreparable devices?
Why bother providing stellar customer service when Google hardly bothers to provide any customer service?
Why care about high quality design and materials when when Amazon just sells cheap knockoffs made from wax and scotch tape?
Why even be lawful, when Facebook can snow the public and regulators and not wind up in jail?
Short-term thinking has plagued various areas of life forever, certainly, but this FA*NG-era death of customer focus is why I feel things are particularly bad now.
Ideally, Google would prefer that you show up, type a search term, and are surfaced a variety of “answers.” Some of them would be in the form of ads, others would be in the form of YouTube links so you can see ads there, and others would be in the form of closed-ended solutions which completely satisfy your query with no need or ability to click. All of the options, crucially, should keep you on Google’s own real estate.
If I’m right, you can expect the organic search results to continue their trend of de-prioritization. They’ve already been pushed below the fold on most types of queries. Next, you should see them buried in a collapsible widget with an unappealing name, like “view unverified results.” The next stage is probably to remove that section entirely but with a user profile preference to restore it, followed by full deprecation, which will probably be noted only by the HN crowd and not really even noticed by everyone else. I would estimate the general public’s rate of choosing the ads on Google SERPs is something like 80-90% already.
I think Google knows search is over and that they know AI will bring something new to that game. So they are perhaps maintaining and not pouring too much into making the product better.
it is that they are making it steadily worse, to make more and more profits.
don't ask me for proof, or why or how, because I won't answer, because that's a huge rabbit hole, but with tons of proof right here on hn, as well as on the rest of the net.
just ... google for it.
/irony intended
>but with tons of proof right here on hn
less than 24 hours after I said that, hot off the hn press, comes:
Google Loses DOJ Antirust Suit Over Search Engine on Phones:
I bet it's the latter.
Could be that he is a decent middle-to-upper manager but fails at strategic vision?
Also, I'm surprised at how trivially easy it was to switch from Google Search to Kagi (virtually from one day to another). I still other Google products (Android, Gmail, Youtube) but was quite surprised at how shallow their moat was (and so maybe I can just ditch Gmail for e.g. Fastmail?)
If anything, his failing is maintaining the right corporate culture (and not his vision).
Would you please share some good links to read about it?
It explains why every tech product is eventually doomed to shittification and opens the doors to competition
Value creation is when you have a new thing and people are adopting. You grow by more people using. Think Google photos offering free unlimited photo storage.
As some point you saturate the market. Then to keep growing you shift to value extraction. Going back to example above, now photos/videos count toward your 15 GB Google limit.
Sundar appears to be an excellent extractor, hence why Google has never done better financially but completely missed the boat on AI. AI is now the new wave of value creation.
What exactly is "the product" here? Google is constantly innovating and its search engine is in no way comparable to the one from 1997. Google Maps, Gmail, YouTube, all have their place in the vast portfolio that circles around ads and search.
And then come other metrics like ads placement revenue etc. and you are blinded. And they really don't care of some rant by one sophisticated engineer, because average person is ok with state of things and does not think about switching to anything installed on the mobile device by default.
Maybe a lot of the users are like me and don't really have a issue? Do you have an example of something the search didn't work for?
so what if Google slowly implodes? Others are working hard to out compete them. All is well in the Universe.
In pile of garbage it is hard to find interesting stuff.
That is why we have HN, reddits. We are trying to find interesting stuff using collective effort. In some cases, this collective effort also is being monetized, so people are disenchanted with such solutions.
You can create your own reddit clones, but it will not work our, because you do not have the user base / count.
I tried collecting domain names at least: https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
In my system I can use the data to find domains, so that when I search for github I find it, when I search for youtube I do not find a ton of minecraft videos.
There is too much separation/abstraction from the people that actually use what they're in charge of. How many times does leadership make shit changes that fuck over the rank and file/boots on the ground?
SearxNG [1]
Also, Bing serves much better results than Google these days. No joke.
What if they know that the results aren't as great as they used to be, but can't do much about it, getting overwhelmed by AI blogspam stuff?
Here's some random lore I saw repeated recently on Blind, left Google a year ago, didn't work on search, not sure how true it is.
The old head, Benedict Gomes, was somewhat against using "the ML algo said so" in the "make a change, test it, see if it has positive impact, deploy" cycle. Thesis was, after N deployed algos you never understood in the first place, you've lost control of the whole thing and can't go back.
The new head, Prabhakar, is widely derided as a leader in the mold of Sundar: don't rock the boat, platitudes, and when moved in as the head, he was all on board with "lets go full bore on ML!!!"
The idea is the guy who built a substantial part of Google-as-we-know-it was pushed out for the guy who "built" Yahoo, and only because he was a yes man (note this was pre-ChatGPT, so it wasn't slavishly AI-for-AIs-sake). Now they've reached the scenario Gomes was afraid of, and there's nothing you can do.
This is such a compelling and easy narrative I wonder how true it is. But there's also ~0 more evidence I can ask for, these are people who definitely work on it discussing it amongst themselves, without outside influence, without any incentive to lie or exaggerate about it.
In general, the problem I saw at Google was it was a powder-keg of high achievers that was shifting mix evermore towards "Ivy League who took the job because its a high paying job", and what I perceived as a rich person thing that it is gauche to care, much less care and raise issues you're not responsible for.
There was an extreme, absurd, aversion to any conflict that let sociopaths and yesmen thrive. In retrospect, I'm not sure this is any different than any other corporation. Before I encountered my resident sociopath, I would have said it was all whiner talk, blaming things on other people. Then I saw it, and started doing peer counselling, and the stories I heard...phew.
They need to come up with a proxy for their signal, because whatever they are using right now just sucks. I switched to bing six months ago, and have had much better results.
They built it that way. Their goal is to earn money and sell ads, not to make their products better.