In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.
I absolutely agree.
One fundamental reason why Yahoo failed is that they prioritized short-term revenue from search partners, over long-term reputation. One of the key people behind that was Prabhakar Raghavan.
And now, Prabhakar Raghavan is at Google. Where he has proceeded to make the same mistake, with the result that Google Search quality fell off of a cliff.
If Google had been acquired by Yahoo, he would have been in a position to destroy Google earlier than he actually did.
An increase in searches isn't necessarily a positive thing. Anecdotally, I've increased the number of Google searches I do simply because it now requires multiple attempts to frame my query in a way that provides the results I'm actually looking for!
Seems logical to me, but then my 71 year old mother with doctorates in both science and literature pulls out her phone and trusts Google AI results without thinking twice.
how much did internet usage increase that year, in terms of the number of people and hours spent? what changes happened in the app ecosystem that had google as a default search provider? what other service offerings shut down or degraded that caused people to move to google? how much did chrome browser usage increase over IE and Safari?
there are so many factors to this, its the same issue when target stock drops 10% over a year and people are like "oh it's because they stopped selling plus size bikinis! the crowd has spoken!". you can attribute it to anything but you're basically always wrong if you're not attributing it to at least a dozen different things
What do you do when you have a product whose value will inevitably drop in the medium/long-term? Squeeze every penny out of it while you still can. There is no solution to the SEO arms race, like there was no way Yahoo's blandly curated portal could stay relevant in the era of social media. He's the right man for the job. Google search has been doomed for a long time. It is another Yahoo.
LLMs have, for me at least, mostly replaced search. Because one of the most common things I search for is stuff like 'what is the function in [x] that does [y] in [z]'. Search for that on Google (or any other search engine) and your results will be complete trash. Search for it on an LLM and it's one of the few things they're nearly perfect at.
Search engines, especially with the resources of Google, could have developed at least basically functional natural language search decades ago. Instead they chose to rest on their laurels (pagerank even still plays a significant role!), and secure market control by anti-competitive behavior.
Google is certainly well on their way to becoming another Yahoo, but there's no extrinsic reason for it in the same way there was no reason for Yahoo to become what it became. In 100 years people will be searching the corpus of human writings (or whatever medium is dominant then) for information that's relevant to them. So there's in intrinsic reason for any search related company to just naturally die. It simply needs to keep innovating, or at least evolutionarily improving.
> Because one of the most common things I search for is stuff like 'what is the function in [x] that does [y] in [z]'.
This is also the type of search that Google makes no money from.
The money is in searching for up-to-date relevant product information, where Google is the undisputed leader.
>Search engines, especially with the resources of Google, could have developed at least basically functional natural language search decades ago
Google is one of the major AI research outfits, and arguably the only one that continues to deliver consistently over the last 2 decades. Statistical Machine Translation/Google Translate, Adwords Quality Score, TensorFlow, AlphaGo, Attention is all you need (Transformers), AlphaFold all Google innovations.
You can't really blame the prevalence of SEO slop on Google. It's not the lack of want of trying, it is hard technically (see how long it took to develop modern AI capabilities), expensive computationally (as we can see with the unsustainable cost of test-time search in ChatGPT) and in terms of user-experience.
>Google is certainly well on their way to becoming another Yahoo
Really, it isn't. Google is in the unique position of being the closest technology company to achieving full vertical integration of their value chain, from silicon to software to data to end-users. They are also at the forefront of frontier AI, including productising the research output. I don't really get the Google hate on HN, apart from maybe the YC/sama bias.
Your answer sounds very artificial. For instance "AI" is in no way whatsoever required for natural language search queries. There was some spreadsheet program back in the mid 90s that even supported natural language operation description - and is something that should also be obviously supported now a days. Even the adventure games of the same era often had natural language interfaces. It was quite useable even if obviously severely limited by minimal R&D put into it.
It was an obvious way to create a better user experience but instead search today is comparable to, if not worse than, search 20 years ago - because at least 20 years ago companies were ahead of the SEO guys, whereas that relationship has long since flipped.
What makes you think that Google hasn't developed natural language processing, when they launched Google Translate in 2006?
Also, what makes you think that NLP would solve the problem you're describing? Only LLMs has proven that it could fully understand and process the queries in the way you're describing, hence why I brought that up. However it is expensive computationally, and only recently was it even technically possible to do.
Most searches, even in natural language, are extremely simple. Google could certainly have added this functionality, but they chose not to. This is how old giants always die. They become so obsessed with further squeezing their users that they begin to stagnate, decline, and eventually completely miss the writing on the wall - and face disruption.
I will tell you all you need to know about Google - I was doing some research for a product I am building, my daughter (age 12) was an inspiration for what I am building and I asked her if she had time to help me with something and she did. Told her to “google ____” and she started laughing HARD and called me a boomer for suggesting she use Google… :)
These aren't incompatible issues. Google has a monopoly maintained by excessive and illegal anti-competitive practices. The majority of users have no clue how to even change their default search engine, which Google actively exploits. Just checking it out - it took no less than 6 clicks into various specific menu and sub-menu settings to do so.
Poll only the subset of people that are actively aware of how to change their search engine and I suspect Google's dominance suddenly completely disappears. Remember, there was a time when Internet Explorer was the leading web browser across all age groups. Then Microsoft was forced to make it easier for people to change their default browser, and suddenly nobody was using IE anymore.
My apologies, I did not mean to imply that my kid's humour is evidence of Google's demise. But it does make you wonder a bit... we use Google out habit (they used to be decent) and also because they pay boatload of money to be default search on iphone and myriad of other reasons but younger generations do not have that intimate relationship with google and can see "with fresh eyes" its usefulness compared to the alternatives ...
> The money is in searching for up-to-date relevant product information, where Google is the undisputed leader.
Actually for products, a lot of people just go to Amazon has a thriving ad business.
> Google is one of the major AI research outfits, and arguably the only one that continues to deliver consistently over the last 2 decades. Statistical Machine Translation/Google Translate, Adwords Quality Score, TensorFlow, AlphaGo, Attention is all you need (Transformers), AlphaFold all Google innovations.
The problem with Google is that they can’t produce good profitable products. Innovation means nothing for a for profit company if it doesn’t make money.
Easy. Google is basically spyware. It's an advertising company, and their product is you.
>searching for up-to-date relevant product information
I realise I'm not a typical user, but I would never trust Google for any searches hinting that I'm looking to buy something, because the results are almost guaranteed to be inorganic. Someone will have paid Google money to be promoted for "best clothes dryer".
>Easy. Google is basically spyware. It's an advertising company, and their product is you.
This is such a flippant and facile response.
Google isn't a advertising company, it is a tech company that gets the majority of its revenue via selling advertising. This can change, and also likely to change in the next decade or so.
The reason things are is that nobody was willing to pay for search - it's a product with a very low incremental cost. The market dictated this operating model, and nobody has been able to upend this model so far, not even OAI. The numbers just don't work out. Do you think OAI can continue to subsidise free ChatGPT queries with paid ChatGPT Plus subscriptions? Almost certainly not.
I think actually people probably are willing to pay for search - Google just did such a damn good job for so long it made it impossible for a competitor to pop up
And now that their core product is getting worse I am paying for search
How else should someone take the statement 'that is the type of search that Google makes no money from' when someone explained what type of searches they do? If Google doesn't make money from it, they don't develop it for search apparently, which is why they haven't progressed in search beyond advertising. You can argue that it needs disrupting, but concluding that 'they make their money from advertising' when that was directly stated by you is not flippant or facile, it is deduction.
You can't eat your cake and still have it. If they refuse to develop an income stream that isn't related to advertising while using practices that use their dominant place in the market to buy other technologies or shut them down, then saying it isn't their fault that the revenue is only advertising is either disingenuous or naive.
Yea this is just pure bs.
If you had taken to search for the name, you'd have found the wiki explaining the name's origin. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raghavan
Also,Raghavan is most probably his father's name and Prabhakar will be his given name.
Are you just pulling this out of your ass? Per Wikipedia, Prabhakar R was not at Yahoo in 1998 and 2002.
> After working 14 years at IBM, he became senior vice president and chief technology officer at enterprise search vendor Verity in 2004.[16][14][12] In July 2005, he was hired by Yahoo! to lead Yahoo! Research in Sunnyvale, California.[17] At Yahoo!, he worked on research projects including search and advertising.[15][18] In 2011, he was appointed as Yahoo!'s chief strategy officer.[1]
> In 2012, Prabhakar joined Google after severe funding cuts in Yahoo!'s research division.[19] In 2018, he was put in charge of Ads and Commerce at Google and in 2020 his scope was expanded to include Search, Geo, and Assistant.[20] [21]
It sounds like you are either unintentionally spreading misinformation, or misinformed.
They never said he was there in those years or was involved in the failed acquisitions. Had Google been acquired then, yes, eventually Raghavan would have been calling the shots.
I absolutely agree.
One fundamental reason why Yahoo failed is that they prioritized short-term revenue from search partners, over long-term reputation. One of the key people behind that was Prabhakar Raghavan.
And now, Prabhakar Raghavan is at Google. Where he has proceeded to make the same mistake, with the result that Google Search quality fell off of a cliff.
If Google had been acquired by Yahoo, he would have been in a position to destroy Google earlier than he actually did.
See https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ for more.