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.
Android is getting genuinely better. Also AndroidAuto.
And the average person won't even notice most of the new features/improvements; perhaps the biggest one is the camera, and that's all done in hardware or AI these days, which is not Android per-se than a photography app (which, again, is usually a Pixel exclusive)
Deep level impressive but maybe just by a company owned by Google is the Deepmind stuff like AlphaFold which recently got a nobel prize and AlphaGo and MuZero. Also you may have heard of the chatgpt/llm stuff that's trendy now, all based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(deep_learning_arc...
Unless you're thinking of Picasa, which is a whole different conversation lol
Sunsetting blog from 2016 for good measure: http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2016/02/moving-on-from-pica...
I think the last straw was when I was forced to replace the stock launcher just to avoid the built in unblockable google search ads. That made me consider why I bothered with Google at all anymore if all I do is hacks to work around their crappy ad filled UI.
that’s really something you don’t read often
At what ? Stealing user data ?
They are still not able to arrange some widgets on the screen and to underestand that, if an app does not have microphone permission, you don't need a bloody microphone widget on the screen.
Also the search is very lackluster
0: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-...
Only the visible portion of the document is rendered (previously in HTML, now in Canvas). Everything before/after is just the document data.
Maybe you started working on longer docs coincidentally around the same time Docs switched to canvas?
You then have to wait for docs glacial performance to catch up and re-render things again.
It’s genuinely garbage and the “live collaboration” features go unused most of the time.
The fact Google did the initial work on transformers but only OpenAI was able to productize is an indictment of their stagnation more than an achievement.
If websites can't earn a living through ads because LLM's don't send them any traffic anymore, where do the LLM's ingest new information from?
The web continues to deteriorate because of this and nobody has solved this problem.
AI is messy
LLMs have to have something ‘true’ (or at least statistically probable) to validate against for training.
Taking the output from it and feeding it back into itself is, essentially, an Ouroboros. Or like locking a human in solitary.
The more/longer it happens, the more deranged it’s going to get.
It's culmination of decades of NLP researches, but it's also just East Asian predictive text percussively adapted for variable word length language. It must've been clear to whoever core people that it's fundamentally a sluggish demo or at most a cheap outright-sold commodity product.
IMO they would be right unless someone finds a reason that LLMs can't ever be self hosted in the way Google Search can't be. They must have just saw by the way it is that LLM is at best a regularization engine for that magic box.
What do you mean? Anthropic and Google both have widely used products based on transformers.
All of these companies are in the red, but OpenAI has the most revenue.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
2017, seven Google employees invent the transformer architecture and publish a paper. Google's investing heavily into ML, with their own custom 'TPU' chips and their 'Tensorflow' ML framework.
2019ish, Google has an internal chatbot they decide to do absolutely nothing with. Some idiot tells the press it's sentient, and they fire him.
2022, ChatGPT launches. It proves really powerful, a product loads of individuals and businesses are ready to pay for, and the value of the company skyrockets.
2023, none of the seven Transformer paper authors are at Google any more. Google rushes out Bard. Turns out they don't have a sentient super-intelligence after all. In fact it's badly received enough they end up needing to rebrand it a few months later.
Classic tortoise-and-hare situation - Google spent 5 years napping, then had to sprint flat out just to take third place.
At worst, Google is in a tie for first.
In the market, I would say both Anthropic and openAI have been able to do that much better than traditional big tech including Google.
E.g. when I start a search session to solve a programming problem (before llms), I will continually search different terms to get to my solution webpage. Then stop. This session metadata and the path I took is highly significant data that can be used to help llms recognise what research itself looks like.
Gemini is Google saying "look at me, I can jump on the AI bandwagon too."
Android has had a bunch of facelifts, but from a user perspective isn't much different to what it was a decade ago. Same for Google Photos.
Google Fiber is dead and all but buried.
Google Fi is just another MVNO.
Youtube used to be a wasteland of horrible insulting comments closer to 4chan in politeness and quality. Near constant spammy meanness.
Youtube has issues, yet when the Baltimore bridge collapsed, the live view on the bridge was almost constantly polite, curious, and respectful commentary. The text summaries are actually a nice change so that if you don't want to sit through some annoying drawn out video, that often ends up using a robot voice anyways, you can just read the text summary. A feature that I was personally interested in a long time ago when almost every article became a video instead. Same reason https://neuters.de/ is one of the best ways to read Reuters News.
Part of the issue with Youtube is not Youtube specifically, it's humanity. A lot of the 90% is annoying spammy BS, and it's difficult to filter away the constant "first post", "you so hot girl", "me too", "like like", "rofl wtf bbq" nonsense. Part of what ended up making FB almost unreadable. Even small town groups are deluges of spammy, copypasta, upvote trolling.
Scrolled through Youtube front page to find a "random" video and landed on a Half Life 2 documentary. Comments were either polite, informative, or opinion without being especially flamebait. There's a lot of the world wide web that's not nearly such high quality these days.
The others issues would probably be multiple pages of commentary, having tried to be an Android developer. "The function you're searching for is deprecated, move to ... a function that is also deprecated."
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.
A lot of other companies do this. Nothing special about Google.
"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.
Areas with tens of thousands of residents get updated on a multi-year schedule; a year-long construction related speed drop might remain in place for years after the construction ends.
Truly remote areas are batch imported from other systems, traced out from satellite images, or some such. Mountain and desert roads are rough suggestions at best.
This seems to have always been true of Google Maps.
It doesnt have all the features in the world but it has some technically impressive ones, least of all the “I can tell you’re all in a meeting room, so I am going to selectively increase the audio where people are speaking and prevent echo from all the speakers”.
I’d love more love for screen sharing, but meet is the only product I see that is getting materially better over time.
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.
When you hire an ex McKinsey CEO and get the guy who destroyed Yahoo Search to run your search business, this is what happens.
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.
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.
The difference to me between whether a company is able to do something amazing vs. a person working at that company does, is whether they're able to productize it/do something with it or not.
Google is famous for hiring the smartest people in the world, and has been for 20 years. That's good. It hires those people and gives them permission to do whatever they want. That's good too! (maybe not for the sharesholders, as we come to see, but for the world of technology and for humanity)
But if all of the authors of the Transformer paper end up having to leave Google and each start competing startups, that shows that the only impressive thing Google has done is managed to hire those people to do the research. That's it.
They had a goldmine and they wasted it.
What are you talking about? They launched Gemini. They didn't waste anything. And you can't force employees to stay. Employees leaving to compete is as old as Silicon Valley.
Google was just being more conservative about launching it until their hand was forced by OpenAI. And for good reason too, considering all the hallucinations. But then they launched. They didn't "waste" anything.
Depending on how you measure you could claim Facebook is 1st if you grade them on a different scale for being the most "open-source". But quality wise, they're pretty much in the "everyone else category.
Anthropic is new to a definitive 2nd position, and it remains to be seen if it's durable (probably not).
But regardless of how you measure, Google/Gemini is squarely in the "everyone else" bucket.
When they should have been the definitive first - leading the entire industry with every launch, the way OpenAI is.
If you look into 2005-2009, there were products like Chrome, Waymo, Youtube, GCP, Google docs and lot more that were very ambitious. After 2009 I can't name any one product on that realm.
And no, Waymo didn't "come out in 2009". It still hasn't come out except in three limited areas, but it's shown astonishing success where it has. So again, if you're only going to count the year a project was started, and not the decades of work it takes to build a world-changing business... I don't know what to tell you.
Except just... talk about moving the goalposts. Geez. I'm pretty sure there isn't a single company on earth that you're going to find impressive enough.
What was argued was not whether Google created impressive things. I was clear what I meant was Google hasn't started anything to their product suite. Adding to the product suite is more challenging than research project for the company, and it was where Google thrived and which led to success of Google.
? Microprocessors ? Neural networks ?
When google required hosting blogspot content on their servers instead of self hosting that was the end of the freedom there. 2009.
The Transformer.
>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.
Ironically I think the dearth of innovation is related to consumers having been rendered too passive since 2010.
Nobody has "needs" for Google to address anymore; now we are told what we should want (clear indication that advertising execs now run the show), usually under protest as they forcibly reshape industry standards and kill beloved products.
The infantilization of AI and the subsequent hilarity of Gemini blackwashing white historical figures says all it needs to about the culture shift.
Search is also censored to an embarrassing degree. Queer theory is treated as irrefutable fact and you'll find infinite dubious content promoting it, while conspiracy theory and anything critical of Israel is downranked or delisted altogether.
Early Google gave us lightsabers [for "free"]. Now they sell lefthanded safety scissors and insist nothing has changed. All stars burn out eventually.
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 open sourcing and open patenting of VP8, and the work done on VP9 and AV1 were genuine public goods from Google.
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.
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've always built as many as I wanted from the fish I get by accident while building other stuff.
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...
Yes it does. It scales with population, which last time I checked is still going up.
You can click `chart` for an easier visualization
Shifting spend from legacy media, and extracting more value from the sellers' margin.
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