[HN Gopher] Google Is Losing Control
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Google Is Losing Control
Author : mikece
Score : 37 points
Date : 2023-02-10 19:05 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| realitysballs wrote:
| Good article
| TomMasz wrote:
| Google sounds like a Kodak or a Xerox, so enamored of their cash
| cow they lose the incentive to innovate. I'm not saying they will
| end up like those companies, though, as they're in an industry
| where catching up won't be as difficult. But they definitely got
| caught napping.
| uejfiweun wrote:
| What exactly is the bottleneck here? What is it about ChatGPT
| that makes it better than Google's stuff? Is it more compute
| power? Better algorithms used in the models? More talent? Better
| work culture? Some proprietary technical innovations? Quality of
| data? Quantity of data? Some combination of all of these?
| knaik94 wrote:
| The bottleneck is clearly Google's hesitancy. ChatGPT is better
| because I can use it right now. I don't care how good the
| research demos are if I can't interact with them myself. Google
| has a track record of discontinuing products and having weird
| user/developer unfriendly policies.
|
| One of the most recent was Chrome's plan to force manifest v3.
| But many of the features promised to devs from v3 wouldn't have
| been ready by the time v3 was supposed to release. I would
| approach Google's AI stuff with similar hesitancy as I would
| have approached Stadia within the last few months before it
| shut down. Just like with Stadia, Google very clearly does not
| care to prioritize this kind of AI tech. Google failed to
| proofread its own ad about Bard. I can't understand how rushed
| they would have to be for something like that to happen.
|
| In my opinion, this is why new ChatGPT users are going to stay
| with ChatGPT, even as the aggressive filtering makes the output
| slightly worse as time goes on.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I think for Google it may be profits. If you're already a near
| monopoly that's captured most of the market using a
| (relatively) cheap means of data processing, an extremely
| expensive competitor is terrible news. You're in a position
| where the winning move where you keep your marketshare means
| far lower profits, at least for some amount of time.
| mikece wrote:
| And the aggressive competitor right now isn't ChatGTP but
| it's TikTok: many people are now turning to TikTok for search
| instead of Google.
| adaptbrian wrote:
| any data to back this up or is this anecdotal? https://tren
| ds.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge... and htt
| ps://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge..
| . doesnt point to anything meteoric here.
| shanemhansen wrote:
| I think google search trends might not provide good data
| on interest in TikTok search.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| I don't but I've seen many people on the app say as much.
|
| I've seen many more people appending reddit to Google
| searches.
|
| google should be more worried about reddit getting their
| search together
| roundandround wrote:
| The same would have hypothetically been true for plenty
| of sites like Stack Overflow.. Which is an example that
| sites themselves penalize anonymous internal search over
| fresh Google search.
|
| Controlling the search pages is of low value compared to
| staying fixed at the top of Google searches (thanks to
| obfuscated interaction rankings) by having a lot of
| people who search dozens of times a day always selecting
| only your page in Google's responses and of course never
| applying captcha to a new visitor from Google.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Google search gets worse and worse every year. It's
| actually becoming painful to search for things now. It
| gives me nothing but spammy low quality results unless I
| restrict resuts to reddit and HN and other old school
| forums where people actually talk about stuff and
| exchange information.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Google is definitely becoming the source of last resort
| for a lot of queries. I also turn to it just to search
| other websites.
|
| The biggest search tragedy is Twitter. There's an
| incredible amount of information on that platform but
| most of it is hard to find because of the awful search.
| canes123456 wrote:
| Change in the status quo. Even if there AI is better than
| ChatGPT, it might monetize as well search queries. When you are
| a monopoly, any change means possible losses.
| moonchrome wrote:
| Just from reading ycombinator on this topic I would say ChatGPT
| went all in on productizing - so like they hired developers to
| solve tasks for it to get training data etc. Maybe Google
| treated it as a research project and didn't pour billions in to
| productizing it sooner because like you said - they had the
| same algorithms/hardware/developer/researcher caliber and
| didn't view it as a threat.
|
| And then when ChatGPT launched they got caught with their pants
| down and rushed to save face.
| krackers wrote:
| For years now Google has been shoving the word "AI" into its
| presentations. Just go through the past GoogleIO and see how
| many times they mention "AI". All along they've painted a
| picture of having some grand plan, that they've got something
| cooking internally that they're perfecting. Maybe some
| investors even believed it, after all if they're publishing
| cutting edge papers surely they must have a product backing
| this as well. And now Microsoft has called their bluff.
|
| And the irony is that if they had simply worked on perfecting
| standard keyword based information retrieval, the thirst for
| a LLM integrated search engine would not be as high.
| cloudking wrote:
| Execs: We need to implement ChatGPT functionality into Google
| search to stay relevant and protect our moat!
|
| Engineers: Okay, we have LaMDA which is a more powerful
| language model, we'll implement it.
|
| Execs: Great, what are the risks?
|
| Engineers: Well each search is going to cost 5x more compute
| power, and may reduce the amount of clicks to ads and search
| results since we're answering all their questions directly.
|
| Execs: Hold on... we need to have a bunch of meetings about why
| not to do this.
| tobiasSoftware wrote:
| I'd say it is about the accessibility of data.
|
| First, there is the issue of paid ads. An example is if I look
| up "How to learn C++", the top link is a paid ad for
| CodeAcademy, which claims to be free, but then has three tiers
| with only the basic one being free. I started looking for
| information on C++ and ended up in a sales room being given a
| payment plan. Contrast this to me typing "How to learn C++"
| into ChatGPT, which informs me about "variables, data types,
| control structures, functions, and arrays", which are a lot of
| nice keywords that I could jump further into.
|
| Second, Google does not give you access to the information
| itself. As such, the style the information is stored in on a
| website is inconsistent, with each website displaying
| information in drastically different ways. For an example, I
| Googled "what is a pointer in c++".
|
| The top link starts with "You learned from the previous
| chapter, that we can get the memory address of a variable by
| using the & operator", leads to a single example, and is about
| a single screen long. This would be useless to someone who has
| no idea what a pointer is and just heard the name of the
| concept.
|
| Meanwhile the second top link starts with "In earlier chapters,
| variables have been explained as locations in the computer's
| memory which can be accessed by their identifier" and is a much
| more in-depth tutorial spanning over a dozen screens worth of
| information. This is better as it gives a lot more information,
| but is still assuming that I got there from following their
| tutorial, but instead Google just jumped me into the middle of
| it.
|
| However, ChatGPT homogenizes this, so the data is already
| organized in an easily accessible format that does not assume
| you have much previous knowledge. When I tried ChatGPT with
| this question, it started with "A pointer is a variable in C++
| that stores the memory address of another variable." That is
| far better than either of the websites that I tried with Google
| that assumed you were halfway through their personal tutorials.
| davidktr wrote:
| Google has something to loose now: their reputation. OpenAI can
| be maverick, any mistakes are "move fast and break things".
|
| Same reason why Mercedes or Audi did not bring automated
| driving on the road, even though they were technologically more
| advanced than Tesla. History proved them right.
| boh wrote:
| It's funny that there's literally no indication that Google is
| losing any material market share but somehow Bing with a chat bot
| (that just launched this week) will, for whatever reason,
| dominate the market (it's almost as if Microsoft has a publicist
| or something). A part of me hopes people will take this seriously
| enough to force Google stock to sell at a discount. The
| expectations of consumer behavior as it relates to search and
| chatbots are wildly optimistic given that using a thing isn't as
| relevant as making money from a person using a thing. So far,
| chatbots don't lead to more sales or more ad revenue and
| assumptions of "potential" behavior aren't as speculative as they
| are unreasonably hopeful.
| pixl97 wrote:
| A crisis of confidence is just as dangerous as a crisis of
| results. If users believe Google is losing users they may try
| other services. Internally it could cause them to make misteps
| in order to maintain its position that lose marker position, or
| causes a bleeding of staff. Also stock prices are set based on
| feelings as much as anything else, and it does appear there is
| at least some risk that G won't be making as much money in the
| future.
| boh wrote:
| I think the evidence of any even perceived "crisis" is still
| lacking (besides these fun articles).
| knaik94 wrote:
| To give Google some credit, I think people would have been
| equally upset if they did release an AI that ended up being used
| maliciously or without proper filters. Google has a habit of
| shipping things while they are still in beta. Gmail kept the
| "beta" label after launch for five years. Not releasing
| unfinished AI products was a calculated move and I think it was
| an overall good decision, but also an expensive one. I am just
| worried about the longevity of it, since Google clearly doesn't
| care to prioritize it. The Bard ad mistake implies a deeper issue
| about resources being allocated incorrectly.
|
| OpenAI clearly spent a lot time red teaming the chatbot to make
| sure the outputs were sanitized. Chatbot as a service is an easy
| monetization strategy from big companies. I wonder if ChatGPT
| servers will share resources with Bing search servers, I can't
| imagine they will, but if they do, the paid subscription will be
| a lot more valuable. I think users will react extremely
| negatively if Bing AI results embed affiliate links on every
| response possible. On the other hand, I can see myself clicking
| links of products ChatGPT recommends if I am intetionally asking
| about some sort of product, like if I ask it types/differences of
| climbing carabiners.
|
| Research is very collaborative, so I understand why those at
| Google stay there. But it seems like MS and OpenAI are
| prioritizing having a clear pathway for novel AI work to reach
| users, and it won't be limited only to implementations that will
| help serve ads better.
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