"Google is Getting Worse," ft. Wendell of Level1 Techs
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Wendell from Level1 Techs got up with us to talk about the decay of Google's Search behavior and results, especially with the advent of "AI" search assistants. Google, probably unexpected to them, ended up facing its first real competition in years primarily from ChatGPT. Now, Google is scrambling to add its own assistant search results. We talk with Wendell in a meandering discussion about what that means for Google.
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Watch our previous video with Wendell here: • PCIE is the Future, Th...
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TIMESTAMPS
00:00 - Google Getting Worse
02:00 - Users Need to Suffer
06:57 - Reddit As Data
11:48 - Google's Competition & Alternatives
17:55 - Keeping People On Google
21:50 - What Happens When Websites Die
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Steve Burke: Host
Wendell of Level1 Techs: Guest
Mike Gaglione: Initial Edits
Vitalii Makhnovets: Camera
Tim Phetdara: Editing - เกม
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Watch our previous video with Wendell here - talks about PCIE as the future! th-cam.com/video/5Fz3P41emo8/w-d-xo.html
Find Level1 Techs here! th-cam.com/users/level1techs
Aww, I wanted to be first for once. :)
Whatever you said in this video isn't going to get me to stop using Google products regardless of the crap clickbait title. I say whatever, because I refuse to watch videos with clickbait titles. Stopped only long enough to write this comment. Enjoy!
I miss the actual numbers and data evidence to prove "Google" (the search results) got, quote: "objectively worse".
Usually I think of GN as a fact based channel - this piece is... different. It's like some ate a pizza with glue in it?
I still remember meta crawlers and all that junk, the search results from the past - I haven't noticed any objectively worse results.
In fact I'd never ever want to return to lets say metacrawlers ever again.
What I've been observing is worse content though - largely copied from one and another, not written by expert matters or just someone talking randomly without evidence etc.
Of course that poisons search results. But that's not results being worse, it's just search finding content that's being worse... completely different logic.
@@didamnesia3575 No one said to stop using them. It's not clickbait - it is the subject of the video.
@@GamersNexus This video was a very good dose of severe optimism. I loved it!
What is INSANE to me is that you literally cannot even search TH-cam anymore. You enter a search, get like 5 results, and it starts showing me "other videos I may like" and my sub feed
Sometimes I would search some very specific problem and someone on the 3rd page described the solution in some 100 view video. Now the search algorithm is absolute garbage.
If you search for something controversial or political sometimes there will be only 3-4 totally unrelated videos. Even if you have the exact video title you sometimes must force to view only channels and search the exact channel manually.
We just get fed the results on youtube some people that also released gemini AI want us to see.
site:youtube producing _completely different results_ than TH-cam's internal search has always baffled me.
Change the sort by to 'date added' or something to get the full search result. At least for now anyway
This.
Yeah and the average age of the 5 results is 7 years ago. So Anti-Intelligence.
"Reddit doesn't tolerate nonsense." Reddit is pure, distilled, unadulterated nonsense.
As with any social media, there's good and bad info and leaving it for an AI to decide is the worst possible decision.
and Reddot is over-moderated to the point of being sterile. It's impossible to post critical comments on any major subreddit in my experience and questioning either the moderation or the mods will get you banned permanently. There's no warnings, no temp bans and they will ban all connected accounts. Appeals are ignored, there is no communication nor any accountability.
I find Reddit extremely useful. This simplistic way of thinking where you take only the bad and make out something is purely that one thing is just another example of disingenious behaviour. I get you likely get some kind of satisfaction from making this kind of negative comment, but it's just not reality based.
@@TheycallmeMrWonka how old are you? The internet was actually useful before reddit and to this day i never get anything technical from reddit.
Social media seems to have a penchant for nonsense! We should train our AI assistant on it!
Google's biggest AI letdown for me has been the map directions. I travel almost constantly for work, and up until around the start of 2024, Google Maps had some of the best spoken directions available. I could easily navigate through unfamiliar cities without having to look away from the road. Right around the new year, that abruptly changed, with the directions becoming downright nonsensical, going from reading out street names to "Take the ramp", which usually means go straight, except when it doesn't. I quickly caught on to the fact that Maps was using AI to read signs from the Street View data that had been collected, and trying to directly convey that into verbal directions. Utter failure, and it's nearly gotten me into several accidents when I had to look away from the road in order to figure out what nonsense Maps was telling me to do. It's bad enough that I'm seriously shopping for a dedicated GPS navigation unit, because I can't trust Google's directions anymore.
Oh, the AI maps are nonsense. They can't do roundabouts, for example. It's broken.
I just look at the route now.
I've seen even worse, just a few weeks ago Maps tried to steer us down some road that didn't even exist. Bad GPS or whatever. But the fact that Apple Maps got us everywhere perfectly fine, is a statement in and of itself. They started out in 2012 but now have the prettier, more reliable and more up-to-date maps.
On a trip back from the eclipse I kept taking wrong turns on interchanges, cuz I could swore she said to take the turn or exit, but then she'd reroute and I kept wondering how I was mishearing multiple times. Glad to know it wasn't just me. It worked just fine last year while traveling :/
A couple of things worth noting here:
- Wendell says the AI companies "haven't really come up with a solution to the hallucination issue" - they won't. They can't. Hallucinations are a direct product of how LLMs and generative AI works - because they don't understand concepts like "true", "real", or "made up". Their fundamental function is to produce a statistically likely output of what a response to your query might look like, based on their dataset. They have absolutely no ability to stop hallucinating, because *every answer* is one - it's just that some data is actually present in the data, so they can come closer to a correct answer as there's more concrete data to work from.
- It's not just google making the Web worse, it's also the proliferation of AI generated, AI translated garbage - which they touch on, but also pretty much entirely bypass the issues around save for Google's failure to respond to it/inadvertent enabling of it.
What were seeing is the enshittification of the web, and Cory Doctorow covers this far better than Steve and Wendell, unfortunately.
Also, it bears mentioning that there's a rather shocking level of naivete on display concerning corporate logic (and greed). Google isn't asleep at the helm in terms of not filtering AI trash on TH-cam - they *want it there*. Because in the short term, it makes them money, as people having to go through a dozen shitty videos before finding what they want lets them serve you more ads. Yes, this will kill the platform if left alone, but they only care about the short term. That's what corporate logic is. It's the same for every single other corporate platform owner out there. Again: enshittification. Please, Steve and Wendell, go Google that word 😉
If you think corporate logic is short term gain at the expense of long term feasibility, you are ignorant enough that I can safely ignore everything else you have to say. You are just cynical and confusing it for wisdom.
They wouldn't get good results from googling it; it's enshitiffied
@@tuhaggis Man, have you paid attention to literally anything corporations have done in, oh, say the past 30 years? The "holding companies" buying out successful businesses, running them into the ground through "cost cutting" and selling off the parts of the carcass? The whole "move fast and break things" attitude? The persistent and pervasive prioritisation of short term profits (and shareholder dividends) rather than long term stability and viability? The consistent attempts at skirting or breaking literally any regulation or law if it boosts profits short term, even if it leads to massive fines or tarnishing their brand? The tech giants desperately going after literally every possible buzzword bubble, even if it leads to oberproduction and exaggerates boom-bust cycles? If you think the average corporation has any interests beyond short term profits, you're buying into corporate propaganda, and that kind of naivete... well, I'd say the same right back at you, nothing else you're going to say is likely to be worth listening to. There's absolutely nothing cynical about my approach. Heck, I'd eager I probably have more hope and faith in humanity than you do. But corporations are literally legally obligated to produce short term profits for their shareholders. And they've been acting accordingly for decades and decades. Expecting them to continue doing so is realistic, not cynical.
I am no subject expert - but could'nt you train a highly specific model to rate things ? Like this is a preference thing, this is objectively better than something else, this is a fact, this is not and inject them into other AI Models that create content, like the most common ones that create a fluid and responsive text output for an end user ?
@@DxCBuG it would be just as prone to hallucinations, ratings for things that have good data for would be decently accurate, while ratings for everything else would be just hallucinated garbage
They abandoned the old motto “don’t be evil”… I wonder why.
Because money and control
What if they bring it back, but they just drop one of the words? Like an efficiency upgrade. "Google: Be Evil." Has a ring to it.
@@GamersNexus I also like "Don't be" - Google
According to Wikipedia, they did not. Between April 21st and May 4th of 2018, the motto was removed from the code of conduct's preface and retained in its last sentence.
The fact they needed that motto in the first place means they were never good people.
lol. The expected result of having to instaban bots in a video where we talk about them. It's becoming self-aware!
They'll be back and in greater numbers
It`s beginning to believe!
@@InternetStranger476 Sandpeople, lol
Does reporting them help you clean them up? Or am I wasting my time
Status indicator: Ominously Red.
I did map software for a certain large atlas company. Not only did they inject false information into every map we had to make sure that new false information was injected into every digital map created from their data (following a format they could easily prove was theirs). That would allow them to prove that any map taken from their system and used by someone else was stolen. It was a significant part of the programming for the SW.
That's been a thing for a long time: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
also like the dbrand/casetify skins case, quite blatant!
Also "paper towns"
Google used to be engineering driven. Now it's driven by marketing people. It used to be important to do cool stuff that solved people's problems. Now money is all that matters. Thanks Ruth.
This is the same story with every tech company. The creators are innovative, ambitious, and driven... but to grow they need capital, so they get investors. Investors are typically only interested in the profit and as they gain more and more control, the direction of the company is shifted. This is especially true when a company is publicly traded, they have a fiduciary responsibility to make money for their investors.
I wish there was a solution to this, where a tech company could grow AND stay true to its origins.
@@tames307 I should point out there's no law that says they have a fiduciary responsibility to make money for their investors.
@@xpyrrulings in court equals law. It was ruled in court.
Not marketing people. But by finance bros.
@@flinchy-5224 it's called case law. Still don't think there is such. That's the risks of investments. You might have mistaken it with contracted terms and conditions if any or shareholder dividends. Mismanagement and clear disregard of best interests of the company is something else entirely.
15 years ago I could find almost anything I wanted on Google. All I get now are poorly written articles from AI that are completely irrelevant and useless.
Copywriters and journalists have clogged up the Internet too. There's a lot of recycled and bloated content to trawl through
There was one specific study/article I found years ago on some chemical reaction that was EXACTLY what I needed for an argument at the time
Can I find it now? Nope, doesn't exist. Pages and pages of irrelevant garbage.
Use bing
DDG*
@@minakatahizuru Microsoft is worthless AND evil.
Wendell always being top tier guest in Gamer Nexus.
I would listen to this guy talk about anything, he just seems like such an authority when he speaks.
Is that the same Wendell from those tec syndikate videos back in the day?
@@tehgzizlauw1787Yep. Level 1 Techs formed when Tek Syndicate imploded.
@GamersNexus Tell Wendell I think Google is just about to drive itself off a cliff, grasping and making increasingly poor decisions along the way.
He's a great source of info regarding Linux and hardware
Public internet is dead.
In the past everything was done publicly-facing on forums boards etc. Corporations and the influencer type of content and manipulation of the medium is and has pushed communities to more private spaces like discord servers and such.
Now, the publicly easy access internet is all influencer and corpo bullshit.
I think greedy and evil people finally get that places to make as what google and company's it is. Thats why its become garbage
The Google search has been terrible for almost a decade by now. In ~2010 the search was absolutely amazing, but nowadays it's utter trash.
I think years ago (pre llm) they switched to indexing in an embedded semantics. This is sorta the early deep learning for natural language processing era. This made power user phrasing adjustment much harder because similar searches projected back to the same embedding. As a dumb example around 2018 I was searching for repair videos for my dodge dakota truck. TH-cam gave me videos for ford rangers. Its "smart" in that both are similar, small trucks but they are totally useless and search doesnt care because they are similar semantically.
Yeah, I alsp regard 2011 as the best year and declining ever since. It has some to do with the rise of social media and declining of forums and other decadent sites. In the past ~5 years it has gotten atrocious though. You search, and it searches for something completely else!
Google search has been getting steadily worse for several years, but lately I've seen a larger number of people starting to notice.
I thought I became a lonely conspiratard.
Shit's genuinely useless now. What do people go to now? Bing? I wanted Duckduckgo to be good, but it just isn't most of the time.
Brave. It’s miles in front of google and bing and equally if not more private than ducksuckgo. Plus the AI feature built in is pretty helpful most of the time.
Most people just don't understand. Or maybe even care.
@@TH-camTookMyNickname.WhyNot Its really nothing new, youtube has been getting worse for like 15 years at this point. But it is nice that people become much more conscious of it.
Like back in the day searching on youtube had a level of utility thats just not there anymore. As long as you dont really, really like Qora...
I love when I try to look up a tutorial on youtube and half the results are random videos I watched 2 months ago 👺
I remember when companies made the best products they could and were proud to stand over their products.
cause they had competition
@@itsmeagain7246 And they relied on reputation to exist, instead of marketing and manipulation and other people excusing away the gaslighting and other abuses by saying it's normal and "every company does it", which is false and a pathetic excuse if it was true, and by blaming the victims for using products.
Wendell is such a smart dude. I could listen to him ramble about anything all day.
Is he actually intelligent if all he is talking about is just hearsay since he doesn't work for Google?
One of Google's problems is severe shortsightedness.
"Oops this isn't profitable by the second quarter. Axe it!"
or
"I don't care if this is the future, it will take 6 years to build. No"
the result of letting shareholders completely dictate your business
All Google had to do to court trust in Stadia was let customers walk with their games like Geforce Now. If Google had done that, people would've given Stadia a chance.
The podcast Better Offline did a good series on why this happened. Hint: the management consultant mindset
@@davidmalkowski7850but they couldn’t. Their tech didn’t allow it. They needed bespoke games. It was a platform.
I understand that you can argue they could have used proton, because their tech was based on Linux. But it’s kind of a big pivoting move to make on an architecture that wasn’t built with that in mind. They probably didn’t want to sink more money into it.
But what do I know. 😂
Cheers.
Their only problem is the woke agenda... child grooming should be illegal...
Planned obsolescence and data obfuscation in software is one terror I did not expect to face in my lifetime.
Huh? IBM started that decades ago well before the Internet. It’s not a new business model in software.
Planned obsolescence existed before you
both always existed
good people rarely imagine how evil other people can be. but once marketing gets ahold of something...
Lightbulb conspiracy….
It was actually comforting to hear about the Internet "starting over" with paid user-content sites, seeing the net get so consolidated over the years made me concerned that it'd become stagnant
Corporate control of the internet is forcing the Dead Internet theory into reality
7:54 I think Wendell is describing PageRank, but calling it "MapReduce". MapReduce, when not talking about a specific software implementation, describes a much more general approach of doing "Map and reduce" at a large scale.
"Replacing the Engineer CEO with an Accounting CEO..."
*Focus on the Intel logo*
Yeah, spit the truth!!!
Where?
@@NoobsDeSroobs 8:22
@@AscalonFI77 Nice!
The thing I love most about Pat "Pat" Gelsinger is that he is a certified *nerd,* having literally _written the book_ on the 80386 processor. Lisa Su has similar _bona fides._ Is it any wonder that we've got the best processor competition we've had in a decade?
Engineers can be idiots too.
Absolutely, it's worse. I used to be able to find almost ANYTHING I wanted to by using old school search terms. Now to find good, COMPLETE information on what I need, I usually end up on Page 2 or even 3.
Noticed this as well, usually got what I wanted from the first page even though my search might have been a bit obscure but with the right terms in there it would return great results. That does not really happen anymore.
Lucky you can find anything at all.
In 2018ish I had to abandon Google because 4/5 of my searches didn't get anything relevant in the first 20+ pages.
Yes, I was going through 20 pages of results, then refining the search, then 20 more pages, then refining results.
It couldn't even give me results for pages that I had bookmarked when I found them on Google 2 years prior.
If a quoted paragraph pasted into the search bar can't be found when I add site:TheSiteI'mSearchingFor then it's clearly trying it's hardest NOT for give me a result.
You only have to go to page two or three? Lucky. I'm stuck just giving up or bookmarking anything I think I mind want or need again.
Who on earth wants to deal with that, seriously? I find immediate and great information using ChatGPT. I use it whenever possible, because the response is just so much more convenient. "Googling" something is WORK. And it gets more and more tedious work.
I'm not sure if it's the case on Google since I stopped using it for search years ago, but I have noticed that some search engines just stop giving results past like page 6.
I've been following Wendell for a long time and am continually amazed when you get him firing on all cylinders. Just wow.
Everytime Wendell said "MapReduce" it makes more sense if he meant "PageRank". Map Reduce is a general purpose multithreading. PageRank was the OG backlink counting search engine ranking monster.
Send data to multiple machines or cores run a program for each piece of data, then reduce it to one result.
I remember when google would reverse image search and pull up the actual source of the image even if it was hidden on a darknet page (unfindable without direct link)
Then they totally gutted it along with the search engine. You cant even add " " for keywords to find anything of meaning anymore.
I miss the old web and landlines
Or - to remove a term
I noticed that too. A few years ago, doing a reverse image search was very reliable. But now it never produces any results when you select "Show Image Source".
Images from "unvetted" sites may contain a vague glimpse of a 17 year old's thigh. Google is protecting our children. You know, all the ones they drive into depression and self-harm with their social media and news feeds.
You're right. Back then you would get the exact picture and it was also able to find and identity parts in the image and find that. Nowadays you get random crap, or just basic images that have literally zero to do with the source image you uploaded. Like oh yeah this weird shaped steel pipe is what is in the source image, which was something that didn't even contain the shape in the first place.
Back when, if you put a picture of some not quite global celebrity you forgot the name of Google would find that person more often than not, or at least it would be among the results. Nowadays you are lucky if the results are of the same gender or even skin color (which is merely to say, they are not even remotely close).
from darknetpage? wtf are you talking about?
I did ask Copilot, "Are you evil," to which it said, "I'm a tool". Got that right.
That made me chuckle. 😂
Good answer, truthful and short.
Didn't say it wasn't evil.
Wait... yet another example of how AI is becoming... self-aware 😂
@@GinkoYoki234 Quite the opposite. It's the most clueless unaware statement ever.
For the last decade or so, Google have been prioritising hiring the wrong people instead of simply hiring engineers. Now they have a huge problem with internal politics.
Make it a series please, these discussions are great.
Google results quality fell off a cliff when they removed the "+" operator in 2011 and the "~" operator in 2013.
It's been tumbling downhill ever since. The LLM/"AI" adoption is just the next cliff.
At least you can still quote a word to require it to be in the result. It works the same as +.
Bro fell of meme 🤔
@@phizc You can, but they've removed its usefulness. It used to be case-sensitive, for example.
No wonder that crap doesn’t work anymore 🤦🏻♂️
First they came for the boolean operators, and/or I did not speak out--because I was not a boolean operator.
I also think ads have lost their value at this point they have infiltrated everything and become nothing but noise.
For real. When was the last time an ad made you MORE likely to buy a product?
Remember when they laundered mobile ads in with "TrueView" ad buys? Johnson & Johnson remembers.
either that or get summarily blocked by the tech savyy
Definitely, I honestly don't mind 20-30 seconds long ads, but the minute they are over 1 minute, I'll refresh and refresh or not bother, the ads I am forced to watch I'll mute and do something else
I remember the good old days of TV ads that were fun, creative, even edgy, and you'd remember every single one, now ads are just noise like you say.
@@4.0.4eco flow ad did 😂
I'm in favor of internet 2.0 and starting over in order to keep the AI out.
I was searching stuff like that earlier today, actually. I wanted to know how to make my own private internet so I could essentially have a way back machine of my own with functioning web pages and make my own search and stuff.
Of course when I asked Google how to make a private internet, it gave results on how to make internet private and all other forms of internet privacy. It gave me nothing related to what I searched.
After about 5 times rewording this search, I gave up and concluded that, if it's even possible, the secrets of creating the internet are locked away and the only way to know the secret is to talk directly with Al Gore, the internet's creator.
I love the Wendell content. He is like a sage from the Usernet age.
Here's how Google let me down: They took out community subtitles. I used to watch a bunch of videos from overseas and it was GREAT when there was a dedicated community that just wanted more people to see the video.Then they removed it for AI generated subtitling and it was/is pretty bad and I lost track of a bunch of channels as a result.
Agreed, the move doesn't make sense. Apparently, uploaders can't upload their own translations
@@verygoodbrother Pretty sure they can. I see a lot of japanese music videos with proper english subtitles.
They also removed the ability to pull up cached versions of results, too. I used that more often than the link itself.
@@agentmith Helps to skirt work firewalls
@@verygoodbrother eh only at first, enterprise content filters have archive/cached results blocks now.
google isnt interested in serving data, their vested interest is keeping their users constrained within their ecosystem for as long as possible to harvest detailed user data...in order to aggregate, collate, and sell that data. the only reason their various softwares work *at all* is to bring users into that ecosystem, regardless of (or sometimes despite) functionality.
That's pretty much why (in the west) Google, and Apple are pretty much the only choices for phone OS.
Throw Microsoft in and likely over 90% of all modern tech stuff is under one of 3 umbrellas.
@@volvo09 ... but Linux. 😏
Are you saying that Google and Apple were the same company all along?
@@falsemcnuggethope No, because Apple does not sell your data. They are actually the opposite.
@@uclajd hahaha a bot with a sense of humor, now that's good AI !
Super fascinating conversation. I'd love to hear more of these talks! I like getting the two different perspectives from Steve and Wendell. well done. Good video.
Anything with Wendell is going to be solid. Love that you two have teamed up in recent years.
Google is just the Shopping network now. That's all it's really good for. To find real information you have to have actual knowledge and then include those details in the search prompt.
Somehow even that tab is bad. I get a lot of sketchy sellers there.
It is not even good for that. Try for example finding memory when you know the exact product number you need, you get a load of other random stuff that is of no use to you, including fake SD cards.
@@katrinabryce just like Amazon's search.
I've gone back to books.
@@katrinabryce Try finding an unknown phone number and getting links to web sites where the number you are looking for isn't on the web page.
Waiting to see the recursive nature of LLMs generating search results about Google's LLM search results lol
It's already happened. The Elmer's Glue result was still the top answer to how to thicken pizza sauce after their moratorium ended-only this time it was referencing the coverage of the initial fail.
It’s going to increase hallucinations and bias
AI companies are already inventing prion disease for nascent AI.
Myself, I'm looking forward to the half-insane AIs eating each other and giving themselves Kuru.
"the precursor to Gemini was duo"LOL no , duo was a video call app like Apple's FaceTime which became an even shittier product called "meet"
What he meant to say was duplex
But still not the precursor to Gemini that was bard.
Where did you find this 🫏🤡
Nobody will talk about the real 🐘 in the room.
The one with the oversized trunk and undersized hat.🕎 Ruined the Internet,there I said it
What a coincidence... Just the other day I was wondering about curated link trees that you pay a subscription to be a member of, and everybody thought I was crazy. Crazy together, Wendell!!
I love you guys chatting - always so incredibly insightful. Wendell is an incredibly connected and forward looking guy, I love hearing his opinions on where things are headed.
Google: "We have all the data on Earth, to make the best AI model ever"
Also Google: "We think you'd like Elmer's glue on your pizza."
I think its trying to tell us something 🚼🍼
It does add thickness though.
But without it all my toppings would fall off.
To be fair, all current AI models still haven't reach AGI capabilities despite what their corporal representatives claim.
@@aladdin8623 AGI? We don't even have I in the AI.
There is already a term for it: Enshittification
Nope. The correct term is Capitalism.
@@truedatrue2744no. Thats the cause
@@truedatrue2744 sure bud
@@truedatrue2744no, considering enshittification can and has occurred in all government types and economic models. It's simply what happens when a society is on the way to the commode.
@@GeeMannni swear some people are worse than even most major llms at interpreting stuff...
More discussions with the two of you going over current tech issues - we need this "real talk"!
Just today i was sanding in an auto parts store trying to Google which oil filter fit my car. No correct answer, only shopping links. I mean, it seems reasonable that it should have known by my location that I was standing in an auto parts store and did not want to buy a filter online.
Everything about cars is just rubbish,
I had exactly the same question and if my uncle hadn't told me about a technical site that had a description of all the parts, I would never have found it....
You have to go to an autozone or similar page, punch in the make, model year trim and engine, on their terrible, barely functional site just to find a compatible head or tail lamp bulb. Absolutely ridiculous
I was noticing poor results on google today. I’ve already been ignoring the stupid AI stuff that is way too simplistic but this time I was searching for what coolant to put in my tractor and it said it couldn’t find good results. So it suggested that I instead search for things like “what does coolant do” 🤬
I was literally complaining about how crappy google has been just today on several discord servers that I frequent. It is *really* bad. It is almost as bad as Bing at this point
Bing will often entirely misinterpret what you've said and not give you a "did you mean?" option. The amount of times I searched for one thing, only to get something else was getting to 50%. Ended up going back to google will heaps of blocking addons.
Interesting you mention the Discord complaints. I bet the loss of forums as crawlable media has contributed!
At least Bing still has a web cache. Google's been giving me a lot of rotten links to 404s, deleted posts, and feeds with what I was looking for rotated out. The tease is more frustrating than no result at all.
@@celeriumlerium8266 Well, at this point I would be happy if the rate was 50% on Google side.
It's gotten so bad now. It straight up shows wrong information now, even easy things like a companies phone number or address. It's become a game of figuring out which key word will generate the search you want it to.
We need more on this topic from you, Steve and Wendell
EXCELLENT conversation. Thank you for putting words to what I think we're all experiencing. Unfortunately, I don't know that I heard too many solutions. But at least you all identified the problems.
yes. google hss become shite and the AI suggestions in browsers now are dumb.
normal people can't find shit and anyone who can effectively search is like a tech guru for their friends and family
The sponsored results already made me leave Google years ago.
Google has simultaneously secured my tech job for years to come, yet also ruined it because the 5% of people who used to solve their own issues...using _Google_ ... can no longer find solutions.
Even if you do know how to search there are still problems for example anything even remotely political/historical feels *heavily* filtered.
I feel like there's some sort of 'controversialness' rating that your search gets that dictates how wide of a net your results are. Anything it deems controversial gets constrained to mainstream media sources. Slightly less controversial and you might get a wikipedia article, or reddit post. Not controversial at all and you start getting access to more independent material.
Ive tried searching some stuff regarding WW2 before and it was a nightmare to find anything.
@@pagatryx5451nah it's just seo at work. Stop looking for dumb conspiracies, it's all about the money
Ah, that sweet, sweet job security. Got to love it.
What is being discussed in the video is the direct, logical outcome of the corporate model of the internet winning over the free and open source model in the 1990s. To imagine a version of the internet - without ad model, without toxic social media model, without sensationalism-driven clickbait headline model, without attention-seeking profit-driven zero-value video model, etc, etc - that could have been realised if the alternative had won, is just a recipe for depression.
And that's why I'm here saying "burn it to the ground". I'm a Luddite. But no, not the "Destroy all tech ever no matter what" luddite. That's a strawman created by those who wish to see me cease existing.
For me being a luddite means "If the tech doesn't serve everyone equally, burn it/break it/tear it down" and you can guess how that works out these days what with a megacorp being the sole provider of anything you can think of without getting too specific these days.
Point is, the stuff they're providing serves themselves primarily, and the user or consumer purely secondarily.
The cart's before the horse. Tech should serve it's operator first, and if it's owner is different, it's owner second, and if it's creator is different, it's creator last. And right now everything's inverted. Tech serves it's operator last right now. So it needs to burn.
@@44R0Ndin funnily enough, your interpretation of Luddite is nearer to the true spirit of the Luddites: they could see their labour being centralised and devalued by the introduction of industrial machines that churned out more product for less money as opposed to artisans working from home producing less but higher quality. The fact that Luddite is used as an insult to suggest someone is backwards and regressive is just a case of history being written by the victors.
It is depressing to think about, although I can't imagine an alternative world where this free internet you describe prevails over the corporate internet. Money makes the world go round and pays the bills. I wish it wasn't the case, but it is.
@@44R0Ndin Yeah that's about right. Luddite's motto was "destroy tech that I disagree with", not "destroy all tech".
Corporations always add layers upon layers of complexity to hide malfeasance, you see it in insurance, investment, banking, etc... anywhere to attempt to profit for providing nothing.
Great discussion. Keep them coming
Wendell looks so much healthier each year. Good for him. Also, love these colabs, should try and do them more often!
Two things I want to mention, is that yeah, reddit has trolls and also bots that has infiltrated it and they make new accounts and cross post the same old posts for drama or engagement.
And the second thing, is that its ironic that google is using reddit's data because I find that the best way to search for something on google is to add the word "reddit" at the end of your query so you get usable results
I agree with this. I think Reddit is largely more useful than other social media. It does have a lot of downsides as all social media does but if I've had multiple tech related extremely specific issues that only had answers on Reddit. There can be good advice on there but yeah, it's normally the more niche communities that are useful. I'm not sure why it tends to get shit on more than other social media. Yeah there can be terrible advice but it's not just trolls and bots. It's much more useful than Facebook, Twitter, Discord or Tumblr.
Unironically. I pretty much append reddit to my search results every time I get some useless seo spam article "what silicone to use for bathrooms" oops "what silicone to use for bathrooms reddit"
I use the reddit suffix for the best results re: gaming searches.
Reddit is a pale shell of itself. The slightest disent in any subreddit results in Bans by moderators without explaining what rule you violated. For instance Energy is rather Anti Nuclear but this is not in the rules. I was muted for three days for even asking why mentioning that Diablo Canyon geneates up to 8.6% of CAs power. There's no recourse. Say anything negative about a Tesla regardless of how many you own and your banned from all of the tesla groups by a automoderator which is appropriate as Musk says they're a AI company, not a car company.
At least reddit does not require login
wht i noticed recently is it stopped showing similar actually searched stuff, it will just invent "similar" search terms.
Throw some quotes around that error you want to search for:
Showing results for /not the error you're looking for/
I know Bing used to be known as being better at finding certain things like p rn but it's surprisingly good with normal searches now as well. It makes no sense how Microsoft could have a product that shows potential.
Similiar? Nah, it has been searching for something totally else for like 5 years...
LTT and GN are sharing Wendell around like an adopted child 😂
I can't express how much I appreciate Steve's chats with both Wendell and Gordon. They're always outstanding, informative and entertaining.
Steve might be tech jesus, but I swear Wendell is some kind of diety. This guy seriously has a complete understanding and a well balanced take on literally everything related to computers. It should not be possible for one person to have that amount of knowledge within the confines of a human life.
If we are sticking with religious names, I vote Wajih. It implies prominence and honor. Or Wani, meaning a gift or precious offering.
We have tech god and tech jesus.
when you've lived as long as i have....
He is legit a Usernet Sage from the prior age.
Truly, Wendell is like the Wendell of technological knowledge.
Google's search results have become overrun with ads and sponsored results. Having to immediately scroll down is annoying, and I've been considering swapping to something else.
That won’t change how websites just spam with ai articles
I already did. Google search is totally ruined. Nobody should use it.
Love to see Wendell, hopeful for future collabs!
Very good discussion and after watching this I realised how bad Google's searches have become. Thanx for this Steve. We need more of these discussions, even down the Ai rabbit hole and data security.
I have noticed Google search getting worse, taking longer, and results that are just plain wrong.
very insightful video, as always! Thanks Steve
2:38 I think this sums it all and this is outrageous to say the least!
Using non-Google search engines to find TH-cam videos because they'll be more relevant is an experience.
DuckDuckGo is not any better and Bing is average at best. Using any search engine today is painful. I miss finding information with keywords.
Bing is the only non Google search.
8:23 Gotta love that zoom in on the intel logo
It was Page Rank, not MapReduce. MapReduce is just a generic algorithm used to processing big amounts of data. But other then that Wendell's description of how Page Rank worked is good enough.
I'm all for more "Is [insert name] Screwed?" Co-op episodes on whatever you decide is relevant. Thanks Steve!
The towns the map makers made up are called "paper towns", there is a really cool TED talk about them, where the John Green also talks about a lawsuit concerning one of these, where it turns out that the town had come into existence and had just been named what it said on the map. 🤷🏼♂️
Baudrillard would have a field day with that.
I definitely think that one possible direction this could lead is people migrating to closed platforms, either small communities like Discord servers or perhaps something like the paid forums Wendell envisioned. It would reduce the amount of spam and bot content for communities, but with none of that information publicly available, it is unclear how people will search for information.
The other issue is, especially with Discord, is finding the information once you find the community. Discord's own search is pretty bad, and you're at the mercy of user curation.
You know, when I first thought about Balkanization in regards to the Internet, I just thought that it would only apply to nation states (ie: Russia and China) and highly competitive fields (Streaming sometimes after Netflix stopped being the only game in town.). Now with everything more or less being restricted to modern day IRCs (Discord) and random forum posts, it's going to be a disaster for anyone who wasn't trained to lurk moar. Even someone like me grew up in the Internet Age almost entirely within Google's existence.
Wendell is awesome. So much experience and knowledge and really good at breaking complex concepts down and explaining them.
My dad usually repaired our electronics on his own and when in early 2000s disassembled TV he observed that it’s been redesigned to locate most delicate electronic elements directly on top of most heat radiating components.
Volkswagen silently exchanged aluminum parts of their full Alu A2 during maintenance checks to steel ones because latter break.
There’s long track of companies deliberately spoiling products to make money.
Sony WH1000 XM4 headphones have internal ANC mics in a place that's particularly vulnerable to humidity damage, leading to them breaking in every pair after a long enough time.
That said, with a little bit of soldering, they're replacable.
The sense I've gotten is that Google-who authored the seminal paper on the transformer architecture in 2017-evaluated the potential for the tech back then and decided it was worthless, and what we're seeing now is that they're being *bullied into* using LLMs in Search to appease shareholders.
I honestly blame Nvidia. Maybe it's my tinfoil hat, but I find it *highly sus* that "AI" started taking off just as the bottom fell out of crypto-and consequently the GPGPU market.
There is no need to tinfoil, OpenAI had to wait for the current craze to end before dropping their bait to start a new one. This is just basic marketing, they didn't want to have to compete with crypto and nft stuff they wanted all the investment bucks to AI
kinda, not really. The crypto shitfest flooded the market with gous. you have a fuck ton of companies with ai capable gpus and a lot of unwanted stock. since we have a lot of them, might as well use em. also ai was starting to pick up before nvidias gpus. it just picked up a lot of steam when everyone was stuck at home.
Ai is scam. There is no ai
When Wendell keeps saying MapReduce, does he actually mean PageRank?
(obviously both are pretty key to early Google, but PageRank is the one which seems to bear more relevance here imo)
I was just about to comment this. Page Rank is what Wendel should be saying. Map Reduce is a big data technique that you might use to implement a Page Rank algorithm
PageRank is one of the coolest algorithms. It's taught in Intro to Linear Algebra courses, and for good reason.
He definitely conflated the two. And they probably were nigh indistinguishable way back in the day. Now Page Rank is (was) more clearly an example of map reduce.
Tech talks with Wendell always are just fantastic to listen to.
Your talk with him is no different and well thought out.
Crazy that we went from a wild west Internet with lots of communities and fan sites to a cooperate Internet (Web 2.0, they call it), to A.I. dominated garbage all mostly pushed by Google and maybe one or two competitors.
I used to work for DOWTY Information Systems, back in the day (we made modems and communication equipment for submarines). Capacitors and resistors had a shelf life and things were designed to last a bit longer than the warranty. I think now it's more about FOMO and new features that people have to have. Like fashion
I thought it was just me getting older to explain why searching was getting worse. Seems like I’m looking for info and instead get a page of places to buy stuff
The purpose of Google's search engine is, not, and never has been, "to help people find things." The purpose of Google products has always been and remains, to build a dossier on users and sell their data to advertisers. When the product is free, *you* are the product.
When the product is free, you are the product. When pay for the product, you are the Guinea pig.👨🔬🧪
You are correct in this instance that Google users are the product, but I’ve always disliked the phrase, because there’s another side of the coin: if a product is free, you are either the product or an unpaid employee.
This is basically how the corporate ad-driven internet functions. So much of the actual value produced is produced by people for free.
Helping people find things used to be the way they drew in users to get data, etc. They had to provide a better service than a number of competitors, notably Yahoo. Now there is no real competition, and no more users to be gained, so they can provide a worse and worse experience to pull more profit from each user. And a lot of the alternative search engines are just piggybacking off Google's results. But if Google could provide decent search in 2003, perhaps we'll see a few more companies trying to provide their own search now.
Yes, but it does both
Small amendment - mapreduce is the compute framework they used to run the processing of the data, but the algorithm itself is called "page rank"
Whatever series you do with Wendell I'll be sure to consume voraciously!
Don't forget their abandoning perfectly functional Chromebooks and creating e-waste.
Apple is just like that. Expensive e waste
Are you talking about chromebooks that are old enough to not receive security updates or what?
@@falsemcnuggethope Obviously he is.
They extended the update period on that issue.
Apple does it with Macs and iOS devices, once they get so old, they arbitrarily decide to stop supporting them even though the hardware is still capable enough for a lot of users. Microsoft followed suit with the Windows 11 requirements, which will cause a lot of older PCs to end up in a landfill. OFC some of them will be repurposed as Linux boxes, but a lot of them will be thrown on the dung heap by Joe Consumer who is just tired of nag screens telling him that Windows 10 is EOL and that he should buy a new device.
So strange how times change all the time and how unexpected. When google was established, we pretty much saw it as an evolutionary step, the online lexicon for all things. Then pretty suddenly it became commercial garbage. So now where do we go?
Dystopia. Or worse
People don't wanna think this days.
We go to what will become very expensive, gatekept, pay in services, that will likely still have ads and info scrapers, just slightly less heavy implementation, because it's the only thing that seems to be working around the quagmire now.
It's that, or burn the infrastructure to the bare metal and start over, which would be tantamount to a real world revolution that would likely be crushed almost instantly, for reasons very obvious if you know how things like the petrodollar are propped up, i.e., at the end of a barrel.
That sly zoom in to Intel when talking about replacing the engineering CEO with the account CEO. Very good.
in my whole life I only clicked once on an ad... with purpose in clicking it, not by accident
only once in my lifetime
and that was back in 2006 or 2007
and I played that game quite actively up till now
has been since about 2016.
2011*
TH-cam search is also gone to shit and Its going to be that way for as long as they have such a big following
you tube started to aggressively censor comments in the past few weeks too.
TH-cam search is ghastly, basically Windows search tier garbage
When I have to go to a web browser and search for the Run command to bring up the window I'm looking for, it's pretty fucking sad
But what annoys me the most is that they took this step on purpose
If people said f youtube and boycott him or create alternative, all will be better.
@@VITAS874 I don't hope that happens anymore, we've gotten a lot of platforms for short videos and streaming but there's still no decent replacement for this platform
Wendell and Steve videos are my favourite thing. Please be around eachother more often.
This was so informative. Thank you
Whatever Google's deal has been lately is getting bad, whether it's how You Tube is functioning or the crap they're changing for worse.
I love how comfortable and natural Wendell appeared in this video, as opposed to other channels I’ve seen his guest appearance on recently. Might have just been the other channels editing? Either way I love L1T and GN.
Wendell mentioned that Google has failed to really monetize their generative AI research, but I'm wondering if any of the other tech firms pushing their own language models have, either. OpenAI has been subsidized to the tune of billions of dollars, Meta is content with lighting huge piles of money on fire (just look at their whole Pivot to Meta) and some of the smaller firms are literally running out of money to pay for their cloud compute bills. The only companies that I see making money right now are nvidia and tsmc, because they can just sit back and watch these fools buy their production capacity a whole year in advance
The whole thing feels like a house of cards and if the only way it ends up working is with local compute, then I'd really rather not see my electricity bill shoot up and my GPU fan spin to max when I enter a query
What is an interesting take on local compute, that makes a ton of sense. Reduces the cost of applying an ML model on a set of data.
Though I guess it’s putting that cost of compute on the user, but I’m not sure if that’s so bad. I like the idea of my computer being used to compute. What a concept!
Google "AI" stands for "Always Impeding" one's search for answers/products
WENDELL!! This is a match made in heaven
Really intelligent fascinating discussion. Thanks guys
Really enjoyed this chat!
Kagi works as well as Google used to. It's paid but 100% worth it IMO.
$10 + VAT is a little steep.... It looked good though.
Agreed, I use it since quite a while and I am happy with it. It also removes the risk of malicious Ads.
cosigned, been using it for a month and totally worth it for me
Yet another user, never feel the need to go to another engine, and even when I do, I still don't get better results. It's expensive relative to the nothing you have paid before but the economics of how they do it means they actually can't do it any cheaper.
Co-signed. I use kagi for 2 months, I never plan to look back. Also they have small details like allowing you to have custom styles (without stylebot, syncs with all logged in devices) and now I have very nice amoled-friendly dark black+green theme. Oh and you can control if you want to rank up or down given sites. Oh, also they have discord chanel where you can actuall chat with staff, bring up your concerns or ideas. And dedicated feedback forum. They actually work for your 10 bucks.
LMAO the zoom in on the intel logo at 8:25 🤣🤣🤣
Which is why competition is so important.. I try to use bing but not everyone uses it so the map isn't updated properly with everything.
What would we do without Steve and Wendell in this kwazy tech world... Keep up the great work guys!! !