17 ms·

Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

390 points by pg_1234 3y ago

mg 3y ago
Information online is “buried at the bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff”, Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can “sell more adverts”, fuelled by Google’s technology. I think we are at a turning point in this regard. AI can now read through SEO fluff text and ads and present the user with the information they are looking for. Therefore, there will be no more incentive to create those types of sites. The web will change. Into what it will change is yet to be seen. But it will change.
- TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
  > Therefore, there will be no more incentive to create those types of sites. There will also be no more incentive to create sites with actual useful information since AI will just appropriate it. AI will destroy the source of its training data.
  - ramraj07 3y ago
    The sites with actual useful information don’t need much effort to create and maintain. If it was all just wikis it’s perfectly great. The problem only became when “entrepreneurs” realized they can game this system to gain money.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      The sites with actually useful information don't care about AI anyway. There's no way in which LLM being trained or used on them hurts them - if anything, it helps the information become more widely available (which is the goal of such sites anyway). If anything, this reduces the load on the site and expense of hosting it - which is a good thing. Such sites would only be hurt if they somehow derived benefit from marginal reader visiting their site - but this doesn't apply to sites with quality, trustworthy information, as the only such benefits you can get is either ego stroking or earning money by subjecting the visitor to some kind of abuse. For sites doing that, if AI kills them, I call good riddance.
    - onion2k 3y ago
      I'm struggling to think of a site I use regularly that could function without either adverts or someone else (businesses, donations, or the site owner) putting money to fund it, and I honestly can't think of one. The modern internet just wouldn't function if we took entrepreneurship out of it.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        Someone has to put some money into everything, but the number can be low enough to be entirely donations. > The modern internet just wouldn't function if we took entrepreneurship out of it. I think the modern internet is specifically what we're all upset about here? That the "entrepreneurship" isn't the grand visions of spaceships and androids and electric driverless cars of Musk, it's not the "app for that" of Jobs, it's not "connecting the world" (who even said that, Zuckerberg?), it's not "organising the world's information" like early Google… it's cramming as many ads as possible into someone's field of view at all times like the villain in Ready Player One.
      - ramraj07 3y ago
        Almost Every single useful site I use is not powered by business. It’s either government funded or donation based.
      - carlosjobim 3y ago
        Better than ads, sites can make money by selling products and services. A website with information on gardening, that also sells the equipment and seeds you need. A website with travel information that also sells tours. A website with any programming and IT information that also sells software. These kind of sites make much better money than ad and affiliate sites, but people haven't understood it yet. The online ad industry – especially on social media – is a huge scam. Small and medium size businesses can't resist throwing in some bucks in the ad casino, and Facebook will tell them they had so many thousands of impressions, funny that it didn't turn into any sales? Online ads are also very comfortable and easy for some worthless manager who has a set advertising budget. Just throw away the money into social media ads instead of thinking through a campaign.
        3y ago
  - tomjen3 3y ago
    Wikipedia is not going to stop. Your local cinema is not going to stop posting movies and show times on their website. The only sites that are going to be hit by this are those that make money on ads.
    - onion2k 3y ago
      My local cinema doesn't have a website. It uses social media instead.
    - TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
      Wikipedia doesn't cover everything. > The only sites that are going to be hit by this are those that make money on ads. There are plenty of those and they do provide value - else they won't have been able to survive all these years via ads.
      - tomjen3 3y ago
        There are plenty of sites, but would you rather follow a link to one of them, or to a personal blog with info about the same thing?
        TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
        > would you rather follow a link to one of them, or to a personal blog with info about the same thing? Either one is OK frankly, as long as I get the information I need. Depending on my confidence level in the accuracy of the information on those sites, I might even visit both to compare and contrast. Regardless, both are unlikely to survive without ads. Most people don't run their own web server to host a blog - most people don't know, and don't want to know, how. Even if hosting isn't a problem for blogs, I think the amount of blogging will drop. Who would want spend a week crafting a blog detailing their experiences with something and what they have learned then get next to no views because some AI appropriated their content and stole all your viewers? With few visitors, probably just search engine and AI crawlers, and no comments on their blog posts ... it's hard not to feel that it's just a wasting time.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  > AI can now read through SEO fluff text and ads and present the user with the information they are looking for. Little comfort when so much of that fluff is now being AI generated. There becomes a point at which we dilute the quality of the information on the web so much, the detail is just lost. AI generating summaries of AI generated garbage is not going to create a better web. I’ve been reading AP News recently, directly on their website, and the site is so riddled with ads it’s hard to read the articles. We are truly breaking the internet.
  - jdblair 3y ago
    We're heading into a future where text is generated by language models, then other language models are used to generate summaries for human consumption. We will drown in AI bullshit and then use more AI to try and extract the meaningful kernel.
    - scary-size 3y ago
      What was it about the internet being five big sites filled with screenshots from the other four…? Let’s turn that up to 11.
    - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
      Yeah. If we can “solve” AI and make systems that develop genuine knowledge, then we will be okay. But that may never happen and we may find ourselves stuck at the current “bullshit generator” phase and if that happens the internet is absolutely fucked.
      - plonk 3y ago
        Search engines are fucked in that scenario. Maybe we'll just need better-curated ones, or a better ranking (usefulness ratings by verified users?). And anyone can still create a website, so you can escape the AI flood. But if Google failed to defend against SEO before LLMs, maybe the scale of the current search engines is just too big for effective moderation and we need to scale down to smaller communities.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  It already changed on the mobile space, native apps have reclaimed what the browser took away on the desktop. Ironically many Web sites packed as Web widgets are no different from the same site being delivered from the Webserver.
- joosters 3y ago
  > AI can now read through SEO fluff text and ads and present the user with the information they are looking for. So? Google can do that too. They just choose not to, for profit reasons. AI can (presumably) also do that. But will AI companies instead choose profit? Of course they will.
  - manmal 3y ago
    They already do, ChatGPT Plus is a monthly subscription. If they add ads or product placement, people will start self-hosting transformers, at least for website summarizing.
    - LtWorf 3y ago
      It requires competence and time to self host.
      - manmal 3y ago
        At this moment, yes. A few more hardware cycles and those can be run in a browser plug-in.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > Therefore, there will be no more incentive to create those types of sites. Incentive is still there; scoundrels trying to make easy money on the Internet will adapt. Before, they tailored their SEO spam to fool Google's search crawlers and ranking algorithms. Now, they'll tailor their spam to fool LLMs. There's a well-established adversarial approach for this too. The LLM works as a discriminator, your job is to train/tune a generative model that fools the discriminator. If you can do it semi-reliably, you can put an API in front of it and sell it as "prompt injector as a service", and rake in the money. Couple more people do that, and all the ex-SEO scoundrels can get back to poisoning the commons for the highest bidder. (Open source, like always, will come to "help", and let any small scamgency run their own "mix ads into content" models locally.) The web will indeed change. But LLMs are like any other tool - they can be used for both good and for ill, and those using it for ill have much more money and drive. So I don't expect the change to be for the better; the tech is different, but the incentives and (severe deficiency of) ethics of the main players are still the same.
  - mattlondon 3y ago
    They can fool LLMs sure, but to what end? They need the traffic on their site to sell the ads - poisoning a LLM's response does not directly drive traffic to their individual site, so they won't profit. I don't think that some random SEO outfit has much more money than Google or OpenAI or Microsoft - they're not going to be able to "DoS" (as it were) a LLM to trick people to come to their site and click ads.
- onetokeoverthe 3y ago
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- quickthrower2 3y ago
  AI has been trying to do this for ages. It is a classification problem not language generation so LLMs were not needed (and may be too expensive for billions of pages) It is a cat and mouse game
- _Algernon_ 3y ago
  Maybe. But the level of effort required to produce the drivel in the first place will also be lowered dramatically. How the overall balance will change is questionable at this point.
calrain 3y ago
This is why I use ChatGPT and Kagi over Google search now.
- danielbln 3y ago
  Same, but perplexity.ai for me. Search enabled LLMs that can slog through the search results for me is where it's at.
  - gonzo41 3y ago
    But LLM's don't really do that. They take the shape and context of your prompt and respond with a corresponding shape of text. But im sure there's some hybrid in the works that will be very helpful soon.
    - danielbln 3y ago
      I'm not sure I follow, those hybrids exist today, I mentioned one of them. They tend to fire search queries, extract the content over multiple hops and inject it into the LLM prompt for evaluation and summary.
  - YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
    If they appear to work now, it's because the SEO leeches haven't found them yet. If they ever become popular, they'll get inundated with garbage too.
  - Varloom 3y ago
    Why I have never heard of perplexity.ai Just tried it, so good and fast.
    - danielbln 3y ago
      Not to sound like a total shill, but if you subscribe they let you switch the underlying llm to GPT-4 or Claude-2, which gives it some more oomph on more complex reasoning tasks. The free model is already quite good for research though.
tehlike 3y ago
It feels a bit hypocritical to bash on the company that acquired your startup.
- junofan 3y ago
  In the words of Sundar Pichai: “can we change the settings of this group to history-off”
- tester756 3y ago
  Fortunely being hypocritical doesnt imply that you're wrong
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago
  I feel it shouldn't be a problem if personal life and belief is different than professional life. I also wouldn't deny tens of millions of dollars even if it comes from someone I hate.
- anonymous_sorry 3y ago
  I'd rather people spoke the truth as they see it, rather than being forever silenced by a big payday. The issue he raises wasn't really a thing in 2014. 9 years later, he can't raise problems? Google search is awful now. And Google search has a big effect on the health of the web. The more people recognise it, the better.
- js8 3y ago
  Why it would be hypocritical? Living in capitalism is not hypocritical, it's the reality. Assuming capitalism works the way it's proponents are saying it works, it doesn't matter who you sell the company to - the market will find the optimum regardless. If you're making a sub-optimal decision to sell company to someone else, the free market should self-correct this. So if you believe in capitalism, your individual moral decisions do not matter. On the other hand, if you don't believe in capitalism, then it is not hypocritical to play by the rules of the system while campaigning for the system to change, because you want the rules to affect everyone, not just you.
  - 3y ago
jonatron 3y ago
As an example, google are knowingly profiting from rip-offs: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56886957 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56886957 Why are there still three ads before the official government site if I search for "apply esta"?
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  > Why are there still three ads before the official government site if I search for "apply esta"? Because it is profitable. Google is amazingly capable of solving problems that risk their bottom line.
ramraj07 3y ago
It’s not just Google. The idea of a search engine leading to web pages with useful information itself has existed long enough to be gamed to the bottom. A new paradigm has to emerge and take over. The LLMs seem like the first real viable alternative but I feel like we are still in the lycos days of this paradigm.
- Jensson 3y ago
  How do I publish data to an LLM? I don't see how it solves the issues the open web solved, so it doesn't seem like a good replacement to a search engine.
  - ramraj07 3y ago
    As I said we are still in the Lycos era of this paradigm. But I’m not sure what you mean, the LLM is the index of the entire internet, so not sure why it’s hard to imagine it becoming a much smarter answering machine (answers being either the actual answer or a link to a website that’s actually useful).
    - brucethemoose2 3y ago
      > LLM is the index of the entire internet It is certainly not an index of the entire internet. Web scraping is a tool to make LLMs "smarter" and better at speaking, but they are not a web archive, not even a reasonably lossy one. Honestly they are a poor substitute for Google, even when augmented with a vectorDB or (hypothetically) some kind of confidence metric, when the information is not immediately verifiable.
mobilio 3y ago
https://archive.md/fQPTD https://archive.md/fQPTD
- znpy 3y ago
  Thanks a lot!
- heresie-dabord 3y ago
  Thank you. Let's recognise the irony of your link. The need for ^^^ such services is a symptom of the problem. We are all taking measures to circumvent the rubbish. I don't believe that every link that I click should contribute revenue to any billion-dollar corpocracy. I definitely do not want rubbish content to be intermingled with valid information. This is not the Internet that we want. If an entity wants money from me, let it prove its value from the basic requirement of quality.
  - tim333 3y ago
    I think the main reason for the link is to circumvent the Telegraph's pay wall? In a way we are the problem - if we won't pay then newspapers have to get money for their staff salaries from somewhere.
    - heresie-dabord 3y ago
      > In a way we are the problem [...] newspapers have to get money for their staff salaries from somewhere I understand your argument and I want to respond. I like a good discussion. Yes of course the news business needs money. The modern economy is not the fault of the news business or its customers. The paper-based news business is almost dead. The Advertising Business quit funding the paper-based news business in order to optimise for an empire of Web-based surveillance and profit. We know even by casual observation that the online advertising business is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. [0] (Read the preceding line again, just for the effect of scale.) Social media aggregates news content because people want news. The news business knows it needs a revenue stream from on-line advertising. The lack of direct traffic to news sites does not mean that people do not want news. Subscriptions could be part of a solution but a) using a paywall is often meaningless to international visitors, and b) the fact is that subscriptions don't scale. Users of the Web and social media find their news via the aggregation provided by Google, Meta, and Xitter. These companies mine user data for profit. These companies are opposed to paying for news content. [3] It's estimated that 30%-40% of users block advertising somehow. [1] Even if we accept this number for the sake of discussion, I doubt that this equates to a direct 30%-40% loss of revenue for a news site. To judge from Firefox's share of usage, a "privacy-focused browser" that is free as in beer isn't anywhere near a major concern for most people. [2] Advertising revenue is easy money. The sad fact is that advertising, market segmentation, and data surveillance have all optimised for enshittification of the Web. Quality of news content or search content be damned! If paywalls won't scale in the modern economy, should the only option be enshittification of content by the insidious advertising business (not to mention filler content -- generated or copy-pasta -- to feed click-bait)? In summary, People want and need news, but Google and Meta are definitely unwilling to pay for being the world's aggregators of news content. [3] Subscriptions don't scale and can't compete with revenue from the Advertising Empire. [0] Don't blame users for not being a multi-billion dollar source of revenue for these obscenely profitable companies. - - - [0] _ https://www.statista.com/statistics/237974/online-advertising-spending-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/237974/online-advertisin... [1] _ https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/ad-blocking/ https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/ad-blocking/ [2] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers [3] _ https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/30/google-to-block-canadian-news-outlets-from-search-results-in-canada.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/30/google-to-block-canadian-new... [4] https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/ad-blocking/ https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/ad-blocking/ _ "As consumers use ad blockers, the tech makes it harder for advertisers to track and measure their ad campaigns, which could negatively affect advertising revenues."
dageshi 3y ago
The web thrived for a decent number of years with ads before it began to really spiral down. For me the biggest cause of that spiral was the shift from most users using desktops to most users using mobile to interact with google. In the desktop search world, google used to respond with large comprehensive articles on subjects that not just answered peoples questions but also educated them on the subject around their question. This was the golden age so to speak, it answered your question along with 10 others on a subject but also helped you to understand if your question was even the right one in the first place. With mobile, google shifted to trying to directly answer the question you asked and nothing else, presumably because people were far less willing to read large articles on mobile and just wanted fast answers. This latter approach is much easier to SEO garbage than the original that took real knowledge and effort to write.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 3y ago
  The salvation of the web lies in banning all the normies and mobile users.
- _ahxg 3y ago
  And here we have the tyranny of the marginal user as posted here a while ago =/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507
- onetokeoverthe 3y ago
  [dead]
- pentae 3y ago
  These days most non technical people just have their phone and live inside the FB/IG/TT/X/Gmail/Google apps on their phones and don't even go on the web. And app developers are doing everything to keep them inside the app with a crappy in-app browser which also benefits the Apple/Google app store ecosystem. Apples intention with Safari was inside the name. "Safari - you're in the African jungle, theres lions and tigers, be careful, probably best avoided." They don't want you using it. Download an app and pay us 30% instead. And that's what people do. Convenience-seeking users don't really seem to care. Why bother with desktops and even google search when they have apps on their phone to do stuff. Nobody even trusts the web anymore because of all the SEO content spam and potential to be scammed. If you were Google making billions a year off the app ecosystem because its a superior experience.. wouldn't your incentive be to make web as bad as possible?
leobg 3y ago
Recipe blogs are the most horrible example. The amount of BS you have to scroll through to get to the actual recipe.
- progbits 3y ago
  I've recently noticed a lot of them have a "skip to the recipe" link on top which just scrolls down. Kind of ridiculous.
- toastal 3y ago
  Often, I like getting the context & history of a recipe. When researching foreign dishes these things help me understand a lot about what might be acceptable ingredient substitutes.
  - toastal 3y ago
    I guess I’m in the minority. Wow.
- walthamstow 3y ago
  Any recipe that shows up on the first page of Google is shit anyway, IMO/IME. There are maybe four or five websites I trust with recipes, anything else I get from a book.
- Gareth321 3y ago
  “I know you’d like this recipe for potato salad, but first, let’s explore the history of the humble potato. Where did it come from? What is its cultural significance? Could this mighty spud someday change the world? Hi, I’m Leslie Snark, and I’ve travelled the world eating delicious food to bring you the best recipes.”
  - evertedsphere 3y ago
    "But before we finally get to the recipe, I'm sure you're dying to know many languages my grandmother knew the word for 'potato' in. Excellent question! In 1710, according to what I've been able to find out from my Ancestry.com results [affiliate link], my great-uncle's ..."
znpy 3y ago
Had to spend some good 5 minutes to unaccept all default cookies settings… only to see a fucking paywall. I’ll add the telegraph to the list of websites I don’t bother opening, next time it’s either archive link or I don’t care what they have to say.
happytiger 3y ago
Enshitification. Of the entire Internet. Thats Google at this point. https://www.communication-generation.com/enshitification/ https://www.communication-generation.com/enshitification/ https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
tannhaeuser 3y ago
US antitrust turning a blind eye towards the aggregation into FAANG (or was it conflict of interest?) also made this possible. Specifically, Google's acquisition of DoubleClick alone (then the largest ad network) created a monopoly and closed vertical supply chain network along with AdWords/Google Search. But then Google also controls TV (YouTube), devices (Android), and browsers (via Chrome and subverting weak and financially dependent puppet orgs for web standardization and advocacy), and also many services found via Google Search. Something's gotta give.
- safety1st 3y ago
  I think it might be the web that gives. If you look at the birth of the web and how it became such a phenomenon, what we had back in those days as the dominant platform for end user applications was Win32. It was OK for its time but had limitations the web didn't have, one of the biggest was - you had to get a user to install stuff locally. So what was necessary for the web to take off as an application platform was first some scrappy startups that saw the potential, Netscape creating Javascript was the first real opening salvo. And then when Microsoft realized the threat it went into overdrive and invented DHTML and arguably put more resources into the Web than a startup ever could, and then all this stuff started getting standardized and we got to enjoy 20 years of a new application platform where there was competition to control it and things were somewhat standardized and not totally monopolized. Notably most people just forgot about Win32 and quit building apps with it, which would have been considered unfathomable at the time. Win32 had had its day and faded into something comparatively niche. I don't see why we wouldn't have the same dynamic now if the Web eventually becomes as monopolized and stagnant as Win32 was. Or at least, I think this may be more likely than the Web somehow getting rescued by regulators or anyone else.
donatj 3y ago
I wrote a not-very-coherent in retrospect article about 12 years ago while working for an SEO firm about how SEO was killing the internet. The basis being companies were creating pages and blog posts specifically to target keywords without actually having coherent things to say on the topic. Moreover people within Google like Matt Cutts seemed to be at the time if not outright encouraging it, at the very least giving pointers on how to game the system. This strikes me as more relevant than ever, and I have to imagine the growth of large language models is only going to amplify this practice dramatically. Beyond that, the way Google now ranks pages based on how well they fit their pretty limited definition of working on mobile and how “fast they load” has done exactly zero to promote quality content. I use quotes because I have worked on ad-ridden super slow SPA’s that manage higher scores than super fast static sites.
- ryanjshaw 3y ago
  > the growth of large language models is only going to amplify this practice dramatically. Do you mean LLMs will be used to generate more SEO content that is irrelevant? Doesn't it work both ways? You can use LLMs to filter out irrelevant content better than ever? A lot of the time I use ChatGPT-4 it's as a search engine - and I don't even mean with the Browser plugin, I mean it's quicker to ask ChatGPT-4 for its encoded knowledge than to Google and click on links.
  - MourYother 3y ago
    GPT4 is trained on mostly garbage optimised for SEO though.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      If general AI, let's call it Heavenweb or Netsky, comes along and it is based on the knowledge of the internet I am not that worried so. GPT4 is trained on SEO crap, parts of it have been propably already written using GPT3. So by the time Skynet comes along, it will assume the bot-to-bot SEO crap content to be actually true, SEO contebt written by AI for AI trained on AI created SEO content. Eith that, Skynet would never be able to achieve anything, no decent scrambled egg let alone a T-100.
xkcd1963 3y ago
It's not like we can't use the internet without google.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  People will largely fall back to other "lazy" search methods (like just asking ChatGPT (and getting a confidant wrong answer) or searching TikTok or YouTube (and getting a influencer with bad information)) rather than some more rigorous search method.
Havoc 3y ago
Bit of a shaky title It's the ad driven model (and resulting SEO) not google specificly. Though they are of course at the forefront of that.
_8j50 3y ago
Perhaps the internet being saturated by the general global public who are very tribal and huddle around their bubble sites is the root cause here. Google, Facebook,etc... are just reacting. People huddle around HN for example like they do on reddit,fb, insta, telegram,discord,vk,yt,bilibili,etc... Before the mobile users' eternal september, I used to find myself searching for sites to hang out at. I can't remember the last time I signed up to a sight to commune with users. Especially, now I am very careful because there are a lot of bad actors and it's impossible to actually be pseudonymous. TLD's were supposed to help with this over commercialization of the internet. .com and .co were supposed to be exclusive to commerical sites, all the blogs,forums,etc... were supposed to be on .org and .net, these days a TLD is like a vanity license plate.
reducesuffering 3y ago
It's going to get worse. Here's a great primer on the problem we're facing, written by a Google -> OpenAI engineer. "I think that being able to automatically produce arbitrary content that is indistinguishable from human-generated content at scale is the death knell of the web as we know it." https://nonint.com/2023/03/09/gpt-might-be-an-information-virus/ https://nonint.com/2023/03/09/gpt-might-be-an-information-vi...
Roark66 3y ago
>The criticism of his former employer came as Mr Suleyman told the Telegraph about plans for a new international body to monitor AI threats. I hope they first threat they choose to monitor is the monopolisation of the AI services, all while the huge monopolies preach about "the dangers of ai" to increase the barriers to entry for the small guy (we all know disappearance of open source models and a ban on sale of hardware capable of running them to individuals is their most desirable wet dream).
- nullc 3y ago
  Exactly. The real AI danger is the people who make the most noise about the dangers of AI.
- blitzar 3y ago
  Those who can do, those who can't become regulators (those who can't but have deep pockets and reputations to uphold beg to become the regulators)
_the_inflator 3y ago
I am always a bit cautious, when I listen to arguments from competitors, who compete with Google. Is it an argument or marketing speech? First of all, Google is not the internet. Is providing search results a challenging business? Yes. Could do Google do a better job? Yes, so could do others. The fact, that Bing does not gain market share even though pushing everything ChatGPT related may confirms this notion. Content and consumer habits changed. In the 90th, website where dominated by text. Compared to today, every page that was suggested by Google resembled a book. Today most websites look like easy to consume snippets due to lower attention span, less time. Then came Twitter, TikTok, Facebook etc. So I would not blame Google in the first place. Will ChatGPT replace Google? Not entierly, but they are working on it. Will we say the same ("ChatGPT send LLMs into 'spiral of decline'") about ChatGPT in 10-15 years from now? Maybe.
- bmitc 3y ago
  > First of all, Google is not the internet. Google's use of AMP disagrees. With Google pushing AMP on users, it's possible you never leave Google. And while.Google might not be the Internet, in general, it does have undue influence on it. > Could do Google do a better job? Yes, so could do others. The fact, that Bing does not gain market share even though pushing everything ChatGPT related may confirms this notion. That's a strange take. Google has a monopoly and abuses that power.
blitzar 3y ago
Google "gave me a massive pile of money", claims DeepMind co-founder
- orangepurple 3y ago
  He did it for "thirty pieces of silver"
rightbyte 3y ago
Mustafa got it wrong. "Click bait" is not the problem. A click bait is an article on the form "Famous celeb did this outrageous thing" where both the celebs name and the thing is not in the title. The point is to make the reader open the article to see what celeb did what and get more ad views. Most readers wont read the article anyway, so it is just enshitification of the user interface. I believe ads in them self are the root problem. It sets up the incentives wrong, where the product being sold are the readers, not the article.
mupuff1234 3y ago
Wasn't he kicked out of deepmind due to toxic behavior and bullying?
- beej71 3y ago
  I don't know, but that's ad hominem in terms of his argument.
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berkes 3y ago
I'd like to see some experiments with Search engines that rank on things that are hard or impossible to game. Impossible in the sense that the search-engine controls this variable entirely. Like "age of the article" through "time we saw it first & how much it changed since". Or like "churn", through "how often we saw new content come and go". Anything that users or owners control, will be gamed. So maybe there are variables that only the search-engine itself controls that still provide adequate or good ranking?
- halflings 3y ago
  But that is exactly what search engines do. Yet people find a way to game these "impossible to game" metrics. For example: "age of the article": search engines value recent content => suddenly you start seeing articles published just weeks/months ago reviewing some rather old piece of hardware/content. Either a full repost under a different URL with a different title etc., or just an incremental (probably automated) update of an older page.
  - berkes 3y ago
    I probably wasn't clear. I truly meant "impossible to game". If I crawl your site today, encounter article A, and crawl it again in a year and again encounter article A, I am sure that article A is a year old (Well, techcnically, what I am certain of, is that I encountered the exact same article two times a year apart). You cannot game that. Now if another year later I encounter article A' where some content on the page has changed, be it sidebars, a new design, or a few paragraphs, I might say, "some version of this article is two years old" and decide to rank that different from "this exact version is two years old". Age is just one variable that I can think off. I'm quite certain there are more variables. But each and every one such variable must be completely controlled and verified by me- the search engine. Nothing external can be such a variable: not "amount of articles that link to X" nor "amount of people that click through". Maybe such variables don't exist. Or maybe they do, but make for terrible ranking, IDK. But I do know that using variables that search-engines don't control make for a terrible search experience over time. As can be witnessed and as is written down in the linked article.
wzdd 3y ago
Not that I disagree, but "I spent 5 years helping Google achieve its market dominance and mindshare, was accused of bullying employees, left quietly a few months later, and am now trashing it in the press as part of the marketing process for my next startup" doesn't have quite the clout it could have.
- aabhay 3y ago
  Exactly. Feels like such a blatant PR stunt to advertise (ironically) for his next company
- Freedom5093 3y ago
  Wasn't he was fired or asked to leave from DeepMind, then Google? I interviewed at Inflection (his startup), and my interview with him (final stage, founder interview) was the worst interview I've ever had. He did no small talk, he immediately (and awkwardly) asked a question off his question list. It lasted 15 minutes. I was immediately put off by his questions, wondering if I should just hang up now. His co-founder interview was not as bad, but still asked an awkward question. They definitely want you to work very hard, including sacrificing your personal life. The product itself (Pi, the assistant) doesn't seem to have traction. Has anyone found it useful?
- danpalmer 3y ago
  I met him, he was an investor in my previous company and I gave him a tour of the product. Very cold, a little disinterested, and remarkably un-insightful for someone in his position. Your summary strikes me as fitting my expectations.
jsemrau 3y ago
The Internet is on a death-spiral as much as Western Civilisation is on a decline.
- SettembreNero 3y ago
  Except that for the internet is a bad thing
dalbasal 3y ago
"Search results plagued with ‘clickbait’ would have been an understatement 20 years ago. The parts of the open web you access from Google/search (most of it) is almost entirely made-for-google' ranking algorithims. The situation is worse than it is on closed social media, including Google's YouTube. Professional YouTubers are also making content for rankings above all, but the fact that it's their own face/voice keeps some of the rot at bay. Google is literally content made by uninterested copywriters exclusively for Google rankings. I was recently looking for general travel advice on Google. I found it completely impossible. The content is all written by people (or ais) that had never visited. Everything reads like a middle school essay. I often resort to searches in a smaller language, where economic incentives are 100X smaller than English. Google created incentives for littering the web with garbage. Then they took away incentives for anyone else to even bother. Google killed the thing that gave them life. They gave Vince Serf a sinecure and a hows-your-mother for the rest. Thieves.
- medion 3y ago
  Amen.
- jorvi 3y ago
  “site:reddit.com” saves the day, but I feel very uneasy doing so ever since they did their nasty API + demodding ploy.
  - seydor 3y ago
    It's odd that reddit has not surpassed google in profits
  - V1ndaar 3y ago
    Honestly, the "golden days" of using reddit for that purpose are over, too. Both the fact that random other crap comes up due to how stuff is linked on reddit and generally most search engines being too lenient with your search terms and finally more and more conversation going to discord and other places that cannot be searched. It really is one of the most unfortunate things of the modern internet. :(
nologic01 3y ago
> Mr Suleyman said chatbots could “take on Google” by providing more accurate information than internet search. Excuse me for no longer taking any tech influencer promises at face value. More accurately, for taking them at zero value. Tell me first 1) your real business model and 2) how other actors will respond to your business model Enough with the half-truths and dishonesty.
- mark_l_watson 3y ago
  While I find Suleyman‘s ideas interesting (and years ago I worked with one of his Deepmind co-founders) he seems like a statist and a corporatist, through and through. Nothing wrong with that, we all have our ideas and ways of doing business, but I prefer, openness, open source, open LLMs, etc. I decided to not buy Suleyman‘s new book because we have such different world views, even though I find the topic interesting.
seydor 3y ago
Google created SEO and has an interest to keep increasing the size and cost of SEO because the cost of SEO is directly related to the cost of their Ads (which are the best kind of SEO) That doesnt mean that the content of the internet is usless, but it is now buried under 3 pages of useless SEO blubber
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  > That doesnt mean that the content of the internet is usless, but it is now buried under 3 pages of useless SEO blubbe Personally, I stopped posting some useful findings in forums and other places. Why bother, when the sites are zombified or enshittified? Also, I used to write small tech articles for a hard hitting PC hardware site. Garbage SEO (and Youtube) ran the whole site out of business. I am a sample size of one, but this feels like a microcosm of what's happening to the web. Some of that good content is dying.
AJRF 3y ago
This guy is such a big mouth. Very obvious he is cozying up to British politicians to further his own goals. Saying "Big Tech Bad" is a surefire hit among that crowd.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
I agree but the root cause isn't Google, it's advertising in all its forms, Google's ads just happen to be the most profitable ones. Kill advertising and the web will be fixed automatically and permanently. Using uBlock Origin is everyone's duty towards a better web. It should come pre-installed in Firefox.
- firtoz 3y ago
  You may be interested in trying Brave. Though that's using chromium and therefore connected to Google, kind of? Would be curious to hear the community's thoughts on this tbh.
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    I use both Brave and Firefox on mobile. I'm using Brave right now.
  - _lvbh 3y ago
    If it wasn’t for all the crypto bloat, Brave would be nice to use. Every time I install it, I got to spend a few minutes toggling all the settings and disabling everything. I use Librewolf not because of the fingerprinting stuff but because it just has sane defaults.
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    Cromite is the bee's knees on Android and Windows. I don't like/trust Brave for a number of reasons, and not just the crypto thing. Hijacking innocuous ads is another big one.
  - aktenlage 3y ago
    Because chrome-based Browsers are used by the large majority of web users, Google can (and does) easily change the web experience for its own profit, by adding, removing, or changing the functionality in chrome. Having the majority of users gives Google this power. As long as you use a chrome based browser, you are still part of that.
- mycologos 3y ago
clnq 3y ago
It has become quite difficult to find experts on Google. Google is probably catering to the "entertainment" category of reader now more than it was in 2013. This opinion stems from my experience. And my experience is that I'm an old school technical blogger who writes articles certainly not for the "entertainment" crowd, but for the professional crowd. My readership stays high from Monday to Friday and drops to nearly zero over the weekend. Over the last 10 years, I have observed that my readers come from referrers like Google.com or Google.de less frequently. I would say that I get about 20 times fewer readers from Google. However, Google still constitutes about 90% of my readership, down from perhaps 97% to 99%. These are the facts, looking at my analytics. The other 10% come from DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yandex, Bitbucket, MS Teams, ChatGPT, Perplexity.ai, Atlassian, Swarm, Ecosia, topical forums, and company domains. The share of readership from sources other than Google used to be closer to 1% - 3% in the past. From my experience as a user of Google, I also find it much more difficult to find experts in any given field. About a decade ago, I would find so many more hard-boiled technical blogs. Now, the mid-level college essay-style knowledge is much more promoted. This shift makes sense for Google as an ad company, even if it harms everyone, future Google included. With all that said, here are my conclusions, based in the reality of my own technical blog and its readership -- Google is worse for the technical crowd, which is now more likely to share technical resources by word of mouth (like Atlassian, Swarm, Teams, topical forums and company domains) or find them with other search engines. Google's effectiveness has not significantly diminished, as it still accounts for 90% of the way people reach my technical blog, so it might still be very functional for this purpose. Challenger search engines appear to have gained a significant stake in the tech crowd, a contrast to the scenario 10 years ago. But it seems like the decline of Google is a bit catastrophized. These are only thoughts from my perspective, though they are grounded in some objective metrics.
- nologic01 3y ago
  A lot of people would corroborate your statistics and observations. The problem is that there is no "entertainment" category of reader. Just different domains and special interests. Nobody likes accessing the internet with a low signal to noise ratio or fighting cut-and-paste "AI" websites that have been engineered to rank on Google.
DoingIsLearning 3y ago
This reminds of Palihapitiya "regreting" helping Facebook become the social media beast it is today and all the social damage it has caused. They somehow never grapple with these ethical issues when getting payed. Edit: I don't disagree but feels hypocritical and obviously on a newspaper to advertise their new ventures.
sharas- 3y ago
did you also get a popup suggesting you login with google just after this article loaded?
nabla9 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification Enshittification, also known as platform decay,[1] is a way to describe the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that act as two-sided markets. The term enshittification was coined by Cory Doctorow in January 2023 in a blog post, later republished as an article in Wired, in which he wrote: Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
fredgrott 3y ago
Most do not know that Google search has an API to turn into a programmable topical search engine...see https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/topical https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/topical Basics is that you create a programmable search engine starting with this tutorial https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/tutorial/introduction https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/tutorial/in... I have played with it and does seem somewhat useful enough for me to create my own custom search engine using Google's API for my own needs.
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Josh613 3y ago
I'm working on a search engine. One foundational difference is that we care about People Rank (TM), not Page Rank. josh@sirch.org if you'd like to join us.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  And what is "People Rank"?
spandextwins 3y ago
Google has evolved into clickbait bullshit, AI will replace it. Just do a Google search for how to make chicken pot pie. All the links are crap clickbait.
wuming2 3y ago
I never understood people writing as there were, or are, no alternatives. For ad professionals perhaps or for content providers. Of any quality. But as a consumer all I needed to leave Goog was to try a few other search engines and settle on the one returning results closest to what I wanted. Then tapped Settings > Safari > Search Engine and made my choice. Years ago now.
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christophilus 3y ago
I remember a time when I thought P2P was the future. BitTorrent, Napster, etc. With YouTube’s recent moves, I wonder if we’ll see a resurgence in those ideas. Hosting costs are not (much of) a problem with that kind of model, so the need for advertising to pay hosting costs is greatly diminished. But, then without a centralized system, you’ll have the dark web everywhere. I wonder if there’s a way to set up a network that incentivizes quality? I have no ideas about how to do that.
- mark_l_watson 3y ago
  Maybe Mastodon?
nojvek 3y ago
Without paywall https://web.archive.org/web/20231015070154/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/10/14/google-internet-spiral-of-decline-deepmind-mustafa-suleyman/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231015070154/https://www.teleg...
Hnrobert42 3y ago
I am interested to here what Kagi users think. Kagi is searching the same web. If the web is now garbage, then I wouldn’t expect improved search to yield improved results.
- beej71 3y ago
  It's about the ordering of the results, but also about finding rare information. I found a link to the age of a very minor lava flow in Oregon on the third link on Kagi. The answer was nowhere on the first 3 pages of Google, which is where I stopped looking. If you deprioritize stuff that works for Google's SEO, you'll get different (better) results.
ravenstine 3y ago
Though I'm usually more than happy to bash The Google for what it is, I think focusing on their role here distracts from the big picture. As a civilization, we have forgotten how to do search. Maybe that's in large part due to over-reliance on The Google, but in any case, we've collectively chosen to not only replace search with "algorithms" but grossly underpower any remaining shred of search that still exists. Ask yourself when was the last time you used any search engine anywhere and came away feeling empowered by the tool in front of you. Maybe this is a feeling that few if any young people today understand. Back in the early days of the web, search engines, even the lousiest ones, made the user feel like all the world's information was at their fingertips. If a query returned few relevant matches, it probably meant your query wasn't good. In other words, search was a power tool. Virtually every form of search engine today, whether it's The Google or a search function on a specific site, is embarrassingly stuck in the past. But it's much worse than that. Not only have there been virtually no meaningful advancements in advanced search features, but the search engines are often not capable of correctly handling basic queries. There are pages I know exist that contain certain verbiage, and my default expectation today is to expect a search engine to not be able to find it. Apparently software developers, or perhaps companies themselves, are so disinterested in search that they won't even use Elasticsearch. Whatever they're doing, they're doing incorrectly. At best, they're doing what was adequate in 2005. By now, search should have become far more advanced. Instead, search engines today fall somewhere between being a mess of algorithmic results plus ads or something barely at the level of a CS student project. Although I like the Kagi search engine, its primary differentiator from other search engines is its ability to filter out the detritus. In terms of results and advanced search capabilities, it's not necessarily that much better in other regards.
lowtech8 3y ago
What ever happened to directory sites, with lists of links to other sites? I think this would be a good way to keep the web alive. I miss finding good web directories…
electrondood 3y ago
It's not just Google, it's any service that shows you a you-shaped bubble, based on your prior interactions.
dredmorbius 3y ago
The meat of this seems to be an upcoming UK AI safety summit: The UK’s AI Safety Summit is due to take place at Bletchley Park and is expected to gather world leaders and tech entrepreneurs to address the challenges of “frontier AI” that might cause “significant harm, including the loss of life”. The two-day summit on Nov 1 and 2 is expected to be attended by top lobbyists from the likes of Meta and Google. Kamala Harris, the US vice president, is expected to attend, while a Chinese delegation has been invited. (From TFA) Anyone have pointers / insights on what this might entail and/or produce?
fijiaarone 3y ago
Back in my day, we had to hear about an interesting website from a friend, and then bookmark it — or remember the site name (including the www dot). And if we wanted to see a cat fall off a couch, we had to watch TV on Sunday night, or wait half the night for it to download, and then click page down repeatedly to make the ascii art appear animated — uphill both ways.
lowtech8 3y ago
All of the top search results were generated yesterday, by design. We should be receiving relevant and accurate content, not content that is automatically regenerated constantly with fake intelligence to appear like ‘something new’ in order to game the search engines. I prefer information that has withstood the test if time, not the next thing that popped into some machine’s head.
absoluteunit1 3y ago
I can see why services like Kagi are becoming popular; I never thought I’d consider paying for search in 2023
resuresu 3y ago
The cultural collapse thats killing the internet has nothing to do with google.
rshaban 3y ago
As a former Google Web Search engineer, I agree.
tim333 3y ago
Unpopular opinion I guess but it seems to me the web keeps getting better and the 'spiral of decline' is kind of clickbait. Fair enough there's more junk on it than ever but also more good stuff.

390 points by pg_1234 3y ago

mg 3y ago

Information online is “buried at the bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff”, Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can “sell more adverts”, fuelled by Google’s technology. I think we are at a turning point in this regard. AI can now read through SEO fluff text and ads and present the user with the information they are looking for. Therefore, there will be no more incentive to create those types of sites. The web will change. Into what it will change is yet to be seen. But it will change.

TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
> Therefore, there will be no more incentive to create those types of sites. There will also be no more incentive to create sites with actual useful information since AI will just appropriate it. AI will destroy the source of its training data.
- ramraj07 3y ago
  The sites with actual useful information don’t need much effort to create and maintain. If it was all just wikis it’s perfectly great. The problem only became when “entrepreneurs” realized they can game this system to gain money.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    The sites with actually useful information don't care about AI anyway. There's no way in which LLM being trained or used on them hurts them - if anything, it helps the information become more widely available (which is the goal of such sites anyway). If anything, this reduces the load on the site and expense of hosting it - which is a good thing. Such sites would only be hurt if they somehow derived benefit from marginal reader visiting their site - but this doesn't apply to sites with quality, trustworthy information, as the only such benefits you can get is either ego stroking or earning money by subjecting the visitor to some kind of abuse. For sites doing that, if AI kills them, I call good riddance.
  - onion2k 3y ago
    I'm struggling to think of a site I use regularly that could function without either adverts or someone else (businesses, donations, or the site owner) putting money to fund it, and I honestly can't think of one. The modern internet just wouldn't function if we took entrepreneurship out of it.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Someone has to put some money into everything, but the number can be low enough to be entirely donations. > The modern internet just wouldn't function if we took entrepreneurship out of it. I think the modern internet is specifically what we're all upset about here? That the "entrepreneurship" isn't the grand visions of spaceships and androids and electric driverless cars of Musk, it's not the "app for that" of Jobs, it's not "connecting the world" (who even said that, Zuckerberg?), it's not "organising the world's information" like early Google… it's cramming as many ads as possible into someone's field of view at all times like the villain in Ready Player One.
    - ramraj07 3y ago
      Almost Every single useful site I use is not powered by business. It’s either government funded or donation based.
    - carlosjobim 3y ago
      Better than ads, sites can make money by selling products and services. A website with information on gardening, that also sells the equipment and seeds you need. A website with travel information that also sells tours. A website with any programming and IT information that also sells software. These kind of sites make much better money than ad and affiliate sites, but people haven't understood it yet. The online ad industry – especially on social media – is a huge scam. Small and medium size businesses can't resist throwing in some bucks in the ad casino, and Facebook will tell them they had so many thousands of impressions, funny that it didn't turn into any sales? Online ads are also very comfortable and easy for some worthless manager who has a set advertising budget. Just throw away the money into social media ads instead of thinking through a campaign.
      - 3y ago
- tomjen3 3y ago
  Wikipedia is not going to stop. Your local cinema is not going to stop posting movies and show times on their website. The only sites that are going to be hit by this are those that make money on ads.
  - onion2k 3y ago
    My local cinema doesn't have a website. It uses social media instead.
  - TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
    Wikipedia doesn't cover everything. > The only sites that are going to be hit by this are those that make money on ads. There are plenty of those and they do provide value - else they won't have been able to survive all these years via ads.
    - tomjen3 3y ago
      There are plenty of sites, but would you rather follow a link to one of them, or to a personal blog with info about the same thing?
      - TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
        > would you rather follow a link to one of them, or to a personal blog with info about the same thing? Either one is OK frankly, as long as I get the information I need. Depending on my confidence level in the accuracy of the information on those sites, I might even visit both to compare and contrast. Regardless, both are unlikely to survive without ads. Most people don't run their own web server to host a blog - most people don't know, and don't want to know, how. Even if hosting isn't a problem for blogs, I think the amount of blogging will drop. Who would want spend a week crafting a blog detailing their experiences with something and what they have learned then get next to no views because some AI appropriated their content and stole all your viewers? With few visitors, probably just search engine and AI crawlers, and no comments on their blog posts ... it's hard not to feel that it's just a wasting time.
TaylorAlexander 3y ago
> AI can now read through SEO fluff text and ads and present the user with the information they are looking for. Little comfort when so much of that fluff is now being AI generated. There becomes a point at which we dilute the quality of the information on the web so much, the detail is just lost. AI generating summaries of AI generated garbage is not going to create a better web. I’ve been reading AP News recently, directly on their website, and the site is so riddled with ads it’s hard to read the articles. We are truly breaking the internet.
- jdblair 3y ago
  We're heading into a future where text is generated by language models, then other language models are used to generate summaries for human consumption. We will drown in AI bullshit and then use more AI to try and extract the meaningful kernel.
  - scary-size 3y ago
    What was it about the internet being five big sites filled with screenshots from the other four…? Let’s turn that up to 11.
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    Yeah. If we can “solve” AI and make systems that develop genuine knowledge, then we will be okay. But that may never happen and we may find ourselves stuck at the current “bullshit generator” phase and if that happens the internet is absolutely fucked.
    - plonk 3y ago
      Search engines are fucked in that scenario. Maybe we'll just need better-curated ones, or a better ranking (usefulness ratings by verified users?). And anyone can still create a website, so you can escape the AI flood. But if Google failed to defend against SEO before LLMs, maybe the scale of the current search engines is just too big for effective moderation and we need to scale down to smaller communities.
pjmlp 3y ago
It already changed on the mobile space, native apps have reclaimed what the browser took away on the desktop. Ironically many Web sites packed as Web widgets are no different from the same site being delivered from the Webserver.
joosters 3y ago
> AI can now read through SEO fluff text and ads and present the user with the information they are looking for. So? Google can do that too. They just choose not to, for profit reasons. AI can (presumably) also do that. But will AI companies instead choose profit? Of course they will.
- manmal 3y ago
  They already do, ChatGPT Plus is a monthly subscription. If they add ads or product placement, people will start self-hosting transformers, at least for website summarizing.
  - LtWorf 3y ago
    It requires competence and time to self host.
    - manmal 3y ago
      At this moment, yes. A few more hardware cycles and those can be run in a browser plug-in.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> Therefore, there will be no more incentive to create those types of sites. Incentive is still there; scoundrels trying to make easy money on the Internet will adapt. Before, they tailored their SEO spam to fool Google's search crawlers and ranking algorithms. Now, they'll tailor their spam to fool LLMs. There's a well-established adversarial approach for this too. The LLM works as a discriminator, your job is to train/tune a generative model that fools the discriminator. If you can do it semi-reliably, you can put an API in front of it and sell it as "prompt injector as a service", and rake in the money. Couple more people do that, and all the ex-SEO scoundrels can get back to poisoning the commons for the highest bidder. (Open source, like always, will come to "help", and let any small scamgency run their own "mix ads into content" models locally.) The web will indeed change. But LLMs are like any other tool - they can be used for both good and for ill, and those using it for ill have much more money and drive. So I don't expect the change to be for the better; the tech is different, but the incentives and (severe deficiency of) ethics of the main players are still the same.
- mattlondon 3y ago
  They can fool LLMs sure, but to what end? They need the traffic on their site to sell the ads - poisoning a LLM's response does not directly drive traffic to their individual site, so they won't profit. I don't think that some random SEO outfit has much more money than Google or OpenAI or Microsoft - they're not going to be able to "DoS" (as it were) a LLM to trick people to come to their site and click ads.
onetokeoverthe 3y ago
[dead]
quickthrower2 3y ago
AI has been trying to do this for ages. It is a classification problem not language generation so LLMs were not needed (and may be too expensive for billions of pages) It is a cat and mouse game
_Algernon_ 3y ago
Maybe. But the level of effort required to produce the drivel in the first place will also be lowered dramatically. How the overall balance will change is questionable at this point.

calrain 3y ago

This is why I use ChatGPT and Kagi over Google search now.

danielbln 3y ago
Same, but perplexity.ai for me. Search enabled LLMs that can slog through the search results for me is where it's at.
- gonzo41 3y ago
  But LLM's don't really do that. They take the shape and context of your prompt and respond with a corresponding shape of text. But im sure there's some hybrid in the works that will be very helpful soon.
  - danielbln 3y ago
    I'm not sure I follow, those hybrids exist today, I mentioned one of them. They tend to fire search queries, extract the content over multiple hops and inject it into the LLM prompt for evaluation and summary.
- YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
  If they appear to work now, it's because the SEO leeches haven't found them yet. If they ever become popular, they'll get inundated with garbage too.
- Varloom 3y ago
  Why I have never heard of perplexity.ai Just tried it, so good and fast.
  - danielbln 3y ago
    Not to sound like a total shill, but if you subscribe they let you switch the underlying llm to GPT-4 or Claude-2, which gives it some more oomph on more complex reasoning tasks. The free model is already quite good for research though.

tehlike 3y ago

It feels a bit hypocritical to bash on the company that acquired your startup.

junofan 3y ago
In the words of Sundar Pichai: “can we change the settings of this group to history-off”
tester756 3y ago
Fortunely being hypocritical doesnt imply that you're wrong
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
I feel it shouldn't be a problem if personal life and belief is different than professional life. I also wouldn't deny tens of millions of dollars even if it comes from someone I hate.
anonymous_sorry 3y ago
I'd rather people spoke the truth as they see it, rather than being forever silenced by a big payday. The issue he raises wasn't really a thing in 2014. 9 years later, he can't raise problems? Google search is awful now. And Google search has a big effect on the health of the web. The more people recognise it, the better.
js8 3y ago
Why it would be hypocritical? Living in capitalism is not hypocritical, it's the reality. Assuming capitalism works the way it's proponents are saying it works, it doesn't matter who you sell the company to - the market will find the optimum regardless. If you're making a sub-optimal decision to sell company to someone else, the free market should self-correct this. So if you believe in capitalism, your individual moral decisions do not matter. On the other hand, if you don't believe in capitalism, then it is not hypocritical to play by the rules of the system while campaigning for the system to change, because you want the rules to affect everyone, not just you.
- 3y ago

jonatron 3y ago

As an example, google are knowingly profiting from rip-offs: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56886957 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56886957 Why are there still three ads before the official government site if I search for "apply esta"?

brucethemoose2 3y ago
> Why are there still three ads before the official government site if I search for "apply esta"? Because it is profitable. Google is amazingly capable of solving problems that risk their bottom line.

ramraj07 3y ago

It’s not just Google. The idea of a search engine leading to web pages with useful information itself has existed long enough to be gamed to the bottom. A new paradigm has to emerge and take over. The LLMs seem like the first real viable alternative but I feel like we are still in the lycos days of this paradigm.

Jensson 3y ago
How do I publish data to an LLM? I don't see how it solves the issues the open web solved, so it doesn't seem like a good replacement to a search engine.
- ramraj07 3y ago
  As I said we are still in the Lycos era of this paradigm. But I’m not sure what you mean, the LLM is the index of the entire internet, so not sure why it’s hard to imagine it becoming a much smarter answering machine (answers being either the actual answer or a link to a website that’s actually useful).
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    > LLM is the index of the entire internet It is certainly not an index of the entire internet. Web scraping is a tool to make LLMs "smarter" and better at speaking, but they are not a web archive, not even a reasonably lossy one. Honestly they are a poor substitute for Google, even when augmented with a vectorDB or (hypothetically) some kind of confidence metric, when the information is not immediately verifiable.

mobilio 3y ago

https://archive.md/fQPTD https://archive.md/fQPTD

znpy 3y ago
Thanks a lot!
heresie-dabord 3y ago
Thank you. Let's recognise the irony of your link. The need for ^^^ such services is a symptom of the problem. We are all taking measures to circumvent the rubbish. I don't believe that every link that I click should contribute revenue to any billion-dollar corpocracy. I definitely do not want rubbish content to be intermingled with valid information. This is not the Internet that we want. If an entity wants money from me, let it prove its value from the basic requirement of quality.
- tim333 3y ago
  I think the main reason for the link is to circumvent the Telegraph's pay wall? In a way we are the problem - if we won't pay then newspapers have to get money for their staff salaries from somewhere.
  - heresie-dabord 3y ago
    > In a way we are the problem [...] newspapers have to get money for their staff salaries from somewhere I understand your argument and I want to respond. I like a good discussion. Yes of course the news business needs money. The modern economy is not the fault of the news business or its customers. The paper-based news business is almost dead. The Advertising Business quit funding the paper-based news business in order to optimise for an empire of Web-based surveillance and profit. We know even by casual observation that the online advertising business is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. [0] (Read the preceding line again, just for the effect of scale.) Social media aggregates news content because people want news. The news business knows it needs a revenue stream from on-line advertising. The lack of direct traffic to news sites does not mean that people do not want news. Subscriptions could be part of a solution but a) using a paywall is often meaningless to international visitors, and b) the fact is that subscriptions don't scale. Users of the Web and social media find their news via the aggregation provided by Google, Meta, and Xitter. These companies mine user data for profit. These companies are opposed to paying for news content. [3] It's estimated that 30%-40% of users block advertising somehow. [1] Even if we accept this number for the sake of discussion, I doubt that this equates to a direct 30%-40% loss of revenue for a news site. To judge from Firefox's share of usage, a "privacy-focused browser" that is free as in beer isn't anywhere near a major concern for most people. [2] Advertising revenue is easy money. The sad fact is that advertising, market segmentation, and data surveillance have all optimised for enshittification of the Web. Quality of news content or search content be damned! If paywalls won't scale in the modern economy, should the only option be enshittification of content by the insidious advertising business (not to mention filler content -- generated or copy-pasta -- to feed click-bait)? In summary, People want and need news, but Google and Meta are definitely unwilling to pay for being the world's aggregators of news content. [3] Subscriptions don't scale and can't compete with revenue from the Advertising Empire. [0] Don't blame users for not being a multi-billion dollar source of revenue for these obscenely profitable companies. - - - [0] _ https://www.statista.com/statistics/237974/online-advertising-spending-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/237974/online-advertisin... [1] _ https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/ad-blocking/ https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/ad-blocking/ [2] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers [3] _ https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/30/google-to-block-canadian-news-outlets-from-search-results-in-canada.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/30/google-to-block-canadian-new... [4] https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/ad-blocking/ https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/ad-blocking/ _ "As consumers use ad blockers, the tech makes it harder for advertisers to track and measure their ad campaigns, which could negatively affect advertising revenues."

dageshi 3y ago

The web thrived for a decent number of years with ads before it began to really spiral down. For me the biggest cause of that spiral was the shift from most users using desktops to most users using mobile to interact with google. In the desktop search world, google used to respond with large comprehensive articles on subjects that not just answered peoples questions but also educated them on the subject around their question. This was the golden age so to speak, it answered your question along with 10 others on a subject but also helped you to understand if your question was even the right one in the first place. With mobile, google shifted to trying to directly answer the question you asked and nothing else, presumably because people were far less willing to read large articles on mobile and just wanted fast answers. This latter approach is much easier to SEO garbage than the original that took real knowledge and effort to write.

ad404b8a372f2b9 3y ago
The salvation of the web lies in banning all the normies and mobile users.
_ahxg 3y ago
And here we have the tyranny of the marginal user as posted here a while ago =/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507
onetokeoverthe 3y ago
[dead]
pentae 3y ago
These days most non technical people just have their phone and live inside the FB/IG/TT/X/Gmail/Google apps on their phones and don't even go on the web. And app developers are doing everything to keep them inside the app with a crappy in-app browser which also benefits the Apple/Google app store ecosystem. Apples intention with Safari was inside the name. "Safari - you're in the African jungle, theres lions and tigers, be careful, probably best avoided." They don't want you using it. Download an app and pay us 30% instead. And that's what people do. Convenience-seeking users don't really seem to care. Why bother with desktops and even google search when they have apps on their phone to do stuff. Nobody even trusts the web anymore because of all the SEO content spam and potential to be scammed. If you were Google making billions a year off the app ecosystem because its a superior experience.. wouldn't your incentive be to make web as bad as possible?

leobg 3y ago

Recipe blogs are the most horrible example. The amount of BS you have to scroll through to get to the actual recipe.

progbits 3y ago
I've recently noticed a lot of them have a "skip to the recipe" link on top which just scrolls down. Kind of ridiculous.
toastal 3y ago
Often, I like getting the context & history of a recipe. When researching foreign dishes these things help me understand a lot about what might be acceptable ingredient substitutes.
- toastal 3y ago
  I guess I’m in the minority. Wow.
walthamstow 3y ago
Any recipe that shows up on the first page of Google is shit anyway, IMO/IME. There are maybe four or five websites I trust with recipes, anything else I get from a book.
Gareth321 3y ago
“I know you’d like this recipe for potato salad, but first, let’s explore the history of the humble potato. Where did it come from? What is its cultural significance? Could this mighty spud someday change the world? Hi, I’m Leslie Snark, and I’ve travelled the world eating delicious food to bring you the best recipes.”
- evertedsphere 3y ago
  "But before we finally get to the recipe, I'm sure you're dying to know many languages my grandmother knew the word for 'potato' in. Excellent question! In 1710, according to what I've been able to find out from my Ancestry.com results [affiliate link], my great-uncle's ..."

znpy 3y ago

Had to spend some good 5 minutes to unaccept all default cookies settings… only to see a fucking paywall. I’ll add the telegraph to the list of websites I don’t bother opening, next time it’s either archive link or I don’t care what they have to say.

happytiger 3y ago

Enshitification. Of the entire Internet. Thats Google at this point. https://www.communication-generation.com/enshitification/ https://www.communication-generation.com/enshitification/ https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

tannhaeuser 3y ago

US antitrust turning a blind eye towards the aggregation into FAANG (or was it conflict of interest?) also made this possible. Specifically, Google's acquisition of DoubleClick alone (then the largest ad network) created a monopoly and closed vertical supply chain network along with AdWords/Google Search. But then Google also controls TV (YouTube), devices (Android), and browsers (via Chrome and subverting weak and financially dependent puppet orgs for web standardization and advocacy), and also many services found via Google Search. Something's gotta give.

safety1st 3y ago
I think it might be the web that gives. If you look at the birth of the web and how it became such a phenomenon, what we had back in those days as the dominant platform for end user applications was Win32. It was OK for its time but had limitations the web didn't have, one of the biggest was - you had to get a user to install stuff locally. So what was necessary for the web to take off as an application platform was first some scrappy startups that saw the potential, Netscape creating Javascript was the first real opening salvo. And then when Microsoft realized the threat it went into overdrive and invented DHTML and arguably put more resources into the Web than a startup ever could, and then all this stuff started getting standardized and we got to enjoy 20 years of a new application platform where there was competition to control it and things were somewhat standardized and not totally monopolized. Notably most people just forgot about Win32 and quit building apps with it, which would have been considered unfathomable at the time. Win32 had had its day and faded into something comparatively niche. I don't see why we wouldn't have the same dynamic now if the Web eventually becomes as monopolized and stagnant as Win32 was. Or at least, I think this may be more likely than the Web somehow getting rescued by regulators or anyone else.

donatj 3y ago

I wrote a not-very-coherent in retrospect article about 12 years ago while working for an SEO firm about how SEO was killing the internet. The basis being companies were creating pages and blog posts specifically to target keywords without actually having coherent things to say on the topic. Moreover people within Google like Matt Cutts seemed to be at the time if not outright encouraging it, at the very least giving pointers on how to game the system. This strikes me as more relevant than ever, and I have to imagine the growth of large language models is only going to amplify this practice dramatically. Beyond that, the way Google now ranks pages based on how well they fit their pretty limited definition of working on mobile and how “fast they load” has done exactly zero to promote quality content. I use quotes because I have worked on ad-ridden super slow SPA’s that manage higher scores than super fast static sites.

ryanjshaw 3y ago
> the growth of large language models is only going to amplify this practice dramatically. Do you mean LLMs will be used to generate more SEO content that is irrelevant? Doesn't it work both ways? You can use LLMs to filter out irrelevant content better than ever? A lot of the time I use ChatGPT-4 it's as a search engine - and I don't even mean with the Browser plugin, I mean it's quicker to ask ChatGPT-4 for its encoded knowledge than to Google and click on links.
- MourYother 3y ago
  GPT4 is trained on mostly garbage optimised for SEO though.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    If general AI, let's call it Heavenweb or Netsky, comes along and it is based on the knowledge of the internet I am not that worried so. GPT4 is trained on SEO crap, parts of it have been propably already written using GPT3. So by the time Skynet comes along, it will assume the bot-to-bot SEO crap content to be actually true, SEO contebt written by AI for AI trained on AI created SEO content. Eith that, Skynet would never be able to achieve anything, no decent scrambled egg let alone a T-100.

xkcd1963 3y ago

It's not like we can't use the internet without google.

brucethemoose2 3y ago
People will largely fall back to other "lazy" search methods (like just asking ChatGPT (and getting a confidant wrong answer) or searching TikTok or YouTube (and getting a influencer with bad information)) rather than some more rigorous search method.

Havoc 3y ago

Bit of a shaky title It's the ad driven model (and resulting SEO) not google specificly. Though they are of course at the forefront of that.

_8j50 3y ago

Perhaps the internet being saturated by the general global public who are very tribal and huddle around their bubble sites is the root cause here. Google, Facebook,etc... are just reacting. People huddle around HN for example like they do on reddit,fb, insta, telegram,discord,vk,yt,bilibili,etc... Before the mobile users' eternal september, I used to find myself searching for sites to hang out at. I can't remember the last time I signed up to a sight to commune with users. Especially, now I am very careful because there are a lot of bad actors and it's impossible to actually be pseudonymous. TLD's were supposed to help with this over commercialization of the internet. .com and .co were supposed to be exclusive to commerical sites, all the blogs,forums,etc... were supposed to be on .org and .net, these days a TLD is like a vanity license plate.

reducesuffering 3y ago

It's going to get worse. Here's a great primer on the problem we're facing, written by a Google -> OpenAI engineer. "I think that being able to automatically produce arbitrary content that is indistinguishable from human-generated content at scale is the death knell of the web as we know it." https://nonint.com/2023/03/09/gpt-might-be-an-information-virus/ https://nonint.com/2023/03/09/gpt-might-be-an-information-vi...

Roark66 3y ago

>The criticism of his former employer came as Mr Suleyman told the Telegraph about plans for a new international body to monitor AI threats. I hope they first threat they choose to monitor is the monopolisation of the AI services, all while the huge monopolies preach about "the dangers of ai" to increase the barriers to entry for the small guy (we all know disappearance of open source models and a ban on sale of hardware capable of running them to individuals is their most desirable wet dream).

nullc 3y ago
Exactly. The real AI danger is the people who make the most noise about the dangers of AI.
blitzar 3y ago
Those who can do, those who can't become regulators (those who can't but have deep pockets and reputations to uphold beg to become the regulators)

_the_inflator 3y ago

I am always a bit cautious, when I listen to arguments from competitors, who compete with Google. Is it an argument or marketing speech? First of all, Google is not the internet. Is providing search results a challenging business? Yes. Could do Google do a better job? Yes, so could do others. The fact, that Bing does not gain market share even though pushing everything ChatGPT related may confirms this notion. Content and consumer habits changed. In the 90th, website where dominated by text. Compared to today, every page that was suggested by Google resembled a book. Today most websites look like easy to consume snippets due to lower attention span, less time. Then came Twitter, TikTok, Facebook etc. So I would not blame Google in the first place. Will ChatGPT replace Google? Not entierly, but they are working on it. Will we say the same ("ChatGPT send LLMs into 'spiral of decline'") about ChatGPT in 10-15 years from now? Maybe.

bmitc 3y ago
> First of all, Google is not the internet. Google's use of AMP disagrees. With Google pushing AMP on users, it's possible you never leave Google. And while.Google might not be the Internet, in general, it does have undue influence on it. > Could do Google do a better job? Yes, so could do others. The fact, that Bing does not gain market share even though pushing everything ChatGPT related may confirms this notion. That's a strange take. Google has a monopoly and abuses that power.

blitzar 3y ago

Google "gave me a massive pile of money", claims DeepMind co-founder

orangepurple 3y ago
He did it for "thirty pieces of silver"

rightbyte 3y ago

Mustafa got it wrong. "Click bait" is not the problem. A click bait is an article on the form "Famous celeb did this outrageous thing" where both the celebs name and the thing is not in the title. The point is to make the reader open the article to see what celeb did what and get more ad views. Most readers wont read the article anyway, so it is just enshitification of the user interface. I believe ads in them self are the root problem. It sets up the incentives wrong, where the product being sold are the readers, not the article.

mupuff1234 3y ago

Wasn't he kicked out of deepmind due to toxic behavior and bullying?

beej71 3y ago
I don't know, but that's ad hominem in terms of his argument.

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berkes 3y ago

I'd like to see some experiments with Search engines that rank on things that are hard or impossible to game. Impossible in the sense that the search-engine controls this variable entirely. Like "age of the article" through "time we saw it first & how much it changed since". Or like "churn", through "how often we saw new content come and go". Anything that users or owners control, will be gamed. So maybe there are variables that only the search-engine itself controls that still provide adequate or good ranking?

halflings 3y ago
But that is exactly what search engines do. Yet people find a way to game these "impossible to game" metrics. For example: "age of the article": search engines value recent content => suddenly you start seeing articles published just weeks/months ago reviewing some rather old piece of hardware/content. Either a full repost under a different URL with a different title etc., or just an incremental (probably automated) update of an older page.
- berkes 3y ago
  I probably wasn't clear. I truly meant "impossible to game". If I crawl your site today, encounter article A, and crawl it again in a year and again encounter article A, I am sure that article A is a year old (Well, techcnically, what I am certain of, is that I encountered the exact same article two times a year apart). You cannot game that. Now if another year later I encounter article A' where some content on the page has changed, be it sidebars, a new design, or a few paragraphs, I might say, "some version of this article is two years old" and decide to rank that different from "this exact version is two years old". Age is just one variable that I can think off. I'm quite certain there are more variables. But each and every one such variable must be completely controlled and verified by me- the search engine. Nothing external can be such a variable: not "amount of articles that link to X" nor "amount of people that click through". Maybe such variables don't exist. Or maybe they do, but make for terrible ranking, IDK. But I do know that using variables that search-engines don't control make for a terrible search experience over time. As can be witnessed and as is written down in the linked article.

wzdd 3y ago

Not that I disagree, but "I spent 5 years helping Google achieve its market dominance and mindshare, was accused of bullying employees, left quietly a few months later, and am now trashing it in the press as part of the marketing process for my next startup" doesn't have quite the clout it could have.

aabhay 3y ago
Exactly. Feels like such a blatant PR stunt to advertise (ironically) for his next company
Freedom5093 3y ago
Wasn't he was fired or asked to leave from DeepMind, then Google? I interviewed at Inflection (his startup), and my interview with him (final stage, founder interview) was the worst interview I've ever had. He did no small talk, he immediately (and awkwardly) asked a question off his question list. It lasted 15 minutes. I was immediately put off by his questions, wondering if I should just hang up now. His co-founder interview was not as bad, but still asked an awkward question. They definitely want you to work very hard, including sacrificing your personal life. The product itself (Pi, the assistant) doesn't seem to have traction. Has anyone found it useful?
danpalmer 3y ago
I met him, he was an investor in my previous company and I gave him a tour of the product. Very cold, a little disinterested, and remarkably un-insightful for someone in his position. Your summary strikes me as fitting my expectations.

jsemrau 3y ago

The Internet is on a death-spiral as much as Western Civilisation is on a decline.

SettembreNero 3y ago
Except that for the internet is a bad thing

dalbasal 3y ago

"Search results plagued with ‘clickbait’ would have been an understatement 20 years ago. The parts of the open web you access from Google/search (most of it) is almost entirely made-for-google' ranking algorithims. The situation is worse than it is on closed social media, including Google's YouTube. Professional YouTubers are also making content for rankings above all, but the fact that it's their own face/voice keeps some of the rot at bay. Google is literally content made by uninterested copywriters exclusively for Google rankings. I was recently looking for general travel advice on Google. I found it completely impossible. The content is all written by people (or ais) that had never visited. Everything reads like a middle school essay. I often resort to searches in a smaller language, where economic incentives are 100X smaller than English. Google created incentives for littering the web with garbage. Then they took away incentives for anyone else to even bother. Google killed the thing that gave them life. They gave Vince Serf a sinecure and a hows-your-mother for the rest. Thieves.

medion 3y ago
Amen.
jorvi 3y ago
“site:reddit.com” saves the day, but I feel very uneasy doing so ever since they did their nasty API + demodding ploy.
- seydor 3y ago
  It's odd that reddit has not surpassed google in profits
- V1ndaar 3y ago
  Honestly, the "golden days" of using reddit for that purpose are over, too. Both the fact that random other crap comes up due to how stuff is linked on reddit and generally most search engines being too lenient with your search terms and finally more and more conversation going to discord and other places that cannot be searched. It really is one of the most unfortunate things of the modern internet. :(

nologic01 3y ago

> Mr Suleyman said chatbots could “take on Google” by providing more accurate information than internet search. Excuse me for no longer taking any tech influencer promises at face value. More accurately, for taking them at zero value. Tell me first 1) your real business model and 2) how other actors will respond to your business model Enough with the half-truths and dishonesty.

mark_l_watson 3y ago
While I find Suleyman‘s ideas interesting (and years ago I worked with one of his Deepmind co-founders) he seems like a statist and a corporatist, through and through. Nothing wrong with that, we all have our ideas and ways of doing business, but I prefer, openness, open source, open LLMs, etc. I decided to not buy Suleyman‘s new book because we have such different world views, even though I find the topic interesting.

seydor 3y ago

Google created SEO and has an interest to keep increasing the size and cost of SEO because the cost of SEO is directly related to the cost of their Ads (which are the best kind of SEO) That doesnt mean that the content of the internet is usless, but it is now buried under 3 pages of useless SEO blubber

brucethemoose2 3y ago
> That doesnt mean that the content of the internet is usless, but it is now buried under 3 pages of useless SEO blubbe Personally, I stopped posting some useful findings in forums and other places. Why bother, when the sites are zombified or enshittified? Also, I used to write small tech articles for a hard hitting PC hardware site. Garbage SEO (and Youtube) ran the whole site out of business. I am a sample size of one, but this feels like a microcosm of what's happening to the web. Some of that good content is dying.

AJRF 3y ago

This guy is such a big mouth. Very obvious he is cozying up to British politicians to further his own goals. Saying "Big Tech Bad" is a surefire hit among that crowd.

matheusmoreira 3y ago

I agree but the root cause isn't Google, it's advertising in all its forms, Google's ads just happen to be the most profitable ones. Kill advertising and the web will be fixed automatically and permanently. Using uBlock Origin is everyone's duty towards a better web. It should come pre-installed in Firefox.

firtoz 3y ago
You may be interested in trying Brave. Though that's using chromium and therefore connected to Google, kind of? Would be curious to hear the community's thoughts on this tbh.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  I use both Brave and Firefox on mobile. I'm using Brave right now.
- _lvbh 3y ago
  If it wasn’t for all the crypto bloat, Brave would be nice to use. Every time I install it, I got to spend a few minutes toggling all the settings and disabling everything. I use Librewolf not because of the fingerprinting stuff but because it just has sane defaults.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  Cromite is the bee's knees on Android and Windows. I don't like/trust Brave for a number of reasons, and not just the crypto thing. Hijacking innocuous ads is another big one.
- aktenlage 3y ago
  Because chrome-based Browsers are used by the large majority of web users, Google can (and does) easily change the web experience for its own profit, by adding, removing, or changing the functionality in chrome. Having the majority of users gives Google this power. As long as you use a chrome based browser, you are still part of that.
mycologos 3y ago

clnq 3y ago

It has become quite difficult to find experts on Google. Google is probably catering to the "entertainment" category of reader now more than it was in 2013. This opinion stems from my experience. And my experience is that I'm an old school technical blogger who writes articles certainly not for the "entertainment" crowd, but for the professional crowd. My readership stays high from Monday to Friday and drops to nearly zero over the weekend. Over the last 10 years, I have observed that my readers come from referrers like Google.com or Google.de less frequently. I would say that I get about 20 times fewer readers from Google. However, Google still constitutes about 90% of my readership, down from perhaps 97% to 99%. These are the facts, looking at my analytics. The other 10% come from DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yandex, Bitbucket, MS Teams, ChatGPT, Perplexity.ai, Atlassian, Swarm, Ecosia, topical forums, and company domains. The share of readership from sources other than Google used to be closer to 1% - 3% in the past. From my experience as a user of Google, I also find it much more difficult to find experts in any given field. About a decade ago, I would find so many more hard-boiled technical blogs. Now, the mid-level college essay-style knowledge is much more promoted. This shift makes sense for Google as an ad company, even if it harms everyone, future Google included. With all that said, here are my conclusions, based in the reality of my own technical blog and its readership -- Google is worse for the technical crowd, which is now more likely to share technical resources by word of mouth (like Atlassian, Swarm, Teams, topical forums and company domains) or find them with other search engines. Google's effectiveness has not significantly diminished, as it still accounts for 90% of the way people reach my technical blog, so it might still be very functional for this purpose. Challenger search engines appear to have gained a significant stake in the tech crowd, a contrast to the scenario 10 years ago. But it seems like the decline of Google is a bit catastrophized. These are only thoughts from my perspective, though they are grounded in some objective metrics.

nologic01 3y ago
A lot of people would corroborate your statistics and observations. The problem is that there is no "entertainment" category of reader. Just different domains and special interests. Nobody likes accessing the internet with a low signal to noise ratio or fighting cut-and-paste "AI" websites that have been engineered to rank on Google.

DoingIsLearning 3y ago

This reminds of Palihapitiya "regreting" helping Facebook become the social media beast it is today and all the social damage it has caused. They somehow never grapple with these ethical issues when getting payed. Edit: I don't disagree but feels hypocritical and obviously on a newspaper to advertise their new ventures.

sharas- 3y ago

did you also get a popup suggesting you login with google just after this article loaded?

nabla9 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification Enshittification, also known as platform decay,[1] is a way to describe the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that act as two-sided markets. The term enshittification was coined by Cory Doctorow in January 2023 in a blog post, later republished as an article in Wired, in which he wrote: Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

fredgrott 3y ago

Most do not know that Google search has an API to turn into a programmable topical search engine...see https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/topical https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/topical Basics is that you create a programmable search engine starting with this tutorial https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/tutorial/introduction https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/tutorial/in... I have played with it and does seem somewhat useful enough for me to create my own custom search engine using Google's API for my own needs.

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Josh613 3y ago

I'm working on a search engine. One foundational difference is that we care about People Rank (TM), not Page Rank. josh@sirch.org if you'd like to join us.

danpalmer 3y ago
And what is "People Rank"?

spandextwins 3y ago

Google has evolved into clickbait bullshit, AI will replace it. Just do a Google search for how to make chicken pot pie. All the links are crap clickbait.

wuming2 3y ago

I never understood people writing as there were, or are, no alternatives. For ad professionals perhaps or for content providers. Of any quality. But as a consumer all I needed to leave Goog was to try a few other search engines and settle on the one returning results closest to what I wanted. Then tapped Settings > Safari > Search Engine and made my choice. Years ago now.

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christophilus 3y ago

I remember a time when I thought P2P was the future. BitTorrent, Napster, etc. With YouTube’s recent moves, I wonder if we’ll see a resurgence in those ideas. Hosting costs are not (much of) a problem with that kind of model, so the need for advertising to pay hosting costs is greatly diminished. But, then without a centralized system, you’ll have the dark web everywhere. I wonder if there’s a way to set up a network that incentivizes quality? I have no ideas about how to do that.

mark_l_watson 3y ago
Maybe Mastodon?

nojvek 3y ago

Without paywall https://web.archive.org/web/20231015070154/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/10/14/google-internet-spiral-of-decline-deepmind-mustafa-suleyman/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231015070154/https://www.teleg...

Hnrobert42 3y ago

I am interested to here what Kagi users think. Kagi is searching the same web. If the web is now garbage, then I wouldn’t expect improved search to yield improved results.

beej71 3y ago
It's about the ordering of the results, but also about finding rare information. I found a link to the age of a very minor lava flow in Oregon on the third link on Kagi. The answer was nowhere on the first 3 pages of Google, which is where I stopped looking. If you deprioritize stuff that works for Google's SEO, you'll get different (better) results.

ravenstine 3y ago

Though I'm usually more than happy to bash The Google for what it is, I think focusing on their role here distracts from the big picture. As a civilization, we have forgotten how to do search. Maybe that's in large part due to over-reliance on The Google, but in any case, we've collectively chosen to not only replace search with "algorithms" but grossly underpower any remaining shred of search that still exists. Ask yourself when was the last time you used any search engine anywhere and came away feeling empowered by the tool in front of you. Maybe this is a feeling that few if any young people today understand. Back in the early days of the web, search engines, even the lousiest ones, made the user feel like all the world's information was at their fingertips. If a query returned few relevant matches, it probably meant your query wasn't good. In other words, search was a power tool. Virtually every form of search engine today, whether it's The Google or a search function on a specific site, is embarrassingly stuck in the past. But it's much worse than that. Not only have there been virtually no meaningful advancements in advanced search features, but the search engines are often not capable of correctly handling basic queries. There are pages I know exist that contain certain verbiage, and my default expectation today is to expect a search engine to not be able to find it. Apparently software developers, or perhaps companies themselves, are so disinterested in search that they won't even use Elasticsearch. Whatever they're doing, they're doing incorrectly. At best, they're doing what was adequate in 2005. By now, search should have become far more advanced. Instead, search engines today fall somewhere between being a mess of algorithmic results plus ads or something barely at the level of a CS student project. Although I like the Kagi search engine, its primary differentiator from other search engines is its ability to filter out the detritus. In terms of results and advanced search capabilities, it's not necessarily that much better in other regards.

lowtech8 3y ago

What ever happened to directory sites, with lists of links to other sites? I think this would be a good way to keep the web alive. I miss finding good web directories…

electrondood 3y ago

It's not just Google, it's any service that shows you a you-shaped bubble, based on your prior interactions.

dredmorbius 3y ago

The meat of this seems to be an upcoming UK AI safety summit: The UK’s AI Safety Summit is due to take place at Bletchley Park and is expected to gather world leaders and tech entrepreneurs to address the challenges of “frontier AI” that might cause “significant harm, including the loss of life”. The two-day summit on Nov 1 and 2 is expected to be attended by top lobbyists from the likes of Meta and Google. Kamala Harris, the US vice president, is expected to attend, while a Chinese delegation has been invited. (From TFA) Anyone have pointers / insights on what this might entail and/or produce?

fijiaarone 3y ago

Back in my day, we had to hear about an interesting website from a friend, and then bookmark it — or remember the site name (including the www dot). And if we wanted to see a cat fall off a couch, we had to watch TV on Sunday night, or wait half the night for it to download, and then click page down repeatedly to make the ascii art appear animated — uphill both ways.

lowtech8 3y ago

All of the top search results were generated yesterday, by design. We should be receiving relevant and accurate content, not content that is automatically regenerated constantly with fake intelligence to appear like ‘something new’ in order to game the search engines. I prefer information that has withstood the test if time, not the next thing that popped into some machine’s head.

absoluteunit1 3y ago

I can see why services like Kagi are becoming popular; I never thought I’d consider paying for search in 2023

resuresu 3y ago

The cultural collapse thats killing the internet has nothing to do with google.

rshaban 3y ago

As a former Google Web Search engineer, I agree.

tim333 3y ago

Unpopular opinion I guess but it seems to me the web keeps getting better and the 'spiral of decline' is kind of clickbait. Fair enough there's more junk on it than ever but also more good stuff.