I don't want conversational AI interfaces. I like search.
If I lose that because it's a losing model, then so be it. But I don't see the point in telling Google to follow somebody else's trend.
They suck in so many ways, but this doesn't add to it. I find this kind of "what have you done for me lately" just a little weird. They have done zillions of crappy things and a dozen earth shaking ones. If the next earth shaking one comes from someone else I don't see any point in waggling my finger at Google over it.
Link are good for search. Where wherever algo leads you to data that may have information you are looking for.
On the other hand, if I just want the answer to a specific question, then links, that we tolerated for so long are bad. They are bad because once presented I now I have to dig and sort through the data to find the answer. It will nearly always be in a different format than the last and take away mental stamina that could be applied to the actual task I am trying to accomplish.
Google, if they stick to links, will continue to be a good search company. The problem is people don’t and did not actually want to search, they simply wanted answers. And thus this is why the entire industry of search will probably go away.
Google is going to have to make a decision. Continue to be search, a product in which demand is dwindling, or be in the business is providing answers.
It is mostly SEO spam, written by LLMs anyway. At that point I prefer the summary from Google.
I am not defending the model, but it is just the reality right now.
- Learning that they had 100K+ employees
- Seeing resumes from people who had spent 5+ years at Google and had a project list with what I would expect from <1 year at a hedge fund or <3 years at a bank
- Learning about the "I want to just serve 5 Terabytes" video/story [0]
- Hiring people away from Google who were, for example, network engineers who turned out to be great SREs with good programming skills
- They just kill off greats apps that people enjoy with little to no notice (granted, keeping stuff around forever ala AWS is its own issue)
In other words, they became a big corporate behemoth and lost a lot of their "spark". Which is sad b/c I remember the early days of using Google search, Google maps etc where it felt like we were all living in the future.
Sure, they are breaking ground in the AI space but 100% agree that it feels like they are on the downward trajectory.
(although other firms have been here and come back so let's see...)
> Gemini 2.5 barely made a ripple in the broader tech conversation.
But my sense (vibes from using it) is it's the very best model right now (though I have not tried the $200 a month exclusive openai offerings)
Google seems to have understood how important a long context length is and what I absolutely love about AI Studio is that it shows how many tokens you've consumed, so that you know that you should start wrapping it up and move to a new chat.
I still use Claude for code but for any general reasoning questions, or even just for Socratic dialogue purposes, Gemini has really blown me away.
It is hard to imagine any LLM being so much better that it is worth going from $0 to $200.
(I'm not saying I don't agree with the complaints.)
1: https://developers.google.com/maps/coverage#countryregion-co...
2: https://support.google.com/mapcontentpartners/answer/144284#...
The monopolization by modern Google is more like it. They're not competitive because they don't have to be.
I just can't work out the economic logic of that. It seems to be then that there are secondary considerations, such as market domination, that provide the value in these transactions. I'm not sure how this argues against my point.
> a large company has the resources and clout to turn a borderline business into a good one
I can't determine why a search and advertising company thought it had the requisite skills to run an ISP or to make it a competitive and profitable business.
> even if it's a large company as sclerotic as Google.
The evidence here is that they failed anyways.
Although they may have been slow to publicly launch anything worthwile in AI, Gemini 2.5 Pro is SOTA.
I mean: AI is the hot topic atm ang Google arrived and are already owning everybody on many metrics.
I wouldn't discount yet a company which powers 70% of the world's smartphones and which knows how runs millions of servers.
They just proved with Gemini 2.5 Pro that the old dog can still learn a new trick. And then teach some to other dogs.
