

Google’s Time at the Top May Be Nearing Its End - psbp
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/12/technology/personaltech/googles-time-at-the-top-may-be-nearing-its-end.html?_r=0

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graycat
To me, the article is mostly just trying to fool people into _aiming their
eyeballs_ at the NYT's ads.

For the future of Google:

(1) Right, Google gets competition for eyeballs and, thus, ad revenue from
Facebook, PInterest, Twitter, SnapChat, and any popular Web site/service that
is ad supported. No surprise here.

(2) What the article misses is that search is a super big problem, issue,
opportunity, and business. Why? Because (A) now there is a lot of content on
the Internet, (B) due both to desktop and laptop computing and now due to
smartphones that can generate content as text, audio, still images, video, and
other data, the total amount of content is growing quickly, (C) finding the
content really want is often super tough to do, and (D) so far Google is one
of the best tools for finding content. So, Google gets lots of eyeballs and,
as the content grows and, if Google's search technology improves, stands to
get a lot more eyeballs and, thus, revenue.

For Web sites/services that can get a larger chunk of the ad revenue, in the
larger scheme of things, the Internet is a better bet than anything like TV,
and for that future Google has about the best opportunity and they seem to be
trying to take it. And if some start up has something close to that future
Google wants, then Google has plenty of cash to buy the start up, make it an
offer it definitely will not refuse.

Google's doing fine and still looks like one of the best bets for the future.

The OP is standing on traditional _formula fiction_ that tries to deliver an
_experience_ , vicarious, escapist, fantasy, emotional experience
entertainment (VEFEEE), both as the _content_ and the ads. Okay, that's their
1000 year old _drama_ hammer that has a very long history from current TV
shows, movies, novels, Dickens, Shakespeare, Chaucer, the Greek dramas, etc.
Okay. That's long been the 900 pound Gorilla in _media_ and remains the main
_hammer_ of the NYT and maybe most of the NYC ad industry and its $155 billion
a year in ad revenue. Okay. But with that one hammer, the OP sees the Internet
and Google as an appropriate nail -- it's not just such a nail, and that
hammer is not all there is that is important or will be important in the
future.

E.g., a lot that is there in mobile now is teenage girls, from the US, and
especially in Japan, using their smartphones for what apparently teenage girls
commonly have done for centuries, likely millennia -- gossip.

But, even if VEFEEE is the content someone wants, mostly they still need a
search engine to find it.

For the OP and yet another NYT _story_ , the main question I would ask is,
where do they get that really strong funny stuff they've been smoking?

~~~
MildlySerious
The biggest problem Google has, in my opinion, is it's identity crisis. It's
becoming a stranger.

Googles popularity came from it's simplicity. The services Google started
buying (looking at YouTube here) were gaining traction because they were the
simple equivalent to their competitors.

Today? Not so much. YouTube has gradually become more alienated since 2009.
Yesterday I was watching a video, and not a single video listed in the sidebar
(once called "Related Videos") was actually related to the video I was
watching. The uploader was a popular YouTuber with easily over a hundred
videos (No idea how much exactly because I couldn't find that number) yet all
the suggestions were music videos from my usual browsing.

Context switching is no more, because everything is being overengineered to
keep you in your own content bubble. Yet, that stupid auto generated playlist
in the sidebar that I've never clicked, keeps lurking there on every video,
for days at a time, before changing into another playlist that is no more
appealing to me than the previous one.

If all the effort of that huge datapool we are selling our souls to is to make
advertisers happy, and the users don't get anything out of that effort but
more abstraction and more generalized data science slapped onto a new UI every
couple years, it's not a fair trade. And people won't put up with that
forever.

Google is still going strong. The foundation that put it in its place, is
crumbling. A big chunk of their business still relies on that, though, so I
think these articles have a fair point.

~~~
graycat
> all the suggestions were music videos from my usual browsing.

Good observation! Google blew it!

When I go to YouTube, I don't see what you saw, but then I don't 'log in' to
Google or accept cookies from them. So, the videos I see on the right are
related to what I am watching at the time instead of whatever I've watched,
searched for, etc. in the past.

I can believe that Google is doing what you describe, and this is a symptom of
totally wacko _data science_ and brain-dead _recommendation engine_
construction. Where from, why?

One approach to recommendation is to try to say what a given user _likes_. So,
look at all their activity, say, products they've looked at at Amazon, videos
they've seen at YouTube, searches they've done at Google, Web sites they've
visited as determined by following _third party cookies_ , etc. Then my view
is:

(1) For ad targeting, in the short term (that is, when displaying an ad only a
short time after the data used for the targeting) maybe okay for effective ad
targeting, assuming it doesn't offend the user.

(2) For content, nope, won't work and with your experience a solid example of
why not.

Why? Here is a hypothetical example: I go online and search for flowers and
chocolate candy and have them delivered gift wrapped; similarly for some
things at Victoria's Secret. So, from then on I get _recommendations_ for
flowers, candy, anything chocolate, and women's frilly undies.

Ha! I'm a fully normal, heterosexual male and don't much care for distaff
stuff! So, why'd I buy the flowers? Sure: As Valentines gift for my wife, once
a year! The other 364 days of the year, f'get about it!

Or, I shop for some DVDs of some old Disney movies. Does this mean that I like
old Disney movies instead of, say, movies about Tom Clancy stories? Nope!
Instead I was just shopping for some DVDs to entertain the children of some of
my friends my wife and I had over for a nice BBQ and beer on the back porch.

Or, as I see it, for something better, what a person _likes_ at a given time
should to be for some one of their _interests_ at that time. Then the
recommendation engine has to _learn_ about that _interest_ at that time.

A biggie is that that _interest_ is likely some _narrow_ thing, _narrow_ in
time, circumstances, etc. So, past browsing history, shopping, watching, etc.
should be treated as, first cut, irrelevant or, in probabilistic terms,
independent of what the heck the person wants in their present context.

BTW, with mild assumptions, probabilistically independent implies
(statistically) uncorrelated, although in the usual treatments independence is
much, much more general, say, is in terms of sigma algebras generated by some
sets, possibly uncountably infinite, of random variables, and such a
definition for uncorrelated is rarely or never given.

With high irony, likely search results at Google from the keywords/phrases
someone enters are likely independent or nearly so of anything else Google
knows about the person. Or, if at Google search type in

"I'm shocked, shocked to learn that gambling is going on here"

then should get back the script of the classic movie _Casablanca_ and don't
expect to get back results about flowers, chocolates, flimsy undies, and
Disney movies, or Tom Clancy movies either.

It's possible to use butter, milk, eggs, flour, _Kirschwasser_ sugar syrup,
cheeries, chocolate, etc. to make a fantastic cake or a really big mess. Same
for using _data science_.

Watch here on HN when I announce my _recommendation_ engine (soon, currently
mud wrestling with DVD burners) that will treat each user's _interest_ as
unique in all the world, have the best protections of user privacy, and do
nothing with and have nothing on anything about the user before they requested
their recommendation. When the recommendations come back, the ad targeting may
have to do with just those recommendations but certainly not with some
shopping for flimsy undies a week before Valentine's day.

Google's search engine is just terrific for a lot of the _content_ on the
Internet, and where Google is good my work will not be better. But as your
experience illustrates, for some searches there is room for something better.
My search engine has nothing to do with keywords/phrases; my view is that what
I've developed stands to be much better for a significant fraction of the
content on the Internet, searches people want to do, and results they want to
find. But, again, for where Google works well, and sometimes it is fantastic,
my work is not better.

