How about Google focus on actually making their search results good again.
I have gotten increasingly frustrated with the results that even 6 years ago were more relevant.
When I put quotes around a specific phrase, I only want direct matches to those words first, before showing me anything else.
Yesterday an uncle was asking me if there are RV parks in SF or nearby. Google proceeds to show me a list of every dog park near my zip code instead. I quote "RV parks" and get similar. When I finally spelled out recreational vehicle parks, I got better results. And every result literally has "RV park" in the title. (Turns out there are 2 in SF. Candlestick park has bad reviews, and the link to the one in the Presidio is 404.)
In a year or two all of this AI stuff is going to calm back down when people finally realize that for other than a few product types, sprinkling "AI" onto everything like cheap MSG isn't going to make the core products any better.
I don't want a "personalized" search experience. I want accurate results for the damned thing I'm searching for. Those should be exactly the same results everyone else gets when looking for the same thing.
More than any other company, Google has influenced the modern web we have today. They created the search -> ads -> SEO flywheel that all websites and their revenue feeds off of.
The reason the search results suck is because the web sucks. #1 search results for recipes crash iOS safari while scrolling past hundreds of ads to get to the ingredients. This is the result of Google's design. Google got us all into this mess, and they realistically have no way out with search as we know it.
While not perfectly accurate today, LLMs are able to troll through Google's mess and pull out the information people are actually looking for. Over time, Google will be forced to conform and will do the only thing they know how - use your personal information to tune an LLM just for you.
It's sad, but the data Google has on people will likely give them a massive edge over Bing and other competitors in the long term
Google really messed up by prioritizing "authority" and "speed + mobile experience". Just a complete misreading of the content landscape.
People who are actually passionate about a topic and write about it for the sake of sharing often don't have the resources or even the desire to invest in SEO and great mobile experience. Crappy commercial sites, meanwhile, can just throw money at SEO and developers to ace all of Google's technical metrics.
Google forgot that at the end of the day, it's the content that matters, not how the site looks or its domain authority.
Huh? When I search for "rv parks" san francisco [1], I get the two you mentioned as the top results, and another in South San Francisco as the third result. And then after that, the top web results are articles that list about a dozen more RV parks in the bay area. Are you seeing dramatically different results?
I guess no one at google ever got promoted for making search return what the user was actually asking for.
The fact that it'll hardly return slow loading or older HTTPS-less (non-commercial) pages has essentially memory-holed a huge part of the internet, containing a lot of valuable and historically important litigation. I'm constantly frustrated in research in looking for material which is out there but which even knowing exact strings from it is difficult to get google (or Bing, which was bad in this way first and is often no better than google) to return.
Part of it is the web in general kind of sucks in an overtly user hostile way.
But I think the main draw of Phind and similar alternatives isn't necessarily that it's that much better at getting the necessary information, it's just so much less annoying to use because it cuts out all the newsletter popovers, bait and switch blogspam, cookie consent popups, SEO dark patterns etc. You don't have to mentally filter out a bunch of nonsense.
Search engines are annoying. I say this as I spend time and effort developing one.
I do not understand how I get good results for all the examples people give in these threads. Do you have a malicious extension installed that is taking over the results?
There is endogeneity between the results and the product. Sites have been gaming SEO for so long that some terms have become their own recursive universe of ad-based search promoting ad-monetized content.
Long-winded recipe pages are the canonical example, but last week I was just looking for info about a place I'd be traveling too, and had to scroll through pages of useless fluff to just get the info I was looking for.
It was surprising to realize how much I have stopped using Google entirely since ChatGPT will just tell me the answer or provide additional context, all from the safe, ad-free interface where I already am.
It's my hope that technologies like this will finally kill the ad-driven internet paradigm. More than social media, it really seems to be the root cause of all of the undesirable things we have seen sprouting like weeds across our relationships, media, and political institutions for the past 15 years.
I despise all the corporate tech speak around these topics. Bing is still a shit search engine no matter which way you cut it. ChatGPT is useful if you know what you are doing and have experience in the field you're asking the questions in. Google is still enslaved by its ad revenue from Search so they will not cut its head off just like that.
Is it really so hard to talk about these things as they are?
Nothing spurs innovation like game-changing competition. Makes you wonder how long Google would have continued to sit on their laurels if GPT or AI never picked up speed.
how can people say that they've been resting on their laurels when they are continuously making their product more shitty and more SEO rewarding with each update? If they were sitting on their laurels, we'd have the same version of search since before the drive for ads over legitimate search results.
I still find it amazing how we've normalized the idea that Google can have 3BN and 20BN contracts with Samsung and Apple respectively to make Google the default search engine. This isn't free market or competition, it's buying the market.
On point, the path from search engine to AI chatbot, in case it does succeed, is quite dramatic in any case:
It might be economically challenging. My understanding is that an AI query is much more expensive to run whilst ad potential is lower. They can place an ad next to an AI answer, but Microsoft might not and subsidize it.
But that's not even the biggest threat. If the AI chat is as good as to give a direct answer, it means you won't hit the source website. Which currently runs ads. This might mean websites getting a fraction of their original traffic in the long run and ad impressions decimate.
Not to mention that even having a website becomes relatively pointless. Almost nobody would ever visit it, you're just a content slave for the big AI machine. You do all the work but get none of the rewards. The machine does no (human) work and gets all the rewards.
This breaks the content "contract" of the internet. The incentives were already bad, but its going to get a whole lot worse.
Your closing sentence made me realize that there are "social contracts" on the Internet, and we're suddenly in a new regime. Our notions of how to operate (and how to monetize) will have to recalibrate to this drastically altered milieu.
Strangest thing about this situation is that the "Attention Is All You Need" paper which, from what I read was crucial to give birth to the technology that fuels OpenAI's GPT actually came from Google Labs. So in theory they had the very upper hand implementing it, back in 2018. Did they put it on hold on purpose?
In Minority Report we saw a guy controlling a computer interface by waving his arms in the air, and ever since we've had people talking about how cool it would be to have that in real life. Well, actually, no it wouldn't. In practice your arms would get tired as hell pretty quickly. A mouse on a table surface is actually a pretty great solution, which is why it's lasted.
People are drawn to things that look cool and innovative for the sake of it, but we're not good at thinking ahead to how well they'd work in practice.
I've been searching the web for so long that it's like breathing. I type a few keywords, hop between the first few results very fast, get what I need and get out. Maybe I have to repeat. Few searches are more complicated than that.
I've tried replacing that flow with AI. It's slower to input, slower to get results, the results are opaque with regards to where they came from and how trustworthy they are. And the results aren't better, in my experience as someone for who finds search to have been solved and painless for many years.
Even asking one question of an LLM takes more time and effort than a traditional search, and the problem is compounded when I have to iterate on a search.
(Also it sucks to cede the kind of power to search providers that gives them leverage to force us to be logged in and monetize what's always been free, but those are just random complaints.)
So, going back to your question. My guess is that Google has always known this isn't a better overall experience, once you get over the initial wow factor. But maybe they underestimated how much that wow factor would allow true competition to materialize before the rest of us would figure it out and lose interest.
Yes, PaLM and Bard have existed internally for years but Google just didn't release them. Imagen, which is better than Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, also hasn't been released.
Google search results went from great to passable to atrocious over the last fifteen years. Part of that is their refusal to maintain an index of older content, in an effort to trim costs. There are searches that I used to make ten years ago that yielded the info I was looking for, and it’s as if the info never existed existed. Part of that may be that the sites are gone, but I did read that Google simply doesn’t want to pay the cost of maintaining that older index as time goes by.
This is all to say - Google could have not let it’s search product become a hopeless piece of garbage before the threat of real competition emerged.
I suspect that as much as we hype ChatGPT here on HN, its effect on Google’s actual revenue is effectively zero. It could affect their stock price due to informed speculators, but their search revenue is another story. I assume it’s declining anyway but I doubt ChatGPT has a noticeable impact on it yet.
It’s still so, so early for ChatGPT. I just started to change my patterns to go to ChatGPT first and I’m a HN user, maybe not the most cutting edge but certainly in the population of internet users overall I’m far from a laggard.
It’s a default everywhere. Usually I’ll go to chatgpt as a 2nd option when google sucks at answering something. Chatgpt is still pretty unreliable for specifics (especially things that involve numbers like dates or statistics).
Pretty excited for the conversational tutor for learning languages. Been hearing about it since 2021 but my guess is Google's big investment in Duolingo probably put the brakes on it internally.
I’m sure it depends on the language but I’ve found ChatGPT works well for this purpose. I suppose the risk is that I don’t know what I don’t know so it very well might look fine to me but terrible to native speakers. Even so I’m fairly certain it’s better than DuoLingo which is more of a mobile vocabulary game than a language learning platform.
Google is right to panic, because they might actually be overtaken now, mired as they are in their ad-driven business model that has largely turned search into SEO-poisoned well [0]. Instead, some future chatbot search will likely win that convinces users it is not influenced by advertisers nor "well-poisoned" by a SEO equivalent.
OpenAI is well positioned and has the lead, but the field is wide open at the moment.
What are the potential ways for companies to make money using LLMs for search? If they start altering the LLMs output with ads, it will significantly reduce the usefulness of the search results, like watching a sponsored video on YouTube. On the other hand, if they only display banner ads related to the search, users can simply ask the LLMs for the best product based on their needs, and ignore the ads completely. Only a few users are probably likely to opt in for a monthly subscription, while the majority wouldn't.
The article is very light on details. For example, it doesn't explain whether this Magi would also be a LLM and whether there are any relevant architectural differences to GPT 4.
This article really shows that google finally realized that its to time to improve and compete.
The product and features mentioned here are certainly interesting and could be indeed useful.
I am surprised how their communication team has handled this, they appear to be calm, in this "we can do this, we can recover" mode, they aren't dismissive of competition or rumors as shown in their official responses in this article.
And unlike others here, I really think its googles game to lose, they have much more data than anyone, they can customize and improve the experience much more than Microsoft can.
And I doubt they are truly as behind GPT-4 as LLaMDA showed.
Competition is definitely needed in the search space and we finally have it.
> Google has been worried about A.I.-powered competitors since OpenAI, a San Francisco start-up that is working with Microsoft, demonstrated a chatbot called ChatGPT in November. About two weeks later, Google created a task force in its search division to start building A.I. products…
Two weeks? That’s a pretty slow response to an existential threat
Why does google only offer a single search product? Why not specialized indexes and engines? I'd pay to reliably find the excerpt of technical doc I'm looking for, good examples, etc. And not just from the public web, partnerships with technology companies so that their documentation is easily consumable.
I believe Google earnestly worked on this for many years, but about a decade ago, after losing the lawsuit with Google Books, this moved to the back burner.
The number one issue to making information universally accessible and useful is no longer technical, it's legal. It's copyright law. Google is making quite a lot of money from the status quo, and is choosing profits over their stated mission. I can't blame them. They carried the torch quite far.
Now OpenAI is running with the torch. They pretty much said "FU" to copyright law and trained on everything anyway. (Which is a great thing!). And now, in many many cases, are delivering on Google's stated mission better than Google.
What I want 99% of the time is a plaintext search of the internet. That's it. Unfortunately 'SEO' and the myriad of ads and other such parasites have poisoned any chance of that actually working.
Google’s finished. Reddit is the number one place I go to first to find information about something, and often the last. Only when I’m desperate for info and can’t find it on Reddit, I decide to wade through the toxic swamp of search results, trying to separate SEO spam from something actually useful.
I’m still puzzled by the fact that Sundar is still the CEO. He’s the Steve Ballmer just riding the stock price but the company is falling ever behind on innovation
reddit is already heavily astroturfed and this is getting worse by the day.
while this method may work, as often as i see this type of comment, i’m guessing reddit’s quality of information will be worse than even google search within months
[+] [-] geuis|2 years ago|reply
I have gotten increasingly frustrated with the results that even 6 years ago were more relevant.
When I put quotes around a specific phrase, I only want direct matches to those words first, before showing me anything else.
Yesterday an uncle was asking me if there are RV parks in SF or nearby. Google proceeds to show me a list of every dog park near my zip code instead. I quote "RV parks" and get similar. When I finally spelled out recreational vehicle parks, I got better results. And every result literally has "RV park" in the title. (Turns out there are 2 in SF. Candlestick park has bad reviews, and the link to the one in the Presidio is 404.)
In a year or two all of this AI stuff is going to calm back down when people finally realize that for other than a few product types, sprinkling "AI" onto everything like cheap MSG isn't going to make the core products any better.
I don't want a "personalized" search experience. I want accurate results for the damned thing I'm searching for. Those should be exactly the same results everyone else gets when looking for the same thing.
[+] [-] cush|2 years ago|reply
The reason the search results suck is because the web sucks. #1 search results for recipes crash iOS safari while scrolling past hundreds of ads to get to the ingredients. This is the result of Google's design. Google got us all into this mess, and they realistically have no way out with search as we know it.
While not perfectly accurate today, LLMs are able to troll through Google's mess and pull out the information people are actually looking for. Over time, Google will be forced to conform and will do the only thing they know how - use your personal information to tune an LLM just for you.
It's sad, but the data Google has on people will likely give them a massive edge over Bing and other competitors in the long term
[+] [-] spaceman_2020|2 years ago|reply
People who are actually passionate about a topic and write about it for the sake of sharing often don't have the resources or even the desire to invest in SEO and great mobile experience. Crappy commercial sites, meanwhile, can just throw money at SEO and developers to ace all of Google's technical metrics.
Google forgot that at the end of the day, it's the content that matters, not how the site looks or its domain authority.
[+] [-] jonas21|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22rv+parks%22+san+francisco
[+] [-] nullc|2 years ago|reply
The fact that it'll hardly return slow loading or older HTTPS-less (non-commercial) pages has essentially memory-holed a huge part of the internet, containing a lot of valuable and historically important litigation. I'm constantly frustrated in research in looking for material which is out there but which even knowing exact strings from it is difficult to get google (or Bing, which was bad in this way first and is often no better than google) to return.
[+] [-] marginalia_nu|2 years ago|reply
But I think the main draw of Phind and similar alternatives isn't necessarily that it's that much better at getting the necessary information, it's just so much less annoying to use because it cuts out all the newsletter popovers, bait and switch blogspam, cookie consent popups, SEO dark patterns etc. You don't have to mentally filter out a bunch of nonsense.
Search engines are annoying. I say this as I spend time and effort developing one.
[+] [-] xnx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trts|2 years ago|reply
Long-winded recipe pages are the canonical example, but last week I was just looking for info about a place I'd be traveling too, and had to scroll through pages of useless fluff to just get the info I was looking for.
It was surprising to realize how much I have stopped using Google entirely since ChatGPT will just tell me the answer or provide additional context, all from the safe, ad-free interface where I already am.
It's my hope that technologies like this will finally kill the ad-driven internet paradigm. More than social media, it really seems to be the root cause of all of the undesirable things we have seen sprouting like weeds across our relationships, media, and political institutions for the past 15 years.
[+] [-] smitty1e|2 years ago|reply
There was a blatant "port list" to the results.
To find some commentary by a nominally centrist voice, I had to search on a blog.
More pure mechanism, less bias, please.
[+] [-] skilled|2 years ago|reply
Is it really so hard to talk about these things as they are?
[+] [-] bagels|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] balls187|2 years ago|reply
I found it exceptionally great.
As an aside, if you ever are in BC with kids, check out Kidtropolis. I did, thx to Bing+ChatGPT
[+] [-] flangola7|2 years ago|reply
Once you have everything set up and configured it is effectively an API that does arbitrary work for you.
[+] [-] m348e912|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dylan604|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dahwolf|2 years ago|reply
On point, the path from search engine to AI chatbot, in case it does succeed, is quite dramatic in any case:
It might be economically challenging. My understanding is that an AI query is much more expensive to run whilst ad potential is lower. They can place an ad next to an AI answer, but Microsoft might not and subsidize it.
But that's not even the biggest threat. If the AI chat is as good as to give a direct answer, it means you won't hit the source website. Which currently runs ads. This might mean websites getting a fraction of their original traffic in the long run and ad impressions decimate.
Not to mention that even having a website becomes relatively pointless. Almost nobody would ever visit it, you're just a content slave for the big AI machine. You do all the work but get none of the rewards. The machine does no (human) work and gets all the rewards.
This breaks the content "contract" of the internet. The incentives were already bad, but its going to get a whole lot worse.
[+] [-] disqard|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carlycue|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrfinn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] add-sub-mul-div|3 years ago|reply
People are drawn to things that look cool and innovative for the sake of it, but we're not good at thinking ahead to how well they'd work in practice.
I've been searching the web for so long that it's like breathing. I type a few keywords, hop between the first few results very fast, get what I need and get out. Maybe I have to repeat. Few searches are more complicated than that.
I've tried replacing that flow with AI. It's slower to input, slower to get results, the results are opaque with regards to where they came from and how trustworthy they are. And the results aren't better, in my experience as someone for who finds search to have been solved and painless for many years.
Even asking one question of an LLM takes more time and effort than a traditional search, and the problem is compounded when I have to iterate on a search.
(Also it sucks to cede the kind of power to search providers that gives them leverage to force us to be logged in and monetize what's always been free, but those are just random complaints.)
So, going back to your question. My guess is that Google has always known this isn't a better overall experience, once you get over the initial wow factor. But maybe they underestimated how much that wow factor would allow true competition to materialize before the rest of us would figure it out and lose interest.
[+] [-] williamstein|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmf|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skyhlar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phmqk76|2 years ago|reply
This is all to say - Google could have not let it’s search product become a hopeless piece of garbage before the threat of real competition emerged.
[+] [-] balls187|2 years ago|reply
My kids will just have a device that responds to their queries using AI.
If that device isn’t made by Google, it won’t use Google search.
Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Nintendo will all aggregate data with their own AI front end.
Google’s saving grace is Youtube.
[+] [-] kingstoned|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TaylorAlexander|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newaccount74|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jitl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eldritch_4ier|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elforce002|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alphabetting|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elliekelly|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stareatgoats|2 years ago|reply
OpenAI is well positioned and has the lead, but the field is wide open at the moment.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCo0A2M1tlE
[+] [-] machdiamonds|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epups|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m3kw9|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fariszr|2 years ago|reply
The product and features mentioned here are certainly interesting and could be indeed useful.
I am surprised how their communication team has handled this, they appear to be calm, in this "we can do this, we can recover" mode, they aren't dismissive of competition or rumors as shown in their official responses in this article.
And unlike others here, I really think its googles game to lose, they have much more data than anyone, they can customize and improve the experience much more than Microsoft can. And I doubt they are truly as behind GPT-4 as LLaMDA showed.
Competition is definitely needed in the search space and we finally have it.
[+] [-] MarkMc|2 years ago|reply
Two weeks? That’s a pretty slow response to an existential threat
[+] [-] gxt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] breck|2 years ago|reply
I believe Google earnestly worked on this for many years, but about a decade ago, after losing the lawsuit with Google Books, this moved to the back burner.
The number one issue to making information universally accessible and useful is no longer technical, it's legal. It's copyright law. Google is making quite a lot of money from the status quo, and is choosing profits over their stated mission. I can't blame them. They carried the torch quite far.
Now OpenAI is running with the torch. They pretty much said "FU" to copyright law and trained on everything anyway. (Which is a great thing!). And now, in many many cases, are delivering on Google's stated mission better than Google.
[+] [-] wildrhythms|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xwdv|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nxm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toofy|2 years ago|reply
while this method may work, as often as i see this type of comment, i’m guessing reddit’s quality of information will be worse than even google search within months
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lm28469|2 years ago|reply