[HN Gopher] Laid Off from Google Search?
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Laid Off from Google Search?
I just got laid off from Google search after working on the ranking
team for four years. Wanted to see if there's anyone out there that
wants to build a search startup, especially if you're ex-Google. I
have some ideas for how to build a search engine like 2010 Google,
that's relatively low tech (i.e. achievable). If you're interested
email me at username @ Gmail.
Author : gregw134
Score : 73 points
Date : 2023-01-26 16:41 UTC (6 hours ago)
| andrewfromx wrote:
| i love how you have to be smart enough to
| s/hacknewsusername/username to email this person
| gregw134 wrote:
| Hacker news doesn't have dm right?
| trevcanhuman wrote:
| nope, you don't even require an email for a new account.
| dekhn wrote:
| no but you can put your email in your profile
| RadiozRadioz wrote:
| That is not a high bar.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| More than that, you need to be smart enough to write the sed
| substitution the other way around.
| doubled112 wrote:
| Could ChatGPT figure it out?
| yonixw wrote:
| < What is the email meant in the following text
|
| "Laid Off from Google Search?
|
| 21 points by gregw134 1 hour ago | flag | hide | past |
| favorite | 13 comments
|
| I just got ...
|
| ...
|
| ... email me at username @ Gmail."
|
| > The email mentioned in the comment is "username@gmail.com"
|
| < What is the email I can use to contact this user? he didn't
| wrote it explicitly. If it helps, his username is gregw134.
|
| > ... It only says "username@gmail.com" which is not a valid
| email.
|
| Looks like he dodged this one!
| gregw134 wrote:
| Nice! I was just hoping to beat regex scrapers.
| orangesite wrote:
| 2010 low tech Google is _exactly_ what I'm looking for.
|
| Everyone else in the search space (even paid search - kagi I'm
| looking at _you_!) seems to be under the impression that it was
| abandoned because it didn't work but I'm pretty sure it was only
| abandoned because it didn't drive ad revenue.
|
| Moar power to you mate, if I wasn't busy with other things right
| now I'd be beating down your door!
| topicseed wrote:
| But it's no longer possible to operate that way as they were
| getting gamed by SEO's.
|
| Today may look bad for searchers like us but it could be a lot
| worse. It's a constant battle.
| traverseda wrote:
| Kagi seems to be returning pretty good results, from what
| little I've tried it
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Really, are you sure?
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| I'd just say: Careful about non-competes and potential trade
| secret violations. Regardless of their merits, if Google wants to
| take you to court, they could bury you in legal costs before it
| ever goes to trial.
| gpt5 wrote:
| "Google accused of laying off employees and then suing them for
| violating non-disclosure agreements". Definitely not a PR
| nightmare.
| rhelz wrote:
| Not any worse P.R. nightmare than laying off ten thousand
| engineers. Nobody cares about engineers man.
| thumbsup-_- wrote:
| Definitely op has no clue about all this else wouldn't have
| posted in a public forum like this
| piloto_ciego wrote:
| I'm a grad student in computer vision, would you want someone
| like me to help out, or are you looking for more established
| folks?
| oars wrote:
| Have you seen https://crowdview.ai?
|
| It's a Forum Search Engine I've seen pop up on HN a few times in
| the past.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| https://knuckleheads.club/ might interest you.
| priyankaja wrote:
| Hi Greg,
|
| I would love to hear about the problem space you are exploring.
| Here is my linkedin: priyankaja
| japanman425 wrote:
| [flagged]
| my_usernam3 wrote:
| Even as a linkedIn hater, I'm confused what the problem here
| is. Priyankaja just wants to connect and continue the
| conversation on a platform that's tailored to connecting
| professionals.
| temp_praneshp wrote:
| > Priyankaja
|
| > for your juggard tech support
|
| maybe they have had really bad experience working with
| Indians?
| dboreham wrote:
| Probably a good plan to ditch the @gmail mailbox.
| LollipopYakuza wrote:
| And avoid communicating with anyone using a @gmail as well?
| slaw wrote:
| And not getting locked out of account.
| gpt5 wrote:
| Oh, c'mon! what's this fear-mongering?
|
| Google would need to break criminal laws (and public trust) in
| order to look at someone's private gmail address for the
| purpose of snooping on their plans / their conversations.
| bradwood wrote:
| Search without LLM/GPT is just dead in the water now, isn't it?
| gregw134 wrote:
| It depends on your goal. If the focus of your search engine is
| question answering (like Google), ChatGPT is serious
| competition. Browsing the web to discover online communities
| and niche websites is an entirely different activity that
| ChatGPT doesn't compete with, and frankly Google doesn't do
| well either.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Yeah discovery is in such a messy state right now. I don't
| think anyone is doing it well.
|
| "Give me facts about X" there are several decent options for.
|
| "Give me quality reading material about topic X", there's
| like nobody even trying. Not that an answer doesn't exist for
| the query, just nobody is able to produce it.
|
| This goes well beyond websites, discovery sucks for streaming
| video, for shopping, almost everything.
| gregw134 wrote:
| I think one issue is broadness. When a user issues a query
| there is often a choice of 1) low quality material that
| directly answers the specific question, or 2) high quality
| material about the subject more broadly. If someone asks
| "how do I fix water in camera iphone 3", if someone has set
| up a content farm for that exact question Google will
| probably send the user there, rather than to a broader
| repair page from apple.com. There's tradeoffs in search
| ranking, which is why I think it's possible to make a
| search engine that takes the opposite side of the tradeoffs
| that Google has.
|
| Nice job on marginalia.nu btw. Your site is a good reminder
| that there is a whole internet out there that just isn't
| able to rank on Google for various reasons.
| randomsolutions wrote:
| Search is one of the least interesting applications of LLMs.
| Most of the complaints about search are self imposed, not
| technical problems. Why are we still talking about a 20 year
| old problem that is basically solved?
| etrautmann wrote:
| Because it's not solved for users?
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I can't decide if LLM/GPT is a seismic shift in the "search
| industry" or if it's just a gimmick. For now I'm considering it
| more of a gimmick that everyone is just very very excited
| about.
| CSSer wrote:
| I've always wondered: Is LLM/GPT already how Google is
| generating answers to "People also ask" questions or are they
| using a prior, or unknown, ML approach for this? I ask this
| because the quality of answers linked to these queries is
| often so astoundingly awful that I can't believe this is in
| production.
|
| The question is often very relevant. I'll readily admit that
| I have a high engagement with that accordion feature, but I
| can't believe how often I open it to find a disappointing
| text selection or even page.
|
| And if it is, I wonder where that leaves JSON-LD schema in
| all of this. Schema is the perfect signal for something like
| this, but I'm afraid, and I believe I can speak
| representatively about this from an agency perspective, the
| trust is kind of broken for that model.
|
| Too many people, myself included, are uneasy about how much
| information to give to Google since they have an insidious
| aim to use it to get information to users faster regardless
| of how much impact it has on a business' ability to remain
| competitive. Yet, on the other hand, I sympathize with the
| idea that the more Google reverses course on this and leans
| into embracing SEO industry-driven control they risk
| compromising the product. It makes me think that Google has
| reached a theoretically maximum level of product
| optimization.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| I think Google has built up a knowledge base that they
| query for those answers. And yes, it's embarrassingly wrong
| so much of the time
| gregw134 wrote:
| If it's useful it isn't a gimmick.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| I think the problem is the popular media coverage makes it
| hard to allow people to actually focus on the value this
| actually brings. I work in ED and its astounding how many
| people fundamentally think basically the school is going to
| shutdown imminently (clearer heads are prevailing... for
| now).
|
| But the tool clearly has some value, which may even reveal
| itself to be quite significant. I think a useful metric is to
| look at what happened with Copilot, which is a domain where
| there has been a lot less media frenzy about, and in which,
| arguably, this kind of model could've have much more readily
| made a tremendous impact. I think even in the dev community
| we went through a small period of folks thinking this was
| going to be earthshattering, followed by a natural cooldown,
| followed by a probably much saner interpretation that it is a
| tool, and in the right contexts might actually be useful.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| yeah I think you're spot on. I don't think GPT is earth
| shattering but it's also hard to tell with all the media
| frenzy about it.
| donretag wrote:
| There is a Slack group related to search at
| http://www.opensourceconnections.com/slack
|
| Great community. I would love to join something from the start,
| but now is not the right time.
| gregw134 wrote:
| Pefect. I joined, thank you.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| Neeva.com is a bunch of ex-Googlers yah?
| jstx1 wrote:
| Can you share any insight into how Google are deciding who to lay
| off? I would have thought that search is a pretty safe team to be
| on.
| throwaway88229 wrote:
| [dead]
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| I'm probably not google-level, but I have an idea to recreate ask
| jeeves, where at first it brings back all the results and people
| check the box next to the ones most likely to fit their need,
| using reinforcement learning it'll eventually know the best ones,
| and then have gpt3 summarize the top 10, and eventually just
| answer the damn question. The goal being
| chatGPT+Google+wikipedia(citations) to combat chatGPT's
| misinformation issues.
|
| Another idea is to basically create LLM's for every city's
| laws/legislation/codes etc and basically be like an ai lexus
| nexus.
| gregw134 wrote:
| I'd imagine the search engine of the future will be like that.
| Let a summarization AI do the search and then report back on
| results, with citations.
| freediver wrote:
| Kagi has a technology demo that does exactly that, with
| varying rate of success:
|
| https://labs.kagi.com/ai/contextai
| barnbuilder wrote:
| I would be careful working on this sort of thing during the next
| 2 months while you are still technically under the employment of
| the company.
| ezekg wrote:
| Sorry to hear that. Kagi is doing great things. If you really
| want to work on search (that doesn't suck), maybe reach out to
| them?
| gregw134 wrote:
| Been hearing a lot about Kagi on here, might reach out. My
| concern is that they're trying to beat Google at its own game
| by being better at scraping, document understanding and
| question-answering.
| D13Fd wrote:
| I don't think so. I was surprised to learn on their Discord
| that they rely heavily on paid results from Google's API and
| other search APIs. Not sure what they do with it but it's
| pretty amazing how they improve the results.
| topicseed wrote:
| Don't think Google has a paid Search API. Bing does though
| with Azure.
| ezekg wrote:
| From Kagi's FAQ (https://kagi.com/faq): >
| Where are your results coming from? > > *Our
| searching includes anonymized requests to traditional
| search indexes like Google* and Bing as well as vertical
| sources like Wikipedia and DeepL or other APIs. >
| We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news
| index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers.
|
| Emphasis mine.
| gregw134 wrote:
| I was looking into that, looks like they have an API but
| it's limited to 10k requests per day, and TOS says you
| can't blend the results with other sources.
| elashri wrote:
| From what I heard from their CEO (Vlad). No they don't try to
| do that and they don't even invest heavily in web scraping.
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(page generated 2023-01-26 23:02 UTC)