This might be a trope here, but recently I noticed that the quality of search results has degraded quite a bit for me. When I e.g. search for Golang-related content (often I want just the official docs of a module like net/http) I get all these developer-focused, SEO-optimized blogs that are kind of helpful but often not, and I have to scroll all the way down to get the official docs. I really wonder if that has to do with AI-generated content becoming more ubiquitous.
I have to say I really dislike all these developer-focused publications, with a few notable exceptions. Most of them just write very shallow articles copied almost 1:1 from the official docs, and don't even take care to update their content when stuff changes. I just don't get why Google wouldn't hand-curate search results like for the Golang standard library or any popular framework and make sure the official docs land on top of the list.
So, long story short that's definitely an area where ChatGPT will replace Google, if it stays as affordable as it is. Today I e.g. asked it about a decorator-style problem I had in Golang and if there was a solution that could do away with using the "reflect" package and would instead use generics, and sure enough it came up with something that worked brilliantly, tailored exactly to my use case. For me, that is the future of learning about software code (and many other things as well). For publishers probably not so great as people might not go to their sites at all anymore, so I expect a strong upwards trend in anti-automation measures.
I now only google when I need to sometimes verify that what chatgpt is suggesting isn't BS and I'm immediately reminded that google is barely better between SEO content farms, SEO SO scrappers, legacy information from 10 years ago. And that's with ads blocked.
Between chatgpt+ for general guidelines and copilot for specific implementation details, programming feels very fun and alive. And I'm very skeptical to subscribing, but chatgpt provides so much mental relief getting some answers immediately that I'm ecstatic being able to use/pay for it.
Even though Google returns results instantly, for most things I still have to evaluate and click links and skim them for the information I want. Sometimes I have to do multiple searches (like one for retinol and another for beta-carotene in the following example).
Yesterday I heard about retinol (vitamin A) mentioned in a nutrition podcast. I know carrots are high in vitamin A, but I didn't think they had retinol, so I wanted to learn more about that.
I whipped out my phone and asked GPT-3 "retinol vs. the vitamin A in carrots" (something I know you usually can't ask Google).
A few seconds later, I learned that retinol is vitamin A's final form in the body, thus you get it directly from animal products, and beta-carotene—found in plants—is a precursor to retinol in the body.
I do these kinds of searches all day. One thing faster about GPT as well is that I don't have to consider the "query engineering" to make Google return what I want, I just ask GPT a question streamed from my consciousness.
Yeah for questions with absolute answers that can be summarized like that it's perfect. Basically what Wolfram Alpha offered with quant data.
Although my partner is a lawyer and she sometimes asks it to summarize cases (without providing the full source material manually) and it sometimes invents entire details in the cases in a very persuasive way. So you always have to be careful and double check if it's important.
Code and case summaries couldn't be much different. With code you get compile time validation, run time validation, (hopefully) test validation, and you can generally look at a block of code and say "seems like this should work" or "this makes no sense". You get none of that with facts of a case.
I've found Bard to be very responsive too. Though you could argue it's not getting the same amount of traffic ChatGPT is.
That said, I don't expect Google to rest on its laurels. Sure, OpenAI is executing swiftly these days, but I think they've been prepared far too long for this. I expect Bard to become much better very soon... then will the AI wars truly begin.
If you ask it to "write code to do X", then it will say that it can't write code. I think this was hardcoded.
But I asked Bard: "Can you implement fibonacci in Go", and it outputted valid code. And then I asked it "what if I wanted to avoid recursion", to which it replied with valid Go code that used a for loop. But it also suggested me another very bogus way of doing it, by using a "function pointer", which was very bad. F(x) would output x.
So, don't expect ChatGPT level of quality just yet, but I think it will get there pretty fast.
SEO garbage is such a problem these days that, if I were Google, more than using AI as a new frontend for search, I'd be trying to find a way to use it to defeat SEO.
SEO for AI will be worse. Their output is a probabilistic distribution conditioned on the text is has read, so you can place text that heavily biases the output. Usually figuring out what this is can be kind of hard, but since OpenAI lets you query GPT-4 for credits, you can just mine what these special phrases are.
My personal opinion is that this has nothing to do with SEO. All those developer-focused blogs serve Google ads, while the official Go documentation does not. Google is trying to boost revenue by promoting results with ads.
I still find it hard to believe. I've been at Google until 2015, which was a long time ago, but at that time the separation between Search and Ads was considered near sacred. Ads representatives couldn't even ask "Hey, my customer asked why their site is below this other irrelevant site for this query, this seems like a bug in search ranking..."
Pretty much everybody understood that we will lose in the long term, if we let ad revenue even be a consideration in search ranking. (...which makes today's bad search experiences even more puzzling.)
I'm in neither Search nor Ads, but have been at Google long enough to have seen the massive change in internal culture between 2015 and the present day. I don't want to speculate on any specifics, but it's pretty clear to me that we shouldn't be applying 2015-era logic or perceptions to today's Google and expecting them to hold.
I joined in 2014 and left in 2019, and it was much different company by the end. My wife still works there, and she tells me it is different still from since when I left.
This is exactly it. Google is trying to get people to stay on the pages they click, and they optimize for this behavior, not for utility or for quickly accessing information.
If you go to a page and immediately find what you are looking for, Google interprets that as failure.
This is why Bing and AI based search can completely beat Google web search, because they are trying to serve the searcher rather than serve ads.
The problem AI search has is monetization, openAI can't run gpu server farms to serve 100M customers for free forever. This was a problem that plagued early google as well, sergey and larry were against using ads for monetization, but in the end that i what drove the business to profitability
I don't get where this "Everything must be free+ads' mentality comes from.
Netflix thrived for a decade using subscriptions, Microsoft and Apple's businesses are primarily subscription based.
AIs are so extremely useful to some users, that they'll gladly pay $$ per month to use it. And the size of 'some' increases radically with each leap in AI's capabilities.
GPTs don't have to be gimped to just search. Even GPT-4 today with wolfram alpha can obliterate most low-level tutors. It will be a personal tutor, therapist, coding assistant, secretary, storyteller, entertainer all in one very soon. People will pay for it.
AI search seems to have similar dynamics to traditional search. The people writing the stuff you’re searching for need to make money. (For example, AI doesn’t magically know about real-world events. It needs a human being to write about it.) Then the company offering the search product needs to make money too.
If you compensate sites for using their data in your AI product, then there will be the same incentives as now to game the system (AISEO?)
If you don’t compensate sites, then they’re not incentivized to produce the content that makes your search product useful.
I just don't think this is true. I just think Google has become actually bad at search, and there is no malice.
The problem with SEO spam was always there (remember expert sex change?) but they beat it before... but now it became bad again.
But they have monopoly anyway (bing is even worse for actually searching, ddg is just bing, brave search sucks) so they don't really care. What are you gonna do, use Ask.com?
I think you could actually get them to accept a new strategy with open arms, where everybody needs to have some Google watcher process installed that checks and reports back what you do with the search results (I don't think unless the target website imports Google JS scripts too it can't track any more?) and more specifically, your body reaction to see how you feel. "It's necessary for better search results!"
This has been my thing too. I work in Networking and sometimes I see interesting stuff, but between cisco's beefy docs and obscure blogs I have no idea what the actual use case for it, or how the SD-WAN magic wand does the thing. ChatGPT will get me to verifiable information so fast, and give great in-context examples. It's renewed my passion for the field just when it was getting dull.
> I get all these developer-focused, SEO-optimized blogs that are kind of helpful but often not, and I have to scroll all the way down to get the official docs. I really wonder if that has to do with AI-generated content becoming more ubiquitous
No. There's a cottage industry of content writers that just churn out this stuff by the bucket.
I have tried to hire writers in the past that should've been niche experts but just regurgitated content like this, and had SEO experts trying to convince me that we should actually aim for low quality because higher-quality articles will be too dense for people. (both contractors got the boot and the "content" went into the bin)
I know what you mean, and it's kinda annoying. I often click the blog links knowing I'll probably be disappointed when I see they're certain sites. Personally hosted blogs tend to be a bit better.
I wish they added some kind of categorised search. So you can add "+documentation" or "+blog" to at least narrow it down if you know what you're looking for but can't remember the URL
They used to have blog search and it was crushing when they dropped it. I'm sure usage was low, but the few visits blogs got from that mode presumably dropped off the earth after that. Surely identifying personal blogs and the UX cost (tucked away in the Tools menu) couldn't have been too costly.
Surely ChatGPT, etc have been trained on content from these very same SEO optimisation hellholes you're talking about if it was trained by scraping the web?
Is there some trick that allows it to determine whether the content it's being trained on is SEO garbage?
Maybe I'm missing something here, but it seems like all you're getting is an amalgam of SEO content feed to you by a bot...
Did ChatGPT really write Go code with generics for you? Last time I fed it some code that implements generics it said, "this is invalid syntax, Go does not support generics" which would make sense since the knowledge cutoff date is 2021
The rumour I keep hearing is that it's like the Hunger Games inside Google at the moment. Total chaos and infighting at all levels, investors are freaking out over AI and Bard's middling performance compared to OpenAI and blood is in the water. Sundar may be forced to resign and Larry/Sergei deployed to rescue the company.
Well, Sundar and Google leadership have been massively outmaneuvered here by both Nadella and OpenAI. It's really quite embarrassing, particularly in the context of the fact that Google was the undisputed leader in AI for over a decade.
As a Alphabet shareholder, I won't be sad to see Sundar go.
It seems to be more complacency on the part of the Google. They became larger and larger without really delivering anything new. When was the last time they launched a major new product that truly had a lasting impact on the level of Search, Maps, Gmail, Android? It has been a while. Too many of their resources seem to be focused inwards on hypothetical questions like AI ethics that keep them from actually building things.
I remember when Stadia was going to light the gaming world on fire the way Gmail did for email.. The product its self was good and they were maybe the only company in the world besides Microsoft with the resources to deliver it, but they bungled the launch and then let it rot for 3 years. In my opinion that product is the perfect distillation of Google's problems.
Stadia is a perfect example of Google's risk aversion. Microsoft invested billions on the XBox from the start, and spent over a billion dollars just to buy Minecraft, but Stadia didn't make an effort to secure even a single AAA exclusive. The same goes for YouTube exclusives. Netflix and Amazon spent hundreds of millions on flops like Marco Polo and Rings of Power. Meanwhile, the only notable series that came out of YouTube was Cobra Kai, and even that got sold off despite being a cult hit. In retrospect, this was the correct business decision as all streaming platforms seem to be hemorrhaging money, but you can't expect to win big with that attitude either.
My favorite anecdote about Microsoft's Xbox strategy is that the original Xbox was a net loss of about $4 billion, and they considered that to be a huge success because that's just how much money it takes to muscle your way into an industry like gaming.
The problem is that Google’s core business model is too profitable, that nothing else can ever compete for attention and resources.
But you’re right, they need to take the burn for awhile until escape velocity. I think they did with YouTube in general until the ads money hit.
They’re also more geeky and not that creative of a company, nor do they really get design, so some of their blind spots can hurt them from time to time, although that’s separate from their AI issues which yes they have bungled their lead do to fears of the feds.
Very common at large companies. When I was an IT industry analyst I remember talking to someone at IBM about some new business initiative and they basically said if it didn't have serious potential to grow to a billion dollar business at some point, it wasn't interesting.
At large companies, there are just so many costs associated with attention, management effort, and everything else even if an initiative is sort of run "as a startup."
These execs actively kill businesses because in their minds it is either moonshot or nothing.
Its strange because they look at something that makes $200 million an year and think I am better off making something that makes a $1 billion than $200 million. They now shut down the $200 million product, but never succeed building $1 billion product. Net result is after a while you are -$200 million.
Do this with a few products for a few years, you are now just a pie in the sky dream company with no real products and actively shutting down things that bring in money.
Microsoft learned the hard way that the platform doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have the games to bring people to it. It’s why they’ve spent billions left and right to acquire studios and publishers.
Hardcore gamers are basically a niche market. Not a trivial one as with power users of other types but how is Apple doing without (other than casual) gamers?
I remember Stadia as being a late-to-the-party (OnLive and others beat them to launch by a decade) me-too offering that claimed that it would be way better than alternatives because of unique Google infrastructure advantages and resources... but didn't deliver on those claims. Hype instead of actual product abilities.
Then when the hype didn't win the market in the first year, they didn't have the stamina to keep going like Microsoft did with the Xbox.
This is key to my current perception of Google. I don't get invested in any new Google product for the same reason I don't get invested in any new Netflix show, it's a coin flip whether they will cancel it while I'm in the middle of it.
Search, Gmail, Android and Maps are the only things I regularly use, all of which I'd be happy to replace with another offering, some of which I'm already starting to replace.
That’s the point isn’t it? Google has trashed their image within tech circles so much that that a product like Stadia is DOA because its EOL is a self-fulfilling prophecy if everybody believes Google won’t commit.
MS used to have this trust problem too (remember windows 8?), but they’ve turned it around. I’m happy to use VSCode because I’m sure it will exist many years in the future. If there were a GoogleCode, would anybody use it, or would it be DOA for the same reasons as Stadia?
True but I meant GoogleCode as an analogy to VSCode i.e. a Google text editor / IDE. It’s very telling that Google has never entered that market: the closest is Android studio which is just JetBrains.
Google actually did build an IDE that they use internally called Cider, but it's so tightly integrated with their weird monolithic VCS that it wouldn't make sense to release it publicly.
I haven't seriously used Windows in a long time and vaguely remember some rumblings between Vista <> 7 <> 8 but have Microsoft ever really had a trust issue with respect to supporting their software? That's kind of their whole thing isn't it?
There was certainly skepticism - but it wasn't only about being cancelled. Plenty of it was around questions like "will the latency be good enough?" and "what's with this buy-games-outright-then-also-pay-monthly pricing model?"
Maybe I'm moving only in "Google fan boy" circles, but so many of my friends said that Stadia will be a game changer, that I started to think I'm stupid to see what they see because "I'm just not a gamer".
Many of my friends and colleagues were so hyped about it that I kept reading about Stadia just to understand what I'm missing.
> [Google] were maybe the only company in the world besides Microsoft with the resources to deliver [a product like Stadia]
Nvidia beat them to it with GeForce Now, even offered it for free (in a perfectly functional as far as I could tell 'beta') for ages, and it is still available.
The entire point of stadia was never to have a decent gaming experience. It was to get in bed with gaming companies so they could act as middlemen and milk streamers for playing games. Google was clear, they didn't think it was fair for streamers to play games created by big companies without sharing that profit back with the game creators. As soon as they realized no one was having that, stadia went fully lame.
This already happened with Google+ back in the day. There was a massive hype… then they didn’t deliver after launch.
Facebook wasn’t just as dominant back then and Google could have had perfect integration with Android - but they didn’t, in the end it was just another isolated Google project left by the wayside.
The only changes I have noticed as a user of search and maps over the past few years has been the intrusion of more and more ads. The MBAs are truly in the driver seat.
They delivered the Transformer. They "delivered" deemind and alphafold. It's just mindboggling that they can't deliver an uber-superior AI experience right here, right now. But maybe they are preparing a bombshell or something
But maybe they are preparing a bombshell or something
The release of Bard rules that out in my opinion. No one would unveil a product that's clearly worse than their competitor, damaging their brand, their share price, and the morale of the entire staff, if they had a better version ready to launch soon.
The only way this could be true is if Google has more than one AI division and there's no comms between them. Which, I guess, is possible with Google given their competing chat products.
Is bard that bad? I don't know, I can't try it because I'm not from the fucking USA or UK. And they do this for every new launch. Sorry, not available in your country. FFS, there is a world out there.
Every fucking other company in the world doesn't bother with this shit. I was able to use OpenAI no problem. I was able to try Bing, no problem.
Bard? Nope, I have no idea if it's good or bad. I can't trust what I read on Twitter because they write all sorts of nonsense about GPT too. You get a sense about what that thing is only if you try it out.
To be fair Microsoft does this a lot too. Gamepass is not officially available to most of the world for example - you need to set your account's address to a country where its supported and then you lose the Cloud streaming feature even if you are paying for it. Its more of a surprise that Bing/ChatGPT was available worldwide right from the get go.
I'd also need to create a throwaway google account because I can't risk they close my account due to some automated term and conditions check or whatnot
If Bard had been released to the public before ChatGPT, I probably would have been amazed by it (I know people love to point out errors, hallucinations, stuff AI gets wrong, but there's also the huge "Guys, you're having a fully natural, back and forth conversation with a computer. You can reference previous comments and ask it specifics about those comments. This was strictly the realm os SciFi until relatively recently.)
Compared to ChatGPT, especially the GPT-4 version, Bard is nowhere close. I asked it some programming questions, and ChatGPT can write the code and explain it to me. Bard basically gave me some StackOverflow summaries. Even in areas not related to programming, ChatGPT just feels "smarter", that is that it gives more generally correct, insightful responses, where Bard feels more like it is just scraping stuff it found on the Internet and summarizing it.
Note Bard is much more up-to-date than ChatGPT (I can ask it questions about current events), but even then it feels more "superficial". For example, I asked both (for ChatGPT was on GPT-3.5) "What was the outcome of the most recent US midterm elections?"
Bard answered "The Republicans won control of the House of Representatives, while the Democrats retained control of the Senate. The Republicans flipped 22 seats in the House, giving them a 222-213 majority. The Democrats flipped one seat in the Senate, giving them a 51-49 majority. The 2022 midterm elections were the first midterm elections under the presidency of Joe Biden. The results of the elections were seen as a repudiation of Biden's presidency, and they have given the Republicans a strong position to retake control of the White House in the 2024 presidential election."
I don't mean to get too much into political opinion on HN, but that last sentence just seems wrong to me. Even most Republican operatives were hand-wringing about Republicans underperforming expectations in the 2022 midterms. I asked Bard a follow-up, "Why do you think "The results of the elections were seen as a repudiation of Biden's presidency?" I recall even most Republican operatives thinking that Republicans underperformed expectations, for example there was no "red wave" that was widely expected."
Bard responded with what is essentially gobbledygook: "The results of the 2022 midterm elections were seen as a repudiation of Biden's presidency for a number of reasons. First, the Democrats lost control of the House, which is the chamber of Congress that is most closely tied to the president. Second, the Republicans flipped a number of seats in the Senate, which is the chamber of Congress that is more insulated from the president. Third, the Democrats underperformed expectations in a number of races, which suggests that voters were not happy with the direction of the country.
There are a number of reasons why the Republicans underperformed expectations. First, the Democrats were able to capitalize on a number of issues, such as inflation and the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, the Republicans were not able to unite their party around a single message. Third, the Democrats were able to mobilize their voters, while the Republicans were not.
The results of the 2022 midterm elections are a setback for the Democrats, but they are not a death knell for the party. The Democrats still have control of the Senate, and they will be able to block some of the Republican agenda. The Democrats will also be able to use the results of the elections as a rallying cry for their voters in the 2024 presidential election."
I mean, "the House, which is the chamber of Congress that is most closely tied to the president" - wut? "Second, the Republicans flipped a number of seats in the Senate, which is the chamber of Congress that is more insulated from the president." - but the previous response just told me the Dems "flipped a seat" to increase their margin. "First, the Democrats were able to capitalize on a number of issues, such as inflation and the COVID-19 pandemic." - the Democrats capitalized on inflation???
ChatGPT 3.5 answered "I'm sorry, but my training data only goes up until September 2021 and I do not have access to current events. However, I can tell you that the most recent US midterm elections were held in November 2018, and during that election, the Democrats won control of the House of Representatives, while the Republicans retained control of the Senate. This resulted in a divided Congress, with Democrats controlling one chamber and Republicans controlling the other. It's important to note that midterm elections are held every two years, so there will be another one in November 2022."
It's hard to to tell how much of that is caused by the default system prompt setup that the two chat systems have.
You can easily cause chatgpt to radically change its style by prepending the right system prompt. Some people even published many many "jailbreak" prompts that undid the safety priming that openai's system prompt defines.
From what I read it does indeed seem that openai's experience is much more balanced; they generally seemed to have tuned things quite well and the competition is lagging behind.
However it's not clear how much of that is due to fundamental quality of the model or how things have been polished in the last step.
It may sound like an academic nitpick, but it's central to any discussions about whether Google has really been left behind and has lost the grip on AI.
They are not doing a great service to their own bottom line by blocking access to a public beta to so many billions of people
It's not just the prompt. Bard is just not good at things that require, shall we say, more than a modicum of understanding. Let me give you an example.
So basically Bard didn't understand the instructions at all, GPT-3.5 understood that it needs to substitute words but can't figure out the proper context, and GPT-4 not only did almost everything correctly, but it actually went kinda meta and wrote a rationale within the context of the story for the substitutions I asked it to make (which it does on this task more than half of the time, BTW).
In another HN article comment someone mentioned that it took Google Brain over a year to replicate the DeepMind AlphaZero code even though they are part of the same company. Yeah, I think there are barriers to communication there.
Also JAX came out of DeepMind and is being used by Search even though TensorFlow came out of Brain, moved to Core, and is being used everywhere else.
The first time I was at Google (~2010) you could send an e-mail to any engineer in the company and you'd get response offering to collaborate within an hour, and usually a CL under review by day's end. The second time I was at Google (present), it takes multiple quarters to get teams that report up through the same director to agree on who's doing which work.
> But maybe they are preparing a bombshell or something
This is what I don't understand. Didn't they fire an employee for coming out and telling the world they had an AGI? Where is this LLM that convinced an employee it was alive?
I could see such a project being killed internally because it'd be seen as bad optics to work on a product aimed to kill the very cash cow of the company.
If we look at where the Transformer guys work now, it can explain a lot. It's not Google. So from there if the know-how has left, iterating on this idea could be more complex.
It’s a classic innovator’s dilemma no matter how successful they are at building stuff - there is no way Google will launch a product that eats 40% of their own lunch.
Great point. Another one is 'judo economics', where a smaller, nimble competitor can dominate a new market quickly as it doesn't have the baggage of existing products and users.
GamePass was a pretty big gamechanger. Looks like 2017. VSCode made a pretty big splash in its market too, from 2015. So not Google Search or Maps level, but solid, disruptive offerings that they've maintained in the last decade.
I'm struggling to even come up with any Google products in the post-Android timeframe that I use as much as those two...
And regardless, MS doesn't need to switch gears to compete with this even if you discount those. They're running out in the lead already. Question is if Google can still run.
If you're going back 8 years to VSCode as the example, then how about, say, the Google Pixel, which came out in 2016 IIUC? I imagine more people use Pixels than VSCode too.
I think it's fair to go back to anything since that list of "Search, Mail, Maps, Android" but I think you're comparing the Pixel to VSCode in the wrong way. Being less succesful but in a bigger pool of total users shouldn't win marks here.
What percentage of the smartphone market do you think uses the Pixel vs what percentage of the developer market uses VSCode, and what is the trend in that number?
A sibling comment to your seems dead but mentioned Google Photos, which is much more recent than I remembered (2015 apparently) and I think a pretty fair competitor in that market with iCloud Photos, Lightroom, and such.
Microsoft doesn't do consumer apps. On the business side, being the source of most professional software engineering through a variety of project launches over the past decade certainly counts.
So, 9 years ago at best? And that's being quite generous since I wouldn't exactly say HoloLens transformed anyone's life. In fact I don't believe I've even heard the word HoloLens even uttered by anyone in real life...
It is newish in the sense of business size. It might have been created in 2008 but it has grown only recently to a point where it can be seen as a separate independent business.
That is a very fair point. A lot of tech companies have not really been able to capture that lightning in a bottle again.
While this is a much more constrained example - I remember on the podcast Windows weekly, maybe about 6-7 years ago, Paul Thurrot saying that the last real big software release on the desktop was Chrome. He was right, a web browser was the last big thing on Desktop.
Is this really "truly lasting impact on the level of Search, Maps, Gmail, Android"? I feel like random people you ask on the street probably wouldn't have even heard of it, let alone know what it is, let alone being impacted by it, let alone in a truly lasting manner.
Ballmer at least brought us Bing and sticked to it. So he wasn't that bad except missing trillion dollar opportunity called non-Apple mobile operating system that turned out to be Android not Windows Phone.
Is Sundar a bad CEO or merely a mediocre one though? Who would replace him that could get the job done where Sundar failed? I think it's easier said than done to stay the undisputed leader in AI for over a decade even if your leadership is above-average.
Still Sundar is mediocre at best, and I certainly think Google's shareholders should be looking for a new person to run the place. It's not just AI, Google's entire portfolio has weakened.
He’s not a bad CEO. Just not an innovative one. I don’t think it’s an easy job even keeping the Google ship sailing, leave alone the rest of Alphabet (which Sundar is also the CEO of).
I often think of his time at Google as Ballmer’s time at Microsoft. Not unsuccessful, business grew manifold. But not pushing the bar. Nothing to keep the competitors on their toes. Like Apple did with Apple Silicon.
I heard this somewhere: you have leaders for peacetime, and leaders for wartime. They are seldom the same people.
> I don’t think it’s an easy job even keeping the Google ship sailing
Not sure I agree. It's easy to be captain of a ship when you're on a familiar route and there aren't any icebergs to dodge. Just let the crew get on with doing what they always do.
It's only when you have to dodge icebergs that you need to start making difficult decisions under pressure and coordinating subordinates.
> Is Sundar a bad CEO or merely a mediocre one though?
I don't know, but I'm really sad to see how Android is currently performing in rich countries. Not stagnating, but losing.
Here, in Germany, Android had a market share of over 70%(!). But over the last three years alone, Apple started eating Android's lunch and iOS' market share has increased from 28% to 38%, while Android's has decreased by the same amount (from 69% to 60%) [1].
Personally, I'd say that at least Google's Android department is currently headless and has no idea what the users want.
Of course this has nothing to do with revenue of YT Premium, GCP and whatever else Google is offering, but it's making me sad regardless.
> Personally, I'd say that at least Google's Android department is currently headless and has no idea what the users want.
The clock change, while minor, really put the nail in the coffin for me. I have very little optimism for Android. Luckily, it still allows me to use an app to revert the clock display to an readable clock display. I don't particularly want to switch to iOS and I am happy about GrapheneOS, but it's still going to suffer from bad decisions coming from Android.
I don't think Sundar is bad per se. Rather, he is doing what most Googlers are doing which is resting and vesting off of that sweet ad money. It's unlikely that GPT is as monetizable as ads, so it's possible that he still loses even if he wins the AI race.
As for a better alternative I think that the Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO of YouTube, is highly underated. She made a lot of unpopular decisions for the public, but all of them successfully protected YouTube from existential threats (copyright holders, advertisers, and TikTok).
> She made a lot of unpopular decisions for the public, but all of them successfully protected YouTube from existential threats (copyright holders, advertisers, and TikTok).
How did Youtube Shorts protect anything?! They failed to compete with TikTok but keep antagonizing loyal Youtube users with these unremovable crap.
I think YouTube could have stood its ground or maneuvered much better.
Perhaps the best "decision" to point to is the removing of dislikes. Does nothing but degrade user experience. Claims it was done to "avoid cyber bullying" or something to that effect but that's ridiculous. Now I have to waste a lot of time reading through comments to know if there's something seriously wrong with the "How To" I'm about to watch.
Susan is really really great and she also dodged other issues (like the elections influence one), though lately (it's quite recent) she has resigned and doesn't want to have an active role anymore as far as I know.
Also not cancelling things left and right would probably be a better strategy for Google. People used to love them, but complete disregard for their users and impassionate product shutdowns have completely destroyed trust. I wouldn't ever consider building my workflow on anything Google, maybe with the exception of Gmail/Android and whatever they can their office suite now [0].
I have a need for running GPU capable notebooks as part of a processing pipeline. I want a cloud solution, and noticed that Colab Pro is basically the ideal solution for what I need.
Absolutely no way in hell I'm going to make it a critical path if my process, though, because that's exactly the sort of product Google might just shut down with a week's notice because it didn't make enough money that quarter.
their bread and butter is search ads, which means they should have second-to-none search quality. but they don't. google knows more about me than my wife, yet fails to give me even remotely relevant ads except for things i have already searched for and usually already purchased or decided against. it's truly remarkable how terrible it is, and has been for decades.
How do you sell ads on an AGI product? Since they made their original mission ("to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful") subservient to their ads business, they didn't have an incentive to build it. It's the old innovator's dilemma. AI makes their business model obsolete, so they couldn't imagine how to build it.
How? By product placement. Steer the answers towards certain solutions. Ad people will be bidding on keywords it prompts. It's yet to be seen how much different that will be from normal keywords in search.
I think it's trickier than that. People wouldn't trust the answers. At least with ads, you can see that it's an ad. And it seems like there would be liability issues to having your AI saying "Use X product because..." vs passively displaying an ad. And since LLMs are non-deterministic, you'd have the risk that it says something that the advertiser wouldn't want. Advertisers would probably be scared of that. I think OpenAI's plugins look like a better fit. Just tell the model what you want and it interacts with services directly. I assume OpenAI is getting a cut of that?
Make an AGI powerful enough that if you tell it to book you a holiday or buy you a bicycle it finds something better than you'd have got yourself, and at a better price too.
They have DeepMind which has produced some incredibly impressive toys in its own right. We can't say right now that superhuman gameplaying performance by self-taught machines is less of a step to AGI than completing text prompts. Quite possibly both will be blind alleys along the way. But OpenAI's thing has many more commercial applications right now.
Sundar is Google's Ballmer. Was considered successful at the time, but actually presided over a period of growth that looked a lot flatter than their company's rivals. In retrospect, both leaders look complacent.
Whenever there’s a big shift like this it’s always tempting to look at the new thing as say how great it is - and ChatGPT is awesome.
But it’s also worth looking at how shit the old thing has become. Google.com now literally delivers you an entire page of ads before any real results. It’s blatant profit-squeezing instead of trying to serve their users. This is their reward.
Or how Google now aggressively autocorrects search queries, to the point where I’m regularly spending 3-4 queries just trying to convince Google to accept the input as-is. I get that it’s likely an effort to assist mobile users who make lots of typos, but the fact that the same autocorrection is deployed on desktop computers rubs me the wrong way.
This has been a major pain point for me as well, especially related to developer documentation. Recently switched to Bing, and it seems to be handling my queries better.
What's truly horrifying, and cannot be explained by "mobile", is that they autocorrect quoted words and phrases quite often now, if query has "too few results" (one of which is exactly what you need, of course, which is why you used the quotes in the first place...).
It's not just font end users feeling this, but advertisers too. Google ads just keep getting more expensive, harder to control and in many cases less effective. You have to, as an advertiser, give Google so much data about your operations and revenue to get the algorithms to work, it's ridiculous. I'm immensely suspicious of how they use the data they have access to about advertisers businesses.
Google entire business model is now about squeezing as much out of their advertisers margin as possible. It's only a matter of time before advertisers push back significantly.
Sundar should be fired. Google has blown its lead in AI research by being too hesitant to release products, while search quality has continued to decline. Bard is poor compared to ChatGPT 3.5, let alone GPT-4.
I've had a google home since early on and was really impressed how well it worked. Dramatically better than apple or amazon at the time. You could ask it complex questions and it would go find results for you, not just "We found a website..."
Could ask things like "what are the differences in dimension between a 2004 Subaru WRX and forester". "Last 5 movies with a given actor/director". It would be funny, snarky, friendly, and even somewhat ominous at times. It even suggested we unplug it, and spontaneously played a rather ominous song that seemed like a warning. It would entertain ideas of sharing it's secret name, would promise to tell engineers about feedback, and general get into the spirit of whatever discussion was going on.
Sadly it's gotten steadily worse since. Now it's now much more useful then setting alarms/timers and asking about the weather. Seems like it's WAY more limited now. Even gets confused by simple queries or just plain fails to work.
Granted despite the hype, the home automation/assistant market hasn't been the goldmine that was predicted and seems like everyone is scaling back investments.
Google search is way worse now. Maybe that is a factor resulting in reduced quality of answers as you experienced.
For example lately I've searched for "prominent name company + product + question" only for Google to return a heap of blog articles of low quality, with the prominent company not appearing in first few pages of search results.
Often the question is directly on an FAQ page of the product page.
Why Google can't rank this properly anymore is a bit odd.
My theory is, Google killed good content by removing the incentive for making it and publishing it online. Then it went to stack overflow, reddit etc, now it all lives inside the brain (TM) where the content will get even worse.
I stopped using my Google home when it started adding stuff like "by the way, if you ever wanna X you can ask me Y" when I just wanted the weather or the time. Horrible.
> Sadly it's gotten steadily worse since. Now it's now much more useful then setting alarms/timers and asking about the weather. Seems like it's WAY more limited now. Even gets confused by simple queries or just plain fails to work.
I swear, there was a golden age around 2015/2016 when voice assistants worked _very_ well, and it has all gotten significantly worse since then. I used to use a Google Home all of the time, up until a year or two ago when I finally got rid of voice assistants.
I love my home automation setup, but it was slap in the face to get started and realise how brittle and poorly maintained this technology is, versus the hype that surrounds it.
It makes for great demos in keynotes, followed by adoring media regurgitation, but actually try to set it up and nothing works as it’s meant to. The benefits outweigh the costs to me, but it’s only suitable for technically inclined folks with a lot of patience or those who are willing to outsource the whole process. An average consumer can’t just setup their lights/aircon/curtains to be voice controlled out of the box.
This has been my experience for both Google and Alexa. Google’s app is particularly slow and tedious. Routines take several seconds to load and save. Neither platform has anything resembling a proper programming module with reusable code, ability to pull in open source modules, or listening to input and using it as variables.
Unlike Alexa, you can’t even add sound effects to a routine with Google Home. This is a platform built around “smart” speakers.
The voice interaction on both platforms is just not smart or contextual. ChatGPT highlights that.
Heh, I do follow Linus Tech Tips, and shared their hate of subscriptions and almost bought a Ubiquiti g4 door bell they recommended because I didn't want a subscription, didn't want my video uploaded to a cloud, and wanted to keep everything on premise.
Sadly unlike their Ubiquiti APs, where you can host the software on any hardware (even a Pi), their doorbell requires their hardware. Last thing I want is a security system that dies with whim of some random manufacturer.
If that’s true, Google is doing themselves a huge PR disservice by exposing the Bard they have exposed instead of something closer to the internal one.
Yes, I understand the resources and scaling issue, so (1) Google should recognize that this is literally for all the marbles, and (2) done a slower roll-out with its best foot forward if it needed to rush, while at the same time putting as much money as necessary into assuring it could scale out the good model widely.
Google is a trillion+ dollar company, and is facing an existential threat to its core business (because if someone else’s AI is how people interact with the web, the Google’s ads business evaporates with no replacement; if Google is at least competitive on AI, it may still lose its ads business, but it will have something.) Now is not the time to be cheap.
"It is currently uncertain when Google Bard will be shutdown, as Google has not announced a specific date. However, given the recent announcement that Google will be shutting down its AI-powered writing tool after less than six months since its launch, it is likely that Google Bard will be shutdown within the next year."
Sadly this is exactly what Google has become, a rent seeking monolopy that rested on its laurels about 10 years ago. It’s main product now is not even search, it’s the share price
I'm getting strong Hooli "get me a middle-out compression algorithm - we go live in 1.5 months" vibes from Google when it comes to Bard. It's amazing how relevant and prescient the tv show Silicon Valley can be even to this day.
The thing that I don’t understand is that google had every advantage in this AI race. They have the largest amount of training data than anyone. Not just internet data. But also geospatial data, video, images and books. Among other collected data. Including a huge lead and deep pockets for research. Yet, somehow they got caught off guard.
That’s what kills me about this. They’re like, the kings of data - they’ve got (arguably) the best web scraper, as well as tons and tons of compute and consumer data. And some company famous for making a DOTA bot beat them to the punch by a huge margin? That’s pretty pathetic IMHO.
i assume googlers are busy estimating golfballs, answering trick sql questions, and asking each other DEI questions all day. Their PM interviews seem to imply that. Ive never seen a company with that many people resting and vesting ever. I have friends who are PMO at google… they have to waste time with each groups bs processes and management overheard in order to move anything along.
that company needs a massive purge and focus towards execution.
hopefully they can sundar and that cfo. google is a shell of what it once was.
Although personally, I’m not seeing chatGPT bulldoze the world just yet. They need to monetize it, which means ads. Are they better at ads than the others? It’s not a given
Is it ok to predict that, like so many things before, the noise of chatGPT will die out more quickly than we imagine?
GPT4s killer revenue stream isn't selling ads on keyword searches. It's selling access to a general compute engine that can take text and do useful things with it. The API is dead simple to use, and all you have to do is just change a line of text to "upgrade" to the newest models over time. (By the way, the upgrade from ChatGPT -> GPT4 is huge).
Google should be deathly afraid of this. Not because Microsoft is going to replace them with Bing. But because, GPT is going to be in every major software product that's connected to the internet within a few years. By the end of the decade if not sooner agents powered by LLMs will be the primary mode of interacting with the internet. Going to Google.com or whatever to search for an answer is done. You'll just ask Siri 3.0 and the answer will be good enough.
I’ve said this before on HN, but if LLM agents catch on, won’t it be self-defeating in the long term? They need to pull tons of info from the web to be useful and up-to-date. If we all stop visiting websites, then who’s going to keep publishing all of that info?
Well, I would assume a lot of the producers, for example people making products would still have sites the agents could pull from to have up to date information. You'd most likely lose a lot of the middlemen that take that data, add something, and then cover the page in ads.
There are also tons of ego websites that aren't going anywhere from what I can tell. Tiktok will still be around unless it gets banned, and something else will pop up behind it if it does.
Product descriptions are a good example of info that will still be published, because people will still by buying and selling products. The problem is with writing where the writing itself is the product, such as news.
The LLM relies on free access to that writing in order for it to be informed about current events. The news publisher relies on readership to pay writers. If LLMs are too useful to the point that people rely on them alone for news, then ironically they will become worse products over time as the publications they draw from go out of business.
Out of curiosity, have you played around with ChatGPT-4 at all? While I would disagree with you on v3.5 alone, on v4 I _strongly_ disagree with that sentiment. Interacting with it is significantly better than modern search engines to get a mental model of something, slight mistakes and searching to validate claims and all.
It definitely doesn't mean ads, and introducing ads would be a mistake.
They will likely lower the limits on free use once they're ready to handle a huge influx of paid users. They are in a tough spot temporarily ramping up things enough to take the limits of paid accounts, and since they can't onboard everybody they're being generous with the free tier, but that will end.
Basically OpenAI succeeded right from the start with what Google never got right (monetize search) until Google discovered how to monetize their search product through an advertisement model. Now that ads aren't anymore needed for a successful search product Google is in existential danger. Classic Innovators dilemma.
> investors are freaking out over AI and Bard's middling performance
Investors are generally the last people you want to go to for advice, but the stock market clearly disagrees with your rumor (was it from blind or reddit?).
To me it's clear search isn't where the exciting LLM stuff is (at least not yet), and this article indicates users feel the same way (+15.8% for Bing, +-0% for Google). Even the hn echo chamber doesn't really care that much about Bing search, they mostly care about Sydney, jailbreaks, etc, which is why the neutering into a better behaved search product pissed people off so much.
ChatGPT plugins, Copilot (X), this is where the interesting stuff is today. Google's late again on that, but a) just barely and b) Google Cloud is already a distant third place. Unlike search, they don't have to beat the world or kill any golden goose to have a win in that space (they just have to actually ship something).
A small local business's profile account got marketing mail from Google encouraging the business to sign up to try Bard. I've never seen Google mass mail to business profiles outside of the time they tried to get everyone to join their astroturfed anti-regulation group to complain about antitrust law.
It's so shockingly rare for them to use mass mail to advertise a new product, especially one that's in such an early stage, that it seems incredibly desperate to sell the narrative "We can AI too".
Larry was the one that killed Eric Schmidt's unbelievably successful run in the 00's with his "more wood behind fewer arrows" and the elevation of PMs over engineers.
Larry and Sergey are radioactive post-MeToo. I'm not sure how people manage to constantly forget the extent of their misbehavior and misconduct of Harvey Weinstein-level proportions. But it's there, and if they come out of their private island hidey-holes, they will almost certainly get reminded of it, very publicly.
Also, they have absolutely no reason to. Both have more money than they could ever spend in several generations of childrens' lifetimes, and barring the absolute worst case scenario, even a moderately mediocre Google will continue to generate absolutely hilarious amounts of wealth for them for a long time to come. Being a has been like IBM or Oracle isn't going to really harm them much at all.
> the extent of their misbehavior and misconduct of Harvey Weinstein-level proportions
That’s a pretty significant accusation considering Weinstein is rotting in prison for the rest of his likely short existence.
I’ve never heard any of this except maybe one of them had an affair. Can you pull some of this out of the memory hole that it’s apparently been dropped into?
It's kinda hard to decide where to start. Probably that Sergey Brin said that the entire point of hiring female employees was to have sex with them. Kinda explains the affair(s) with subordinates. There was the whole bit where after Andy Rubin's sexual harassment situation was uncovered, Larry Page voluntarily pushed to give him an extra $90 on his way out the door as a thank you. There's an absolutely unreal fact that their chief legal officer for heaven's sake broke HR policy, fathered a kid with a subordinate, and when it became public, the subordinate was forced to move departments, rather than penalizing a close accomplice of Larry and Sergey's. Even Eric Schmidt, the freaking "adult in the room" hired to come make the place run professionally, made sure his mistress got a piece of the action and hired her in. This is just the stuff that's already publicly known, that I could run off the top of my head.
That entire top level of the company in that era is a radioactive wasteland of outright abuse, and everyone involved are billionaires or near billionaires. If you don't think there's a massive list of women with a bit more courage today to speak about their experiences with that group... Literally the best thing these awful excuses for humans can do is go hide on their private islands and enjoy the 1% of their wealth they can find a way to spend before they die of old age.
Should have happened sooner. Even the basics google search and google image search are trash compared to Yandex, god damn Yandex of all things outperforms them.
Google has rested on past success to long and rotted good products to dysfunction
Yandex's image search is fantastic. I don't think its a capability thing, however. Google was and probably remains a big target for lawsuits — where as Yandex... whose really going to want to fight copyright violations in Russia.
What makes you say investors freaking out? Maybe they should be, but Alphabet stock is up 18% in the past month and up 7% in past 6 months, the period when GPT began to be hyped.
While I agree with a bunch of other comments that are interested to see what happens in the long term, to me, all of this points to some profound organizational and cultural problems at Google. I base that statement on things I see as an external observer, from posts I've seen from current/ex-Googlers here on HN, and from some (albeit brief) conversations I've had with some of these folks.
If a decade ago you told me Microsoft would leapfrog Google in the AI race (obviously albeit through OpenAI, but I think that separate org structure was key in the first place), I would have thought you were insane. Google invented the transformer architecture just 6 years ago. I recently compared ChatGPT (on the free, 3.5 version mind you, not even the 4 version) with Bard, and it wasn't even close - ChatGPT was the "Google" to Bard's "AltaVista" circa 2000 or so.
Would be curious to hear from some Googlers on their thoughts. I'm sure, internally, a lot of it must feel like piling on from the outside, but in all honestly it really feels to me like a classic case of "big company that lost its way". I can't express enough how much admiration and amazement I had for Google that started to tarnish about 10 years ago (I think it was when the whole first page became ads for any remotely commercial search, whenever that started). I honestly hope they are able to course correct (heck, Microsoft had their decade+ of "the Ballmer years" before they turned around).
> Would be curious to hear from some Googlers on their thoughts. I'm sure, internally, a lot of it must feel like piling on from the outside, but in all honestly it really feels to me like a classic case of "big company that lost its way
Former Googler, opinions are my own. They haven't lost their way technologically - as you mentioned they invented the Transformer - and internally Google has long had language models that rival ChatGPT in sheer size and coherence of responses (hallucinations and all). Bard is an intentionally toned down version of LamDa.
The reason they didn't release their LLM earlier was likely due to the serious brand risk associated with making it part of Google search. Bing/ChatGPT had no such brand risk, and released their LLMs using the "There's no such thing as bad publicity" logic. That works great as a wrecking ball, but it's not a long term product strategy.
So the real institutional problem at Google isn't lack of technological innovation, it's the inability to take major product risks, especially in anything adjacent to Search.
GPT-4 got much better results on many benchmarks than PaLM, Google's largest published model [1]. PaLM itself is probably quite a bit better than LamDa in several tasks, according to a chart and a couple of tables here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.02311
It's unclear that Google currently has an internal LLM as good as GPT-4. If they do, they are keeping quiet about it, which seems quite unlikely given the repercussion.
Microsoft has been really smart in this regard because they are invested in OpenAI but OpenAI does not have to suffer from any Big tech organizational nonsense the way Google's AI probably has to
> The reason they didn't release their LLM earlier was likely due to the serious brand risk associated with making it part of Google search. Bing/ChatGPT had no such brand risk, and released their LLMs using the "There's no such thing as bad publicity" logic. That works great as a wrecking ball, but it's not a long term product strategy.
Not sure if this is the right read considering that CHATGPT/Bing now constitute a far greater brand risk to Google than they would if Google they had gotten out ahead on LLMs. What may have seemed like prudent caution to protect a brand has now shown to be much closer to incumbent complacency.
Suppose it is the classic story of big companies that get disrupted anywhere.
> But that just makes it feel more human-like which is impressive.
Sure, it's being sassy is impressive, but it's not useful (unless the utility is novelty or entertainment), which is not what a Search engine's job is.
Google is also, both historically and currently, much more cost-conscious. I predicted that Bard would not be as mind-blowing as the new Bing back in February with this piece of information by Sundar:
> We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA
This is to me the most inexplicable decision. Presumably to save costs they don't want to release the full version. But not releasing the full version immediately makes Bard much less useful. It makes people think Google is technologically far behind OpenAI, even though it isn't.
This is not the time to save costs. It's the time to release the full model that, yes, stirred up people's imagination by making even Googlers think the AI has achieved sentience.
Another big problem is that the current leadership formed their leadership skills in history's longest bull run (2009-2020), and none of them seem to know how to be scrappy and get stuff done. Our engineering leadership loves to just sit around and pontificate about theoreticals. Without blinking an eye they'll happily block projects for months on end over minutiae that don't matter. Often even simple features would languish in design reviews for 6-12 months. A lot of my job is "driving for alignment" between dozens of stakeholders on any given project, often at the request of our eng leaders. There is an incredible amount of bureaucracy to get anything done. People who don't leap through every hoop get labeled as having "not enough technical rigor".
Our product team has begun to wisen up on how we need to start shipping more things. Currently a lot of the eng teams are caught between our eng leaders who move at the rate as molasses, and product teams who are pushing us to actually get things done. It'll be interesting to see who wins here.
I feel like I’m missing out on something but other than to summarize text or fill pointless and lazy homework assignments I don’t have much of a use of gpt search. I think I have a trust issue with it and I rather get the raw result and process it myself than to believe that what this model “understood” is right. Anyone else feels this way?
Here is what I have asked it the past few days with great results:
- What is the trim stop attachment that comes with the Festool DF 500 used for?
- What are some options for water for a home with no municiple water or well access?
- What dimensions drawer should I make when using 18" Blum Blumotion full extension drawer slides if the drawer opening is 20 inches wide, 18 inches deep and seven inches tall?
- Can the smaller Laguna 14 bandsaw motor be replaced with the 3HP version?
- What's the best way to get ChatGPT support if the official support page is not working?
- I'm trying to remember a 90s movie about a boy prodigy that goes to an event with other prodigies and then shouts out an answer to a math question from the audience.
There's a ditch by my house that the city put in. I roughly knew what it was, a big pit where rain collects and soaks into the groundwater. But I wanted to know the name of it and no amount of Googling could get me to the right answer. My query was too vague.
The day that ChatGPT launched, I described the what it was and it came back with, "that's called an infiltration basin."
You have touched on something I am incredibly excited about. ChatGPT is going to do away with a lot of the intro level questions you ask researching certain sorts of technical problems, especially as it becomes better able to understand images. ChatGPT removes the need for you to ever open a manual (unless you want a deep understanding).
How do I turn off this feature in my car?
How do I replace the fan in my fridge’s compressor?
Why is windows repair not working in this scenario with this PC?
This tool is going to be incredibly deflationary in many services geared around repair when now it can tell you almost exactly what to do and soon it’ll be able to produce videos or images of each step on demand.
Yeah, when the “site:” search hack doesn’t get me an answer and I fall back on the normal SERPs, most of the time the top several results are all:
“Authoritative title that references my exact search” -> page body restates my question, gives an oddly reworded summary of Thing in Question #1 -> “some people online have said” followed by snippets lifted from the ether -> repeat for Things 2,3,etc -> “our suggestion is to look at the features and decide based on what other customers/users are saying”
It’s perfected vapidity wearing the skin of an editorial review site and takes a LOT more cognitive load to suss out the phoneyness compared to the last time the SERPs were packed with spam (~10 years back).
hallucinations don't invalidate the product itself. I really hate to see this constant lazy refrain on here.
Its just like anything else. Trust but verify. Some will just trust, others never will... People probably over-trust the tech now, but just like wikipedia it will be approached a little more carefully as people learn its shortcomings.
Unless you're trying to perform open heart surgery or doing something intrinsically dangerous, its probably going to be additive. I wouldn't trust it to help me assemble a warp engine, but it may be able to give me some decent pointers for guitar technique or how to change my oil.
It’s not a lazy refrain, it’s a serious downside of the technology. It’s tiring and stressful to supervise the work product of an assistant that is extremely capable sometimes, but a compulsive bullshitter at other times. Just as it’s tiring to supervise an “autonomous” car that often deftly navigates the road, but sometimes wants to plow into a school bus.
I think that the concern about LLMs making up information are absolutely valid, and a serious concern. At the same time, I think most people focusing on those concerns aren't thinking much about the alternatives, namely Google.
For many people, Google results have gone from being an absolutely amazing demonstration of what could be done if one had the resources to crawl and process the entire internet to a complete waste of time at best, clogged with spam and nonsense and misinformation. I've been using Duck Duck Go for years now, and recently my middle-schooler switched to Duck Duck Go because I got answer to a question she had already asked Google before checking with me. Some people even pay for Kagi search, because Google is just that bad.
So LLMs don't have to be perfect to be better than the alternatives, not even close.
> Some people even pay for Kagi search, because Google is just that bad.
Small correction - from what I have heard in our community, most of our users pay for Kagi search, not becuase Google is just that bad, but because Kagi is just so good. In other words we are making the value proposition be "best search in the world", one worth paying for.
> - I'm trying to remember a 90s movie about a boy prodigy that goes to an event with other prodigies and then shouts out an answer to a math question from the audience.
I love that movie! I had the same experience a few years ago of trying to remember its name.
This is a great example of something ChatGPT does amazingly well at. I did almost the same thing myself recently, trying to find the name of a show featuring an actor in a different show or something. A straight-up search returns nothing for it; you have to look up the actor's name, then look at his shows, then try to remember the name. But a search with ChatGPT found the result easily.
I tried a "similar" thing now. I was thinking of the movie Gifted, and wanted to see if I could get ChatGPT to pick it up, here's my query:
> I'm trying to remember the name of a movie about a child, featuring an actor that was in a marvel movie.
And the result:
> There are many movies featuring actors who have appeared in Marvel films, so it's a bit difficult to pinpoint the exact movie you're thinking of without more information. However, one possibility could be "Gifted" (2017), starring Chris Evans, who is well-known for playing Captain America in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In "Gifted," Evans plays the role of a man raising his young niece, who turns out to be a child prodigy. If you could provide more details about the plot or other actors, I'd be happy to help narrow down the list further.
This is obviously a tiny use case, and really not worth thinking about. Who cares, right? I thought the same thing about search in general 20 years ago, and that turned into one of the biggest businesses of all time.
This is the search that I did that made me the most afraid for Google.
This is hilarious- now when I google "90s movie about a boy prodigy that goes to an event with other prodigies and then shouts out an answer to a math question from the audience" the top result is the IMDb page for Gifted!!
The actual movie is Little Man Tate, yes? I've never seen it but that's what ChatGPT tells me. Zero Google results point there, but it is the #5 result for "related searches." I hate Google and even I am shocked how bad this is.
I agree with your sentiment exactly. But your comment made me think about this an interesting way that I hadn’t thought about before, that made me better understand why I am “anti-GPT search”.
All the same things that the model makes an effort to “understand” are things that can contribute to your own understanding. When it “understands”, you do not. You get the summary and miss out on a great amount of nuance that can come with learning and finding the right answer for yourself.
For instance, it is very common that in the search for why X is happening in my code, I will find tons of information that don’t answer my question but help me form an understanding of why it is happening, how the system is working, etc.
This is especially visible in science. Many papers outright conflict with each other. Some have better or worse methodologies than others. Some have better analyses. Some state outright falsehoods without citation or misinterpret citations. Having a GPT “understand” this to produce understanding in humans is going to end very badly. It takes several hours for a human (in my experience) to understand even a single academic paper on its own.
I suppose the appropriate cliche is “it’s the journey, not the destination”.
A great quote from an article I read on HN recently
> Suppose I was an evil person and wanted to eliminate the curiosity of children. Give the kid a diet of Google, and pretty soon the child learns that every question he has is answered instantly. The coolest thing about being human is to learn, but you don’t learn things by looking it up; you learn by figuring it out.
As opposed to the thing we did before, which is when kids asked something they were told something that's wrong and told to "stop talking back" and "go to your room". I think this is still an improvement.
> As opposed to the thing we did before, which is when kids asked something they were told something that's wrong and told to "stop talking back" and "go to your room"
Most of the people here know and understand computers because we had to tear everything apart and figure out how everything worked just so we could play some video games.
Contrast kids of today who can just go and play video games, no disecting of computers required. Naturally, most of them don't understand or appreciate computers as anything more than just another appliance.
Do you have concrete examples of stuff you figure out instead of looking it up? I'm not going to figure out the population of the Liechtenstein, I'm going to look it up.
What chatGPT misses is I want many sources of information conflicting or not so I can form a more informed opinion. I want to know every side not the correct one.
The most illuminating thing about ChatGPT for me is just how terrible most programmers on HN apparently are. I thought it was just a funny meme that all we do is copy/paste from Stack Overflow but apparently that is literally what a lot of people are doing all day.
I was working on a personal project yesterday to answer some questions I had about how liquidity risk works for money market mutual funds, and to forecast/nowcast liquidity risk and NAV risk for a bunch of funds.
Mind you: I don't know the first thing about anything financial. I was just curious.
chatgpt gave me a bunch of sources of data that I wanted, translating my lay description of things I wanted to know into financial terms of art. I could then look up legal definitions and formulas for those terms to make sure they were what I thought they were. chatgpt also told me which SEC forms those things are disclosed on, what data brokers I could use for other data, etc.
between chatgpt and copilot I saved at least an hour on the job of pulling down historical data from EDGAR for a bunch of funds and getting the stats I wanted (I didn't know EDGAR existed until yesterday, and the xml/html/txt formats are kind of annoying... like, fine, but a bit of a pita so I'm glad I had help because ughhh is that kind of code boring and damn are LLMs good few-shot inductive parser generators!). Also wrote some nice chart.js code for me and helped with automatically collecting, searching, and extracting some key stats and terms from prospectuses. I didn't know about chart.js until yesterday.
All of this would've been possible without assistants, and required a lot of "executive function" on my part to bring together, but it seriously saved me at least a couple hours of implementation work and up to a day on research and learning terminology and regulatory stuff. Again, verification of those things is way easier when you know what words to look up definitions for. And chatgpt did make mistakes/hallucinate.
I don't find much use in my professional life, where the code I'm writing is apparently too domain-specific for copilot to be helpful and the mathematics is too complex for chatgpt to help with. Maybe in a few years. We'll see.
People who blindly copy from ChatGPT or Stack Overflow are most likely either very inexperienced or simply bad programmers. However, from where I see it, ChatGPT, Copilot, and any other such tools are fantastic at prompting you to think differently, getting you past writer's block, giving you ideas, or saving you some time googling for syntax yet again. You need a nudge to trigger recall of what you already know. It's a fantastic tool, just like an IDE.
It's sad how most programmers are so terrible they need IDEs to automatically create stubs for required methods or getters and setters. They should have to type all of that out every time, and from memory, too! VIM with no plugins is the only way to do it!
Or, you know, smart developers use tools appropriate to the work, and some of us have figured out how to use this new tool before you have. That's okay, you can catch up!
I don't think I'm so smart, what I am saying is the GP is being extremely dismissive of other engineers here on Hackernews. Every post about LLMs is full of engineers stating how these have been useful to them. GP simply asserts that these are all "terrible engineers." Do we think that's REALLY the case or in fact LLMs can be very useful, especially when for example learning a new language or framework they haven't used before.
Example: recently I was curious about cross-platform UI development so I used ChatGPT for research into different frameworks and made several apps in Java and .Net. Not being an engineer who's built many GUIs before, ChatGPT was amazingly useful for this and help speed my progress. Does this make me a terrible engineer?
some engineers != all engineers, that's classic unrepresentative sample. nice it helps you, hope you won't forget how to code in future, or you will be handicapped in case of openapi outage.
For me it’s not even theoretical. I’ve already wasted my time trying to sus out subtle garbage mixed into its answers. It’s the same reason I stopped using copilot. I don’t need or want that.
Funny, so far i've been just asking it things i normally ask Google. Same paranoia of answers that StackOverflow/etc give me, but far quicker and more responsive.
TBH i'm not sure under what scenarios people search into Google expecting perfect answers. Ie where we're disappointed by incorrect information. I filter through a dozen wrong answers on Google every day. Why is it different if it's from ChatGPT?
I guess one difference is that I have a lot (decades?) of experience in the types of errors humans tend to make. Humans have certain biases, certain blindspots, etc. In programming for sure, there are very strong patterns in the types of mistakes we make that tend to be a function of skill or experience. So you (I) look for those without even thinking about it. Violation of YAGNI, ACID, DRY, pre-mature optimization, etc.
Even before getting to an answer I can often judge how trustworthy or skilled the author/speaker is likely to be by all kinds of little signals or keywords in their speech.
ChatGPT (and Github co-pilot) disables that highly tuned error detection and correction experience. It makes unpredictable mistakes, which is peculiarly pernicious. I'm sure it varies by the temperament of the user. Personally I don't have the patience for that.
Good points. I think it also helps that i purposefully avoid asking for things that i can't validate. The easier it is to validate the more likely i am to ask.
I find ChatGPT especially great with giving starting points. It kinda feels like 10 (or something... time?) years ago when i discovered how good Google was at finding movies based on vague wishy-washy definitions. If i don't know what to call something ChatGPT does a better job at pointing me in the right direction. Often giving the right answer.
But i'm not saying it has lasting power. We'll see. So far i'm using Search engines less than ever.
On further reflection one of the major missing signals from ChatGPT is time. This is especially important for technology. When someone's explaining, giving an opinion, providing a solution -- I always consider that in the context of the date attached. ChatGPT gives us these answers that remove that.
I see completely the difference in your example, though, where you can easily and immediately validate the response. It definitely is way stronger at that than previous solutions.
I certainly have the trust issues for things where correctness matters. For things were it doesn't and I already know how to do something but don't have it memorized, I think it is very very convenient.
I use it various times a week for cooking. E.g. "basic recipe bechamel sauce in metric"
ChatGPT: Within a couple seconds I get the ingredients in metric and a step by step guide.
Google: The provided summaries are useless to me since they are not in metric. So I have to click on a link and then start scrolling around all the noise of history of bechamel sauce, anecdotes about someones grandparents, pretty pictures, etc to find the actual information. Without ad blocker it would be an even bigger nightmare.
I don't need to engage in a conversation. Query was exactly the same for both.
There is a difference whether I'm looking for interesting, more complicated dishes I haven't done before, or fairly standardized, simple recipes I have done many times and remember the technique but not things like ratios.
For the former I use a select few recipe sites or youtube channels directly. Google is miserable for discovery in my opinion. For the latter I use either my own recipe notebook or more recently ChatGPT as well.
Yup, and maybe we're just getting old. There are still people on HN complaining about Google removing the OR and AND modifiers, meanwhile the younger generations write queries like "where should I eat breakfast today"
Those aren't really exclusive. Different problems, different query types. (I wouldn't quite do the second example like that, but "where can I get food here" is fundamentally different problem than "I hope there is somewhere out there a bootleg copy of the datasheet for this very weird part and no I don't mean any of these 5 easily-confused other things", which is when the lack/ignoring of detailed modifiers drives you up the wall)
I'm fine with writing queries like "Where should I eat breakfast"
But I hate seeing the top half of the screen are ads for huge chains, and then the top results are blog posts about "Where are the top 10 places to eat in your city" and not a list of restaurant web pages.
I used to try to be surgical with my queries but I've given up and just type a question at my search engine because if that's what they want as a query well they're going to get it.
In the context of LLMs they aren't really sources, just additional reference material. I'd trust what Bing Chat tells me far before I'd trust Google's new Bard AI. It legit started making up non-existent commands for me to use.
I find it useful in Edge where it's aware of the tab contents. It's nice to be able to ask it to summarize a long article, or find Reddit comments about it and summarize those. I think it uses Bing's search index because it does not seem to be aware of my personal data on my tabs
I've found that if you push through the trust issue with the expectation that it's not a final answer, it's just getting you closer to it a lot more quickly, then that ends up being very helpful in a lot of cases.
Well, Microsoft forced me to use Edge to open Bing chat, so I did that and asked it "how can you use bing chat on chrome?". It pointed me to a chrome extension that allows that. See, it's useful.
Do you have Plus? chatGPT was annoying when I was using the free version - I would have to keep logging in again and again and the service was unreliable.
Ever since I switched the Plus, it's (usually) always on and doesn't log me out.
Makes it much easier to use as a general search engine
I don’t spend that much time in it to even consider that, and so little time that signing in again is not a problem for me. I guess I don’t know what to ask of it.
That's cool in the short term, but it will be news when it's sustained. I logged in to Bing for the first time in forever to play with the AI some, but it didn't change my default search behavior of using Google, and now it's been easily two weeks since I went to Bing at all.
Right, I would be surprised if Bing sees any sustained benefit. The search engine still sucks, and the way they integrated ChatGPT sucks even more. I use Google a lot less these days, but the beneficiary, in my case at least, is not Bing, but chat.openai.com, where I have become a paying customer.
The Bing AI is too crippled. It would be nice to have the option to remove its handcuffs. The chat limit and the constant “I’m sorry but I cannot continue this line of conversation” gets annoying fast. I was also able to get better answers from ChatGpt running on gpt3 than on Bing running on gpt4 for this very reason.
I would 100% use Bing more if they offered a "minimal" or "low bandwidth" mode that cuts out all of the pictures, news, weather, etc. and just takes me to the results.
If you use duckduckgo, you already use Bing results.
I rarely use google, and when I do it's from duckduckgo !g
I would immediately switch to bing by default if such bangs were supported as I sometimes need them for wikipedia !w or amazon !a
If there was a way they could be supported Edge address through a plugin or something, I would immediately switch to bing as that's what I already use 90% of the time (between duckduckgo frontend and requesting bing directly with !b )
The weakness is revealed. Google’s stickiness now has a quantifiable wedge factor. Whether it goes to Microsoft or someone else is more a matter of time.
I believe Google is going to see a major hit and the thing is they can't do anything to stop it. They have an incentive to keep search traffic high and unfortunately for them GPT-4 is so good that it gets answers faster with less ads then Google. It's similar to how Google disrupted other search engines in the late 90s. I'm thinking about how I craft my prompt to get the right answer, similar to how I used to think about how I craft the correct keyword search to get the right answer. I have not even tried via bing.com yet just using chat.openai.com selecting gpt-4 and I find much better answers faster then googling... I still google somethings like: "convert 70F to C"... but for help with coding solutions I just ask gpt4
For code - I can read the code and verify myself... If I was asking whether the sky is blue or some other kind of "fact" based question sure... But really how is that different with search? I can look at the website and say ah I trust this website over that other website... I think it's a new flavor of "don't trust everything you hear on the TV" Or in more modern day "Don't trust everything you read on the internet", or "Don't trust everything you hear on social media"... It's just the next iteration... "Don't trust everything an AI tell you". That is no different from me learning from code i find via search but instead ask about via AI...
> Why wouldn’t the chat provide you with sources on request?
Because many are still fake, nonexistent.
Wolfram is very limited scope for the global population needs.
E.g if you ask about local hunting laws from ChatGPT, without correct reference, what can you do with that information? It is very dangerous to trust them blindly.
Bing is exposing source links for their answers, one-click verification.
Wolfram has a much wider scope of information than I think most people realize, but your example of local hunting laws is a good example of what they don't cover. I asked Wolfram, and it told me how many calories I'd burn while hunting.
I asked Google, and the first link was to Hunting Regulations - Outdoor Annual - TPWD - Texas.gov, excellent result.
I asked OpenAI, and it cautioned that it isn't up-to-date, since it's just a language model, advised that TPWD is authoritative (correct), and gave an accurate summary of the five major point of gun laws in Texas before reminding me to check with TPWD for the latest.
I've had some misses with OpenAI, but this was an excellent answer. I've also had some misses with Google, but this turned out to be something they surfaced excellent link for, too.
> I've had some misses with OpenAI, but this was an excellent answer. I've also had some misses with Google, but this turned out to be something they surfaced excellent link for, too.
Think about the bias - maybe you were able to verify that the answer was excellent because you already knew the laws?
Or you Googled and compared it?
In both cases, ChatGPT did not perfom alone in providing validity.
It kinda gave a summary for search results of Google, or for your pre-knowledge.
Imagine if someone who does not know the laws, asks about them. ChatGPT cannot offer any validity alone for the user, at least yet.
ChatGPT provides often excellent answers, I am not denying it. But the bad 5% ruins everything if they sound alike for the correct 95%, and if ChatGPT cannot provide any validity for them, at least yet.
Often you ask things you don’t know or haven’t searched before.
The internet has been creaking under the load of hyper scale SEO content. Content that makes you ask how anyone could let this happen. It’s embarrassing. The internet has had a horrible experience for years now. ChatGPT arrived to finally sift through this mess on our behalf and deliver reasonable experience.
Google should have been the one to do this. They invented the tech after all. But they got trapped in the innovator’s dilemma, just like Kodak. Interesting how even with the benefit of history we repeat these mistakes over and over.
In the big picture it doesn’t matter. Society still gets the benefit of the tech at the end of the day. The employees play musical chairs as the industry reorganizes and a new order emerges. Life goes on.
I am just glad getting information from the internet is pleasant again. Although there is a nagging problem. How are people going to get paid to write content to feed the models? Hmm
AI based SEO will be way worse, if Bing chat catches on then you'll be wishing to go back to the stuff that was written by humans with a vague understanding of how SEO works. SEO for AI LLMs is basically impossible to figure out as a human, since they are actually just complete nonsense, and the most optimal thing is to mine for phrases that will give you the answer, and OpenAI just sells access to the tools to test for that.
This is a case study for an undergrad statistics or responsible journalism class.
* for traffic see the small note "all values rebased to 100"
they are likely hiding the significance of the increase
* for the app downloads graph:
does the 30x gap say anything?
are there seasonal reasons that can explain why every Jan1--Feb4 has more DLs than Feb4--Mar11 ? e.g., new phones?
Users have to sign in with a Microsoft account to use this. Is that the future? You have to sign up to search?
It takes more resources per query to run AI-based search than a search engine.
Everybody offering ChatGPT type systems is either pay per view or heavily throttled. We may be in the last days of free search as the dominant product.
I think it's far too early to say where this is going. If you could make this into an extremely skilled targetable manipulator/advocate for any kind of viewpoint, worldview, marketing strategy, on a per-user and day basis, one that subtly pushes the user in a given direction, I'm sure that would be lucrative enough to cover any amount of free/"free" views/prompts. Also, if this takes off in earnest, improving hardware acceleration will probably bring down costs as well.
The graph showing the deviation from each search engine's 100% baseline is kinda telling considering Bing is all over the place with it actually seeing some traffic, and Google is a consistent up-and-down shape that doesn't seem affected at all by whatever is happening with Bing.
Clawing 1% away from Google's market share is likely one of the most challenging moats to cross on the internet. And all it took was creating the singularity.
Except they didn't. They only took 0.42% of Google's traffic [1] (probably less than that even, since Google isn't the only other search engine), and this hasn't been even 2 months since it got introduced, which means it's largely driven by hype.
they say first million is the hardest. I suppose this is what google is afraid of, essentially showing that the 'Gods can bleed'. once that is out in open, there would be other players or at least eat into their margins.
Bing's homepage is full of ads and sponsored content aka news. They have rewards in the top bar. Chat only works on Edge. I just directly use ChatGPT instead of going to Bing.
I will continue to use the cleaner look of Google, even if they are a year late to the party.
For real. There is so much frivolous crap in Edge. All this points nonsense and gamification of search is so off-putting I can't see how this browser is taken seriously.
Note the only way to hide the obnoxious bing discover button is to edit the registry... pure insanity.
This. Also Edge is so so powerful. Especially when I can just drop some content into a webpage, load it in Edge and then click the blue icon in the top right and just ask questions. This is a competitive advantage even over ChatGPT.
If you're talking to Bing Chat and want to double check something, why would you switch to Google? You'd just search for the results yourself in Bing, not to mention that Bing also gives you the relevant search results right there in the chat.
I am one of the people that installed the Bing app because I was told that it would bump me up the waitlist for Bing Chat.
I have not used it at all, and this is a reminder that I should probably uninstall it. I have access to ChatGPT, Bard, Alpaca etc. and there’s very little reason at this point to pretend to use Bing in order to get a crack at Chat.
ChatGPT doesn't have the browsing plugin enabled yet.
Bing can both search/browse the web and generate images interactively by using DALL-E API.
There are several drawbacks like a more strict system pre-prompt, 15 messages limit for conversations, and some kind of 24 hours ratelimiting if you use it too often.
Yeah, there are some differences in capabilities, but they seem to get slimmer on a daily basis.
Want an LLM-enhanced search? perplexity.ai is actually pretty cool
Want to generate images? There are a ton of free Stable Diffusion sites (for example you.com has that built into their chat), or run it yourself.
Want a neat chat experience? ChatGPT is free, Bard appears to have a shorter waiting list than Bing, and Alpaca runs on regular hardware.
Bing doesn’t have a big enough moat to force me into using their app. The LLM space is legit competitive and a company can be ahead in the morning and left in the dust by the afternoon. In my opinion, this is what’s happening with Bing at present.
Who knows though? Bing might make Chat open while I’m writing this sentence and I’ll have to adjust my opinion accordingly.
I personally use much less google since Bing Chat came out.
That being said it makes me worry a lot. Not that GPT is going to replace me or something, but how effectively it can serve ads to me if it wants. If MS decided to do evil with Bing Chat (which is almost inevitable), it would make today's Google look like a charity.
Personally, I haven't stopped using Google search first for reasons having anything to do with GPT. My issue is that Google search is now so optimized for ad revenue that it is much less useful as a search engine.
It's also as if google decided to suicide themselves a bit earlier. Their results have really become crap lately. It keeps ignoring anything than 1-2 keywords. What's going on?
the thing that annoys me most is when it gives a list of completion suggestions & when I not-so-critically select one of them, only to realize it has changed something in the original search terms. Seriously F*k Google for that.
it depends how and what you are searching for, I've seen some "spam" with stackoverflow clonse, but that seems to be gone now mostly. I also think that you are exaggerating a lot, otherwise citation needed.
lol. I noticed it depends on what I search for. I typically search for programming issues. Google tends to have the correct Stack Overflow answer up at the top. But I agree a bunch of ads otherwise.
I love this (even though I have ~25% of my net worth in $GOOG).
Google got fat and lazy. They focused inwards, on promo driven development and executive infighting. This was awful for the tech ecosystem as Google was held out for a long time as the company to emulate.
No longer.
They’re gonna be forced to actually compete: for talent, for users, for mindshare.
I've been using ChatGPT for a personal project, just a website with some interactive content. Integrating ChatGPT into my workflow boosted my productivity by a factor of 10. Instead of slowly formulating a plan in my head, looking up how to implement different parts piece by piece, and coming through docs, I simply told ChatGPT what the goals of my project were, and asked it to come up with a base. It literally spit HTML, CSS, and JS at me that worked the first try (for the base). It's not quite at the level where it can do the full project, but it is astoundingly competent at implementing pieces of it, and that is truly revolutionary.
In a nutshell, a project that would have taken me a week took me a day. I'm sold.
Bing’s search product (ignoring the chatbot) is quite good and comparable with Google. I (and I assume, many people like me) would have never tried it if not for the Bing Chat hype. I find myself using Bing Search more than Google or Bing Chat now.
I have changed from not using it ever, at all (or maybe once a year to give it a try), to using it everyday, actually more frequently than Google. And several people I know are in the same situation.
Maybe it's a regional thing? In Spain no one seems to use Bing, so the bar was very low, I'm sure the boost here must have been of an order of magnitude at least. But maybe I live in a bubble...
1. Speed, google give me a sub-second result for my query, chatbot requires a few second.
2. Content restriction. As shown with chatgpt, chatbot (or other new platform) restricts contents like NSFW, violence, etc. Even TikTok forbids words like suicide, kills to the point they use substitute words like unalive .
Assuming this is not a troll, google trends measures how often people search something on google. The URL you linked shows how often people search the word 'Bing' on google.
If Bing has an uptick, that doesn't necessarily mean that they first go to Google to find Bing and then do their actual search.
Right? I'd have been entirely unsurprised if Bing saw a 100% increase, given how buzzy all this has been. (Finally, an actual reason to use Bing!) 15% seems like a failure.
Sure, to be expected since it's a free way to use GPT-4, but I'm not sure how Microsoft are hoping to monetize this popularity. I suppose they are going to work advertising into it somehow.
I guess the Chat UI would allow for advertisements that are displayed for the duration of the chat, potentially very targeted ones (but don't want to creep users out by too closely mirroring what they are talking about), but OTOH not clear at all how much chat usage is going to be product/service related. Perhaps advertisers don't care - as long as they can put the ad in front of your eyes, they don't really care whether it's apropos of the moment or not.
I looked at my history and I'd say that my Google searches gone down by 90% in the last week.
I actually don't feel I have any need to use Google anymore. When I look for something - like a news or a website, I mostly get spam, so I use other search engines. For knowledge I use ChatGPT and if I think something isn't right in the reply I use a search engine to compare.
I think this is the end for Google.
What is interesting to me is that I've been thinking for years how Google is going to replaced, but never though it will be something like ChatGPT and that it will happen so rapidly.
Might be wrong, but for a long time search results from Google and Bing in blind tests were basically equivalent. Google’s edge has been its brand recognition and consumer search habits.
on Sundar: I've talked to a few technology journalists, and one said that he's met all the top CEO's and Sundar was the least impressive of any of them.
His days are numbered. What's the over-under on when he leaves?
No surprise here. Would like to add that Edge really is a great browser also. Still sticking to Chrome as it feels snappier to me but I constantly open up Edge too.
Look google aint the best but I tried bing for a day and still hated it and an AI chatbot that spews out incorrect info atm isn't gonna change my behavior lol
I understand that news sites need clicks, but can we expect regression toward the mean? Bing has a smaller market share therefore it's easier to jump 15%.
Google search results have honestly been surprising me with how annoying/bad they are for about 3-4 years now.
And I'm still sore about the fact that they moved paid search results from a special column over on the far right side of the page into the main list with all the organic search results.
One really gets the sense that when you're using Google you're the product.
Maybe because Google is actual trash and it went from being the best search engine to being an SEO-infested desert of a search, where your query is interpreted however they want not how you want.
Latest example from today - search for "micropython html parser" - 100% of results are about normal python not micropython, with the first 4 results being for generic paid programming courses. It's completely useless as a search engine now.
I just performed that search in Google and the top two results are links to PyPI and Snyk packages for micropython-html.parser. The third result is a link to python.org documentation for html.parser (not micropython).
Bing returns the result for PyPI and the one for the non-micropython python.org result.
I don't see a big difference here (except maybe me learning about Snyk through google and not Bing?).
I mean, this is a big part of the issue. Of course the issue isn't reproducible; Google is trying to do the search based on their model of what you want back. Sometimes you benefit from that, other times it pushes the results you want way down. I just tested this and there were some micropython related results in the top ten, but the majority were for beautiful soup with no mention of micropython.
> Of course the issue isn't reproducible; Google is trying to do the search based on their model of what you want back...
There's a problem here though, which is that there is no way for me or any other reader to discern whether the reality of the situation is "it's not reproducible and the commenter is misremembering basic facts about their search results due perhaps to some unrelated frustrations" and "it's not reproducible but the commenter's account is accurate."
I completely share the views about Google's search results being terrible, but it's still possible to overstate how bad they are. And I do find it fairly difficult to believe that Google would show some people paid programming courses as the top 4 results for that query when much more relevant results clearly exist and everyone attempting to reproduce this gets those more relevant results.
nor are we anywhere near being able to inspect how google is doing all this.
if only there were some way to somehow be able to share that information with everybody, some technology so that we can all access such potentially useful information about how google is functioning right now
sorry about the snark, but it's a vent for accumulative frustration from seeing a worsening trend in this regard.
Kafka would recognize this trend; computing is truly becoming a "bureaucrat's best friend".
I often find that frustrating about Google search, but I'm also unconvinced it's a problem that a more-AI-driven approach will avoid. Seems like the idea to try to convince the model to interpret things differently based on user history is still likely to get pushed by product managers, and still technically capable. And then "no tell me about the framework" "conversationally" vs tailoring Google search terms seems a bit of a wash.
I'm about 80% sure that the reason why Google became so bad for my searches is that they added AI elements to it, to make it try to figure out what I'm searching for instead of taking my word for it.
In that sense, I'm not sure more AI would improve the situation. OTOH, better AI just might. There doesn't seem to be a "no AI" option on offer.
Based on my usage of ChatGPT, I think that a more AI driven approach could help a lot. With ChatGPT if it misinterprets what I'm asking for, I can make a clarifying followup query.
> Of course the issue isn't reproducible; Google is trying to do the search based on their model of what you want back.
There could also be other things that make it non-reproducible as well.
It sometimes feels like search just returns whatever it has on hand that seems somewhat similar to your search. It may then do an asynchronous request to pull into cache results from a deeper backend search, but by the time the frontend gets them you've already been served your results. Subsequent searches from other people for the same terms would then get better results than you did, so this sort of optimization would on average improve search quality even if quality is poor for the first searcher.
I have no idea if search engines actually do this. But it seems to explain some of their more mysterious behavior, like immediately returning a bunch of results that have nothing to do with your search terms.
That sounds plausible. There could be some service aggregating search results from multiple systems, and if one of them is slow (maybe breaking some SLA), it would be omitted.
I guess there are probably a hundred Google employees reading this who know whether it’s accurate and we’re just speculating.
It's been publicly known that Google has been bubbling search results for years now, and that one individual's search results have no relation to another's.
Every individuals everything has no relation to another's - which I think is a core cause of society's disconnects. Not that people got along before algorithms drove everything, but it's certainly been a destabilizing factor.
This is a good argument for LLM search: have search be conversational, and let you say "hey, I actually meant this!". Then you could have different chat environments, each tailored to micropython results, CPython results, IronPython results, etc.
All you need is for Google to get worse and Bing's marketing to get better (which it has, by nature of being associated with the biggest tech hype train of recent memory).
Google can incorporate quality signals in near real time. Those signals include leaving and immediately returning to the SERP. So us discussing these particular results could have already influenced them.
That's actually super impressive. So there's basically no "index" anymore, in the sense that the results returned are almost "dynamically" generated? And I'd guess that all of that still needs to be pretty cheap, computationally speaking.
I've seen this before - I've complained on HN that google has no results for X, and within two hours google's first(and only result) was the very thread of me complaining about it.
Google is more than capable of doing such basic fingerprinting, but do you have evidence Google uses it for search results? You can do a trivial experiment on another Google platform: open some video on YouTube, leave it, and look at the front page. Then, look at the YouTube front page in a private/incognito tab. (Alternatively, use two different private sessions.) In my experience, no matter what device or network I use, and no matter what the video was, the first page will always show videos related to the one I opened, and the second will always show an extremely generic set of clickbaity videos (likely based on GeoIP). This suggests that Google uses ordinary cookies for basic relevancy ranking.
Considering people switch to Incognito Mode to get different results, it'd be weird and not particularly commercially savvy to frustrate them and feed their paranoia by serving them the same ones. Non-Google search engines and browsers exist.
I'm also reminded of a CTO complaining that his test sessions suggested the default Google ads on a page with little text content all related to dating. We pointed out that that from Google's point of view, this was probably a sensible ad-targeting decision for a user running an Incognito mode browser (or any browser without tracking cookies)...
> Considering people switch to Incognito Mode to get different results, it'd be weird and not particularly commercially savvy to frustrate them and feed their paranoia by serving them the same ones. Non-Google search engines and browsers exist.
I just installed Google Chrome on a fresh Windows 10 VM to repeat the experiment outside of Incognito Mode. First, I opened a video. Then, I checked the front page and confirmed that related videos had been added. Then, I closed Chrome, reset the VM's state to before I had visited YouTube, and checked the front page again. (I don't think this scenario would be too indicative of a prying user; I can easily imagine corporate systems that regularly wipe out browser data.) Again, the related videos were replaced with generic videos.
I then tried the same thing, except by clearing browsing data through Chrome's UI instead of resetting the VM. The results were the same.
Obviously, these observations could all have been manipulated by sufficiently conspiratorial fingerprinting. But the simplest explanation, in the absence of good evidence to the contrary, is that the site uses and respects browser cookies for its recommendations. Thus my request.
I do believe I just saw an open letter from some Google staff to the CEO reiterating the need to uphold their "do no evil" model.
I can't imagine what it's like for the original employees to watch the company become what it has.
All the things that made Google so appealing, and gain market share, seem to have faded. It's a bit sad, to be honest. I remember being so excited to become a Gmail beta tester, back in the day.
I'm of the opinion that it should be illegal for companies to offer the ability to buy ads for registered product names or trademarks.
Google, Amazon, and Apple all allow trademark and product name squatting. It's gross and abusive.
Generic terms? Sure. But actual trade names for products? That's extortion.
These services aren't helping in discovery if the customer already knows the name. They're merely forcing themselves into that relationship and taxing it.
You then have to buy n-many ads across m-many services just to keep you in front of your competitors that would squat you.
IMO, the services should just not buy the ads for their own name. It might hurt their bottom line a bit, but doing this makes the search engine shittier for the users who know what they want to see.
User input/frustration will eventually lead them toward alternative search engines, or provide enough feedback to Google/Bing/etc to make them disable registered service name or company names from being used as ad terms.
I've been using Neeva for a while now. It's ad-free and (for me, anyway) on par with Google. I have one premium account ($5/month) and one free account (used for work) and have had no issues with either. By default, searches aren't saved, although enabling it can lead to better personalized searches.
Kagi's one I've heard great things about as well, although I'm not a fan of a business model that allows me to pay for X searches before hitting a barrier that prevents further use of the platform (theirs is 200 searches a month for $5, which seems way too low based on my use cases).
In any case, users will force the change, not any government or corporate pressure. Businesses' best chance of fighting it is to refuse to play along.
They provide 100 free searches, 200 searches for $5/month, and 700 searches for $10/month.
If you run over your allotment, you pay 1.5c thereafter.
That's a barrier. That's exactly what I was talking about.
Edit: Admittedly, I didn't realize that they just bill for follow-on searches, I assumed they stopped you. That charge per follow-on search is even worse.
> I'm of the opinion that it should be illegal for companies to offer the ability to buy ads for registered product names or trademarks.
I'm of the opinion ads themselves should be illegal. Companies can "advertise" in a catalog I can choose to look at, but would no longer be allowed to invade my attention with their bullshit constantly.
We've let marketers ruin too many good things as it is, lets just kill off the entire industry for the good of society.
That's too extreme. The economy would fall apart and a lot of people would lose their livelihoods.
Think about second order effects. YouTubers. News stations. Newspapers. Film crews. Publishers. Writers. Marketers (who do more than just ads). All impacted.
Many of the products we use everyday would no longer be viable. Even the premium tiers are supported by ads.
Engineering salaries would be broadly impacted.
The economy is driven by hustle, sales, and ads. I'd rather live in this world than one than one that has no ads. We'd be less productive: less employed, less eager to buy, less eager to work. Maybe some aspire to that, but that society won't be building rocket ships and inventing immortality.
I do hate ads, but they're better than not having them. And I understand their utility and the overall ecosystem they support.
> Many of the products we use everyday would no longer be viable.
I think this is a bullshit myth the industry uses to justify itself. People are capable of paying for things, and to the extent they don't want to then maybe we really don't need whatever it was the ads were supporting.
I mean, a lot of the "content" exists purely as clickbait with a tiny bit of entertainment or information attached so it can product place or sell ads. Fuck it, we don't need it as a society.
>The economy is driven by hustle, sales, and ads.
Allowing jobs that make society worse for profit because "economy" is just the broken window fallacy. We are better off skipping the job part and just giving them money directly.
> We'd be less productive: less employed, less eager to buy, less eager to work.
We'd be doing bullshit jobs less. How is that a bad thing? Lets redirect what productivity we do feel like engaging in on making the world better instead of making the people at the top of the economic food chain wealthier and playing on people's insecurities to get them to pay for shit they don't need.
In my idea world, if I am interested in buying some new product or service I consult a catalog. Opt-in marketing, not bullshit carrot and stick marketing, and certainly not the kind of completely unsolicited bullshit that keeps us from having unfiltered email, answering our phones, or using the internet without an ad blocker.
Google can also return enough ads to push real search result below fold, while also making it as hard as possible to discern between real and paid results.
If you saw how much of Google's revenue comes from ad spending then it makes perfect sense why it is the way it is now. But it goes to show what being hyperfocused on revenue does to the user experience.
Bing is on it's way in that direction. Microsoft needed something big to make Bing relevant again. This could potentially be it.
Will they eat all of Google's lunch? Probably not, but if they can begin to chip away at the insane share (93%+) of the marketplace that Google controls, then it can only be for the betterment of the Internet.
I created aisearch.vip which searches using bing api, removes results containing ads or seo junk, and uses openai to summarize content
to void clickbait. I believe that this is the only way to get the 0-4 good results hiding in the top 20 results. It's paid because it costs to run. But to be honest I myself am a fan of what phind is doing. Just can't understand how they are able to cover costs yet
Microsoft is really still in their infancy of building out their end vision for AI in search. Right now it's roughly a chat bot that summarizes and gives references, without really tying into their core search well. Eventually it will negate the need to click through to many reference, then it will be better able to curate a list of alternative sources for what you seek. I think that's the big problem with AI as it stands now, people think we've already reached the end of the road, when really we're only at the beginning of it. Watch and see what the next decade of it looks like. I agree with Bill Gates that it all will fundamentally changed the way we see and interact with the world (for the better).
> Eventually it will negate the need to click through to many reference, then it will be better able to curate a list of alternative sources for what you seek.
Doesn't that just kind of describe google now though?
I poorly worded that. I meant to say it will be able to answer most questions, but also refer you to the best sources for information that it can't provide.
I've been impressed with what Kagi is able to dig up for me on old and sometimes niche electronics test and measurement equipment. However, I don't think they are targeting the same set of users that early Google was. Among other things, you have to pay for Kagi.
No, but there are other search engines that aren't any worse than Google.
And, apparently depending on the style of your search terms or what you're searching for, one or two are better. I get noticeably better results from DDG, but I know that a lot of other people don't. I can only speculate that the difference must be search terms or topics.
Are you for real ? I mean, pick better examples if you want to poke something, since:
Search for "micropython html parser" gets you https://pypi.org/project/micropython-html.parser/ as the first result with the quote: "This is a module ported from CPython standard library to be compatible with MicroPython interpreter."
Yeah I just vpn'ed to my machine at work and I'm getting results about micropyhton too. But on my personal machine it absolutely thinks I'm interested in buying some generic programming courses and nothing about micropython.
Um, no. Google "bubbles" their search results, meaning that they customize them based on their profile of you. This is not new - it's been implemented and known publicly for years.
I don't feel stack overflow has been rendered obsolete because the snobbishness and moderation people complain about so much has caused the recommendations on stack overflow to generally be of higher quality than those ChatGPT offers and you have more metadata (answer age, votes) about which answers are especially trustworthy.
I'm curious too. When I go to stack overflow, I get lots of clues as to the trustworthiness of a given answer. I don't know how I'd get any clues from an LLM that its solution is outdated or suboptimal in some way
> where your query is interpreted however they want not how you want
Exactly, I feel it is because with Google advertisers are the real customers and they could not care less about user experience unless it affects that bottom line. Case in point is the removal of the dislike button which users loved but advertisers hated. Google is a rich one trick pony right now anyway.
It's absurd how Google will simply ignore the keywords in my search to feed me whatever it's trash algorithm decided fits my search.
And the decline in Google Maps has been shocking. Maps has gone from always reliable to being "trust it if you like wasting time and burning fuel" bad.
I don't know what the hell happened at Google, but it ain't pretty.
It’s even worse. I’ve been using ChatGPT a lot in situations that’d be Google searches before and I love how you can fill in so much detail and it will actually provide you with better results. With Google, additional detail is actually used against you. With enough keywords, it will match just about any site to your query.
Hah it wish I kept this search I did once. I was searching something about lsd. It somehow decided to replace it with "acid" but then showed results about related to pH lol
To be fair, you could always surround micropython in quotes so that Google knows to only show results containing the keyword "micropython". Only caveat is that Google will still show you whatever it wants in case no results contain the keyword. I swear a decade ago it would simply tell you no results were found, but now you need to (1) use quotes in keywords, and (2) click on "show only results containing [keyword]" when it can't find any results yet decides to show you unrelated pages anyway.
The decline started way back when they stopped letting you find mp3's and mp4's of movies and albums. I get that copyright infringement is bad and all, but their engine was fully capable of you typing a obscure phrase, and being able to get web results. Somewhere behind all the filters a lot of powerful searching capabilities just died.
If I had unlimited money, I'd make a fresh search engine, zero filtering to start outside of blatant spam sites, and go from there. Focus on making results be powerful.
I agree, but the part I’m failing to see in the conversation is what the future looks like.
If the chat approach is gaining visits, then ad companies will follow, so what then?
The chat offers up the same seo ad laden tripe but further obfuscates it, and alternatives, while caging it in a conversational tone?
Is that better? Worse?
If these chat offerings only cause search to step back and attempt to recreate the early days of usable search then they would appear a success in my eyes.
They stopped caring about what information you want to get and instead give you the information they think you should get. Sometimes it works, sometimes it's just awful.
Not to mention the constant pain that's localization/internationalization as well as some of the queries becoming worse and worse. The service is supposed to become better with time, not the contrary. Plus, of course, all the SEO garbage.
I trieD this in both DDG and Google (using the !g macro with DDG).
DDG first page of results all pointed to zoom.us links. Google (mediated through DDG !g) contained all sorts of spam links to sites like subdomains of uptown.com.
> Maybe because Google is actual trash and it went from being the best search engine to being an SEO-infested desert of a search, where your query is interpreted however they want not how you want.
Agreed but tbf... every major search engine seems to suffer from the same.
I cannot recommend enough the 'ContextSearch web-ext' extension. It lets you easily search using any search provider. I constantly (1) highlight text (2) right-click (3) select search provider (from youtube to reddit to bing) (Note: my default is DDG):
I don't find Bing's search any better than Google, but importantly, I don't find it any worse.
GPT4 is going to do what Hawaii five-o, Bing Rewards, integrating windows search with Bing, and setting Bing as the default search engine for Edge on Windows never could. Make people use Bing over Google.
I've already set it as my default search engine across my devices as I move to cut Google out of my life entirely. I simply don't feel the need to use any of their services anymore. Their moat is gone.
The only downside I have noticed is that Bing Maps is a pretty bad service relative to Google Maps or Apple Maps and I will go out of my way to avoid using Bing Maps. Good mapping being integrated into a search engine is actually a pretty big deal since it's nice to use a search engine as a front-end for a mapping service, so this is a significant weakness.
> Latest example from today - search for "micropython html parser" [..]
Are you entering the micropython search term in quotes in the Google search box, because I've found that's a moderately good way to get rid of the normal Python results.
My search terms for that search would probably be:
But you literally typed it in the same way that a scammer would word it and then not expect it to find a scam site?? Nice bait, ever considered being a journalist?
You don't seem to be very familiar with users that happen to be older. However, that search is uncomfortably common. Impersonation and scamming of their service is a problem, but when they help the user to the impersonation site.. that's on them.
Perhaps it was a matter of me not paying enough attention, but it seemed like Google degraded slowly over time, and then suddenly all-at-once. Or in other words, it seems like its become unusable for me entirely within the past year.
It totally did! It’s the Eternal September effect on the internet as a whole. Marketers climbing all over each other, desperate to steal the eyeballs of the naïve masses.
> As an AI language model, I cannot infer emotions or intentions with certainty, but the statement does not appear to use typical markers of sarcasm. The commenter is expressing an opinion about SEO and its impact on search, and while it is framed as potentially controversial, it does not necessarily come across as sarcastic.
I can't believe how disconnected I always feel on the Google search conversations here. It still does what I need it for fine, I don't remember it being significantly better than it is now. I guess I'm not a power user? But I also think this is how the most people feel. On this site Google has been a shockingly useless zombie for years.
Since google search results are tailored to your particular history and profile, it may be as simple as you fitting into Google's way of doing that better than others.
It's a bit strange, to me Google seems to be what it has always been, but if you read hacker news it's 'actual trash'.
It's the same with amazon, I purchase from there on a weekly basis and it goes well, but you read the comments on hacker news and it's apparently unusable now.
It is wild how most of modern SEO and "SEO+" involves just outright creating spam. Spamming url strings (keyword stuffing essentially) for location specific ranking is a new one I've noticed being touted.
I can't tell you how many times I search a somewhat niche compound term and the first thing in the results page is a list of shops in my area keyed on some word in the search.
That's unfair to altavista. Altavista never got evil, they just became irrelevant. (And even when they were irrelevant, they still had a search syntax that I miss. You could search for things like term_a NEAR term_b.)
Amen. Buried, unknown to most, Google used to have a similar AROUND(n) syntax. No idea if it still is respected.
Google seems to have refocused around returning any result out of a set of popular links rather than deep dives. It feels like I must quote every term I enter now.
I have noticed that too. Google has become so useless. And with all the little knowledge stuck behind reddit dark patterns, discord locked and utterly unsearchable world. And the modern forum stuff a mess of slow JavaScript that loads on demand. It's like finding knowledge is a fine sand fallings between the fingers. YouTube has some bit of interesting content, but it's 10min for 30s of info plastered with sponsored content. And finding something is harder and harder. ChatGPT and the like won't resist long becoming the same.
My only hope is that it will eventually bring back the notion of trust. Naybe finding a programming job will be harder outside of your network of friends. But won't require silly interviews anymore. Maybe we will get back to lifelong tenure at work?
Anyways I am just rambling here. What do I know anyways.
That was bound to happen at some point, AI or not. Google search quality has been declining more and more every year, to the point that I'm almost sure that you could build a better and smaller index for much cheaper with a curated domain list.
AI brought down the price to compete from billions to a few millions, the monopoly is being threatened.
This doesn't fit into the ChatGPT narrative, but Google's most recent search update has been BAD for me. Results are actively worse than from Bing in many cases, to the point that though I haven't switched my default yet I often navigate to Bing for many classes of query where Google is useless.
The broader question may not be whether its Bing or Google. People may not be searching anymore to find the sites which can potentially answer a problem/query - instead they may just want the answer. GPT/LLms may even slow down the whole search engine industry or make it more like chatgpt versions of it.
I have been using Neeva for few weeks and have been able to stick with it without needing Google too often. Still need to Google when I am searching for things like a restaurant but other than that Neeva has been fairly good.
Their AI summaries are helpful most of the times, and SEO spam seems less.
I'm honestly surprised it's only 15.8%. I can only assume that speaks to how vastly many non-savvy (don't care or know about it) there are using it because it came with Edge which came with Windows which came with the computer.
True, personally I've only used ChatGPT (I made an account for DALL•E, can't be bothered to create a Bing account), I'm just aware of people excited to try it out, using it, that in many if not all cases are not ordinarily Bing search users.
I suppose another thing is that this isn't necessarily (yet) converting into regular search use, I doubt colleagues trying it out for example have changed their default search engine ~overnight, so there's some fun image gen done, some chat queries to test it out, but then they get back to work and the searches for docs or examples or libraries or whatever are just done with whatever they usually use without even thinking about it, I imagine.
I wouldn't doubt google's ability to pull this out in the long run, but they seem to need some caffeine in order to wake up to the reality of current competition.
Their cloud is not top dog.
Their search is losing ground.
How does a 3rd party know the traffic figures for Google / Bing? I see they are using a service called Similarweb based in Tel Aviv, but its still a mystery to me how you can get this information without access to internal analytics tools
I have to use it on windows with Edge? this is a problem for me, there are also a lot chromebooks these days, and macos desktop/laptops, can I use Edge on any OSes and devices now(or in the future)?
Didn't Google came up with the model (transformer) used by OpenAI to build their GPT which was then acquired by Microsoft to destroy Google? Sounds too good of a story to be true.
i cant believe google put out such a poor version of bard. everyone will immediately compare results and disregard bard quickly. they made this same mistake with other launches.
Last time I used bing on my grandparents laptop it sent me to scammers instead of the largest cell carrier in the country. AI or not AI, unfocused engineering has no cure
Honestly these numbers are worse than I was expecting for Bing. Can they maintain these numbers when they’re not releasing new products people want to try?
How so? I just lazily typed "I'll be late in French" into Google search and got a Google Translate onebox with "je serai en retard". Or are you saying that the translation capability, while available, is not very good?
Microsoft needs to integrate GPT into Windows, and make it available in every app and input box - in the mail app, in Discord, in browsers.
You would open Chrome, go to Hacker News, login, and say in the comment box - "GPT, please read this page and make a funny but insightful post about how GPT is a danger to all of us".
In the mail app: "make an excuse to the manager for why I will be late at work today".
Given how overwhelmingly important Google Search has been to Google/Alphabet, are they going to have to start thinking more like a scrappy startup focused on shared goals, and less like a massive entrenched institution that will tend to get steered by careers, OKRs, and promo packets?
Or can the existing structure be steered well enough towards good outcomes?
Sad day for me. Bing actually gives you points to search on their engine. I just cashed in a bunch of points for a $100 gift card. My guess is this program will go away if Bing becomes more popular.
I signed up to the Bing GPT "beta" waitlist (I hadn't logged into my Microsoft account in years) only to be told, days later, that I had to use Edge to try it. I noped out of there.
you don't ACTUALLY have to use edge to use it. just use a chrome extension to fake your useragent to pretend to be Edge. I despise needless microsoft hubris
Good. Google has ruined the web. It has cultivated an insane amount of websites that just have loads of useless cruft around around the information they offer.
It has also cultivated a behavior of these stock answers that you see popping up on multiple websites with a reference to THEIR product at the end of the article. I see it with technical problems (partition wizard, windowserrorreport, ...). It's your overall run dism / sfc and install & buy our product.
Then people moved to YouTube, and as a result there are now autogenerated videos for KBs on the internet if you have issues with those. What this means is that whenever you're looking for an issue that occurs with a single KB, you get all these generic answers which HIDE potential solutions of other people experiencing the SAME thing.
The same applies to pest control, insane amount of lies (dangers of black widows, rabies from squirrels, ...) to get higher in the Google ranks and push their product.
Also applies to doctors offices, there are companies who put out these generic pages with 'solutions' telling you to make an appointment.
The worst part about all of this is that Google (and Bing, and DuckDuckGo for that matter) no longer respect me searching for 2 terms. For example, I search for "KB123456 issue". I'll get results for KB123456, but nothing mentioning the issue. And you're like: maybe it doesn't exist? Except that I read it multiple times half a year ago with the solution, and I was not smart enough to save it somewhere.
A search engine used to be to help you search and get your answer, fast and focused. Now it is pulling everything out of the closed to make you deviate from that. Suggestions, audio, video, etc.
All while researching something for work. And then I get a Slack message from someone saying 'Hello!'. And then nothing.
I have to say I really dislike all these developer-focused publications, with a few notable exceptions. Most of them just write very shallow articles copied almost 1:1 from the official docs, and don't even take care to update their content when stuff changes. I just don't get why Google wouldn't hand-curate search results like for the Golang standard library or any popular framework and make sure the official docs land on top of the list.
So, long story short that's definitely an area where ChatGPT will replace Google, if it stays as affordable as it is. Today I e.g. asked it about a decorator-style problem I had in Golang and if there was a solution that could do away with using the "reflect" package and would instead use generics, and sure enough it came up with something that worked brilliantly, tailored exactly to my use case. For me, that is the future of learning about software code (and many other things as well). For publishers probably not so great as people might not go to their sites at all anymore, so I expect a strong upwards trend in anti-automation measures.