This is probably Google's Altavista moment, by making their results crappier by the year in search of Ad dollars everyone has felt that there is a potential for search to be better and once that becomes available they'll be in a continious game of catch-up.
Yes, Google has their own AI divisions, tons of money and SEO is to blame for part of their crappiness. But they've also _explicitly_ focused on ad-dollars over algorithmic purity if one is to believe the reports of their internal politics and if those are true they have probably lost a ton of people who they'd need right now to turn the ship around quickly.
At some point it seems like Google switch to ML-based search instead of index based search. You can search for very specific combinations of lyrics and scenes: "eyes on me pineapple bucket of water house of cards chess time loop" and you won't surface a link to the music video featuring all of those things (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlzgDVLtU6g), you'll just get really generic results of the average of your query.
Has google completely stopped working for anyone else?
I can still search things, i get results but, they're an ordered list of popular places the engine is directing me to. Some kind of filtering is occurring on nearly every search i make that's making the results feel entirely useless.
Image search stopped working sometime ago and now it just runs an AI filter on whatever image you search for, tells you there's a man in the picture and gives up.
Youtube recommendations is always hundreds of videos i've watched already, with maybe 1-2 recommendations to new channels when i know there's millions of content creators out there struggling who it will never introduce me to. What happened to the rabbit holes of crazy youtube stuff you could go down?
This product is a shell of its old self, why did it stop working?
Google search is completely broken IMO. I stopped using Google search years ago and every time I go back on the off chance that it's bigger index has something that DuckDuckGo couldn't find for me.
Image search isn't great either but it still often gives me something close and that usually satisfies my image searching needs.
I still find YouTube recommendations quite good for me, but there are occasional ones I've watched already. I still go down its fun (and educational!) rabbit holes all the time.
Exact same experience, YouTube recommendations (in incognito without being logged in!) usually give me stuff related to the video in watching.
However when they don't, it's invariably to push some alt-right slop down my throat. Video is about a comedian? Suggestion "feminist woke takedown compilation". Video about news? Suggestion "$european_far_right_party's channel says gypsies are subhuman". Video about economics? Suggestion is Jordan Peterson ranting about something. And so on and so on. It's pretty tiring.
I see this argument in HN a lot, so I checked my search history (googled "search history") it seems I use it ~10-20 times a day, looked at individual searches e.g. last week, and except a few queries, I have found what I was looking at.
Yes it is hard to find some stuff in internet because it is filled with generated affiliate spam and walled gardens, Has Google stopped working for me? Nope It seems still alive and kicking.
> Has google completely stopped working for anyone else?
Yes. However, I found that https://scholar.google.com still works perfectly well. It feels just as the old Google without all the crap they've been adding in the last years.
Very small team, only still exists because they are a rounding error to the CFO on the balance sheet, but otherwise they could go at any time.
Oddly their biggest strength is being irrelevant to the decision makers, if the bean counters noticed the few million they are losing on running Scholar there will be ads + Gemini all over it.
In my experience as a published academic author all the LLM will make up all kinds of plausible papers I “wrote” that don’t exist, academic positions I’ve never held, and the like.
Even if you give it a paper directly I’d not believe it to be reliable. Maybe it could help search for papers, but that’s it.
Despite all the comments it still works pretty well for me. I feel like they've improved it a bit in the last year or so so you don't get way too much Quora and GitHub/Stackoverflow clones.
The level of sponsored results for some queries is way OTT, and obviously any kind of search like "best laptop 2024" is never going to give you good results (probably because they don't exist), but other than that I'm still pretty happy with Google Search.
Genuinely interested: have you tried to spend a few weeks on an alternative?
I decided to try DuckDuckGo a few years ago. Not because it was obviously better, but to see if I could get used to it. After a few weeks, I had completely stopped falling back to Google when not finding what I wanted. I stayed on DDG for a couple years. Then same thing with Kagi: I just decided to try. It's been 1.5-2 years now and I'm disappointed when I can't use Kagi (which has my customizations, like some websites I ignore and some that I pin).
I guess my point is that it's not necessarily that you have to try something else when Google is unbearable. Maybe you can try something else and then realize (or not) that Google was not better.
That's not where I thought this was going. I tried using DDG and Kagi and went back to Google. Google had more relevant, fresher results than DDG, and Kagi didn't have the same integration with Google Maps and often a smaller set of results for very niche queries. Google is still basically the internet - the entire internet - though in many ways they do still fall short. But breadth of content indexing and information about local places, Google is still king.
> information about local places, Google is still king.
I try to use OpenStreetMap as much as I can (I have a deGoogled smartphone and OpenStreetMap works well enough) but it is true that Google Maps is better (at the cost of privacy of course).
But in terms of search... I can't remember of a time where I tried Google because I couldn't find with Kagi and ended up finding something with Google. On the contrary with the Kagi lenses it's often a lot easier to get specific results.
Here's an easy test case on a topic which is HEAVILY modified by Google. There are many such cases Google distorts searches but the following query is purely for illustration of the problem because it is so obvious.
1. Search Google for "ukrainian who shot his commanding officer" without quotes
2. Google serves me nothing but MSM articles of Russian this or that. The word Russian wasn't even in my search string.
3. Add the Google operator MINUS SIGN Russia
4. Results:
a) Policeman feared Chris Kaba would kill, court told
b) Media: Russian Repeated Offender Kills Five More His ...
c) President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and First Lady Olena ...
d) Ukrainian Galician Army
e) Article from 2017 entitled Killed Defense Intelligence Officer Was "The First Donetsk Cyborg"
f) Shots fired at car carrying Ukrainian President Zelenskiy's ...
5. Go to yandex.com and search the original query
6. It comes up on Yandex immediately with the original query
The only relevant result I get on Yandex is a website, which supposedly is a Russian propaganda outlet. Maybe that is why it is not showing up on Google, and isn't necessarily a distortion?
Yandex is indeed a Russian company. But do you really need to go to media bias fact check dot com—everyone's confirmed universal source of absolute truth, of course—to learn that?
good "best laptop 2024" search results, absolutely exist, but they have to be heavily personalized towards user and i dont think we adjusted to such levels of in search (we have expectations of median/commonality there)
There's a difference between searching for a topic and searching for an item. All of those are topic searches.
Try searching for a particular video, one that is not super popular. What I want is a complete list of results that match my query. What I get is YouTube trying to recommend videos to me.
I don't understand your use case. If I know the exact title of the video, it finds it. Everytime.
If you try to describe a non-popular video it just becomes a crapshoot on what to give you if there's no word/tag watching. You'd need some hint of the channel name or something. The volume of low viewership videos is incredibly high.
Can you give me a real example of something you've tried to do?
> If I know the exact title of the video, it finds it. Everytime.
This is unfortunately not true. I have a little channel and there have been times when searching for the exact title of some of my videos did not return it in the results at all (searching with quotes or not). Cannot reproduce now because the search algorithm has now started liking me.
When the videos are completely unrelated to your search, but just happen to be new/popular videos, then yes it's useless. Surfacing relevant videos would make sense.
For example, searching for climbing comp videos and getting a completely unrelated video about some new tech gadget released within the last couple days from a random popular content creators makes no sense.
Clearly, it works for Google (content creators intentionally make click-baity thumbnails and titles because Google encourages it), but it's user hostile: it's designed to suck you into a vortex, which is not what the user was intending in the first place.
That said, all content platforms do this right now, so my intention isn't singling out Google. It's frustrating nonetheless.
Here's a good one I just saw because Joe Rogan complained about it. Search youtube for: trump podcast. You won't find the most important one. It's all MSM and useless clips of other interviews.
The top search result for me -- below German news snippets complaining about US politics -- is Joe Rogan Experience #2219 - Donald Trump on Youtube, presumably what you're looking for. It's also number 3, the same thing on Spotify.
I guess people's perception becomes extremely skewed when they are disappointed with something. After this you give them examples and they swiftly move the goal post.
It feels like YouTube search doesn't even deserve to be called search anymore. If I'm lucky, I get 1–3 not-totally-irrelevant videos, a row of shorts, then a couple tangential videos, then a bunch more shorts, then "Explore More" or "Previously Watched" or "People Also Watched"... and shorts. It's pretty disgusting all around, because it totally does not seem like there is any intent to surface actually relevant videos.
It works in the same sense that you try asking a stranger for directions and he wraps you into a fishing net and drags you to the nearest mall whose name resembles your question if shouted into a bucket.
Back in the day, Google searches could lead you down unplanned paths, into niche forums or fascinating rabbit holes that felt organic and less commercial.
I switched to DDG couple of years ago without knowing what to expect. Once I got used to their UI there was no turning back.
And on rare occasions now when I do search on Google I feel so happy I switched to DDG. To an extent that it does feel to me that Google has indeed stopped working completely for me. And yes I’ve stopped their search history, recommendations etc on YouTube.
it seems google switched to some kind of semantic search instead of word based search. It doesn't search for what your words are, but instead what your words kindof sortof mean. Which means you always get 'average' results instead of precise results.
This may make it better for the non-tech folks who search for things in unclear language, and likely make it worse for those who search with precision (i.e. much of the HN crowd).
Most importantly, they make their money off ads, and it probably makes sense to optimize for the non-tech folks. The ones that don't run ad blockers and accidentally click the barely differentiable ads.
In short - I suspect they're just using new tech to make more money.
People have been throwing up the, "You're just too technical," canard for years, and it's just not true. Google search does not find what anyone is looking for; it finds what it wants to sell, in a way that makes it more likely that a purchase will be made. Full stop.
This comment is just laughably wrong. I use google a hundred times a day, from programming stuff to news stuff. I have never felt like it wasn't finding what I was looking for.
Google is extremely good if you search for a product they can advertise to you. I've recently wanted to buy lost sunglasses. Just selected them from the photo and google found exactly brand and model, with a link to the store.
If there are no sponsored links - the result is crap.
Google is good at searching, they just have no incentive to show you results.
Much like Google itself, Youtube has been trending towards ushering users to a minute collection of blessed official/popular sources, often news channels. Maybe it's in response to kvetching over ``disinformation?" Idunno, but it's absolutely infuriating for some of my interests.
If I search "Mullica Hill tornado" on yt itself, I get nothing but useless 1 min local news clips. If I search the same term on Reddit, I get first person footage of the tornado passing over people's houses—hosted on Youtube! Tornado enthusiasts still occasionally dredge up "lost media" of events like the 2011 Alabama outbreak that have been on the site this entire time, but are effectively impossible to view via the algorithm, even with the precise date and location specified.
FWIW, ChatGPT Search didn't surface the video either with that query
> Based on the elements you’ve described—eyes, a pineapple, a bucket of water, a house of cards, chess, and a time loop—it’s challenging to identify a single music video that encompasses all these features.
Same here. I've generally found complaints about Google's recent decline to be overblown, but lyrics are one area where it's truly gone off the deep end.
Even if I type in 2-3 lines worth of nearly-exact lyrics that show up on multiple lyrics websites, it'll give me completely unrelated songs that match several words at most.
On that note, if anyone needs a good browser-based song finder, the "Aha Music Identifier" extension is pretty good. It's a life saver when watching Twitch streams that don't list the currently-playing song.
I think this is a separate issue although it also exists.
What the parent is referring to is favoring annoying ad-filled garbage over an equally relevant but straightforward result.
The hidden variable is that ad-riddled spam sites also invest in SEO, which is why they rank higher. I am not aware of any evidence that Google is using number of Google ads as a ranking factor directly. But I would push back and say that “SEO” is something Google should be doing, not websites, and a properly optimized search engine would be penalizing obvious garbage.
Yes and no. Yes for the quality of search results. Google algorithm and user experience was simply better than AltaVista's, but Google had another advantage. It used a cluster of cheap consumer-grade hardware (PCs) as its backend, rather than the expensive servers AltaVista used, in fact, AltaVista started off as a way for DEC to show off its hardware.
As a result Google was not only better than its competitors at searching, it was also cheaper and scaled better, and this architecture became the new standard.
It is the opposite for these AI-based systems. AI is expensive, it uses a lot of energy, and the hardware is definitely not consumer-grade.
What it means is that barring a significant breakthrough, cheap ChatGPT-like services are simply unsustainable. Google don't have to do anything, it will collapse on its own. Ironically, probably in the same way that Google result became crappier by the year, but on fast forward.
> What it means is that barring a significant breakthrough, cheap ChatGPT-like services are simply unsustainable.
This is the basic premise of Ed Zitron's article https://www.wheresyoured.at/to-serve-altman/ and others written around the same time. A lot of what he's written seems to be coming to pass, e.g. unfathomably large investments (~$100 billion) by tech giants in OpenAI and other AI startups to keep them going. That does seem unsustainable.
Can anyone make a counterpoint to this claim? I'd be very interested to hear what a viable path to profitability looks like for OpenAI.
Probably "every major corporation pays them a gazillion dollars a year for enterprise-class AI services that outperform humans while running at 100x speed"?
In essence there is no “objective” algorithm. It’s a mish mash of random black box patterns that we hope delivers the right answer. It probably will most of the time but it will be gamed hard and it’s going to be hard to undo changes in gamified models.
I'll take a stab at it. What is the web, really? Gotta be stuff you see and interact with in web browsers right? Sure, you can get to HN, YouTube and Instagram in a browser. But by traffic for example, how much of activity on HN, Instagram and YouTube combined is through a browser? I mean, gotta be pretty low...like 5%? Just a guess, but remember all the app usage and TV usage for those sites is pretty big.
So if 95% of traffic/users/whatever metric are not using a web browser for those activities, is it really the web? It can't be called the web just 'cause they use HTTPS. It's gotta be a 'world wide web' experience, which I think a good proxy for would be using a web browser.
I got no horse in this race, just thinking out loud about it.
“The web” is, by definition, a collection of things that are loosely connected and accessible (searchable, etc). While the current internet is still “a web”, it’s mostly a web of 2-3 massive properties, entirely operated by the same 2-3 companies, completely devoided of public apis (and sometimes even web accessible content). The fact that sometimes they have an html version makes them “websites”, I guess, but not really a “web of nodes” the same way it used to be
Another common phenomenon these days is that lots of businesses don’t even bother having a web presence - it’s all instagram, WhatsApp and tiktok accounts, mostly only accessible via apps (or worse, chat platforms like discord)
the web was the clicking of links from site to site. the interconnectedness of information. Searching the web was the start of browsing but it was not the only means of traversing.
Honestly the web died long ago imo. Wikipedia and other wikis are the only places that feel like the old web to me now.
How can an economy function if there is no way to get any value from producing anything?
Google (and Facebook, a few other platforms) made it so that the vast majority of websites are never visited. ChatGPT further erodes the possibility of tying economic value to the production of that value.
Seems like we need a new framework around "intellectual property"
You’re also giving Google feedback when you click a search result link. Presumably that should be a huge signal for measuring search quality.
Heck, Google even promoted the `ping`[0] anchor attribute feature so they can log what link you click without slowing you down. (Firefox doesn’t support ping, which means when Firefox users click on a Google search result link they’re sent to an internal google.com URL first and then redirected for logging purposes)
I have no doubt that Google’s search team is optimizing for the best results. The problem is their ads team is optimizing for revenue. You can’t optimize for two things at the same time without compromising (the optimum is the Pareto frontier).
In my opinion, the issue is that the user's definition of "best results" and Google's definition do not align, including the Search team. Google's incentives are very different than user's needs.
I disagree, personally. I think the engineers there are human and they can see that the results aren’t good. Maybe some of them are in this thread. If I had to guess, I think there are a lot of sub-teams contributing scores to the overall ranking and optimizing for sub-metrics, and it’s too big of a beast to fix. In other words, a failure of leadership.
Of course. But this will be true for OpenAI and all other AI players as well. During the honeymoon phase user needs matter, that’s how they get you. Comparing a company in the free-money phase with one in the value extraction phase is apples to oranges.
Is it optimising for all users? And assuming people thumbs up the correct info. I wonder what accuracy percentage we are looking at there. ChatGPTs responses are so confident when wrong I fear people will just give it a thumbs up when its wrong. (This is if how I understand the feature you mention is working)
I am not talking about accuracy. Only experts can determine factuality.
I am talking about relevance or returning what I asked. If I ask for reviews for SaaS product, Google will usually return a rival vendors’ biased review.
If ChatGpt search returns a review written by “the professional association of xxx developers” or another unbiased site, I will give it a thumbs up. I believe other people will do the same.
One thing I will always admire Apple for is being willing to essentially kill the iPod with the iPhone in 2007. No other company I've seen has been willing to kill their cash cow so thoroughly and so profitably.
Hate to break it to you, but Zuck didn’t create Instagram. Buying out a threatening competitor is not the same sort of risky move as what Apple did with the iPod/iPhone.
I don't see it as materially different. I also don't consider this to be an example of either of them being genius visionaries. I actually think it's an extremely straightforward tactic to cannibalize part of your business to break into another bigger market.
Apple didn't stop selling iPods, you know? I don't really get why it was more risky for Apple to market the iPhone than for Facebook to decide not to shut down Instagram once they acquired it.
The differences in the literal creation of the entity are immaterial to my point.
You don't see the difference between creating and buying?
> Apple didn't stop selling iPods, you know?
Read The Innovator's Dilemma. Apple launching the iPhone would be equivalent to Google, today, replacing a list of search hits with, at most, three answers.
Google is trying to beat potential competitors to the punch. They hold the search market, but if people start querying AI instead of searching they need a product in that space of they'll lose their lead.
I just got back from a job where my tech used AI on his phone every time he needed to search for something. The results were hilariously bad, but if things keep improving one day they might not be. Google needs to be ready for that.
Google is entirely to blame. It would be trivial for them to train a model to rank sites on a scale of SEO garbage to nobel laureate essay, then filter out the bottom 50%.
To be honest, this looks more like OpenAI playing catchup to what Google’s done since 2023. The fact is that ChatGPT, which people thought would kill Search, is falling behind Google in some ways.
I think it’s great that competition is driving both companies to improve, but I’m not seeing anything about this that screams “Google-killer”
> But they've also _explicitly_ focused on ad-dollars over algorithmic purity
I think they prioritized large and fast incomes over long, steady incomes.
Also, there isn't just money that taints Google search results. It's also censorship and political motivation, which is mostly obvious in image search.
There's this tech pattern of letting the cash-cow stagnate and deteriorate while focusing on high risk moonshots.
This especially happens after they dominate the market.
Take for example IE6, Intel, Facebook, IBM, and now Google.
They have everything they need to keep things from going off the rails, management however has a tendency to delusionally assume their ship is so unsinkable that they're not even manning their stations.
It becomes Clayton Christensenesque - they're dismissive of the competition as not real threats and don't realize their cash-cow is running on only fumes and inertia until its too late.
I think it’s what is the natural consequence of handing over management to MBA types. They can’t create new things. I don’t mean that they should be programmers, engineers or whatever they’re working with. I mean that they can only exact value from something that already exists. Which is always going to be a short term strategy because the only way to do that is to make “the it” worse.
I’m not sure Facebook fits in considering they at least managed to get some other products along the way, and may get more.
I certainly don’t think Google fits the bill. Google is failing because they let their cash cow ruin everything else, not because they let it stagnate while they chased the next moonshot. Google Cloud could have easily been competitive with AWS and Azure in European Enterprise, but it’s not even considered an option because Google Advertising wouldn’t let it exist without data harvesting. Google had Office365 long before Microsoft took every organisation online. But Google failed to sell it because… well…
It’s very typical MBA though. Google has killed profitable products because those products weren’t growing enough. A silly metric really, but one which isn’t surprising when your CEO is a former McKinsey.
It couldn’t happen to a nicer company though, and at least it won’t kill people unlike Boeing.
* Boeing is a consequence of the "Jack Welch" effect - gutting the core in service of short term gains for stock-holders.
* The MBA type, typified by John Sculley at Apple is about calcifying the current offerings presuming market segments supported by historicals with predictable demand. This works well for defensives such as utilities, consumer products and health care but not for markets with dynamic consumer relationships such as technology.
* The Google Cloud example is the Xerox Parc phenomena. Xerox was organizationally structured for investment payoffs only characteristically similar to their mainline products thus they couldn't properly allocate resources to things, such as desktop computing, with different kinds of curves. This is similar to how the franchise retailer Blockbuster so slowly responded to the centralized mail-order subscription Netflix. The institutional structure is only-so-flexible. This is similar to Conway's Law.
* The "ruin everything else" is a generalized form of a "brand extension failure". Examples include Harley Davidson perfume, Bic underwear, McDonalds Pizza, and Heinz cleaning vinegar - an over-leveraged commitment to a wildly successful core offering makes other ventures impossible.
This is not that. It's yet something else. Abstractly it's "X is a wild success, let's make Y another X instead of working on X+1"
Organizations suffer from varying degrees of ailments and they can create codependencies making the unraveling hard. Often
it devolves into politics of power brokers with the company's survival dependent on the competency of the influential instead of the influence of the competent. A brutal struggle to control a sinking ship.
The crisis of the third century happens every day.
They're "integrated" the way Adobe or Autodesk's acquisitions are "integrated," which is to say that they're not, in any meaningful way - but at least you only have to log in/get your credit card out once. And that's sort of fine, because they never needed to be integrated. All of the individual applications work fine on their own, with common media formats if you need to move between them. In fact, the acquisitions should have never taken place at all; they should have been blocked for antitrust violations.
> There's this tech pattern of letting the cash-cow stagnate and deteriorate while focusing on high risk moonshots.
It is interesting to go back a decade and read the articles about Google's moonshots from then. There was even more "we're building the future!" hype than what Elon Musk or Sam Altman are currently pushing.
More competition is good, but I’m pretty sure the end result will just be, at best, a duopoly of products equally ruined by advertising for their “free” tier, and somewhat less ruined for the “premium” tier.
I'm wondering if they've seen the writing on the wall for a long time, and if diversification is going to save the day. I don't know that I've ever clicked on an ad in Google search results, but I happily pay them for a family account for Youtube and 2TB of drive storage, plus, you know, a flagship phone every couple years. :-)
All businesses seek to diversify to reduce risk. That doesn't mean they have any reason to believe a cataclysmic event for search is more likely now vs before. ChatGPT to search feels like a similar situation of macos is to windows. It may take market share but the ecosystem around Windows keeps it by far in the lead in market share. Also Microsoft diversifying away from windows enabled that market share loss to not really matter all that much.
Google, even with all the trillions in additional productivity it has added to the world, has left the world at a net-negative. We can't even quantify it, and every person will tell you a different way in which it has impacted the world negatively.
E.g. for me, how much Google (and silicon valley in general) have enabled twisted ideologies to flourish. All in search of ad-dollars by virtue of eyeballs on screens, at the detriment of everything.
Anyone have some good links/citations on the consumer surplus of Google? How much value do we get as users?
Considering the value of time, past consumer surplus is especially valuable now.
Sure, there are systematic flaws causing SEO to ruin the information provided: but it isn't clear what Google can do to fight the emergent system.
I'm not sure that Bing/DDG are any better.
I use search (DDG web, Google/Apple maps, YouTube) all the time and I am regularly given results that are extremely valuable to me (and mostly only directly cost me a small amount of my time some of my time e.g. YouTube adverts). Blaming SEO on Google seems thoughtless to me. Google appears to be the victims of human cybersystems as much as we are.
I'm seeing the trillions in additional productivity argument more often here, especially when trying to defend their monopolistic tendencies. What I've never seen are raw numbers backing this.
I feel like we have an opportunity to break a feedback loop. SEO worked because of links. No links in my chatgpt discussions. Ah, but what about all the junk ai gen content you may counter, but that stuff only works because of SEO links. As more people abandon searching for links for discussions, the SEO usefulness diminishes. Maybe to the point where many parasites stop making SEO shite in the first place.
But to your points. I think the problem with your analysis is that it forgets that the real driver of the junk is the advertising environment. The SEO links were profitable because the advertisers were willing to pay a few cents for space on those pages. Yes, the incentives are changing for the teenagers who are churning out text and adding seo links to their stable of cheap websites, but the advertisers are going to find a way to manipulate consumers that's compatible with the new order. I don't know what that will be, but whatever it is will depend on information pollution just as much as the current one.
I was just wondering what has come out of silicon valley since say 2003 that has been a net positive for humanity. Just because something is profitable doesn't mean it's progress.
I know this is a predominantly white, upper middle class site (read: progressive), and people from that demo sure love to point out that "you can't say the leg is broken just because the foot is dangling at 90 degrees, you aren't a doctor!" ..... but at some point you surely have to start to trust your own eyes and use critical thinking, right??
It's not a conspiracy theory Google ruined their search to serve more ads. It's so obvious and happening for such a long period of time, anyone above certain age and with decent memory can see it. You don't have to "believe the reports", you don't even have to be smart, just use your eyes and your memory.
Yes, Google has their own AI divisions, tons of money and SEO is to blame for part of their crappiness. But they've also _explicitly_ focused on ad-dollars over algorithmic purity if one is to believe the reports of their internal politics and if those are true they have probably lost a ton of people who they'd need right now to turn the ship around quickly.