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Google has been failing to innovate for years. The last time they put out a useful innovation was Google Images, and every change they've made to it since its debut has made it worse. (Most recently hiding the link to images under a "more" button, dumbing down the "size" option years ago, and a handful of other things I can't recall at the moment.) Even the Russian search engine Yandex's image search is better than google images. The search pages are loaded with ads and irritating "helpful" information that just makes me spend more time trying to find what I want. Don't get me started on trying to find the names of songs by song lyric, the one thing a search engine should actually be good at 100% of the time...
I don't know if it's specifically "AI chatbots" that are going to threaten google but it seems like they've been stagnating for years so I'm sure some emerging technology is going to make them obsolete if they continue the same trajectory. I don't know why they're not incorporating AI into google images for example, the possibilities there are endless, it's like they're stuck in the 2010s while the rest of the internet has moved on
To be fair, I do like the features recently added to Google Image search: the ability to transcribe text from images, or to translate it into another language directly. They can be helpful in many cases (including, frivolous as it may be, quickly translating dialogue in Japanese fanart).
On the other hand, finding the original source of an image (a very common use case) now requires a few extra clicks, since Google Image prefers to "helpfully" offer you other images with similar content.
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Apparently the US gov got angry about Google Images advanced features because they made it too easy to track down federal agents from photos. So they were asked to disable those features and are afraid to roll out new ones.
I have a hard time believing that being able to search for specific size images would meaningfully help tracking federal agents.
They added a facial search feature briefly and that's what caused the blowback. Rolling back the problematic features left them with no development path, so they swapped in some ai image recognition stuff instead.
Basically no one wanted to work on basic image search, they wanted to use cool new tech.
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Source? Interesting if true, but couldn't find anything.
Someone on Hacker News was talking about it, I don't have a source to back it up.
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Yandex's reverse image search is better than not only googles image search but all other image searches I am aware of. It is shockingly good, so good that it found me pictures of people I know in real life just by facial similarity, no other reverse search was able to do this. Of course, no image search is as good as a hypothetical ideal, but Yandex has its moments of brilliance more than others.
I feel like people have majorly updated toward thinking Russians are... kind of like Africans because of the way the war is waged and Russian elites behave, so now it's surprising when a Russian product is competitive with a Western one, or even superior. How could Orcs build something beautiful? Must be meh. I've seen it discussed more than once that Soviet STEM was just Jews who were prevented from leaving, too.
Yandex is leagues above most Asian and Europoor companies, and is a proper Bay Area tier Big Tech, with a stack of cutting edge AI-based applications on top of text search. The best voice assistant, the best navigation, the best AI weather forecast, the best open-source LLM. (Or rather, it used to be; now its promising self-driving department, for instance, got relocated to Israel, on a questionable legal basis). The next big thing in open source text to image generation is apparently made by a guy from Sberbank, following the ruDalle line. Heck, even Mail.ru is fairly competitive.
Ongoing dissolution of those entities is a national tragedy that in the long run may well eclipse the war's cost in blood.
There definitely is a discrepancy in how Westerners think about Russians vs how Non-Westerners like me. My surprise at Yandex's quality was not because it's Russian but because it's actually very good, yet no one uses it. I'll try out Yandex's other tools since you claim they are exceptional as well.
Naive or ignorant as it may be, In my headcanon, the Russians were always competent people who just had to have the worst leaders of all time, The Soviets produced no shortage of brilliant scientists or bad leaders. The fact that Russia was a superpower and still has certain trappings of that is still not lost on Asians. Or names like Sergey Brin or Ilya Sutskever are not exactly hard to figure out the root of. People in online gaming are still scared shitless of the mythical "Russian Hacker" who will DDoS you at best and empty your bank account at worst lest you anger him.
It does ultimately sadden me that Russia is so vehemently 'othered' by the West instead of let's say Saudi Arabia or even China (I wish we all got along but that's for a different universe).
Yeah being surprised at how good yandex images is specifically is very common because it's much better in many ways than google's or bing's or tineye, not that it's competitive and people think russians are dumb. The surprise is more 'google didn't do it' than 'yandex did'. Yandex search isn't that bad, nobody remarks on it.
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