It’s been talked about here before, but fundamentally it’s when the advertising guys won the power struggle over the search engine guys. Previously, advertising was a means to fund cool technology (and also get filthy rich).
Now it’s just a way to make the number perpetually go up, sucking every last drop of value out of the system.
Plus the complete lack of vision or strategy from Google’s senior leadership.
> Plus the complete lack of vision or strategy from Google’s senior leadership.
I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years.
Search peaked in like 2009
Maps has only become slower and less informative (I remember when it use to actually display everything that was in a location and not just the popular/paid for stuff) since 2009
Google Docs was incredibly impressive... in 2006 and now almost 20 years later there's been a few QoL improvements, but nothing wow worthy.
And it seems everything else they've done has been shuttered and/or wasn't all that innovative in the first place and usually just trying to copy someone else work but in an uninspired way.
> Google Docs was incredibly impressive... in 2006 and now almost 20 years later there's been a few QoL improvements, but nothing wow worthy.
Give the product owner a raise then. Any time Microsoft tries to radically change Office, everyone just gets annoyed, and searches like "where is the print button in excel?" will suddenly skyrocket for a month or two.
> Maps has only become slower and less informative (I remember when it use to actually display everything that was in a location and not just the popular/paid for stuff) since 2009
"Ground Truth" is truly dead... we've been to 25 states in the last year and the speed limits displayed in Maps were correct about 10% of the time.
>> Plus the complete lack of vision or strategy from Google’s senior leadership.
>I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years.
It is strange to see how the "narrative" of Google unfolds. If parents and grand parents said this in 2015 or 2005 it would perhaps be an extremely unpopular opinion. Or I doubt both would have that opinion in 2015 or 2005.
But >complete lack of vision or strategy from Google’s senior leadership > has been a thing since 2003 - 2004 during their IPO. None of their problems happening now is really new. Their "Dont be Evil" BS, their WiFi privacy issues in 2006 - 2007 before Steve Jobs take a jab on stage in 2008. That was before most people thought about privacy. Not developing a browser against Firefox and then Chrome. It took some Firefox developers some 10+ years before they realise may be Chrome and Google isn't what they thought. They basically earn more money than they know what to do with it and had zero discipline on what, how and where to use it. They continue to pay $10 - $20B a year to Apple as default search engine. Apple is very good at extracting value out of Google. While it seems no one at Google cares about it.
Needless to say I have been ringing the alarm bell on google for 20 years. I wished Mozilla take notes earlier. But they have their own sets of problems.
If there is one thing other than search that Google has achieved was they managed to lift up the salary of the whole Tech industry. They single handedly pulled the average salary of programmers up 10% YoY for many years since IPO. To the point in ~2018 - 2022 many really thought Google's starting salary for a new Junior Dev is $200K.
When I started at Google it has a very Montessori-like atmosphere. Really brilliant people there who were given a lot of autonomy to go and figure things out.
By the time I left, almost nine years later, the culture was dominated by fear and conflicting top-down directives — and the autonomy was gone.
The launch was technically pre-2009, yet Streetview meets my personal criteria.
Streetview was OK for many years, yet now borders on the miraculous.
The other day I virtually drove to Seattle just to see what the capabilities were and whether Google was capturing the downtown homeless encampment situation. Visited near Covid and the tent quantity was disturbing. Found out Seattle's response was to wall off the entire park downtown where homeless were gathering. [1][2]
However, far as Streetview, hundreds of miles of continuous highway where you can click yourself along the entire way to any location in America.
The week after, upon finding The Trace's - Gun Violence Map [3] I wanted to check whether East side Washington DC was really that much of a danger zone. Seemed difficult to believe right next to so much political money and visibility. Ended watching the Google car have a gun pulled on them in the rear view by drug dealers and watching a different Google car drive right into a police raid. Mission accomplished. East side Washington DC is kind of sketchy.
The HN community seems split between people who want simple products that do one thing well, and others that want continual feature churn and additions. What was Google Docs need exactly to be better? It seems to work perfectly for the targeted users.
> I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years.
I find that hard to fathom. I think what you meant to say is "an impressive right that actually got made into a b2c product".
Otherwise you'd have to ignore that they kinda pioneered llms, until OpenAI poached their tech, polished into a (for a consumer) breathtakingly functional "AI"
They also kept researching self driving via weymo etc
On the business side they've also made a significant mark on the programming world via k8s, golang and angular2 among other things
But I'd completely agree with the sentiment that they completely dropped the ball wrt their original target demographic. Beyond the improvements to android, I can't really think of anything since 2010 either that really improved things.
> I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years.
The stupid thing is that, for example, ChromeOS is genuinely technically very impressive. Wayland over virtio to securely expose GUIs from untrusted virtual machines is brilliant technology. I want that, reimplemented by someone who cares about an open source ecosystem.
That Waymo thing is pretty cool. Transformers seem like pretty foundational work, even if they weren't the ones that ultimately popularized it in the market.
The paperclip maximizer reports steady and heartening progress on converting all available matter in the Earth system to paperclips. Shares of $PCLIP are up 20% on the news.
Universal Paperclips was my favorite piece of art I interacted with this year (so far). It really affected how I think about what I'm doing, and what humanity is doing as a whole.
It's a lot like the credit card issuing banks. Two notable big names, Wells Fargo and Bank of America both "illegally used or obtained consumers’ credit reports, and then applied for and enrolled consumers in credit card accounts without consumers’ knowledge or authorization." [1][2]
Banks had each employee need to sell 50 credit cards a month. Employees sold 50 a month.
Banks needed "line goes up" for every quarter. Banks had each employee sell 100 a month. Employee's tried to sell 100 a month.
Banks needed "line goes up." Eventually market was saturated, yet banks said sell 1000 credit cards a month. Employees replied, "we cannot, market is saturated." Bank said "sell 1000 a month." Employee's responded with "make shit up, open accounts without consumers knowledge." Fraud.
Advertisers are locked into an arms race for attention with each other. Even if you were stuck with the same slice of eyeball time, you can still grow by selling it for more, and in many ways that's what google's auctions are set up to do. But google's investment in youtube in particular has steadily grown the eyeball-time they have access to as well. I'm not ruling out fraud but I don't see how these facts prove fraud, it seems more like google continuing to naturally benefit from the decline of traditional print and television media.
Attention has a common resource problem. If you (google) don't overgraze your cattle on it, the facebook will because they both are getting the same users at the same time. It's a race at this point. I am getting ads from same company being recommended on both Meta and Google ads real estate.
Is total available human attention actually relevant here? It implies that all the possible attention is available already for advertising purposes which doesn't seem true at all.
> but fundamentally it’s when the advertising guys won the power struggle over the search engine guys
How would that explain Google search results getting worse though?
Ads only get viewed as long as Search is high quality and people don't switch to a competitor.
Ads fill up the top with sponsored results, but they don't affect the organic results. If by "the advertising guys won" you mean they got more sponsored slots, all that means is they got more sponsored slots. It doesn't affect the quality of organic results.
> Ads only get viewed as long as Search is high quality and people don't switch to a competitor.
This is what someone thinking long term would conclude. On the contrary, lowering the quality of your search causes people to spend more time in the search engine since they have to try more searches. This in turn increases the probability of clicking an ad.
"Previously, advertising was a means to fund cool technology (and also get filthy rich)."
What is advertising now.
Is it possible that the "technology" being funded is "the delivery of advertising over a computer network".
Is that "cool technology". If not, then is the "cool technology" serving as bait to lure in ad targets, i.e., is it merely a component of the advertising services technology.
Why not sell or license the "cool technology" for fees instead of hiring "advertising guys". Why can't this unspecified "cool technology" exist on its own. The parent comment implies there is "value" in "the system", presumably independent of advertising.
If you've been on the Internet during the last 20 years, you'd notice that people in general aren't willing to pay for something if something cheaper exists, and the "cost equivalent" of advertising exposure is perceived as extremely, extremely low, even by people who dislike advertising.
"The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users... advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
— The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998
Yeah, you can't talk about the deterioration of Google without talking about the deterioration of the culture at Google.
I didn't like working at AWS for the most part, but I have never seen Google-level dysfunction there. There were a lot of times I disagreed with decision, but I could always understand the reasoning behind it. On the contrary, I can't explain most of the decision being made at Google. The enshittification from the very top has been amazing to watch, even for someone like me who joined only 3.5 years ago. Both senior and mid-level leadership lack a clear vision and the execution has obviously been horrible. Google needs a hard reset if they want to be successful again. I'm not buying the "too-big-to-fail" bullshit.
> Morgan: Literally Danny said he sat with an engineer team with examples of people in the room and said why aren’t they showing up and they did their “debugging process” and couldn’t figure it out.
Meanwhile a single Swede with a single desktop class machine in his living room created a search engine so good that I would often switch to it when Google failed.
These days I use Kagi, which has prioritization and block lists (which I don't use because the results are good out of the box).
Wanna know what is really interesting about the Kagi story?
While Kagi is building its own index, for a long time they were kind of reselling a wrapped version of Google + Bing results, but still were extremely much better IMO.
I have two theories:
- either Kagi has some seriously smart systems that read in the first tens of results and reshuffle them
- or more likely in my opinion the reason why results have been so good is because kagi has api access which bypass the "query expander and stupidifier"[1] on the way in to Google and the personalization thing on the way out. That way they just interact with the core of Google search which somehow still works.
[1]: "stupidifier" the thing in the Google pipeline that rewrites
- "obscure-js-lib" (think one that a previous dev used, that I now need to debug
- to "well-knowm-js-lib-with-kind-of-similar-name".
Or decide that when I search for Angular "mat-table" I probably want some tables with mats on even if they don't have anything to do with Angular.
Have one of those I actually thought was kind of funny, and bit like having a conversation with an AI.
Tried searching for quotes from the Matrix because of all these AI issues and asked:
"Quote of Agent Smith to Mr. Neo 'How will you speak with no mouth?'"
and got back:
"You're wrong. Agent Smith never refers to Neo as anything other than Mr. Anderson." Completely did not even try to answer the question.
Course, these days it's more Harlan Ellison "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" [1]. Kind of went beyond the Matrix to total thought control and constant machine torture. "How will you search if all results are false?"
And nowadays it sometimes just silently drops a huge range of matching verbatim results without even informing the user.
It’s especially serious when searching for UN related documents, which have a special document symbol structure.
e.g. 99.9%+ of the documents under the classification A/C.1/… simply don’t show up with a “A/C.1/“ search, except for a handful. And it’s not like irrelevant results are clogging it up either, as Google only returns 40ish results for the whole internet. When there’s thousands of publicly accessible UN documents in that category…
According to the Kagi FAQ, "our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide", so I don't think they are relying entirely on their own index.
If you get to scrape competitor results then all you need to do to improve them is strip out the ads. It's not exactly rocket science if that's allowed.
I’m not precisely sure what problem the author is talking about. Is it the fact that some sites have built a business model around search results or is it that Google changed it search algorithm and they don’t like the way they are prioritized or is it something else?
It seems kind of unreasonable to expect Google to never experiment with their algorithm; and unfortunately at its core it is a zero sum game. You might be a winner today but a loser tomorrow.
if your concern is about revenue, sharing or referrals or ad placements or ??? then I would point out that it’s very unwise to build a business whose success is based entirely on the whims of another business.
I think search in general is becoming a very poor way to discover content as it is slowly getting planted by LLMs and also for years has been gamified by SEO.
I think that the right model for content discovery is either crowd sourced by a like-minded community, like hacker news or curated; if the curator or community drifts away from your interests, then you have to find a new one, but oddly enough, this can actually be done within the same framework.
> then I would point out that it’s very unwise to build a business whose success is based entirely on the whims of another business.
When that other business is a monopoly, what choice do you have? The rise of google has effectively killed all other sources of traffic. Web sites used to get their traffic from things like webrings, directories and a variety of smaller search engines. Now? Google, or one of its properties, and to a smaller degree Meta are basically it. The curator and community discovery model is a victim of google, not a solution to it.
Building a business that relies solely on Web traffic is iffy for reasons unrelated to Google. Supply far, far exceeds demand, to the point that you have to pay to get people to visit your website. Which really explains a lot about the current Web ecosystem.
Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, even YouTube (Google property but not Google the search engine) are all paths to discovery. To a lesser degree sites like HN. There's also nothing actually stopping anyone from going to Bing or something. My Chrome browser takes me to Bing if I type in it or change the search engine...
Also de-ranking SEO spammers is a net positive IMO.
In a sentence, the theory is that as search added optimization layer based on ML, after optimization layer based on ML, it's nigh-debuggable.
Put another way, Google launched 1000 experiments that got +0.2% CTR and seemed innocuous, and now they have a system that only wants to give out Reddit and Quora links.
I've seen this story on Google's private Blind section multiple times. Usually, coupled to discussion about a more cautionary approach taken by the pre-2020 head of search, who was worried about this outcome.
IMHO they're feeling out the same outcome without the benefit of the above knowledge. I don't see this theory well-understood outside Googlers, modulo a pair of popular blog posts, whose name I can't recall, that hit the nail on the head.
(disclaimer: xoogler as of oct 2023, didn't work on search)
I don't just mean filtering out the spam; that's a hard problem on its own. But the good-click metrics... if serving up reddit and quora links at #1 makes more people satisfied with the first result, defining satisfied as 'reads the #1 page and doesn't go back for more', then...
What's wrong with that metric?
That isn't a rhetorical question. It's tempting to claim the users are wrong to prefer it, but not very nice. Why do they do so?
> I think that the right model for content discovery is either crowd sourced by a like-minded community, like hacker news or curated;
I'm curious how you'd scale that. Google gets 8.5 billion searches per day. 8.5 billion "Ask HN: Where's the best resource for X" isn't going to scale to that.
Also the article did a terrible job by confusing LLM and AI query results with Google’s not-LLM search engine.
And yes, like you alluded to, search engines aren’t the only way to acquire your readership or regular customers. Some media outlets basically don’t even use search engines to drive traffic, like so many social media based businesses out there. There are hundreds of thousands of businesses that barely have a linktree page.
"I think that the right model for content discovery is either crowd sourced by a like-minded community" and now you've re-created the original Yahoo search, which was killed off in the original Search Engine Wars by the likes of AltaVista and later Google because it didn't take long for the amount of new content on the web to overwhelm the manual curation process.
A manually curated system can only truly work with a constrained domain of content/subject matter and tolerance for high lag regarding new information. Wikipedia is an example of what that kind of system would look like.
> it is slowly getting planted by LLMs and also for years has been gamified by SEO.
I think that is basically what they are complaining about, from a content creator's perspective. They are upset that their quality content (according to them at least) is losing to ML generated garbage, and that google engineers don't even seem to be able to understand why that happens.
Maybe the Google Search engineers should ask the team next door, that has been receiving the lion's share of Google's funding over the last 3 years years, with the express goal of doing exactly that?
My take on what the author was getting at, is how Google's manipulation of its algorithm has led to poor results and backfired on them. Not just for the users of its search engine, but small businesses counting on being discovered that way.
Arguably, the problem is black-box algorithms and how they are manipulated. The same problem can be faced by any curated community, where there is little to no transparency. Curated can still mean manipulated. People can jump from place to place, but that may not be advantageous, because where they want to be or the most likely places for discovery are not available.
Bad argument. Having all of ones business dependencies to be that from a single business, subject to its whims, is unwise regardless of the fact that no business can exist without dependencies at all.
Everything exists in a system. I suppose the least (and therefore most resistant) to dependency related issues is small family farmers that run things like U Pick farms and grow a diversity of crops
I think you should read the blogpost again. Google wants these smaller websites to come into search results but it can't coax the The Algorithm to do it. That's why they are actively trying to debug these issues.
> I think search in general is becoming a very poor way to discover content as it is slowly getting planted by LLMs and also for years has been gamified by SEO.
Does anyone have a set of queries that google returns poor results for?
I spent a few minutes looking at my search history (filtering chrome history by "google search"), and the vast of my queries are quite simple (e.g. people's names) that google does well on (in fact I find google search for people better than linkedin sometimes).
I also tried a few complex queries and compared them to Kagi:
"How much bitcoin does microstrategy own" -> Google returns the correct snippet from here[0] while Kagi only linked to articles about how much it acquired in the last few days.
"how to pronounce stratchery" -> Google returns the correct snippet from the Stratechery website[1] while Kagi's first result is a spam entry[2] with the wrong pronunciation (the second result is a tweet with the correct pronunciation).
I'd be curious to see more comparisons!
Edit: I just remembered Dan Luu's post (https://danluu.com/seo-spam/) but after looking through my search history, the queries he uses are not at all representative of my day to day searches.
You’ve subconsciously altered your search behavior to avoid categories that Google is horrible at.
Any product reviews will be SEO garbage (blogspam too 10 lists). Anything travel will be a page full of ads before organic results, if any. You just know to not even bother so you’re left with the queries that still work.
I was wondering the same thing. I see all these complaints that Google is awful and broken but it generally seems to work fine for me, apart from stuff that all the search engines struggle with.
Some example of something that's hard to find with Google but easy with something else?
If Google is so bad why don't people, myself included click on one of the other ones?
I sympathise with Giant Freakin Robot not getting clicks - I'd never heard of them. But that's different from Google being bad from a user point of view.
I just tried clicking on them all - they all work. Baidu is kind of funny as it's all in Chinese and searching The Sound of Music came back with Chinese which Google translated to "The Nun and the Seven Naughty Children!"
> If Google is so bad why don't people, myself included click on one of the other ones?
I believe because stickyness is a strong force. Google gets worse, but you know it and you know how it fails and what to do to make it better (i.e. how to word your query differently, what parameters to add etc when you get terrible results).
You don't know this for any other search engine, so you need to make a) an active decision to try another search engine, and b) learn how to use it so it delivers what you want.
And I assume that, for most people, Google isn't bad enough to make that kind of investment.
Earlier today I tried to find out what's currently happening in Sudan, is there any shift in the civil war etc. Google was pretty useless. News articles from 6 weeks ago, the best results were probably Wikipedia, but they ranked the Timeline higher than the actual article. I tried with "sudan civil war", "sudan civil war maps" etc.
I tried just now and Yandex actuall provided much better results for what I wanted. They had sudan.liveuamap.com, they showed polgeonow.com, which looks very interesting (can't say if accurate or trustworthy, but definitely topically relevant), sudanwarmonitor.org etc. Compared to Google, they show much less "top 1000 media sites" and more of what look to be topic-experts.
Bing found sudanshahid.org (again, don't know how accurate), multiple arcgis.com-hosted articles, and also included sudanwarmonitor.org. I'd say more Big News Corps than Yandex, but less than Google.
On this search, I'd say Yandex was best, Bing second, Google last. Yet still I use Google as my daily driver, I think mostly because I don't know how far I can trust Yandex, and I have a general bias against MS products. It's certainly not because they don't deliver better results -- but I know Google and it's "the devil you know", until Google becomes too hard to extract results from, at which point I'll be forced to switch.
Google has clearly transitioned away from prioritizing customer value (and content creator value, unless you're an advertiser) in favor of some internal opaque KPIs.
After switching to DuckDuckGo years ago, and Kagi last year, it's obvious every time I go back to Google how much they have lost the plot.
It'll take another decade before they lose dominance, but the writing is on the wall. Inertia and market position are the only reason they're still on top. Meanwhile, the younger generation barely uses web search, and the tech savvy are starting to drain away more and more quickly.
Startups should be excited. Rather than being the 800-lb gorilla that is going to come take your lunch, Google is the walking dead behemoth waiting to be harvested for conceptual parts.
Seriously ! after switching to Kagi along with recent annoying changes to Google search last 2 years , the switch back to google unimaginable.
Recently I realized that i only !g to google from kagi just a handful of times this year and every time to instant regret .
A marked contrast to couple of years back with DDG !g would instinctive and probably half the time and results felt better in google . Sticking with DDG felt idealistic and the quality second class, not so with Kagi, it feels the $10 pays off every month in much improved productivity.
It is to be noted that Kagi uses google search index as a source, so it is not like Google cannot improve the results or UX technically, just not possible institutionally.
google was always by far the best search engine compared to the competition, so data harvesting, advertising etc were accepted costs of doing business. now search engines all suck with the advent of seo, ai pollution, and enshittification - so there is no longer an overwhelming benefit to using google. interesting to witness control slip from a behemoth.
"As is the fact that around the same time others also warned that one common consequence of mass layoffs is they tend to turn internal systems into black boxes because everybody with a deep understanding of them has left."
Direct loss of knowledgeable people is real but it is not the main reason for these systems becoming black boxes.
For every knowledgeable person laid off there's twenty who stay and adjust to the new reality where their future at the company is much less certain. These adjustments vary person to person but literally nobody goes to say "Whoa, I better improve the documentation and share my knowledge so that I'm easier to fire!"
When I was leaving a job, I decided to start documenting things. I had a solid documentation before I gave my two weeks notice. Then I used the remaining time to refine it, it was a pretty good documentation.
A month after I left, they contacted me and offered contract work, which i declined. For the following year, employees reached out to me directly for help. It didn't matter that everything I helped with was already documented.
My take is there isn't a solution for proper knowledge transfer in companies. That's why I find it fascinating when people get fired on a whim. You lose so much more than an employee.
> Whoa, I better improve the documentation and share my knowledge so that I'm easier to fire
I don't disagree that people react as you say and create knowledge silos with the misguided idea that it protects their job, but I do want to point out the consequences of it for any here who may be considering doing so on purpose. Knowledge silos do not secure your job. They in fact limit your ability to advance, limit your ability to collaborate across an organization, limit your ability to adapt, limit your ability to take up other tasks, limit your ability to delegate, and reduce collaboration and project success thereby reducing your perceived performance within an org. There are a bunch more reasons why knowledge silos are bad not just for an organization but for individual engineers living in the silos, but you don't need to take my word for it, there are multiple studies published on this you can find.
It's not only misguided job security. Silos is what you get by default. You need additional effort to prevent silos rather than some nefarious additional effort to lock information up.
People who are uncertain that they're still around in a year are much less willing to put this additional effort which pays off in the long term.
I doubt many will see this, but Yandex (yes, the Russian Google), is basically 2006 Google in the sense that it shows you what you want versus what Google’s lawyers and a bunch of SF dweebs working on their promo packet have in their best interest for you to see or not see.
Perhaps there’s domestic Russian things that are censored but that’s far outside my use-case.
Yandex is only good if you search in English, because Yandex doesn't care about the English market :D. They only care about Russian and Turkic makers. (Maybe Vietnam? I forgot.)
Yandex is following the same trajectory. Yandex reverse image search used to find websites with an image, a la old Google. Now it’s the same “similar image” crap.
Exactly. At least Google gives you an "Find image source" button that restricts the result to exact matches. If the Yandex artificial stupidity decides you actually want some different image you don't get a choice. IME the Yandex image index also seems much smaller than Google's.
OTOH Yandex still gives your direct image links and is better at showing you the largest versions of an image (although too often that's just a blurry upscale).
Isn't most of Google from 2006 open source, or at least known in publicly available papers? So someone in the US should be able to re-create Google, and go back to basic page rank.
Is there anything preventing new search engines? Except scale and servers. But what most of us want is just plain old ordinary search as it existed in 2006, so that is probably reproducible.
I know there are some other engines. Like DuckDuckGo, but just found out they are really just Bing.
Which I guess begs the question, if Google Sucks so bad, why doesn't Bing take over??? It isn't as bad, even if not great.
Edit: After reading more posts. Appears Kagi is doing this.
PageRank relies on pages from one domain linking to pages on another domain as the main signal of quality. But no one does that anymore, because of PageRank. Most cross-domain links are from "partnerships" made under the explicit premise of boosting PageRank score. The metric became the goal, invalidating the metric.
Another factor is that since 2006, social media has displaced blogs. Blogs were a rich source of "authentic" cross-domain links, and the movement of online discussions to consolidated and closed platforms has dried up that well. Some even go so far as to pin the downturn of blogging on the demise of Google Reader.
Is it? How many more pages get published each day? If you include each YouTube video and social media post, it's easily several orders of magnitude. Organizing this kind of firehose isn't easy, neither is prioritizing/ranking it.
Yes, 2019. Without any insider knowledge, I remember a Google update at the end of 2019 where they really went to shit, gone from "don't be evil" all the way to evil
It was actually later than I expected it to happen but it seems like distinct enough event that it's had reverberation all the way to the present.
Readit News
Now it’s just a way to make the number perpetually go up, sucking every last drop of value out of the system.
Plus the complete lack of vision or strategy from Google’s senior leadership.
I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years.
Search peaked in like 2009
Maps has only become slower and less informative (I remember when it use to actually display everything that was in a location and not just the popular/paid for stuff) since 2009
Google Docs was incredibly impressive... in 2006 and now almost 20 years later there's been a few QoL improvements, but nothing wow worthy.
And it seems everything else they've done has been shuttered and/or wasn't all that innovative in the first place and usually just trying to copy someone else work but in an uninspired way.
When you hire an ex McKinsey CEO and get the guy who destroyed Yahoo Search to run your search business, this is what happens.
They invented the technology behind LLM's. So whether you use Gemini or ChatGPT, that was pretty impressive.
Also, Waymo is crazy impressive. If you're considering Alphabet as a whole (which there's no reason not to, it's all under the same stock ticker).
Those are two industry-changing things, so I think Google's doing OK.
Give the product owner a raise then. Any time Microsoft tries to radically change Office, everyone just gets annoyed, and searches like "where is the print button in excel?" will suddenly skyrocket for a month or two.
Meet team ported advanced audio processing, environmental noise cancelling and camera effects to Firefox, and they work really well.
It's not impressive of course, but interesting enough to notice.
Android is getting genuinely better. Also AndroidAuto.
"Ground Truth" is truly dead... we've been to 25 states in the last year and the speed limits displayed in Maps were correct about 10% of the time.
0: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-...
>I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years.
It is strange to see how the "narrative" of Google unfolds. If parents and grand parents said this in 2015 or 2005 it would perhaps be an extremely unpopular opinion. Or I doubt both would have that opinion in 2015 or 2005.
But >complete lack of vision or strategy from Google’s senior leadership > has been a thing since 2003 - 2004 during their IPO. None of their problems happening now is really new. Their "Dont be Evil" BS, their WiFi privacy issues in 2006 - 2007 before Steve Jobs take a jab on stage in 2008. That was before most people thought about privacy. Not developing a browser against Firefox and then Chrome. It took some Firefox developers some 10+ years before they realise may be Chrome and Google isn't what they thought. They basically earn more money than they know what to do with it and had zero discipline on what, how and where to use it. They continue to pay $10 - $20B a year to Apple as default search engine. Apple is very good at extracting value out of Google. While it seems no one at Google cares about it.
Needless to say I have been ringing the alarm bell on google for 20 years. I wished Mozilla take notes earlier. But they have their own sets of problems.
If there is one thing other than search that Google has achieved was they managed to lift up the salary of the whole Tech industry. They single handedly pulled the average salary of programmers up 10% YoY for many years since IPO. To the point in ~2018 - 2022 many really thought Google's starting salary for a new Junior Dev is $200K.
By the time I left, almost nine years later, the culture was dominated by fear and conflicting top-down directives — and the autonomy was gone.
Streetview was OK for many years, yet now borders on the miraculous.
The other day I virtually drove to Seattle just to see what the capabilities were and whether Google was capturing the downtown homeless encampment situation. Visited near Covid and the tent quantity was disturbing. Found out Seattle's response was to wall off the entire park downtown where homeless were gathering. [1][2]
However, far as Streetview, hundreds of miles of continuous highway where you can click yourself along the entire way to any location in America.
The week after, upon finding The Trace's - Gun Violence Map [3] I wanted to check whether East side Washington DC was really that much of a danger zone. Seemed difficult to believe right next to so much political money and visibility. Ended watching the Google car have a gun pulled on them in the rear view by drug dealers and watching a different Google car drive right into a police raid. Mission accomplished. East side Washington DC is kind of sketchy.
[1] Seattle, City Hall Park, 2021, July: https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6017717,-122.33027,3a,75y,12...
[2] Seattle, City Hall Park, 2023, February: https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6017076,-122.3302728,3a,75y,...
[3] https://www.thetrace.org/2023/02/gun-violence-map-america-sh...
I find that hard to fathom. I think what you meant to say is "an impressive right that actually got made into a b2c product".
Otherwise you'd have to ignore that they kinda pioneered llms, until OpenAI poached their tech, polished into a (for a consumer) breathtakingly functional "AI"
They also kept researching self driving via weymo etc
On the business side they've also made a significant mark on the programming world via k8s, golang and angular2 among other things
But I'd completely agree with the sentiment that they completely dropped the ball wrt their original target demographic. Beyond the improvements to android, I can't really think of anything since 2010 either that really improved things.
The Transformer.
The stupid thing is that, for example, ChromeOS is genuinely technically very impressive. Wayland over virtio to securely expose GUIs from untrusted virtual machines is brilliant technology. I want that, reimplemented by someone who cares about an open source ecosystem.
It's just a dead product.
When google required hosting blogspot content on their servers instead of self hosting that was the end of the freedom there. 2009.
The open sourcing and open patenting of VP8, and the work done on VP9 and AV1 were genuine public goods from Google.
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So how does Adtech generate more and more revenue and sells more and more ads year on year?
Simple answer - Fraud.
It's a lot like the credit card issuing banks. Two notable big names, Wells Fargo and Bank of America both "illegally used or obtained consumers’ credit reports, and then applied for and enrolled consumers in credit card accounts without consumers’ knowledge or authorization." [1][2]
Banks had each employee need to sell 50 credit cards a month. Employees sold 50 a month.
Banks needed "line goes up" for every quarter. Banks had each employee sell 100 a month. Employee's tried to sell 100 a month.
Banks needed "line goes up." Eventually market was saturated, yet banks said sell 1000 credit cards a month. Employees replied, "we cannot, market is saturated." Bank said "sell 1000 a month." Employee's responded with "make shit up, open accounts without consumers knowledge." Fraud.
[1] (Wells Fargo, millions of accounts, $3B civil settlement, $3.7B CFPB judgement, 2020), https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wells-fargo-agrees-pay-3-bill..., https://www.forbes.com/sites/anafaguy/2023/07/11/bank-of-ame...
[2] (Bank of America, unspecified # of accounts, 2023) https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/bank-of-am...
Shifting spend from legacy media, and extracting more value from the sellers' margin.
Yes it does. It scales with population, which last time I checked is still going up.
How would that explain Google search results getting worse though?
Ads only get viewed as long as Search is high quality and people don't switch to a competitor.
Ads fill up the top with sponsored results, but they don't affect the organic results. If by "the advertising guys won" you mean they got more sponsored slots, all that means is they got more sponsored slots. It doesn't affect the quality of organic results.
So I don't understand what your theory is here.
This is what someone thinking long term would conclude. On the contrary, lowering the quality of your search causes people to spend more time in the search engine since they have to try more searches. This in turn increases the probability of clicking an ad.
What is advertising now.
Is it possible that the "technology" being funded is "the delivery of advertising over a computer network".
Is that "cool technology". If not, then is the "cool technology" serving as bait to lure in ad targets, i.e., is it merely a component of the advertising services technology.
Why not sell or license the "cool technology" for fees instead of hiring "advertising guys". Why can't this unspecified "cool technology" exist on its own. The parent comment implies there is "value" in "the system", presumably independent of advertising.
— The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998
when the search engine guys won over the diverse team of web surfers.
search engine was the automation of cheap labour. but early search relief heavily on the ranks early sites won by directory era curation.
search engine tech was unknowingly piggy backing on work from the surfers.
it would crumble for sure since there were no more surfers. AI just made it extremely obviously that Its done.
I didn't like working at AWS for the most part, but I have never seen Google-level dysfunction there. There were a lot of times I disagreed with decision, but I could always understand the reasoning behind it. On the contrary, I can't explain most of the decision being made at Google. The enshittification from the very top has been amazing to watch, even for someone like me who joined only 3.5 years ago. Both senior and mid-level leadership lack a clear vision and the execution has obviously been horrible. Google needs a hard reset if they want to be successful again. I'm not buying the "too-big-to-fail" bullshit.
Boeing letting McDonnell Douglas take over
Google letting DoubleClick take over
Meanwhile a single Swede with a single desktop class machine in his living room created a search engine so good that I would often switch to it when Google failed.
These days I use Kagi, which has prioritization and block lists (which I don't use because the results are good out of the box).
Wanna know what is really interesting about the Kagi story?
While Kagi is building its own index, for a long time they were kind of reselling a wrapped version of Google + Bing results, but still were extremely much better IMO.
I have two theories:
- either Kagi has some seriously smart systems that read in the first tens of results and reshuffle them
- or more likely in my opinion the reason why results have been so good is because kagi has api access which bypass the "query expander and stupidifier"[1] on the way in to Google and the personalization thing on the way out. That way they just interact with the core of Google search which somehow still works.
[1]: "stupidifier" the thing in the Google pipeline that rewrites
- "obscure-js-lib" (think one that a previous dev used, that I now need to debug
- to "well-knowm-js-lib-with-kind-of-similar-name".
Or decide that when I search for Angular "mat-table" I probably want some tables with mats on even if they don't have anything to do with Angular.
- Not showing loads of valid results when looking for UN documents and instead just return 40 or so out of thousands: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42288776
- Returning something we absolutely did not ask for in a verbatim query: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42278753
Me: “exactly-this-thing.py”
Google: You misspelled “sorta-related.js”. Here you go.
Me: Did I stutter?!
Tried searching for quotes from the Matrix because of all these AI issues and asked:
"Quote of Agent Smith to Mr. Neo 'How will you speak with no mouth?'"
and got back:
"You're wrong. Agent Smith never refers to Neo as anything other than Mr. Anderson." Completely did not even try to answer the question.
Course, these days it's more Harlan Ellison "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" [1]. Kind of went beyond the Matrix to total thought control and constant machine torture. "How will you search if all results are false?"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...
It’s especially serious when searching for UN related documents, which have a special document symbol structure.
e.g. 99.9%+ of the documents under the classification A/C.1/… simply don’t show up with a “A/C.1/“ search, except for a handful. And it’s not like irrelevant results are clogging it up either, as Google only returns 40ish results for the whole internet. When there’s thousands of publicly accessible UN documents in that category…
It seems kind of unreasonable to expect Google to never experiment with their algorithm; and unfortunately at its core it is a zero sum game. You might be a winner today but a loser tomorrow.
if your concern is about revenue, sharing or referrals or ad placements or ??? then I would point out that it’s very unwise to build a business whose success is based entirely on the whims of another business.
I think search in general is becoming a very poor way to discover content as it is slowly getting planted by LLMs and also for years has been gamified by SEO.
I think that the right model for content discovery is either crowd sourced by a like-minded community, like hacker news or curated; if the curator or community drifts away from your interests, then you have to find a new one, but oddly enough, this can actually be done within the same framework.
When that other business is a monopoly, what choice do you have? The rise of google has effectively killed all other sources of traffic. Web sites used to get their traffic from things like webrings, directories and a variety of smaller search engines. Now? Google, or one of its properties, and to a smaller degree Meta are basically it. The curator and community discovery model is a victim of google, not a solution to it.
Also de-ranking SEO spammers is a net positive IMO.
Put another way, Google launched 1000 experiments that got +0.2% CTR and seemed innocuous, and now they have a system that only wants to give out Reddit and Quora links.
I've seen this story on Google's private Blind section multiple times. Usually, coupled to discussion about a more cautionary approach taken by the pre-2020 head of search, who was worried about this outcome.
IMHO they're feeling out the same outcome without the benefit of the above knowledge. I don't see this theory well-understood outside Googlers, modulo a pair of popular blog posts, whose name I can't recall, that hit the nail on the head.
(disclaimer: xoogler as of oct 2023, didn't work on search)
I don't just mean filtering out the spam; that's a hard problem on its own. But the good-click metrics... if serving up reddit and quora links at #1 makes more people satisfied with the first result, defining satisfied as 'reads the #1 page and doesn't go back for more', then...
What's wrong with that metric?
That isn't a rhetorical question. It's tempting to claim the users are wrong to prefer it, but not very nice. Why do they do so?
I'm curious how you'd scale that. Google gets 8.5 billion searches per day. 8.5 billion "Ask HN: Where's the best resource for X" isn't going to scale to that.
Reddit is a pretty credible alternative for that.
This is how all the subreddits that are remotely related to politics or news got so biased.
Of course I don't know what the alternative is. If I did I would be making that ideal site instead of scrolling HN.
And yes, like you alluded to, search engines aren’t the only way to acquire your readership or regular customers. Some media outlets basically don’t even use search engines to drive traffic, like so many social media based businesses out there. There are hundreds of thousands of businesses that barely have a linktree page.
A manually curated system can only truly work with a constrained domain of content/subject matter and tolerance for high lag regarding new information. Wikipedia is an example of what that kind of system would look like.
I think that is basically what they are complaining about, from a content creator's perspective. They are upset that their quality content (according to them at least) is losing to ML generated garbage, and that google engineers don't even seem to be able to understand why that happens.
Arguably, the problem is black-box algorithms and how they are manipulated. The same problem can be faced by any curated community, where there is little to no transparency. Curated can still mean manipulated. People can jump from place to place, but that may not be advantageous, because where they want to be or the most likely places for discovery are not available.
Show me a business free of dependencies and I'll eat my hat.
Did you mean supplanted here?
Perhaps the ranking was terrible before and now is better. Or is it the other way around?
I spent a few minutes looking at my search history (filtering chrome history by "google search"), and the vast of my queries are quite simple (e.g. people's names) that google does well on (in fact I find google search for people better than linkedin sometimes).
I also tried a few complex queries and compared them to Kagi:
"How much bitcoin does microstrategy own" -> Google returns the correct snippet from here[0] while Kagi only linked to articles about how much it acquired in the last few days.
"how to pronounce stratchery" -> Google returns the correct snippet from the Stratechery website[1] while Kagi's first result is a spam entry[2] with the wrong pronunciation (the second result is a tweet with the correct pronunciation).
I'd be curious to see more comparisons!
Edit: I just remembered Dan Luu's post (https://danluu.com/seo-spam/) but after looking through my search history, the queries he uses are not at all representative of my day to day searches.
[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/11/29/micro...
[1]https://stratechery.com/category/about/#:~:text=UPDATE%3A%20....
[2]https://www.howtopronounce.com/stratechery
Any product reviews will be SEO garbage (blogspam too 10 lists). Anything travel will be a page full of ads before organic results, if any. You just know to not even bother so you’re left with the queries that still work.
Some example of something that's hard to find with Google but easy with something else?
I mean some recent global use stats are
Google 89.33% bing 4.15% YANDEX 2.8% Yahoo! 1.33% Baidu 0.83% DuckDuckGo 0.69% (oct 2024, https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share)
If Google is so bad why don't people, myself included click on one of the other ones?
I sympathise with Giant Freakin Robot not getting clicks - I'd never heard of them. But that's different from Google being bad from a user point of view.
I just tried clicking on them all - they all work. Baidu is kind of funny as it's all in Chinese and searching The Sound of Music came back with Chinese which Google translated to "The Nun and the Seven Naughty Children!"
I believe because stickyness is a strong force. Google gets worse, but you know it and you know how it fails and what to do to make it better (i.e. how to word your query differently, what parameters to add etc when you get terrible results).
You don't know this for any other search engine, so you need to make a) an active decision to try another search engine, and b) learn how to use it so it delivers what you want.
And I assume that, for most people, Google isn't bad enough to make that kind of investment.
Earlier today I tried to find out what's currently happening in Sudan, is there any shift in the civil war etc. Google was pretty useless. News articles from 6 weeks ago, the best results were probably Wikipedia, but they ranked the Timeline higher than the actual article. I tried with "sudan civil war", "sudan civil war maps" etc.
I tried just now and Yandex actuall provided much better results for what I wanted. They had sudan.liveuamap.com, they showed polgeonow.com, which looks very interesting (can't say if accurate or trustworthy, but definitely topically relevant), sudanwarmonitor.org etc. Compared to Google, they show much less "top 1000 media sites" and more of what look to be topic-experts.
Bing found sudanshahid.org (again, don't know how accurate), multiple arcgis.com-hosted articles, and also included sudanwarmonitor.org. I'd say more Big News Corps than Yandex, but less than Google.
On this search, I'd say Yandex was best, Bing second, Google last. Yet still I use Google as my daily driver, I think mostly because I don't know how far I can trust Yandex, and I have a general bias against MS products. It's certainly not because they don't deliver better results -- but I know Google and it's "the devil you know", until Google becomes too hard to extract results from, at which point I'll be forced to switch.
After switching to DuckDuckGo years ago, and Kagi last year, it's obvious every time I go back to Google how much they have lost the plot.
It'll take another decade before they lose dominance, but the writing is on the wall. Inertia and market position are the only reason they're still on top. Meanwhile, the younger generation barely uses web search, and the tech savvy are starting to drain away more and more quickly.
Startups should be excited. Rather than being the 800-lb gorilla that is going to come take your lunch, Google is the walking dead behemoth waiting to be harvested for conceptual parts.
Recently I realized that i only !g to google from kagi just a handful of times this year and every time to instant regret .
A marked contrast to couple of years back with DDG !g would instinctive and probably half the time and results felt better in google . Sticking with DDG felt idealistic and the quality second class, not so with Kagi, it feels the $10 pays off every month in much improved productivity.
It is to be noted that Kagi uses google search index as a source, so it is not like Google cannot improve the results or UX technically, just not possible institutionally.
I might be a little out of touch, but what do they do instead?
Direct loss of knowledgeable people is real but it is not the main reason for these systems becoming black boxes.
For every knowledgeable person laid off there's twenty who stay and adjust to the new reality where their future at the company is much less certain. These adjustments vary person to person but literally nobody goes to say "Whoa, I better improve the documentation and share my knowledge so that I'm easier to fire!"
A month after I left, they contacted me and offered contract work, which i declined. For the following year, employees reached out to me directly for help. It didn't matter that everything I helped with was already documented.
My take is there isn't a solution for proper knowledge transfer in companies. That's why I find it fascinating when people get fired on a whim. You lose so much more than an employee.
I don't disagree that people react as you say and create knowledge silos with the misguided idea that it protects their job, but I do want to point out the consequences of it for any here who may be considering doing so on purpose. Knowledge silos do not secure your job. They in fact limit your ability to advance, limit your ability to collaborate across an organization, limit your ability to adapt, limit your ability to take up other tasks, limit your ability to delegate, and reduce collaboration and project success thereby reducing your perceived performance within an org. There are a bunch more reasons why knowledge silos are bad not just for an organization but for individual engineers living in the silos, but you don't need to take my word for it, there are multiple studies published on this you can find.
People who are uncertain that they're still around in a year are much less willing to put this additional effort which pays off in the long term.
Where people in a large organisations work to make an open source project more resistant to organizational changes (and priorities).
But yes, layoffs certainly has negative side effects.
Perhaps there’s domestic Russian things that are censored but that’s far outside my use-case.
OTOH Yandex still gives your direct image links and is better at showing you the largest versions of an image (although too often that's just a blurry upscale).
Is there anything preventing new search engines? Except scale and servers. But what most of us want is just plain old ordinary search as it existed in 2006, so that is probably reproducible.
I know there are some other engines. Like DuckDuckGo, but just found out they are really just Bing.
Which I guess begs the question, if Google Sucks so bad, why doesn't Bing take over??? It isn't as bad, even if not great.
Edit: After reading more posts. Appears Kagi is doing this.
Another factor is that since 2006, social media has displaced blogs. Blogs were a rich source of "authentic" cross-domain links, and the movement of online discussions to consolidated and closed platforms has dried up that well. Some even go so far as to pin the downturn of blogging on the demise of Google Reader.
Is it? How many more pages get published each day? If you include each YouTube video and social media post, it's easily several orders of magnitude. Organizing this kind of firehose isn't easy, neither is prioritizing/ranking it.
2006 was child's play in comparison.
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https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
It was actually later than I expected it to happen but it seems like distinct enough event that it's had reverberation all the way to the present.
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