177 mentions · 138 chunks · 81 episodes
Back in the very early 2000's, Google was clearly a different type of company. It seemed to do everything differently and better. Optimistic, inspiring, open. They published a list of "Te...
...s difficult to spell and I likely spelled incorrectly. In the past, I could use Google, with a good helping of Google-fu, to construct a clever query that would help me find the original quote and who said it. But if I didn't construct ...
... effect: the more that users use it, the better the quality gets. Despite this, Google stays in a commanding position because no one else has better quality, and Google gives a good enough answer to almost every query. Operating systems...
...tly good results requires a lot of nuanced expertise. Similar to how navigating Google back at the beginning required a kind of literacy called Google-fu. The people who can wield LLMs most effectively understand what LLMs are good at… ...
... judgment is in the loop, always. But the boring / hard part is automated away. Google Search is fundamentally framed as "here are 10 options, you pick the one you want" Very forgiving UX modality, with a clean hill to climb of quality....
...uite large; you're out $100 and only realize it was wrong days later. If it's a Google Search, the downside is tiny; just immediately do the query again manually. Amazon's search results have famously become quite scammy and crappy, whi...
...ot of trust to the hardware. But it also verifiably locks the cloud host (think Google, Amazon, Microsoft) out from peeking at what is happening. But the risk factor that most people care about as a user is not so much the cloud host, b...
Google Search was selecting over a sea of static content. But in AI, content can be hallucinated on demand, so maybe the Google-like position is the generat...
...ps can show up in the system. Apple is not the only one doing this, by the way. Google has been trying, although significantly less successfully–apps are far more wary about making themselves legible to Google. This is not the only way ...
...ve typos, etc). Don't have clear explainers or READMEs. Have documentation in a Google Doc, not a website. Assume background context the reader might not have. Connect nine of the ten dots. Hide signal in a swarm of interesting but dist...
...sn't useful for today's mainstream cloud services and architectures. "Of course Google can see my gmail data, how could they not?" The current default service architecture presumes the service can see all of the data. Confidential compu...
... away, and even a small improvement for a massive number of users is important. Google-scale infrastructure needs could support, for example, the development of Spanner. In a fractally complicated new idea there are "PhD thesis' rabbit ...
...e a clear starter use case for users so they can get a sense of what it can do. Google Search and ChatGPT are two open-ended tools. But they are both good enough at so many things, that no matter what you do as a first use case, you're ...
...ost every MidJourney user session presumably has many iteration cycles, whereas Google Search sessions presumably have 1.1 (or less) iteration cycles. It allows the user to be in the driver's seat, but without having to be proactive. It...
...evels of abstraction that made this very intuitive for me. My time on search at Google had a similar vibe, I realize. "All of the random human behavior on the web is weird noise… but if you average it correctly, you can get extremely cl...
Google Search is a meta-product. Its quality and usefulness isn't just a reflection of the effort invested by its builders. The quality and usefulness is al...
Google Search is a hyper bespoke yet mass market product. It was one-size-fits-all, but also perfectly bespoke to each user's needs. The user interacts with...
What was the killer use case of the web? Google. Google wasn't even imaginable until the web was already deeply underway. It was a thing that had to do with the specific novel dimension of the web,...
Using LLMs properly requires LLM-fu. Just like Google-fu back in the day. The kinds of people who had developed an intuition on how to formulate their query (sometimes in non-obvious ways!) to get great ...
...ment, it's much harder to get out over your skis; the feedback loop is tighter. Googlers typically don't understand how to do anything in a scrappy, scarcity mindset given how resource-rich the environment is. The playbook I used to be ...