Samsung considers moving to Bing as default search engine

https://www.sammobile.com/news/samsung-galaxy-phones-tablets-bing-search-replace-google-default-search-engine/

by carlycue • 3 years ago

624 730 3 years ago

king_magic• 3 years ago

I mean it is kind of nuts. I didn't have "pretty much switch entirely to Bing" on my 2023 search Bingo card, but here we are.

detourdog2• 3 years ago

My computer literate but non-technical wife just noticed yesterday that google searches are a waste of time compared to ChatGPT. Over the course of about six hours it went from this thing is amazing to this stupid thing knows I'm on a Mac but still refers to F11 keys.

She even got ChatGPT to re-enforce she was on Mac and didn't have an F11 key but never got a substitute key to use for Mac users. (F11 is volume down on my Mac keyboard.)

ralfd• 3 years ago

What does F11 do?

steve1977• 3 years ago

Bingo… I see what you did there…

tapoxi• 3 years ago

What's Sundar's goal for Google? They seem to be aimless since he took the helm.

m00dy• 3 years ago

He will be fired very soon

throwntoday2• 3 years ago

Hopefully. I can't think of a single product that has grown because of him so much as in spite of him.

ksec2• 3 years ago

They seem to be aimless

I would argue for 95% of Google's existence they have been pretty much aimless.

nbar1• 3 years ago

Then please provide your argument.

Arnt4• 3 years ago

Right. They develop services, see which ones attract a large audience, and close those that don't. https://killedbygoogle.com.

I like it, personally speaking. Google has a lot of power, and it's an approach that minimise the use of that power to push people around.

kramerger2• 3 years ago

A little bit of everything until they figure out what to do.

Samsung and other OEMs get a lot of crap for how they handle android. But they are really the ones driving innovation here.

piyush_soni2• 3 years ago

That's exactly what I think. I personally also find him very uninspiring, it looks like he's basically just 'maintaining' the company on auto-pilot mode. No out of the world new ideas, and now the company is losing on the very field they were seemingly far-far ahead than the rest of the world.

bowsamic• 3 years ago

10 years ago, Google was one of the most exciting companies in the world to me, culminating in that amazing Google Chrome comic https://www.scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/

Their products and software seemed genuinely inspiring. Now, it seems to just be maintenance or death. Seemingly happens with all once-loved tech companies to some degree. It's quite sad but I guess time moves on. Totally self-inflicted for them though, they decided to stop moving forward

shmapf• 3 years ago

I agree, and on top of that Google products used to be, in my experience of top notch quality. But over the past couple of years I'm seeing more and more bugs in Google maps, chrome, and android. I think they've really let the quality bar slip. They were/are in such a dominant position it's taking a long time to crumble, but crumbling they seem to be, slowly but surely.

vxNsr• 3 years ago

Seems his main goal was avoiding getting anything on the record.

ranting-moth• 3 years ago

Or, if it got on, deleting those records after 24 hours.

egeozcan2• 3 years ago

If gods of chaos decide give a future where google completely gets broken up a chance, I'd be massively pissed if someone doesn't detach google reader and bring it online just to make a point.

ant6n3• 3 years ago

Well, blogs are dead so bringing back reader won’t be all that useful.

musictubes• 3 years ago

There are plenty of good RSS services now. In fact I’d argue there is more choice and higher quality now than when Reader was around. I use Newsblur as my aggregator and either net news wire on my Mac and Unread on my iPhone and ipad. I’m glad Google got out of the RSS business.

nus07• 3 years ago

Sundar is a McKinsey consultant who is very pleasant and agreeable and can keep a boat steady while maximizing shareholder return. Unfortunately there isn’t much innovation happening . Google needs a Larry Page or Musk like character back at the helm.

oldgradstudent4• 3 years ago

while maximizing shareholder return.

That's not maximizing shareholder return.

That's locally maximizing shareholder return.

ur-whale4• 3 years ago

Sundar is a McKinsey consultant who is very pleasant and agreeable and can keep a boat steady

Yep. In fact, he was specifically chose to step in as CEO for his meekness : voted most likely to preserve brand value by best distracting folks from the evil turn the company had taken.

while maximizing shareholder return.

Nope. He's a 100% static CEO, and he's therefore squandering huge amounts of capital and human resources.

That's not what I'd call "maximizing shareholder return".

Planktonne• 3 years ago

Google needs a Larry Page or Musk like character

These are not the same kind of character.

joseph_grobbles• 3 years ago

Sundar is a caretaker who got credited for simple inertia: The momentum in place before he took the reigns were predestined to grow earnings for years, but suddenly Pichai gets to pretend it's all him.

Palpatineli• 3 years ago

Especially compared to Nadella, who shows that someone not from the the founders’ circle, a corporate ladder climber, can lead an IT company with great vision too.

foobiekr2• 3 years ago

Microsoft dealt with with the too-rich-to-work problem and the founders-and-earlies-lost-interest problems in the 80s and 90s. "FYIFV" (despite being a bit of a tech urban legend) and "Quietly Vesting Disease" (QVD) and all that. They're an actual grown up company that knows how to build and vet leaders.

Google is not a grown up company - it runs the way a 2nd generation dynastic family runs their businesses - haphazard and sloppy and entirely surviving because of a cash cow and nothing else. Plus, they have a fairly substantial crew with "rest and vest" as a mantra at least for the folks I knew there prior to 2008..

m3kw92• 3 years ago

Google hasn't done jack in terms of innovation since he took over. They did close out a few moon shots. but nothing to note.

philistine3• 3 years ago

It's werid to me that no one has made the self-evident comparison: Sundar is like Steve Ballmer was for Microsoft.

Coming in right after the founders and trying to raise the moats of the exisiting products instead of creating new moats. Google Stadia is a similar failure to Ballmer's late Windows Live initiatives.

krade• 3 years ago

Bad comparison. Ballmer launched Azure, Surface, Bing, Xbox and Office on iOS and Office365. He was also the one go all-in on the cloud and to start the shift towards embracing Open Source. Pretty much everything that people attribute to Nadella either launched or started under Ballmer.

kccqzy3• 3 years ago

Maybe finally the board will wake up and find a replacement for Sundar this year. I thought Googlers were internally very unhappy about Sundar for a long time now.

bushbaba2• 3 years ago

To maximize shareholder value which he’s done. He’s the balmer (but worse) of our generation.

jillesvangurp• 3 years ago

Not sure. The real question is what the Google founders and board want and expect. Sundar is just looking after things for them. The reason he got the job is that he was never going to do more than that. But you might legitimately ask at this point if that's enough. And he's been there long enough that he could be replaced without anyone losing too much face. Surround it with some corporate euphemisms and get some fresh blood in and move on. I would not be surprised if they are already looking around.

It worked for Microsoft obviously. This is quite a coup for Satya Nadella. And he got that one on merit. MS has no stake in Android (they declined to get into that after killing Windows Phone). Also, he hit the ground running after Steve Ballmer was retired. Not that hard of course after Ballmer but he did a few decisive things early on that all seem to have mostly worked out. The Linkedin acquisition; fixing .Net, re-establishing MS as a bonafide OSS player with the Github acquisition and VS-Code. And then making a smart investment in OpenAI which they are now riding to success. All great moves.

I'd say, Google is in the same boat right now. Lots of obvious potential, an extended period of a bit rudderless performance, missed boats, and no clear direction or vision. Fix that and it could go somewhere else again. Doing more of the same isn't going to be anywhere near good enough. They seem to be stuck playing a game of whack-a-mole in terms of strategy and ever responding to what others are doing and never quite catching up with that instead of initiating things themselves and leading.

AndrewKemendo• 3 years ago

The same job as every public company CEO: Keep their job by prioritizing the stock price, board happiness and keeping activist shareholders from causing problems

ocdtrekkie3• 3 years ago

Samsung has done this before, and Google has multiple times made various offers and incentives intended to "encourage" Samsung not to. Because a huge portion of the Android monopoly will leave Google Search when this happens. Stuff like OEMs getting a cut of Play Store revenue are mechanics done to avoid this.

There's a pretty good chance Samsung is just negotiating for better terms, kinda like carriage disputes for TV networks.

tazjin• 3 years ago

Yeah, for Google this is existential, for Microsoft it's not. Google will go a lot further than Microsoft will to keep Samsung on their side.

rippercushions• 3 years ago

For comparison, Google pays Apple an estimated $15 billion a year to be the default engine on Safari.

https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/25/analysts-google-to-pay-apple-...

ocdtrekkie3• 3 years ago

Indeed. Though for Android OEMs, "paying" for Google's app suite is considered part of the equation. It's less of an incentive for Samsung though since they have their own replacements for most Google apps ready to go.

roenxi• 3 years ago

1) "It will reportedly be known as Project ‘Magi’ and is said to provide a far more personalized experience than the company’s current service."

That is super creepy. Google knows a lot about you, and now it is using that knowledge to really put you in a filter bubble. Imagine this plus engagement metrics.

2) So much for that monopoly a lot of people thought Google had. Turns out they're still as exposed to market pressure as they ever were.

lightbendover2• 3 years ago

The last thing anyone should ever want from a search engine is different results from the next person over.

mattw2121• 3 years ago

I strongly disagree. I would love for a search engine to, intelligently, cater the results based on my previous search history and patterns.

fluidcruft• 3 years ago

I'm actually not entirely sure about that. For example, if I know a lot about a particular topic and the search engine knows that I know a lot about that particular topic, then when I search for something, it should give me a condensed result and not introductory-level material. Or if I have certain preferences for the format of material I'm given. For example, if I prefer college-level outline material versus eighth-grade reading level text, for example.

So it seems entirely reasonable to me that you would get different results.

If I had a personal assistant that was performing the search for me, I would expect customized results from them. I don't know why I should not expect the same from a machine.

Arnt4• 3 years ago

The next person over cares about sports and boobies. By which I mean spectator sports and, uhm, spectator boobies.

Is the last thing I'd want really results different from my neighbour?

MajimasEyepatch• 3 years ago

That’s not true. If I, a software developer, search for “pandas,” Google should probably show me the Python data library near or at the top. If my friend who’s not an engineer searches for “pandas,” they’re probably looking for the bear.

SquareWheel• 3 years ago

That might be true in concept, but I don't think it's true in reality. When people search for something online, they want the first result to be whatever they had in mind. If I search for Python, I want the homepage for the programming language. When somebody else searches for Python, they might be looking to learn about the animal.

You could argue that we should just ask for exactly what we want, but that puts more work on the user and reduces the effectiveness of the tool. I don't want to type more than "python", I just want the link!

Search engines provide very little personalization even today. I'm almost surprised a competitor hasn't popped up with a product that tries to fill that niche.

HelloNurse• 3 years ago

Not "anyone": only mature searchers that worry about privacy, filter bubbles and artificially buried/censored good results.

Advertisement buyers, on the other hand, benefit greatly from carefully controlling who sees their ads. For example, child care related products for female teenagers that are one year too old for their school class, or lawyers for young adult males from bad neighborhoods; I'm sure everyone can think of something more creepy and offensive.

qwertox4• 3 years ago

It really depends. If I want to search coding related stuff, I want this to be personalized as much as possible, with always having the option to extend the search for non-traditional topics.

Or when searching for places to go, it would be nice to get recommendations which consider that I love to ride bicycle.

Then there's DuckDuckGo on Firefox for legacy search if you're paranoid.

raldi• 3 years ago

What do you think an American tourist overseas wants when they ask for [football scores]?

Do you think an ergonomics engineer logged in from the office and a musician in their studio might want different things when they search for [keyboard reviews]?

How about a 16-year-old male native Texan versus a 62-year-old female immigrant with a degree in fine arts who search for [nearby movies]?

dyno12345• 3 years ago

this is might be a great example of the difference between what people think they want being completely at odds with how they actually behave

kramerger2• 3 years ago

Wait, people actually use the android search box?

It's usually the first thing I remove

phpnode• 3 years ago

Normal people just use the defaults, the idea of choosing a web browser or changing the default search engine is completely alien to most.

zirgs4• 3 years ago

You can't even change the browser on iOS. Apple forces all browsers to use the same rendering engine under the hood.

ThrowawayTestr• 3 years ago

How do you search on your phone? Open the web browser, navigate to google.com and enter your query?

surgical_fire3• 3 years ago

Not GP, but I open the browser (in my case Vivaldi) and type my query in the address box.

My default search engine on Vivaldi is DDG, it issues a query to DDG.

Do you actually use the default google shit widget to do web searches?

adithyassekhar2• 3 years ago

Opening the widget is useless because it shows the result in the Google app (a 350MB monster) and when you click to open a result it opens in app.

You can't have your browser's features, You can't open multiple results in multiple tabs you need to go back each time.

A better option is to add the browser's search widget on the home screen, it takes you straight to the address bar where you can enter your query. All modern browsers support searching from the address bar, no need to go to google.com

nailer• 3 years ago

Edit: looks like I'm wrong, see IceWreck's reply below.

Original comment: my understanding is that this means Google will deny their customers access to Google Play, Photos and other first party Google apps. Samsung has replacements for some of these but not all of them.

IceWreck• 3 years ago

Nope, to access play services you have to add the powered by android logo and preinstall a minimum set of required apps (including the google search app), but afaik nothing saying google has to be the default search engine.

robertlagrant2• 3 years ago

Perhaps that will change in response to this.

Zigurd8• 3 years ago

Android's early commercialization actively encouraged OEMs to "customize" Android for at least two reasons: Android product maturity was questionable, and what else are phone OEM product managers going to do?

Now that "Google experience" is generally cleaner and better than OEMs' customizations, Google is struggling to put the toothpaste back in the tube. It is very damaging to Android as a product because OEMs are slow to issue updates and won't continue updates beyond three years, in most cases.

I doubt Google will strong-arm Samsung over this. They need Samsung more than Samsung needs the Play Store and other "Google experience" apps.

pjmlp8• 3 years ago

Pixels hardly get much more updates, despite Google.

pelagicAustral2• 3 years ago

I've been using Bing for a few weeks now it is not all the way there yet but so far the experience is more gratifying than Google. The results seem to be better and there is less ads on top the search results. Their AI integration is also well accomplished. No complains there...

sempron64• 3 years ago

Anecdotally, their actual search results have sucked for me. For example, I searched for “narrowest cars with 6 or more seats”, and Bing’s results were terrible and irrelevant. The AI version gave me some acceptable results but very few. Google returned pages of relevant results from different years.

Sindisil2• 3 years ago

When I try that search string on DuckDuckGo, I see what looks to be pretty decent results, FWIW.

vitorgrs3• 3 years ago

You probably tried on balanced mode, that is shitty. Tried now on Creative and seems... very good?

https://imgur.com/a/xekxNAh

Tactician_mark• 3 years ago

I'd use Bing's chat feature if it wasn't only available on Edge... I can't seem to get any Chromium browsers working well on my Fedora install. I already want to use Microsoft's search engine, why do they need me to use their browser too?

seydor4• 3 years ago

When MS switches on bing chat on chrome it will be a huge blow to google

badsoftware• 3 years ago

There’s an extension that enables it for all browsers

cosmojg• 3 years ago

There are addons/extensions for that!

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bing-chat-for...

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bing-chat-for-all-...

pelagicAustral2• 3 years ago

Didn't realized that. My currently employer is MS-stack based so I have been working with Edge and to be fair, this was also surprising. I would probably rather work with Firefox but the browser is not that intrusive and provide the same level of support and tooling I get with FF. I think one the reasons I decided to stick with Edge these last few weeks is the extremely poor support I get when working with the SharePoint implementations that are for internal use, seems to be a issue with the way FF interacts with Windows Authentication.

michaelcampbell• 3 years ago

There's a plugin for both chrome and firefox that allow chat to work within.

They both work for me at least on MacOS and Windows; haven't tried any linux distos yet, but worth a look.

VWWHFSfQ2• 3 years ago

I use bing via duck duck go and it's total dog shit but I don't want to use Google so I just suffer through it. And even Google's 1st page results are pretty useless nowadays

unloco2• 3 years ago

except you cant use the AI function without using Edge.. That's a huge complaint from me.

shostack• 3 years ago

Half the time I enter a prompt it spits back regular search results without any chat response.

moron4hire• 3 years ago

I've been using it for about 4 years now. Occasionally, I'll try Google when I'm having difficulty finding something with Bing. It's usually something where I have only a vague recollection of what I'm looking for and I'm starting by using search to find other keywords to eventually get to my true search terms. But it has yet to work out that Google has provided better results in those cases. Indeed, the results are often worse and I doubt I'd be able to make any progress with Google anymore.

And now, with ChatGPT integrated with Bing, I have found it makes very, very short work of those sorts of vague, barely remembered searches.

jzombie• 3 years ago

I can't tell if this Magi project is supposed to be an iteration of Bard or something new.

eoooooooo• 3 years ago

Some interesting dynamics at play here if true. Google basically maintains Android to get people to use Google services on it, so Samsung switching to Bing would eliminate Google's incentive to develop Android. Samsung is also by FAR the largest Android OEM and holds almost as much power over the platform as Google just from the sheer amount of Android devices that they ship.

amelius• 3 years ago

Samsung switching to Bing would eliminate Google's incentive to develop Android

They still have quite some apps on Android that they can use to extract data from users and send ads, e.g. youtube, gmail, maps, etc.

Hippocrates• 3 years ago

Pretty interesting when put that way. Why DID google develop android??? Oh yeah.

jimmar• 3 years ago

This sounds similar to Walmart saying they'll stop taking Visa. Samsung would be dumb not to at least threaten moving away from Google, even if they had no intention to change. It's a negotiating tactic, one that has more teeth in recent months because Google's competitors are finally showing a real challenge.

muyuu2• 3 years ago

They'd only be moving away from Google search not GMS. In my recent experience, Google Search is mediocre at best and perhaps worse than Bing most of the time. So it's not a massive gamble.

simula67• 3 years ago

I always thought that Google made a big blunder by not encroaching upon Microsoft's turf more aggressively. They should have tried to make a better desktop OS (just buy Canonical or something) and then eat into Microsoft Office market share by releasing Google Office for Desktop. Wait for an opportunity to emerge and then pounce.

This is precisely what Microsoft did to Google. They had Bing running in the background for years losing truckloads of money. Now that AI has upset the applecart, they can use Bing to choke off Google's airsupply.

One of the reasons for Google getting so good early on was that they had oodles of usage data to test and improve their search functionality forming a positive feedback loop. Now, with deals such as this, Microsoft will have more data to tune their engine while Google is left on the sidelines.

Let's just hope that the AI driven search revolution does not produce a monopoly.

chickenpotpie• 3 years ago

ChromeOS and Google Docs?

PlutoIsAPlanet• 3 years ago

just buy Canonical or something

Canonical doesn't really make any things that are considered part of a desktop OS. Ubuntu is just a package (and some argue a bad one) of things made by other people.

There's very little value in the Linux desktop and I don't see that changing anytime soon. You're probably best re-inventing the wheel if you want a Windows competitor, like Google did with ChromeOS.

pjmlp8• 3 years ago

They surely do, its reason to fame is being the best distribution supporting OEM devices without religion regarding open source drivers.

asddubs2• 3 years ago

A canonical engineer did fix a kernel bug that prevented my laptop from booting on newer kernel versions. And they do develop their own software, too. Saying that they are "just a package" is not giving them enough credit.

sho_hn4• 3 years ago

There's very little value in the Linux desktop

There's a tremendous amount of value in the Linux desktop. It's used to do amazing things every day.

What you mean is that it's very hard to turn it into a business model, which I'd agree with. But these are not the same in the world.

eastbound• 3 years ago

There's very little value in the Linux desktop and I don't see that changing anytime soon

Only because no-one has disrupted the market. Typical case of “Who would pay for a Mantis open-source bugtracker”, then Jira appear and companies purchase it.

What you mean is, who would pay for Ubuntu. But I’d pay for an open-source macOS, with online backups, video editing and SSO for my IT fleet, anything that doesn’t look like Ubuntu.

murdoze2• 3 years ago

I see no value in the Windows desktop. For my tasks.

garganzol• 3 years ago

better desktop OS
Google

It wouldn't be an OS, it would be a casino full of flashy ads. The worst company for anything business critical. Ads - yes, email - ok, anything else - never. They get away with Android because it's mostly a consumer market.

rob74• 3 years ago

Did you use Windows recently? https://uk.pcmag.com/migrated-3765-windows-10/132748/how-to-...

colanderman• 3 years ago

Windows is already crapped up with flashy ads; it's a pretty damn low bar.

indymike• 3 years ago

Having deployed Chromebooks into corporate and education, there's less ad content there than on a Windows machine... by oodles. In fact, the only place a stock Chromebook has ads is on websites, in the browser and I believe on a personal install it tries to sell you a subscription to Google's cloud service for extra storage. Once you start installing apps, well, your mileage will vary.

Having used Android as my daily driver since Android 1.3, again, the default experience is pretty much ad-free. I've even used Android in "desktop mode" where you connect a display, keyboard and mouse and used windowed Android apps. When you start installing apps, or if you buy a device with non-default apps installed (i.e. the mobile carrier install as infested crap). In that case you can disable or uninstall that app and move on.

The worst company for anything business critical. Ads - yes, email - ok, anything else - never.

While Google does have a history of cancelling some well-loved products (like Reader), Google Apps (Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Presentations, etc...) has been solid for a decade. The live, multiuser, real-time editing and versioning is a wonderful feature for collaboration. Also, Google has been very reasonable on pricing, and after six years of running three companies on Google Worplace/Apps, I'm very impressed with the reliability of Google Workplace (what they are now calling Apps).

CydeWeys4• 3 years ago

Have you actually used Chrome OS? It's not like this at all. I would imagine the same approach would be taken on a fully featured OS.

Ironically Windows is the OS that is full of shit ads these days, not Google's OS.

Zigurd8• 3 years ago

Desktop market share moves very slowly. A 1% shift per year is a big move last I looked. ChromeOS is doing about as well as possible gaining share.

unloco2• 3 years ago

ChromeOS is only in the market because they have cheap laptops that schools bought up. And not a single student I know would ever use one outside of school.

gaogao• 3 years ago

Where do you see ChromeOS and Google Office as falling flat in that regard? Desktops are pretty smaller in market size compared to laptops these days.

ant6n3• 3 years ago

Desktop = Laptop

DrThunder6• 3 years ago

By desktop app they don't mean an app that runs on desktop computers only. They mean an app that runs locally and not web-based. Office 365 desktop vs Office 365 web portal. Google doesn't offer anything but web based.

pjmlp8• 3 years ago

Laptops are desktops.

In regards to ChromeOS, it hardly matters outside the US school system and Googleplex.

that_guy_iain4• 3 years ago

Google docs/etc are totally eating into Microsoft Office's market share. I can't remember the last company I was at where they expected us to use Microsoft office products. But we used Google docs,sheets,etc constantly.

phpisthebest2• 3 years ago

For a business environment, Google Office is terrible compared to MS Office.

The features and functionally of Google office are very limited, especially when you compare Sheets to Excel

esprehn• 3 years ago

I can't tell if your sarcasm is top notch, but isn't Chromebooks and GSuite (docs, sheets, slides) exactly the thing you describe?

dheera• 3 years ago

That's a stripped down OS running only a web browser and a bunch of webapps, not a real OS. Another one of those Google fantasies that failed to understand normal people.

candiddevmike• 3 years ago

Why hasn't Canonical been acquired yet?

asddubs2• 3 years ago

maybe shuttleworth is not interested in selling?

Xelbair• 3 years ago

google
making any product that lasts

that's a tough chance for OS.

it wouldn't hit growth targets after n-th year and would be remotely disabled by google worldwide.

the_snooze• 3 years ago

Google Office for Desktop. Wait for an opportunity to emerge and then pounce.

Microsoft Office has a lot of network effect surrounding it. Organizations use MS Office because the people who pay them (e.g., government or large corporations) use MS Office. I've tried switching away to LibreOffice or Google Docs/Sheets/Slides, and those are very likely to mangle layout and formatting when saving to DOCX/XLSX/PPTX. Not worth the hassle trying to troubleshoot why my government program managers aren't seeing what I'm seeing on the document I sent them.

illnewsthat• 3 years ago

They had Bing running in the background for years losing truckloads of money.

Maybe a nitpick, but I think Bing has been profitable on its own for a while now.

(2015) https://time.com/4084975/microsoft-bing-search-engine-profit...

moufestaphio• 3 years ago

Yeah, Bing has been consistently profitable for a long time.

People mock it because its not bringing in obscene amounts that google search does, but it's revenues have consistently been growing for years: https://fourweekmba.com/bing-revenue/

$11.59B is pretty damn good revenue for a 'laughing stock'. Especially Consider that gaming 'only' was $16.23B.

_fat_santa• 3 years ago

They kinda did that with ChromeOS + Google Docs with offline mode. The problem for Google is that while it was a solid investment for MS to persue cloud services to compete with Google, I don't think it would have been a good investment the other way around. Chrome is really the only desktop product that makes sense for Google because it pushes people into their ecosystem online. Creating something like a standalone OS or a standalone office software would have gone in the "wrong direction" for Google, taking people off their site rather than taking people there.

Also on a total sidenote, if you told me 5 years ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google I would have a laughed.

hrunt• 3 years ago

Also on a total sidenote, if you told me 5 years ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google I would have a laughed.

If you had told me 3 months ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google, I still would have laughed. That's how much impact the ChatGPT integration had for Bing -- overnight.

bookofjoe• 3 years ago

Or that someday Apple would be the most valuable company in the world

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 3 years ago

I moved to Bing a year ago, as 1) Google became a senseless SEO swamp 2) they don't allow VPN.

warner253• 3 years ago

I think we still have a long way to go before people are actually saying "Bing it." Then it's a serious threat.

mark_l_watson3• 3 years ago

Even though I have invested heavily in Apple's sandbox world, I am very impressed by ChromeOS and inexpensive Chromebooks by 3rd parties. I have close to the cost of a car invested in Apple gear, yet, if I had to I could do all of my writing and coding on the very inexpensive Lenovo Duet Chromebook I bought a year ago. The Linux container support is OK, and I usually use remote servers anyway.

For search, Bing + ChatGPT is now my driver for search. I still use Google and Duck Duck Go occasionally, but usually I am OK with waiting a short while for Bing + ChatGPT results.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 3 years ago

They used to ship a Google Drive app for Windows that adds it to Explorer similar to OneDrive. They killed it, as with everything else.

Edit: I'm wrong!

qikInNdOutReply• 3 years ago

Somewhere some shareholders are whispering to stage a culture revolution in the G.

pmlnr• 3 years ago

One of the reasons for Google getting so good early on was that they had oodles of usage data to test and improve their search functionality forming a positive feedback loop

???

PageRank. It was PageRank, and the fact that they didn't rely on the lies put into <meta> tags. There was no feedback loop at that point.

collaborative2• 3 years ago

I created AISearch.vip but honestly I am now going to open source it and make it a locally run stand-alone AI search engine because it's absurd having to call OpenAI APIs in the backend when I can let the user run it with their own API keys

There's no moat in anything AI, but MS gets OpenAI access at a discount and therefore will win

bachmeier• 3 years ago

Now that AI has upset the applecart, they can use Bing to choke off Google's airsupply.

It's more like Google has to change from optimizing for next week's revenue numbers to optimizing for user experience. People have been saying for years that their search results are trash. That we haven't seen a response from Google may be an indicator that they aren't able to return useful search results.

ChildOfChaos• 3 years ago

'People have been saying for years that their search results are trash'.

Have they? I hear people say this on Hacker news but i've never heard it anywhere else, people seem to be using the internet just fine with Google as there main search engine, what is the alternative? Bing? It's still trash and Bing Chat is like a worse version of ChatGPT, I don't see it replacing Google currently.

pibechorro• 3 years ago

We will only see a monopoly if there is protectionism. Regulations, licensing, do not compete patents, etc.

delfinom4• 3 years ago

They should have tried to make a better desktop OS (just buy Canonical or something)

Ah yes, Canonical, land of people attempting to fork the Linux ecosystem and getting shot down by everyone and doubling down.

Would be a perfect fit for Google.

andsoitis• 3 years ago

They should have tried to make a better desktop OS

Desktop OS's are not the long term future of computing, is it? But they were astute in acquiring Android. Meanwhile, Microsoft thought that a mobile OS is just a desktop OS squished onto a smaller screen.

GeekyBear2• 3 years ago

I always thought that Google made a big blunder by not encroaching upon Microsoft's turf more aggressively.

I've always been shocked that Google didn't face antitrust action over using their internet video monopoly to kill Windows Phone. They wouldn't create a Youtube app for Windows Phone, nor would they allow Microsoft to create one themselves.

JustLurking20223• 3 years ago

I had a Windows phone and android simultaneously - I actually liked the UI on the windows phone but I think I may have been the only person on earth that did because I virtually never saw another one. From that perspective, I can understand choosing not to build for the platform.

matheusmoreira2• 3 years ago

Is this really about AI and ChatGPT? Google search just sucks now. I actually get better results from Bing and Duck Duck Go.

then eat into Microsoft Office market share by releasing Google Office for Desktop

With their inferior products? Not a chance. Google's apps are so far away from even competing with Microsoft's it's not even funny. Google Sheets doesn't even have proper tables. I wouldn't even be surprised if they cancelled it.

Rastonbury2• 3 years ago

The fact that big corps have moved to Gsuite always surprises me and credit to Google salespeople. But they will never meaningfully breach Office, people at Microsoft fight tooth and nail when renewals are up and Google is in the picture

rchaud2• 3 years ago

A Google desktop OS wasn't going to win against Windows in PC gaming compatibility. Nor was it going to displace MS Office + Active Directory at the enterprise level.

With ChromeOS, they took the route available to them, which was to enter the school market and try to build something from there.

taylodl2• 3 years ago

Google's whole raison d'être was internet computing - computing at scales never before seen. Think "BigFiles" and the original Google search. They were able to leverage that technology in creating AdSense, which is their huge money-maker. Google's challenge has been finding ways to monetize their internet compute technologies. But now that it's 25 years later and more and more people have internet-scale computing available to them it appears Google is losing their edge. What used to be their "special sauce" has now become a commodity. It's a story as old as business.

kccqzy3• 3 years ago

Increasingly people don't need this kind of special sauce to run a big Internet service. Everything that's challenging has been outsourced to public clouds. Just pay more and those special sauce comes to you.

Admittedly Google still has some special sauce left, but in my opinion those special sauce only improves efficiency; it doesn't enable one to do something that's impossible otherwise. (I've been reading about some public research reports about Google's special sauce: they range from special user space networking to new congestion control to custom TPUs etc.)

hintymad• 3 years ago

They should have tried to make a better desktop OS

Wouldn't office suite be a better target? Everyone uses it. Lots of low hanging fruits. Easy to win the heart of geeks. Ample opportunities to integrate with other enterprise services.

wslh• 3 years ago

If Microsoft's 48-year history has shown anything, it is that they can produce subpar products, experience numerous failures, make poor investments and acquisitions, and even ruin products (e.g., Skype), yet they remain resilient and successful!

As for Google, I am uncertain whether they were prepared for this competition because, firstly, the business terms offered by Microsoft might have been quite strategic, and secondly, the Google search engine has not experienced significant innovation or improvement since PageRank, at least from a user experience perspective rather than complexity. I will regale my descendants with stories of a time when I searched for something and found at least one relevant result among the top 20.

brokencode• 3 years ago

That to me is the big difference between Google and Microsoft. Microsoft is willing to slowly build on something for years before it goes anywhere. They maintain their products for incredible amounts of time, such as how IE11 was only killed off like a decade after its release.

Google on the other hand is always chasing the next big thing. It just doesn’t have the institutional attention span to do anything really big. If a project isn’t an explosive hit right away, Google moves on to the next big idea.

ignoramous• 3 years ago

...Google Office for Desktop

They did one better and made Chrome so good that its the OS for most, for all intents and purposes, now.

Macha2• 3 years ago

What would a Google office for desktop do that the current Google docs doesn't?

Even MS is moving office to being cloud based, so it's not clear business users value local document availability that much - rather the opposite, I've worked in places that like cloud services because locking out their data from a disgruntled or departed employee is one button away.

layer82• 3 years ago

There are worlds of difference between MS Office and Google Docs in terms of features and abilities. There’s actually a risk for MS to lose their edge by moving to the cloud with a reduced feature set.

SecretDreams• 3 years ago

Have people used BING lately? It's still not good - but maybe it will improve.

Google search has just gotten worse and is more ad prone. It's still better, but not golden age google - not even close.

yusufnb• 3 years ago

Google did encroach. Google office/docs is much better than Microsoft. Chrome OS is a better OS for most non-tech jobs. The browser is the operating system for most people, and Chrome is leading in that. They won on mobile as well with Android. Google Workspace, in my opinion, is much better than Microsoft.

It's their outdated search bringing everything else down it seems.

batiudrami• 3 years ago

Google Docs is not anywhere close to as powerful or as performant as Microsoft Office. I don’t really see how someone familiar with both forward suites could think that is the case.

eclipsetheworld• 3 years ago

This article seems a little hyperbolic since I assume the default search engine will simply be the highest bidder...

devnullbrain• 3 years ago

This is a very Samsung move: making their premium product feel cheap and cynical to users for easy money.

shever73• 3 years ago

This is hardly surprising. I never normally use Google, but was asked to check some SEO using Google search the other day. The results were a dumpster fire of sponsored content, “other people also search for” and stuff that was largely irrelevant. I had to go onto the second and third pages to find anything even remotely close to what I wanted.

zdragnar• 3 years ago

It must depend heavily on what you are searching for. There are a lot of things I dislike about Google, but their search results are consistently better than Bing in my experience.

electrosphere• 3 years ago

Shame not DuckDuckGo.

hardware2win2• 3 years ago

DDG uses Bing under the hood

Nicksil• 3 years ago

DDG uses Bing under the hood

Bing is just one of many sources DuckDuckGo utilizes

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

ksec2• 3 years ago

This is basically Samsung asking Google to pay up. Google needs to pay Apple / iOS for Default Search Engine, and paying Samsung for staying on Android with Google Search.

Basically Google is being squeezed left and right. So the only way to increase revenue or profits to satisfy the money they spend on Apple and Samsung? More Ads on Youtube and Google Search. The more Ads they serve, the worse UX they have. All while completely fail to compete against AWS or Azure.

seydor4• 3 years ago

google still owns android

pulse7• 3 years ago

True, but Android is open-source and suppliers can replace default search engine - and other services - on it...

Zigurd8• 3 years ago

More precisely, Google makes AOSP, which is the basis for a licensed version of Android that includes a number of proprietary apps.

Two things are not likely to happen:

1. Samsung will not give up on licensing Google proprietary package of apps.

2. Google will not yank Samsung's license.

Google will absolutely tighten the screws on their future contracts to discourage these deals, as well as sweeping out crappy "customizations."

dougmwne2• 3 years ago

An extremely second rate phone platform compared to iOS where the customers don’t spend nearly as much money and they have minimal control over their hardware partners.

balls1874• 3 years ago

It does, and funny enough that Antitrust lawsuit against MSFT bundling IE in Windows may end up helping them here.

gspencley3• 3 years ago

Most of Android is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. So while the word "owns" is true in a technical legal sense, there is nothing to prevent anyone from forking it and doing their own thing. Unlike with GPL code, they don't even need to license their changes under the same license as long as they abide the terms with respects to the original.

Personally I use GrapheneOS in order to "de-Google" without switching to the Apple ecosystem. No Google Play (you can install it but I choose not to), FOSS apps only. I don't recommend it for everyone but it made me not hate owning a smart phone for the first time since the "mobile revolution" passed my old grumpy self by.

sebstefan• 3 years ago

What could they possibly do with that that doesn't violate an anti-trust law?

balls1874• 3 years ago

I’d bet Microsoft will gladly match all of Google’s offers here.

alphabetting• 3 years ago

Just the payment to Apple would be significantly more than their 2022 search revenue. I wouldn't be shocked but it would be a pretty big gamble.

tyingq• 3 years ago

Probably, though taking the lower offer from Google means no change for end users, and thus probably less risk for Samsung.

tomjen3• 3 years ago

If Samsung is smart, then they ensure that their users gets access to new Bing as default, which means that even if people switch back (read get their nerdy friends to switch them back) they will find that Google is missing quite a lot.

ehsankia• 3 years ago

Why? Google makes a shit ton of money from Search, Microsoft doesn't.

The whole Bing AI stuff is already a huge money sink for them, how much can they afford to throw into this pit before investors start being worried?

creatonez• 3 years ago

So what changed? Why didn't they before?

In the past Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, etc. have frequently gotten outbidded by Google for similar deals.

jrockway• 3 years ago

Is GCP really a failure? I think the product is OK and they seem to have some big customers. They're maybe #3 in the space, but you can make a lot of money without being #1.

Yes, we all hate their support structure (it goes through SADA), but the price is right. At my last company with 4 engineers we were paying AWS ~$1000/month for support. At my current company back when we had a cloud service on GCP, we got weekly calls with support for $0/month. Folks at Google also seemed to approve my weird resource requests (tons of GPUs in the midst of a GPU shortage, etc.) without me going through any back channels. I didn't find it terrible to work with at all, and it was much cheaper than AWS.

somsak23• 3 years ago

I'd call being half of Azure's market share today a failure. Hell, they were better-positioned than Amazon to offer an AWS-like product when AWS itself came out.

foobiekr2• 3 years ago

I am curious why you find it cheaper than AWS. Are you sure the application didn't change and was at the same scale?

In my experience, GCP and AWS are within a tiny % of each other.

seneca• 3 years ago

Yes, we all hate their support structure (it goes through SADA)

SADA (and their competitor DoIT) are just resellers. Support doesn't inherently go through them. That's a decision your company makes. It's generally not a great decision either, in my opinion, as those resellers add a lot of opacity between you and your cloud provider. Google recommends them because it's easier for them.

paulpan• 3 years ago

The frenemy status of Google-Samsung is once again on display. Samsung probably hasn't been happy with the Google's continued Pixel phone push :p

But why is Google paying Apple to be the default search engine on iOS devices?

It seems a waste of money as Apple would be stupid to default to any other search engine given the lower search quality results. End users would notice if there was a result degradation and likely switch their default. Google seems to be playing the "Intel Inside" part without reaping the marketing benefits and only paying the traffic acquisition costs.

Sai_• 3 years ago

Apple may not consider any other default search engine only in the absence of a search engine other than google offering a pot of money to be the default search engine.

tadfisher2• 3 years ago

If Samsung really wasn't happy, they wouldn't be manufacturing Google's phones and providing custom silicon. I think the Pixel phones are a blip on Samsung's radar in terms of competition.

carlosjobim3• 3 years ago

Apple could spin up a better search engine than Google in a swirley. The big question is why haven't they!?

vitorgrs3• 3 years ago

You realize that before google paid, microsoft actually did it and bing was used in Siri even, right?

Twirrim• 3 years ago

When I saw the title it reminded me of the 20+ years we'd see almost bi-annual news articles about how Dell was considering adding AMD chips to their line-up.

They'd do that, Intel would offer them a discount, and that'd be the last we'd hear of it for a year or so, until that discount would be expiring.

slimginz• 3 years ago

IIRC someone at Intel once said that Dell is the “best friend money can buy” in an internal email that came out when Intel was being investigated for anti-competitive practices.

gofreddygo• 3 years ago

Google is losing its competitive advantage in the search space. DDG and Bing are very strong competitors for the typical web search usecase.

External forces of economic and technical nature are not in their favor. Internal forces from politics, leadership and management issues are surfacing.

This does not sound good for Google. Almost like it will implode.

dehrmann• 3 years ago

This is basically Samsung asking Google to pay up

True, but Samsung isn't known for user-friendly phones, and they often come with a lot of bloat. At some point, it drives more and more users to Pixel.

thelittleone• 3 years ago

I moved to Samsung from Apple and that wasn't my experience at all.

sm_10242• 3 years ago

That hasn't been my experience at all. If anything, they are more userfriendly than other phones I have used. One thing in particular that is very nice is that everything is accessible on the larger screen sizes, action centers, call logs, messages, everything is designed to be accessible when holding your phone with one hand without having to awkwardly reach the top.

filmgirlcw• 3 years ago

Except Samsung sells orders of magnitude more phones than Google does.

I don’t like the Samsung inference either, but millions and millions of people don’t just like it, they prefer it. They buy the phones specifically because they know how to use it. They aren’t loyal to Android, they are loyal to the Galaxy line.

robotnikman• 3 years ago

That used to be the case almost a decade ago, but everything is the past 5 years has been good in terms of user experience and little bloat.

Dylan16807• 3 years ago

They can go ahead and put an extra gig of basic apps on there as long as they keep making models with microsd slots.

2h• 3 years ago

AWS or Azure

I was recently in the market for a basic VPS, and Azure is absolutely awful for this use. The most bloated complicated signup and setup process I have experienced in a long time. Google was tolerable. Of the three amazon lightsail was the best, but even that loses to something like digital ocean

jiggawatts• 3 years ago

I often see products optimise for the "get-started-quick" part, which is often 0.1% of the total experience. For example, reviews of operating systems often focus more than 50% of the content on the upgrade or installation process, even though that's actually a rare operation.

Azure focuses on Microsoft's large enterprise customers. They want guard rails, separation of responsibilities, policy, compliance controls, etc...

Nothing to do with the process required to get 1 VM up and running from scratch, including signing up. Their bread & butter customers have enterprise agreements in place already for Office and Windows licensing!

seydor4• 3 years ago

Samsung has been trying to push that bixby thing on me but if it 's bing instead, i d gladly change

lasermike026• 3 years ago

Could this be because of GPT at OpenAI(MS).

hardware2win2• 3 years ago

If Bing will manage to pull it off then the only conclusion to draw from this will be: never bet against Microsoft, lol.

dougmwne2• 3 years ago

From my use of Bard, I think it’s main issue is poor alignment due to lack of RLHF dataset. Open AI has been curating its data set for years as it aggressively pushed to productization. Google never cared about getting its models into the hands of the public so is having to scramble. I think Google will catch up eventually, but not before doing major damage to its market share and partnerships.

overthrow• 3 years ago

I think the smarter move would be to integrate GPT-4 into Bixby. That's what finally got me to use Bing... it could probably get people to use Bixby too.

b112• 3 years ago

Bixby, the first key I disable, the first thing I adb uninstall on any samsung device.

I cannot imagine every wanting to talk to any computing device.

cleanchit• 3 years ago

all we need is a programmable voice assistant to which you can add custom voice commands that run your own programs.

Rels• 3 years ago

A lot of words without a lot of source or data.

The only source linked in the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/technology/google-search-...

It's probably the only source at all, as every number in the sammobile article is also in the NYT, like the 160+ people working on Magi.

As the sammobile article doesn't appear to do anything but regurgitate what is in the NYT article without any apparent validation on their side, the link should be changed to the NYT IMO, whose article seems at least based on actual internal messages from Google. I understand that the title isn't as attention grabbing though ("Google Devising Radical Search Changes to Beat Back A.I. Rivals").

throwaway4good• 3 years ago

Is Google paying Android phone manufacturers for having Google as default search engine similar how they are paying Apple?

dathinab2• 3 years ago

Soon we have a Microsoft more power full then ever but less controlled and constrained by anti monopoly regulation then ever.

- after google search degraded for a while bing is competive

- MS has much influence and stack in (not really open) OpenAI

- MS has with LinkedLn a relevant social network, sure it's work focused but increasingly used for non work usecases

- MS controls 2 of the 6 relevant gaming platforms (XBox, PC -- the others are Switch, Playstation, iOS and Android), they happen to also be 2 of the 3 AAA gaming platforms (XBox, PC -- the other is Playstation)

- MS owns a lot of game production

- MS has the go to email solution for companies Outlook as part of Office365

- MS has what some call the best Calendar/schedule Meeting app, also part of Office365

- MS has the go to online meeting platform for companies (teams as part of Office365, through it succks)

- MS has a competitive company chatting platform

- MS competes with Google and Apple in the Cloud

- MS has a not so competitive ad platform

- MS has a semi competitive voice assistant which if integrated with ChatGPT tech could very well become very competitive very fast

- MS doesn't have a phone OS, but a lot control over phone through MDM features integrated into teams/outlook etc.

- MS has one of the main browsers (edge) with a lot of people happily explicitly opting for it or being coerced or tricked into using it (they lost that in the past but regained it). While it pains me its likely more relevant then Firefox by now.

- MS sells PC/Laptop like hardware successfully, but not that competitive

- one of the best standard consumer ergonomic keyboards is from MS

- they still have one of the most widely used presentation and note taking applications

- their database system is still around and sells, not sure why

- they control both of the some of the most widely used IDEs (VS and VSCode)

- they have some experience with AR/VR through I'm not sure about the competitiveness of current products from them

- they made some of the main reasons why people tried out Linux go away by having WSL

- .... I most likely forgot a lot

I.e. all in all: MS is EVERYWHERE with constant faster growing power and control all through the tech space. If it keeps up that way MS will soon be both more powerful then Google and then it ever have been. If they had managed to properly land their phone OS things would be really scary now.

Nephx• 3 years ago

And they've invested billions into the development-scene, especially lately. Noteworthy;

- Github with its new Copilot API to multiple IDE's (incl. third party)

- Typescript and standards management

- NPM, locking into the entire web2 ecosystem

tough5• 3 years ago

Oh damn, NPM too?

lol. MS owns my ass and I can't even do shit about it

tough5• 3 years ago

From my list of my daily usage offenders which also include VS Code, you forgot Github and TypeScript I think.

HDThoreaun2• 3 years ago

Microsoft's effort to corner the developer productivity software market has surprised me with how successful it's been. Github has solid vscode integration, WSL works well enough, copilot is seeing use. They've really solidified themselves as the enterprise productivity software company for all stacks other than creative which adobe still dominates. Wonder if they plan to expand there next?

throw84249948• 3 years ago

- MS complies with Chinese laws so they operate in China. That's a huge population Google is missing out on. If other countries start to enact similar laws, MS would eagerly comply to get into that market.

michaelt• 3 years ago

Some would consider the fact that Microsoft "competes with Google and Apple in the Cloud" and "has a not so competitive ad platform" and "has a semi competitive voice assistant" and so on is evidence they don't have a monopoly, rather than evidence they do.

dathinab2• 3 years ago

they don't have a monopoloy but they are not far away from having more power then when they had a quasi monopoly

the mono in monopoly is in the end irrelevant, what matters is the power and ways you can abuse it. In the past you mainly got that with being a monopoly or duopoly but by now you can archive it by being "just" competitive with the best in a sector, and doing so in docent of areas and slowly integrating all of that into each other

machiaweliczny• 3 years ago

Yes, you forgot github, typescript and NPM. They acquired most popular dev platform along with code editor, watch what you do and will automate that.

abudabi123• 3 years ago

With the aim of making premium margins from hw/sw products better than Apple without Microsoft, the partnership of Google, Mercedes-Benz, Sony could go far with top cover and Nintendo's superpower patience and as a key point of difference promise to re-supply parts without short fast fashion half lives. I fail to understand how Microsoft gets away with huge market monopoly without correction from parliamentarians confining them to one third or two of industry dominance.

psuresh• 3 years ago

Microsoft Windows survived thanks to Apple on proprietary OS front by not licencing OS separately and Google on open source OS front by not pursuing desktop ChromeOS

traveler012• 3 years ago

Google constant failure astonish me. How a company with so much money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine? I kept reading news about Google's AI programs, how the hell was Microsoft with OpenAI that came up with the biggest hit in AI?

Also, how does Google want people to use their new services if they keep closing them down after their "failure" (a.k.a Google completely forgeting about them and proceeding to close them down).

beached_whale2• 3 years ago

It was a google paper that open ai is based on, no?

herval• 3 years ago

that makes it even worse, doesn't it?

daydream• 3 years ago

How a company with so much money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine?

It’s like the curse of oil. Google found a revenue stream early on that was so massive it covered up all their other sins. They dealt with their problems belatedly at best.

Now that revenue stream is under attack and they are scrambling. To put it politely.

jack_riminton3• 3 years ago

Continuing with the oil analogy, I wonder if they'd have done better if they did something similar to what Norway did with their oil wealth (i.e. only spend a small percentage on the interest earned from oil). Perhaps they could've spent less on all of their moonshots and focussed solely on AI. Hindsight is 20/20 I guess.

Gustomaximus• 3 years ago

so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine?

I get the essence of the comment and agree somewhat, but also feel;

There are plenty of other areas driving big revenue like adsense, youtube, play store, cloud and pixel.

I dont feel its fair to compare revenue to these in the same level of search. Search was a true unicorn business and took over the world, there only so many businesses that will ever reach those heights. If any of these businesses were stand alone they would be impressive. Its like looking at that photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger standing next to Andre the Giant, Arnie is a big guy, but there he doesn't look too significant.

I think, the bigger worry is their chrun and burn is going to limit take-up of future products. They need to do something like run new products in a lab type environment, not put the full weight of the weight of the brand behind them til they earn reasonable thresholds, then make them so they can be split out if teams want to take them independent should they decide to close.

jwestbury• 3 years ago

Taking another approach: Google is proof that having great engineering doesn't matter without competent business leadership. For all their failures, this is where Amazon and Microsoft excel -- they both have incredibly talented businesspeople with long-term focus and a focus on delivering real value, rather than pursuing the latest fad passion project.

scarface744• 3 years ago

There are plenty of other areas driving big revenue like adsense, youtube, play store, cloud and pixel.

YouTube is still estimated to be barely above break even, GCP is losing money and if you look at the estimated Pixel sells annually of around 5 million a year is about how many iPhones Apple sells in three weeks.

ajmurmann4• 3 years ago

I think it all comes down to the culture of rewarding shipping new things, but not maintaining and iterating. If Microsoft was like Google they would have shut down Bing years ago.

londons_explore2• 3 years ago

It's all a shortcoming of management and incentives. They have plenty of smart people, plenty of amazing tech, but they are 100% failing to deploy the right people on building the right products for the right customers.

londons_explore2• 3 years ago

They also don't give enough polish to their products.

For example, the Nexus 5 (2013!) had a bug - if you took 7 photos in quick succession, it wouldn't save photo 3 and 4. For example, you're photographing someone doing a dance, and you want a photo on each beat, so you tap the shutter to the beat of the music.

On a 2022 Pixel 7, 10 years on...... The exact same bug.

binkHN• 3 years ago

...how the hell was Microsoft with OpenAI that came up with the biggest hit in AI?

Microsoft is just an investor that got access to a product that OpenAI has been working on for the last 7 years. OpenAI has a single purpose and doesn't have to worry about displaying ads.

gremlinsinc3• 3 years ago

If Google's CEO were really visionary he'd invest 10 billion and half his engineers to support Claude and that AI company's trajectory, because deepmind seems a bit lackluster lately, or maybe they just have their own research agendas that aren't in line with industry demands or something.

gsatic2• 3 years ago

Google is not going anywhere and they will easily replicate anything OpenAI does. Its not that magical.

Why they still rely on search/advertising is well known - Replacing a 150 Billion $$$ source of revenue is not a simple thing.

Its like trying to replace everything ppl do in a midsized rich country with something else.

And compared to Facebook which is still 99% dependent on Ads, Google is much more diversified (total revenue is north of 250 billion). They have cloud, youtube, docs, google play, all the alphabet experiments etc. And most importantly half the worlds online advertising (exchanges/ auctions etc) uses Google ad tech. So Google is not going anywhere.

They just look at the world through a very different lens due to their size. I am guessing they dont see the point of keeping businesses that produce a few hundred million in revenue running, cause they really need businesses that produce a few hundred billion to keep all their free stuff (search, email, chat, chrome, android, video, r&d for other stuff etc) afloat.

philistine3• 3 years ago

Decrying the imminent death of Google is ridiculous, but what you’re doing is also ridiculous. Google has fragile legs. They are not diversified enough, and a blow to their cash cow could severely hurt them. Losing advertising dollars in search could even hurt the YouTube revenue stream, since it’s the same advertisers for both products.

Google could be in deep trouble in five years.

Angostura• 3 years ago

they will easily replicate anything OpenAI does

... not if it threatens their cash cow they won't. It's not a technical challenge, its a business model challenge

nickv3• 3 years ago

>Why they still rely on search/advertising is well known - Replacing a 150 Billion $$$ source of revenue is not a simple thing.

You just described The Innovators Dilemma. You'd hope Google, considering how everyone reveres how well run it is would find ways to avoid it, but they didn't not. You know who used to avoid the Innovators Dilemma amazingly well? Apple. You know who does it really well now? Microsoft. They literally killed their OS revenue to grow the company. That's the equivalent of Google killing their search revenue for something new. It's hard to do, but you have to do it in tech.

>And compared to Facebook which is still 99% dependent on Ads, Google is much more diversified (total revenue is north of 250 billion). They have cloud, youtube, docs, google play, all the alphabet experiments etc.

In 2022, Google was 80%+ directly dependent on Ads for revenue, and 10.3% indirectly dependent on it. Sure, Google does a lot of things but 90.3% of the actual money that keeps the lights on is advertising. Their revenue mix is extremely similar to Meta.

bastardoperator2• 3 years ago

OpenAI has been gobbling up Google AI talent for years now. The difference between ChatGPT and Bard is just comical. The part that you seem to be missing is that users will gladly jump ship if something better comes along and it's kind of coming, and people are already jumping ship. Google hit the ceiling, which is awesome, but now, there is nowhere for them to go except back down. They're an AD company fighting against tech companies, they will do everything to protect their cash cow while people continue to innovate and move way past keyword search.

sebzim45004• 3 years ago

Google is not going anywhere and they will easily replicate anything OpenAI does.

They've had a while now, and all they've come up with is Bard.

somsak23• 3 years ago

Google is much more diversified (total revenue is north of 250 billion)

Over 80% of that revenue is still just ads though, not really very diversified. And even with GCP they are in a distant 3rd to AWS / Azure.

illiarian2• 3 years ago

Google is much more diversified (total revenue is north of 250 billion). They have cloud, youtube, docs, google play, all the alphabet experiments etc.

Do read their 10-K: https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q4_alphabet_earnings...

The only thing that realistically brings in money is ads. All other things are just subsidised by them.

For example Google Cloud (which includes both GCP and workspace offerings aka docs)? Well, it lost 6 billion dollars.

cause they really need businesses that produce a few hundred billion to keep all their free stuff

The only such business they have is ads.

bdavisx• 3 years ago

What makes them "wonderful engineers"? The vast majority are very smart, and obviously can code 'leet code like no tomorrow, but that doesn't make them wonderful.

Remember when the person who created homebrew couldn't get a job at google. That person created software used by a lot of people. He saw something that "needed fixing" and he fixed it. He fixed it so well a bunch of other people started using his fix. That's a wonderful engineer. Created a project used (and loved?) by many people. That's the kind of person you want helping to create products at your company.

Google puts so much emphasis on (coding) skills that aren't needed for the majority of the work done, and doesn't emphasize selecting for the ability to create things that people want to use. I also find the coding skills selection kind of amusing since they had to create a simplified programming language (Go) because so many of their 'leet coding new graduates couldn't handle C++ correctly. Perhaps being able to 'leet code in your sleep doesn't really make you a "wonderful" engineer either.

KRAKRISMOTT• 3 years ago

Ignore the engineers for now, Google is chock full of product manager. What the hell have they been doing?

ravenstine• 3 years ago

Perhaps it's overly reductionist, but I think a lot of The Google's issues come down to their self-image. To this day they're stuck in the year 2006 when everybody and their grandma saw them as "cool", "innovative", "not Micro$oft", and "not evil." Most average joes don't believe those things anymore and just see The Google as the default thingamahoozie for looking up stuff on their phone. The Google believed they could grow rapidly and structure themselves with ordered-chaos because they were the chosen ones. Their road has yet to have become bumpy enough that they get knocked down a peg and forced to look at themselves in the mirror. Their hubris has allowed them to believe that they have no serious competition; just because your competition isn't actively competing now doesn't mean they won't be down the road when you're weak.

In regards to engineering, the quality of engineering is largely overrated and isn't even that well understood in the first place. Most systems are poorly engineered, and many engineering teams are inefficient, not because of the years of experience of the engineers or even so much their talent but because of bad management. Senior and lead engineers can massage a junior writing l33t code into only submitting PRs that are competently written. But if management gives engineering lip service while undermining their ability to write quality code, and the engineers who actually care end up leaving as a result, then all you're going to get is endless duct-taping and half-assed projects. Worse yet, you get almost nothing but makework projects that go nowhere because project manager #8,592 needs to look important to save their job.

bena2• 3 years ago

Eh. Yes and no.

Homebrew may be a wonderful product, but that doesn't make the creator a wonderful engineer. Useful things can be poorly created. And this is not to shit on either Homebrew or Max Howell. I personally do not know if Howell is a wonderful engineer or not. He's obviously competent enough to ship working software. That's not nothing.

And everyone has an idea on how to improve everything. Sometimes we're right, sometimes we're wrong. And even when we're right, it doesn't make us right all the time. You can't really select for "the ability to create things that people want to use". No one's track record is flawless. It's very nearly a crapshoot.

Basically, you're putting Howell on a pedestal, in much the same manner you're accusing others of doing so with Google employees.

I think traveler01 does have a valid question. Essentially, with all of their engineers, why is Google so limited? And I don't think it's a matter of not being able to ship stuff that people use. Google Drive, GMail, etc. They just don't seem to be able to monetize beyond ads. Maybe their fault isn't in pure engineering.

And to be fair to the hiring process at Google at the time he interviewed, Google was an "all yes" kind of place. If anyone had any sort of hesitation, that could cause a candidate to be rejected. Their philosophy was that it was better to reject a good candidate than hire a bad one. So all he had to do was have one off hour, and that could have killed his entire interview. I personally don't think being rejected by Google's hiring committee is a mark against anyone. To get even that far requires a certain level of skill and/or talent.

sebzim45004• 3 years ago

From the outside, Alphabet seems to do a very good job when it comes to engineering. They have very little downtime, fewer embarrassing security moments than most, youtube is far better technically than the competition, etc.

It's just that they aren't building things that people want to use, but that's a failure of management and incentives.

JustLurking20223• 3 years ago

Just to clarify on the Go point - that was all made up BS from Rob Pike.

TingPing• 3 years ago

Moving from C++ is the most reasonable choice ever. It is very complex and 20 developers who use it could come up with 20 solutions given freedom. Standardizing on a simple language is just good for collaboration.

tester756• 3 years ago

Remember when the person who created homebrew couldn't get a job at google.

That tree reverse meme?

he made it up

snotrockets• 3 years ago

Go isn't replacement for C++, and no one can handle C++.

delfinom4• 3 years ago

How a company with so much money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine?

Because they lack product management at the executive level downwards. With no goals set for current and future products, the engineers downstairs are allowed to play....a little too much which means the company as a whole flounders.

browningstreet• 3 years ago

Watched the 60 Minutes interview with Pichai last night. He’s really… unimpressive. He shouldn’t be doing MSM interviews if that’s the tenor of his performance.

Google is supposed to be a technical firebrand and their cloud isn't dominant, and their AI product and market position got punk'd by Microsoft... and he's out there saying things like AI will be a bigger discovery than fire. Which calls into question: so why isn't Google a leader in AI, or seem to be?

It's a bad PR thread for Google, and he lacked any Q factor in those interview clips.

ur-whale4• 3 years ago

He’s really… unimpressive.

That's putting it mildly

He shouldn’t be doing interviews

He should not be running Google at all, period.

0zemp1c3• 3 years ago

he's a good choice for "Good Times"...when the money is rolling in and you're on top, it is okay to have an inoffensive friendly supportive type in the CEO chair

those times are gone though and Google definitely needs someone more proactive and focused

JohnFen6• 3 years ago

Google is supposed to be a technical firebrand

They used to be, but they haven't been that for a long, long time.

raxxorraxor3• 3 years ago

I imagine they have some AI solution in reach.

I wouldn't want somebody to give presentations as a head of Google. On the contrary, I hate when people produce vapor.

Microsoft bought their AI solution. We will see if they can successfully integrate it. I am not yet sure about that. I hardly call that innovation though.

nickv3• 3 years ago

I can't help but feel like Google is going through their "Steve Ballmer CEO Phase". I wonder who will be the next CEO to fix things.

gremlinsinc3• 3 years ago

He comes off to me as someone in a funk, or stupor, or depression. Like he's out of touch, out of grasp with realities, and I think changes and things at google have probably hurt their culture quite a bit over the years. The best engineers in the world will churn out shit, if they aren't inspired to at least do exciting things sometimes, and I think Google's lost that thing that made them excite developers.

simantel• 3 years ago

Google Cloud revenue (which includes Workspace revenue) was $26B in 2022. That's only 10% of Google's total revenue, but to put it in perspective, all of Salesforce did $31B.

oldgradstudent4• 3 years ago

Revenue is nice, but is Google Cloud profitable?

I can generate huge revenues selling $100 bills for $95.

jmyeet• 3 years ago

It's incredibly rare for any company to produce one golden goose. It's even rarer for them to produce more than one. Google is the norm here.

Chrome and Gmail are homegrown but Maps, Youtube, Docs/Drive, the display ad business (ie DoubleClick) and Android are all acquisitions.

Think of it this way: if your ad business generates $100B/year, how do you justify spending billions on something that will generate a farction of that, particularly to start? How does that effort ever compete for resources internally?

And if you are successful it reaches a point where your two efforts can become competing interests.

thrashh2• 3 years ago

Well Google keeps putting out new products. And I hear you get promotions when you release a new product.

Good products come through refinement.

But every time you use most Google stuff, it feels like it’s still version 1. When compared to competitors’ products that they’ve been improving time after time, it just falls flat.

ugh123• 3 years ago

Lack of Product sense. Not an engineering problem.

endtime• 3 years ago

Google constant failure astonish me. How a company with so much money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine?

I have a slightly different answer than most of the other replies, which is that Google just got too big. I worked there for 10 years (left a year ago for a smaller company) and the amount of inefficiency and waste due to having too many layers of middle management with no real visibility into what was going on was just astounding. Over that decade they paid me millions of dollars in total, while canceling whatever I was working on almost exactly every 18 months like clockwork. Typically due to management issues or corporate politics rather than for any real technical or business reason.

MichaelZuo6• 3 years ago

This has been described in many variations on HN, what puzzles me is why the early, loyal, employees didn't point out this dynamic developing.

Or if they did internally, why the Board decided to ignore the most loyal and proven.

Googler #1 to #1000 were clearly not fools, and by the 2010s they very likely had enough credibility to be taken seriously if several dozen of them said this.

joe_the_user• 3 years ago

Google produces other products than search - Android for example. Waymo is the best self-driving car company (but the problem is self-driving cars won't work for a long time, if ever).

The problem is all Google's products use the free-plus-advertising model and this has caused them to drift to serving the advertisers rather than serving the users. And that makes it hard to switch gears to offer more benefits to users.

The main problem is Google shifted from making search better for their users

regnull• 3 years ago

Management. The a company grows, top management becomes risk-averse, and middle management cares more about their carriers than the company future. They will kill anything perceived as even slightly risky coming out of engineering. And guess what, anything good and new will be controversial and risky.

DrBenCarson• 3 years ago

Their search engine doesn’t make money. Ads do.

g9yuayon• 3 years ago

I kept reading news about Google's AI programs

Technology is not a product. A product that uses technology to solve a number of clearly defined real problems is a product. When Google was saying AI this AI that, I had yet to see any product.

potatolicious2• 3 years ago

This is a pet topic of mine to think about - so my (probably over-long) two cents below...

For context, I worked at Google for ~4 years, and have also been at two other FAANGs, as well as done time at VC-funded startups. I'd like to think I have a good gamut of experiences to compare against both in the realm of smaller companies and massive megacorps.

Google's problems are (from most severe IMO to least severe):

- Poor senior management. Other posts touch on the middle-manager-heavy ranks of Google, but IMO that misses the forest for the trees. A bloated middle management layer is but a symptom of a sclerotic upper management. To add some color to this:

- Google has a fundamental ethos that I haven't seen described in other writings and lacks a good term for it. In my head I call it the hypothesis of the free-range engineer. The foundational belief is that upper management's job is to get out of the way of the top talent they've hired. Product ideas should come from the bottom of the company - and even more importantly, they should succeed through intra-company competition. This is probably the singular most impactful organizational cultural belief at Google, and it informs how the entire company is structured. My position: the entire hypothesis is crap, and is a huge part of what holds the company back.

- The net result of Google's culture is that upper management sets very little product direction, in favor of letting individual teams set their own priorities and ship independently. This means a lot of duplicative products and a lot of products that don't integrate with each other (see: Workspace account sign-in and... literally everything). Upper management has a light touch and is extremely loathe to mandate standards, resulting in a really mind-blowing level of product fragmentation. Much of this seems to be a deathly allergy that the company developed after the total and utter failure of Google+, where upper management did exert direct influence over product. The lesson they took from G+'s failure wasn't "have a better top-down product strategy next time" and was instead "top-down product strategy bad".

- Upper management turnover is excessive. All big companies suffer from re-orgs, but Google practically makes re-orgs a sport. In addition to upper management being extremely loathe to give product direction, upper management (by this I mean Director-and-up) rotates alarmingly often, and each time it's accompanied with a re-org where projects are killed or deprioritized. I don't think in my entire time at Google I ever saw a multi-year roadmap actually executed to completion - each and every time some senior leader is replaced and the entire roadmap and strategy rewritten.

- Google has poor product strategy overall. The company tends to swing for a lot of home-runs but structures these endeavors poorly. There are a lot of ambitious PMs advocating for huge multi-year megaprojects that end up being total failures. Upper management is credulous and doesn't demand proof of viability prior to sinking a ton of resources over multiple years into a thing (this feeds the turnover problem above - where inevitably when a multi-year thing flops heads roll, when the real problem is that upper management did not exert scrutiny over the project sooner). Big, ambitious goals are good - but viability needs to be validated quickly and continuously throughout the development process so that requirements can change (and yes, so that the project can be killed expediently if the fundamentals aren't there). Again, a failure of Google's upper management.

- Continuing on that theme, Google's upper management is naive and credulous when it comes to product forecasts. PMs seeking to have their projects approved (especially big megaprojects) will make up absolutely bonkers projections for fundamental success metrics, and are often not seriously challenged on them. Senior leadership is ready to believe numbers that are facially absurd, and then are surprised when the product fails to live up to the unrealistic expectations. This phenomenon also drives the turnover/re-org problem above - since when the product whiffs the metrics by a mile somebody has to get the boot - but the real problem was believing the bad projections to begin with!

- Promotion-driven development is a problem. But unlike most prognostications about Google I don't think it's their main problem. Leadership is at the core of Google's problems and promo-driven development is just an exacerbating factor IMO. But there is a serious problem with how Google structures incentives for ICs and middle management. The biggest concrete effect of this is that after launching, engineering teams empty out rapidly as people sense that no promos are forthcoming for working on the product, and look for greener pastures. This exacerbates the effects from above, where -- through an array of leadership failures -- the product was already on thin ice. The collapse of the engineering teams on it further buries the product and sends it on a death spiral.

Anyway, this is already running way too long. At this point I think there needs to be a fundamental change to how Google pursues product if they hope to turn this boat around.

mrkramer3• 3 years ago

Google has poor product strategy overall. The company tends to swing for a lot of home-runs but structures these endeavors poorly.

I wouldn't say so; I mean they like to experiment a lot but their product strategy is good in the long term e.g. Google Search, Google Mail, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Chrome, Android etc. If 5 experiments fail and 1 succeeds and brings billions of dollars in revenue that's win in their book and in my book too.

Basically what Google is doing is building its family of apps to capture more attention and sell more ads. The same thing Facebook does with its family of apps e.g. Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. The goal is to capture as much attention as they can and then sell ads because that's what their business model is all about. Zuck even tried to acquire Twitter back in the day plus Snapchat as well. I doubt he liked the products or the people behind it, he just wanted to get rid of competition which was stealing attention or screen time from his family of apps. The same thing is with Google, that's why they are constantly pushing new apps and services (to gain market share and user attention and then to push ads).

dboreham2• 3 years ago

How does this happen for me when I use Chrome on my Samsung phone?

Oras• 3 years ago

Looking at how Google managed to "launch" Bard, I do not see how they will convince Samsung from a tech perspective.

Does anyone remember Bard? I hardly see anyone talking about it.

tough5• 3 years ago

I think Samsung will mostly care about money here

AlexandrB• 3 years ago

Microsoft is a shark and they smell blood in the water right now. While I hate their products, I have to admire their decision making. For example, I think they see the threat that SteamDeck poses (Linux gaming becoming feasible) and are already working to head it off at the pass: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/04/handheld-mode-for-wi...

hbn4• 3 years ago

I'm not sure that's a great example of quick-pivot defensive decision-making on Microsoft's part. It was just a leaked slide deck of a hackathon project done by a few employees. If the project actually gets greenlit and shipped, that's another thing.

jzb• 3 years ago

Microsoft has often been good at the Vaporware / stall approach. If a competitor/underdog looks like they're getting traction, announce something similar even if it isn't available for a long time (or ever). If you can stall adoption for a few quarters you can catch up to or kill a competing product. Sigh.

htag2• 3 years ago

Microsoft has always been a shark in the water. Maybe it was slightly less capable of killing blows during the Ballmer days.

mannyv• 3 years ago

With AI search, you won't have to go to the referenced page to read the content, which will kill the display ad business.

How's google going to get around that?

ChatGTP3• 3 years ago

Bing embeds ads, so no problem there.

bfrog2• 3 years ago

Too busy asking people to invert binary trees and not looking for people that know how to make products that make money.

xiphias22• 3 years ago

Actually if you have been really looking at Google's management, just the opposite has happened.

Eric Schmidt, who is an exceptionally rare talent understanding engineering, business and politics at the same time was changed to a person who just want to show more ads (the product that makes money) with 0 engineering background.

phendrenad22• 3 years ago

I think you're both right. Change comes from above and reflects from below. "We hire the best" has become "we hire the best at passing a generic set of tests" because they want hiring to be a thoughtless, automated process.

thisarticle2• 3 years ago

And it’s disgusting, the amount of ads on YouTube now is gross. I recently wasn’t logged in and saw how many ads I had to watch to see a minute long video. I wouldn’t use the service if it wasn’t for YouTube Premium.

0xDEF• 3 years ago

To train and productionize large-scale AI you need people who are good at algorithms and data structures.

post_break• 3 years ago

Apple should do the same thing now, twist the knife.

DeathMetal3000• 3 years ago

There’s 15 billion reasons they won’t.

freediver• 3 years ago

Now we have Kagi and Magi, lovely.

Btw Magi was already a search engine - magi.com and it seems it is suspending services now, wonder if domain is being bought by Google?

hn8305823• 3 years ago

The inevitable result of years (decades?) of rest and vest

devmor• 3 years ago

Both major search engines are utterly useless when compared to the Google of years ago, but anecdotally I do find Bing more reliable lately for actually finding what I'm looking for.

arthurofbabylon• 3 years ago

As an advertiser, it occurs to me that google severely dropped the ball. I've been waiting to hand them money, but they refuse to be sufficiently organized to onboard new, non-megacorp advertisers.

At first glance that makes sense: prioritize onboarding large businesses with large budgets. With a second thought, this approach seems foolish: their ad network is an ecosystem, and the X00,000 businesses like mine that are excluded would be an enormous boost to ad bids, ad targeting, and ad quality – 3 of the 4 things that Google breathes (the fourth being traffic).

If google screwed this up, what else are they screwing up?

collaborative2• 3 years ago

Don't hand them money. Ads only makes sense for companies with money to burn (mega corps)

chankstein383• 3 years ago

Maybe an unpopular opinion but it feels like Google is near useless anymore. Between results containing outdated or broken links to empty discussions, and ads being their main priority as well as "fuzzy search results" where you can search for one thing and get something completely unrelated because Google decided you also meant to search for something else that is possibly contextually adjacent, I can't really get good results from it anymore.

I mean, I can still get answers for simple questions but when it comes to anything unique or complex I usually just get frustrated and go to duckduckgo or something else. ChatGPT now adays mostly.

Sure ChatGPT can hallucinate but Google's results rely on some random person somewhere to have properly answered something. The reality of that is so many of the "answers" I find are discussions on forums between a bunch of random people who have no real credentials or factual answers but instead just opinions based on something else they read on Google. People google something, read the google blurb about it at the top of the results, then go answer other people's questions.

I honestly think Google is losing favor at this point. I've even been considering moving away from Android because the OS just feels like the Walmart iOS now adays. It features the same problems but in a way that nothing is polished versus iOS.

Google needs to stop just following everyone else. Everything now adays feels like the ol Google+ move. "Ah, successful product someone else made, let's remake it and name it google something!"

kmlx• 3 years ago

Sure ChatGPT can hallucinate but Google's results rely on some random person somewhere to have properly answered something.

i don't know about your experience with chatgpt, but to me it's been untrustworthy. so much so that every answer i get needs to be double checked against google and that "random person".

chankstein383• 3 years ago

That's fair I can definitely agree that but my point was more that neither is a very trustworthy source anyway. It's the same way I'd double check one source versus another. It's just easier to start with GPT at this point because at least I know it'll just answer based on what it has been trained with versus special interests. One example I've used is the question "Is Fix A Flat ok to use in tires?" the results are from the company that makes fix a flat saying basically "Yes obviously" while you then see tire companies and repair shops giving you mixed responses. Then you have the third group being just people who have heard from one of the first 2 groups. People are worried about AI degrading the quality of information over time, learning from itself. We're basically there thanks to people caring more about being right than being correct and never doing their own leg work.

tadfisher2• 3 years ago

I think Reddit has a golden opportunity here, considering how often I prefix searches with "site:reddit.com" to filter out SEO bullshit and usually get an answer from a subject-matter expert in the top ten results. They could even tie an LLM into it and regurgitate the highest-voted comment, and it would likely be more effective than Google or GPT.

ur-whale4• 3 years ago

Sure ChatGPT can hallucinate

For the non-ML crowd out there, in the AI world:

          to hallucinate <=> to lie

chankstein383• 3 years ago

You're absolutely correct but it's fair to also point out that people do this constantly as well. Try googling any controversial topic.

kristopolous• 3 years ago

Google is optimized for shopping and commercial sites at all other costs.

It's really become an impossibly frustrating tool. They've sucked for years and this was bound to happen.

rurp4• 3 years ago

I find that forums are often some of the most useful results. The posts are typically written by genuine people, many of whom are passionate about the subject matter.

Reliability can be an issue, but the medium at least provides a number of context clues to help. Seeing how individuals write and interact is helpful when judging how much weight to give to their words.

Converting those forum posts into a generic and overly confident interface strips away useful information.

carlosjobim3• 3 years ago

Yes, but maybe 5 times out of 10 the forum has your question, but not your answer. Add to this that guy on the Apple support forums, who has destroyed millions of lives by repeating the same answer to every thread opened for the last 15 years.

snowwrestler• 3 years ago

Apple used this tactic to put pressure on Google:

2013: Apple Makes Bing The “Default Search Engine” For Siri

https://searchengineland.com/apple-makes-bing-the-default-se...

2017: Apple switches from Bing to Google for Siri web search results on iOS and Spotlight on Mac

https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/25/apple-switches-from-bing-t...

Hard to know if the AI features of Bing are the key factor here for Samsung, or just a handy excuse for Samsung to renegotiate pricing with Google.

sdze• 3 years ago

Who cares? People will quickly setup their own default search engine. And I guess it will be Google. Google is a household name. Nobody in the "real" world cares about this AI crap.

qwertox4• 3 years ago

Up until ChatGPT, Bing was meaningless to me; Google Search served all my needs. I never had a reason to look over to Bing. The only contact I had with it was when something embedded their maps.

But now, with the AI integration, even when I tried it and left disappointed, Bing is starting to sound interesting.

Then there's how they are starting to integrate AI into their other products and putting a lot of good effort in visual design. Their products look modern and polished, while Google is "still the same old" with their Material Design.

I know they are the most capable engineers and that behind the scenes they are building the best quality soft- and hardware, but if they don't start to focus on the user again they will no longer be the titan they used to be.

htag2• 3 years ago

But now, with the AI integration, even when I tried it and left disappointed, Bing is starting to sound interesting.

When I try a new feature, and am disappointed, I think marketing overhyped it and lose interest. Why do you think ChatGPT + Search is a good combo, even after you were disappointed when trying it?

qwertox4• 3 years ago

They are showing that they have a strong interest in including it. Sure, it still isn't where I'd like it to be, but what does Google have to offer?

Bard is US-only, so not reachable for me, I don't even know how or if it is integrated into Google Search. They'd have a bigger potential in enriching their search with AI features, better search, probably a better AI. At least from what they have been publishing during these past two years, they seem to have gathered a lot of experience with AI.

In regards to Bing, I felt like you.com had a slightly better AI integration.

What ChatGPT lacks are links to related websites. For example, give me a links to the documentation of the `.into()` trait [0] instead of "only" explaining it to me.

[0] https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/convert/trait.Into.html

ur-whale4• 3 years ago

The problem with Google is very simple: they have become entirely incapable of creating new products (specifically: stuff that people actually want).

Most of the tech. that underpins OpenAI's stuff has been invented at Google, and quite a long time ago.

They've been sitting on it, not doing anything with it, and even when their most direct competitor comes to take a huge pound of flesh out using stuff they created, all they manage to do is put out a lame subpar competitor (bard).

Things this situation evokes for me:

   - Google plus

   - Kodak

   - Xerox

bagacrap• 3 years ago

But Microsoft can create new products?

HacklesRaised• 3 years ago

Out of the frying pan, into the fire!

rvba• 3 years ago

Google Magi’s initial launch will be only in the US, with a maximum of one million users. Later, by the year’s end, it will expand to 30 million users.

It seems they never learned from the failed launches like Google Wave or Google Plus. Where you couldnt use them and by the time you and your friends got them the hype allready wore off.

m3kw92• 3 years ago

People want LLM leveraged search, and Google isn't delivering.

qrck132• 3 years ago

I think majority of "ordinary" users just what the search results when they need them, not really caring about the technology beingb used behind the scene.

And here bing is still often interior to b Google, LLM add some fun factor but factual quality actually goes down as GPT is known for making up facts

jdlyga• 3 years ago

Google got too corporate and played things too safe for too long. Imagine if Google released Bard 1 year ago.

rolph• 3 years ago

Google needs platforms. platforms only need to browse web. platforms wear the pants.

kernal• 3 years ago

Google should respond by charging Samsung a healthy licensing fee to use Google services and receive security and OS updates. They should also re-evaluate their Android licensing model and make it free for non commercial applications only.

newbie578• 3 years ago

Love to see a title like this. Would love to be a fly inside the Google execs offices right now. I do wonder if they are confused, why are their factory workers, i.e. leet code solvers not able to innovate?

I find this hilarious and positively validating. Building a tech product is not about being able to memorise an algorithm or knowing how to sort an array in the fastest way possible. They are stuck in the past.

You will not ask a today's Software Engineer how does a bootloader function, yet the big tech companies keep asking irrelevant questions blown by time and progress.

anonkogudhyfhhf• 3 years ago

Good. Samsung is removing that blogspam of a search

qrck132• 3 years ago

For me that would be a reason to avoid buying Samsung from now on. Can't stand bings UI overloaded with visuals that only distract you.

Tempest1981• 3 years ago

How are people pronouncing "Magi"? Same as GIF?

theonemind• 3 years ago

Do you mean are people going both ways? I don’t think gif is settled. I’m in the soft G camp on gif.

I think magi is already an English word with soft G, so I don’t know if there’s any room for controversy on this one.

saulpw• 3 years ago

The gif debate is over, it's pronounced like gin or git.

natch• 3 years ago

Employees being both arrogant and lazy is quite a corrosive dynamic for a company.

nstart• 3 years ago

A quick note to say that this article is mostly a rehash of the New York Times article it references as its source. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/technology/google-search-...

29athrowaway• 3 years ago

They will become the next Nokia.

thexumaker• 3 years ago

lol I'm officially moving off of samsung if this happens. No way in hell I'm using a shitty bing browser

mrkramer3• 3 years ago

Time to shower Samsung with cash.

NayamAmarshe• 3 years ago

I don't know how Bing is any better. I tried Bing today and the results are awful! The search results page is very bloated and there's too much going on everywhere. Too much irrelevant information. What surprises me is that they managed to make content look like ads, irrelevant and noisy.

Comparing the screens to Brave Search, I'm surprised how good Brave Search is. Not only are the results much better, but the UI is super-clean! There's only digestible information and no bloat.

imperialdrive• 3 years ago

Yah, it is really hard to imagine Bing cleaning itself up. No way users don't backlash on Samsung the moment they notice the gunky search results. And holy smokes, Teams, it's falling apart every new release. Once users have enough of that experience they're really going to wonder why they dove in head first.

sebzim45004• 3 years ago

Teams, it's falling apart every new release

I've never used Teams, but it is weird to me that non-tech people seem to really like it while tech people hate it. Is it simply that the tech people are comparing it to slack but the non-tech people are comparing it to email/skype/etc.?

nomel• 3 years ago

In the crevices of search space, I get more duplicates with Bing than with Google. But, I do get duplicates, with both, which is insanely infuriating.

Animats2• 3 years ago

This may be a Myspace moment for Google. The competition is now better.

There's another huge issue. Google is an ad business. That meshes well with search, and not so well with question answering system on mobile. What's ChatGPT supposed to say? "But first, this word from our sponsor?".

A big change in the ecosystem is coming. These next generation systems are being set up as walled gardens. Bing FAQ: "You’ll need to use the Microsoft Edge browser and sign in with your Microsoft account to access all the capabilities of the new Bing." Google is talking about limiting the number of users of their chat system, which implies they are tying usage to login.

This is a huge change to the business model. It's going to be about owning the customer relationship, not serving ads.

luckydata• 3 years ago

Is it better? It's flashy and interesting, but I don't think ChatGPT brings any actual value to the search use case. Other stuff, sure.

Animats2• 3 years ago

It does on phones, where content has to be slimmed down.

ivanmontillam• 3 years ago

I think that Search Engine Optimization as we know it is also going to change forever as well.

Don't be surprised if we start seeing ads like "If you don't appear in Bing/GPT, you don't exist;" we are now in the era of AI-based Search Engine Optimization, or whatever term you want to put it on.

The end result is that the BigAI must know about you and talk about you. You must position yourself in the mind of ChatGPT or similar.

EDIT: How about "Prompt Search Term Optimization" (PSTO)?

kazinator• 3 years ago

Could it be that Google is pissing off Samsung with their garbage Android releases whose most visible effect is that of actively ruining the user experience?

I can imagine that creates work and headaches for Samsung, and other vendors.

cleandreams• 3 years ago

I have begun to find bing search invaluable. It's annoying to use google although I don't even like the bing user interface for AI search. Much too hard to get to. I don't want a single extra keystroke.

layer82• 3 years ago

Magi? What happened to Bard?

JohnFen6• 3 years ago

It makes sense, though. Google search is terrible. Bing isn't great, either. But Bing probably charges less, and if there's no real quality difference between the two, why pay more?

jsnell5• 3 years ago

You've got the flow of money inverted... Phone manufacturers don't pay for the right of getting to set a search engine as the default. They expect to be paid.

JohnFen6• 3 years ago

Ah, right. My brain farted.

tomcam• 3 years ago

A gentle reminder that there is no proof of the “Google in shock“ assertion. The fact that an anonymous source maybe claimed it to someone at the New York Times has essentially zero credibility.

Until an attributed source at Google says something like “we were shocked“ or “we were gobsmacked, etc.“ that’s all just third-hand information reported fourth-hand.

naves• 3 years ago

I can imaging Apple mulling about the same for iOS. Microsoft is on a roll and they have the money to challenge Google’s default place in our pockets.

andrewinardeer• 3 years ago

It's going to be wild when Bing Maps is superior to Google Maps.

ekvintroj• 3 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if they do that, Sammy already forces us to live with MS related bloatware on their phones and tablets.

mensetmanusman2• 3 years ago

Bing still gives me poor results when I am in science search mode.

Samsung considers moving to Bing as default search engine

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