7 ms·

This is kinda crazy considering the tremendous effort Google has gone to over the decades to shave milliseconds off their response time. They invented a whole T

by wrs 2y ago

This is kinda crazy considering the tremendous effort Google has gone to over the decades to shave milliseconds off their response time. They invented a whole TCP replacement to reduce page latency, and now this?

h2odragon 2y ago
"happy users" has not been on google's priority list for a long, long time. 20 years or more.
- phreeza 2y ago
  Google is not a monolith, there are plenty of people at Google trying to make a good user experience.
  - buildsjets 2y ago
    The cafeteria ladies?
  - _hcuq 2y ago
    Google is evil. Sorry. It is driving people mad via the YouTube algorithms. And it is destroying democracy.
    - FredPret 2y ago
      Which democracies have descended into dictatorships because of Google? All Youtube does is feed me engineering and astronomy videos. It's actually improving my life. Your algorithm is a reflection of you.
      - Alupis 2y ago
        > Your algorithm is a reflection of you. This is objectively false. "The" algorithm is designed to maximize engagement - so you will be shown content you are most likely to watch, click, listen to the most. As it turns out, "Outrage Porn" is highly engaging... Scroll through enough YouTube Shorts, and just like TikTok, your "algorithm" slowly but surely reduces to outrage porn. All paths lead to outrage porn. All of them...
        supriyo-biswas 2y ago
        n=1, but I've watch a fair bit of Youtube shorts and this has never happened. The algorithm rewards what you watch, and someone addicted to politics and the culture of outrage around it, will get what they ask for.
        Alupis 2y ago
        It usually starts off with just content you're overtly interested in. Then, they'll sprinkle in random clips every so many scrolls to guard against overfitting the model and getting stale for the user. Some of those random clips are Outrage Porn designed to get a reaction out of you... You scroll past, then scroll back because "wtf did I just see?" - and now you're in. The frequency starts to increase and pretty soon you're shouting at clouds feeling like you're the only one that realizes how crazy everything is... It's hard to keep your feed "clean" and dialed into just things that bring you intellectual stimulation or enjoyment. It's not impossible, but it's quit difficult. You constantly have to realign your algorithm lest it goes off into the weeds.
        marcosdumay 2y ago
        > It's hard to keep your feed "clean" and dialed into just things that bring you intellectual stimulation or enjoyment. The confusion happens because this can be very easy. All it takes is rarely watching youtube. If you only watch a random video here and there, Google won't push all the bullshit at all. So the people watching many videos, getting the shitty recommendations, and complaining that the internet is crazy end-up sounding insane to everybody else.
        silverquiet 2y ago
        I was watching exercises for shoulder tendonitis and it escalated to surgeries of shoulder replacement - it seems to be good at upping the intensity (for lack of a better word) of whatever you're watching regardless of the subject.
        FredPret 2y ago
        The algo will only push outrage on you if you secretly like it enough to spend hours watching that shit. I have consumed more than my fair share of content on Youtube, Instagram, Facebook videos, and TikTok. My timeline is all engineering, spaceships, jumping puppies, and comedians (and not the negative kind). It's an algorithm, it wants you to watch more and click on all the ads. It doesn't care if the world burns, but it also isn't going to push you that way. My statement will only be "objectively false" if the algorithm is somehow programmed for political extremism. In reality, each of us is in the driver's seat. People have been spouting crap since time immemorial - doesn't mean you have to watch it. I would suggest a heavy and sustained dose of puppy videos.
      - AnnoyedComment 2y ago
        [dead]
      - legulere 2y ago
        One example of meta instead of google: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
      - SkyBelow 2y ago
        It ends up being a reflection in the flaws built into humans. We have many vices. Individuals overcome it, but as a group we are susceptible. We have a long history of deciding where to draw the line between exploiting a vice to control someone and where it becomes letting others live while minding ones own business. We might allow alcohol starting around 18-21, but we ban food companies putting certain addicting drugs in their recipes (but yet allowing others, not fully consistent). Where this algorithm's exploit falls is a new area we haven't really decided upon as a society. Is it like adding cocaine to soda or like adding caffeine to soda?
      - mrweasel 2y ago
        > Your algorithm is a reflection of you. Yes and no, you're correct in that it feeds you more of the stuff you engage with, but that's not what it should be going if YouTube cared about the mental well being of it's users. The YouTube algorithm is notorious for not responding to deliberate user input. Say I know that the content I engage with is harmful to my mental health, first step in dealing with the issue. You CANNOT tell YouTube to stop enabling you, even if you try. There are things the algorithm isn't smart enough to understand, or if YouTube is evil, understand that it SHOULD NOT respond to. Example: I wasted a lot of time on Shorts, and videos less than 2 minutes, junk content. So I start hitting "Not interested", the algorithm WILL NOT pick up on the thing these videos have in common, that they are short. You can block channels, that works, except that there are thousands of similar channels which YouTube will then just push instead. What I would like to see is YouTube have settings for: What kind of person do you want to be? And then just push the hell out of relevant content, ignoring any level of engagement. I think everyone knows why YouTube won't be doing that. YouTube is a company, they do what's good for the stock price / profit margin. If it hurts the users, they don't care. It's not that they are evil, they just don't give a crap.
      - gspencley 2y ago
        I'm starting to consider creating different accounts / profiles for my different interests. The problem that I have with YouTube is that it can't know what I'm in the mood for at any given moment and it thinks that if I click on one single video about a sensitive topic that suddenly I want my entire home page to be overrun with recommendations about that. To give a specific example, something that honestly kind of baffles and bothers me is the amount of firearms related videos in my recommendations despite the fact that I never watch them, I don't own any firearms and I keep clicking "Don't Recommend Channel" and they never seem to go away. It has to be because the topic is tangentially related somehow to something I've watched, or maybe people who are into firearms overlap with some of the content I watch. But it's the volume and the non-responsiveness to my feedback that annoys me. Another example: my wife and I enjoy watching the Eurovision Song Contest every year. So naturally we've watched a lot of that content in the days and weeks leading up to it. Obviously the algorithm is going to recommend content related to Eurovision, but my home page is completely flooded with these recommendations to the seeming exclusion of most other stuff that I want to watch. And I keep clicking "Don't Recommend Channel" on the various "reaction" videos that are just feeder content featuring people reacting to the songs and performances ... because I CAN'T STAND reaction videos in general and NEVER watch them. But they keep appearing in the recommendations nonetheless. Recommendation algorithms are a hard problem to solve, for sure. I'm not trying to be unfair to YouTube because I know these recommendations are somehow related to what I do watch. I just know that it feels like 90% of those recommendations miss the mark regardless. YouTube is starting to feel like cable TV these days ("200 channels and nothing to watch") where my wife and I often find ourselves just doom scrolling and refreshing the home page (we watch on our TV) hoping that something we're interested in watching at that moment will appear. Often times nothing does and we go do something else.
        gspencley 2y ago
        Replying to myself because I just thought of a 3rd example that is extremely common for me: news channels. I don't watch news on YouTube, ever. If I see a video from a news outlet I automatically click "Don't Recommend Channel." And I've done that with all of the big major news channels like CNN, Fox News, MSNBC etc. But that doesn't stop videos from local affiliates showing up in a never ending game of whack-a-mole. To be fair these do not tend to "flood" my recommendations. But I want them to go away all together and I can't seem to make that happen.
      - borgdefense 2y ago
        [flagged]
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      Do you have a specific example for Google? The fact that it has been reported by groups like Amnesty International that Facebook helped to enable the ethnic violence in Myanmar makes arguing this sort of point much easier. People want to treat complaints about attention economy companies like they are coming from whiners who just don’t like ad profiles. It is useful to have specific information to remind people of the actual stakes of uncontrolled, personalized propaganda and social manipulation that these companies can enable. So if you have one for Google I’d definitely be interested in adding it to my collection. (I’ll admit some bias, I think they are a little better than Facebook, but that bar is so low, let’s be careful not to trip over it).
      - holonsphere 2y ago
        Some of the best examples are too sensitive to share on this forum. Other things get flagged and reported. Some new topics/sources that squeeze by invite the bots. The best arguments for Google's algorithms making people crazy for lay people would be Aaron Swartz like individuals who just go unknown. I can think of atleast 4 individuals new to me the last 6mo ive discovered who used to cover court cases, ran NGOs, or worked as journalists that have been seemingly swept up in what looks like delusions. Lots of typos, egegious oversights, etc#. Its hard to personify these individuals as theyre hard to reach and anyone w ptsd or whom knows people w ptsd know how hard it is to provide support to someone locked in a fight-or-flight reflex. After a terror/fear/paranoia becomes familiar anything else feels foreign. Human connection becomes scary. Read up on bateson-esque schizomogenisis and reflect on the CIAs relation with the "unabomber".
        kridsdale3 2y ago
        What you’re describing sounds uncannily like the effects of Snow Crash.
    - southernplaces7 2y ago
      Holy shit folks, use a bit of your innate agency, and let others do likewise. Yes, Google, sorry, "Alphabet", is a dirt shitty company that engages in all kinds of ugly corporate and legal practices, but no, the YT algorithm isn't destroying democracy or ruining human thinking. The vast majority of us are cognitive beings with the ability to choose what kind of content we consume, or not. In most cases, people who watch a whole pile of garbage on YT are people who would find some other source of it anyhow and always would have throughout history. Those who can separate wheat from chaff will do so regardless of what the algorithm pushes at them. In fact, they'll generally find their own algo-generated suggestions to be in line with the higher quality they steadily pursue. And quite frankly, there is a great deal of excellent content on YouTube to be found. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Many of the comments here exaggerating the evil of the algo and claiming that it ruins people's minds unless they're "shown better" reek of elitism and an implicit desire to control other's belief/feedback choices for their own good. Aside from this being a morally weak viewpoint, it's also bullshit in a practical sense. The majority of such people with an intellectual superiority complex are little better at avoiding intellectual bias than the average person, they just sometimes learn to disguise it with more sophisticated looking justifications.
  - mateus1 2y ago
    But the good people are being driven out while the good product are being killed.
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    Leave and deliver somewhere it’s possible. You’re never going to win against corporate inertia and management interests at Google.
    - phreeza 2y ago
      Many people actually deliver things that are objectively improvements to user experience, such as latency improvements?
      - toomuchtodo 2y ago
        Serving ads and poor quality search results faster is an objective improvement? Agree to disagree. If the only thing gen AI delivers is killing Google’s search standing, it’ll have served a useful purpose.
        phreeza 2y ago
        Is it a deterioration? I don't disagree that results are getting worse, but I'd still say all else being equal faster results are better than slower results.
        toomuchtodo 2y ago
        https://mashable.com/article/google-search-low-quality-research https://mashable.com/article/google-search-low-quality-resea... https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_20... https://fortune.com/2024/01/18/why-is-google-search-so-bad-spam-links-seo-ai-algorithm/ https://fortune.com/2024/01/18/why-is-google-search-so-bad-s... | https://archive.is/CLO4S https://archive.is/CLO4S https://searchengineland.com/google-to-cut-thousands-of-search-quality-rater-jobs-after-dropping-contract-with-appen-436739 https://searchengineland.com/google-to-cut-thousands-of-sear... (I use Kagi, DDG, and OpenAI for search primarily, all paid for, so my first hand experience with Google Search is limited, intentionally; are faster poor results better than slightly slower good results? I can spare a few seconds for better, this is not high frequency trading)
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    That does not matter one iota. Google's goal since they bought doubleclick has been to serve more ads and make more cash, and everything is subservient to that goal. If serving more ads reduces the user experience, they will not choose to stop serving those ads, they will choose to reduce the user experience. Companies are not democracies. If every single dev thinks that the user experience matters, but the CEO wants more ads, you will get more ads. It's literally a tyranny.
    - phreeza 2y ago
      You can get away with a lot of things even inside of a tyranny, if you are good at selling to your superiors. So in your example, a dev who wants to improve user experience might have to couch it in terms of how users are likely to come back more often an click on more ads, and if they do this well, they will often be allowed to do the improvements they want.
  - hehdhdjehehegwv 2y ago
    Leadership however is a monolith: they are all 100% locked into quarterly stock market price as the single criteria for making decisions. Or, as I like to say, Google hired some of the best, and promoted all of the worst…and after 25 years here we are.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
    I think those people are the minority. Ux at Google has always been poor and they have never been able to ship a bug free product. Now they are bending over backwards to stay in the AI race but honestly it just seems like they are done. They are a huge balloon so it will take a while to come down but the gas gas started leaking.
- derefr 2y ago
  This isn't even about "happy users", though; it's about money. Where does Google's ad revenue come from if users give up on waiting for their searches to complete before they're ever shown any revenue-generating sponsored links? Actually, thinking about this more, I fundamentally don't understand Google's search experience strategy over the last 10 years. Even before AI answers, they were heuristic-ing answers into a little box that pushed sponsored ad placements below the fold. Why push sponsored results below the fold? How does Google make money from a search engine that just answers people's questions directly, rather than doing lead-gen for the rest of the Internet (with much of the Internet willing to pay for that)?
  - zitterbewegung 2y ago
    I think they just want to have your captured on their platform . If you get all of your answers then why pick a competitor?
    - theolivenbaum 2y ago
      They probably also know that some types of queries are not ad-worth (like age of an actor, etc), while others would never show a box
      - derefr 2y ago
        That's a really good point. Google has likely decided that some query categories are unprofitable-enough already that they can just drop the rest of the expected revenue from them, and instead use them as loss-leaders — aiming to give the customer a better (but zero-revenue) experience today, to increase retention, so they'll come back with positive-revenue-generating queries later. They've just done a rather braindead job of it, with the experience of these loss-leader queries feeling perceptually† worse than a regular SERP page would. It's like a grocery store running a sale on e.g. milk, selling it for below-cost — but then making you have to wait in a line for five minutes in front of the milk cooler to get it. It feels like so much friction that not only wouldn't lure people in; it would push people to avoid that grocer when its milk sales are happening, and shop at other stores instead! --- † I emphasize perceptually here. Even if the total time spent waiting for an AI answer is shorter than the time it would take to load a SERP page, read and select a link that looks like it'll have your answer, click it, load the resulting page, and read it — the AI experience could still feel longer, in large part because "the ball is in your court" for a lot of the self-navigated query, with you being given things to look at and click on; while "the ball is in their court" for the entirety of the AI response, with just a spinner and no indication of what's happening. As such, I wonder if this could be solved by just running a cute little animation under the AI prompt window: make it look like it's automating the loading of a [blurred to non-identifiability] SERP page, scrolling down, clicking a result, loading an [again blurred] page, highlighting a few random fragments of it, and then transposing them together to form the paragraphs of the answer — before the answer actually snaps into place on top of that animation. If you can predict how long before the AI answers, you can even use that to determine how long the animation should spend dicking around on the pretend SERP page and answer page.
gmuslera 2y ago
Remember the Not be Evil? And how minimal used to be the Google search (and gmail) user interface? This is just another step into that direction. All the other optimizations were intended to minimize the intrusiveness of those anti optimizations.
georgeecollins 2y ago
Not surprising to me after their AMP initiative. Supposedly this was supposed to make the mobile web faster. Really the point was to make it more difficult to get different bid for ads. This is just one example of a pattern of behavior of saying you are doing something for the consumer but really its just to exploit a monopoly. If you are in a field with digital advertising you really should read the link below, and be very suspicious of Google. https://texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/images/child-support/20220114_195_0_States%20Third%20Amended%20Complaint.pdf https://texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/images/...
christkv 2y ago
Not yet in Europe it seems. I can’t wait /s. Might have to finally sign up for kagi.
caesil 2y ago
Really seems like they are terrified and flailing wildly
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
barfbagginus 2y ago
It is standard with Bing and chat GPT to wait a few seconds before the result appears. Early adopters excuse this since they value the AI text, realize it's being generated at high expense, and there's no way to make it much faster on the backend. Non-adopters won't value AI text or the technical hurdles. Google is in a hard place - they need to roll the feature out to stay relevant to early adopters of AI. But they can't give good results without making it a huge loss leader - their revenue comes from sending users to spam. They can't seriously commit to a loss leader that counters their entire business model, so they're going to half ass it. That stands to upset established users and early adopters alike, with an unfocused and executive sabotaged Hail Mary. I call this the "decline of AOL" phase of Google's lifecycle. There's a big crisis about the value and necessity of the service, but rather than innovating, execs can only push annoying ads and gimmicks.
pushedx 2y ago
They've invented multiple TCP replacements to reduce page latency. Remember SPDY? Not to mention improvements to TCP itself (BBR congestion control). This is really sad. Seems like a product team throwing many tens of millions of dollars worth of performance research out the window.
surfingdino 2y ago
AI is a play to appease Wall Street. It is similar to the VR race, which has just ended and anyone investing heavily in it would not necessarily be praised by the stock market. Companies like Alphabet, Meta, or Apple have to be seen to be innovating or else their stock will suffer. So, even if they know it is all not going to work they are forced to show they are keeping up. So they suck life of the new tech by deploying billions of USD to hoover up talent and tech and thus asphyxiate competition, especially smaller players. Once the dust settles in a couple of years there will be some leftover tech that might be useful and a whole bunch of patents kept at the ready for the next round of crazy. Google could be doing nothing, but there would be no end to the comments that they are finished and have no future. Funny that nobody expects Oracle or Autodesk to out-hallucinate their competition. I guess they don't because bank ledgers or high-rise designs are best kept away from the tricksters selling another iteration of Mechanical Turk under the guise of "saving humanity". Unfortunately for us, unlike previous advances in IT this one make things slower, uses way more energy, and spits out BS. Give it a couple of years and a wider war effort where compute power might get nationalised for the purpose of fighting the enemy in a more efficient way or designing deadlier weapons faster and we will not see AI available to the general public for much longer. Not that it's a bad thing, SEO spammers trying to outdo one another in who can publish more crap is something I'd like to see less of.
cyanydeez 2y ago
They ditched real search results for markrting 5 years ago. Why pretend theyre doing anything but making ads more than anything else
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
"They invented a whole TCP replacement to reduce page latency, and now this?" What is the reason for the page latency. Is it TCP. No. It is pages laden with excessive amounts of advertising. Google is an advertising company. The problem is the advertising, which causes latency, not TCP. Moreover, they did not "invent" this TCP replacement, they borrowed the idea from djb (CurveCP) who may have borrowed it from someone else. CurveCP does better as it encrypts each packet individually, does not require TLS and allows multiple websites to be hosted on the same IP address. No plaintext domainnames on the wire (SNI) required. Nor some elaborate, complex and cumbersome Band-aid like ECH. Google's problem is how to deliver more advertising without affecting www speed, i.e., without web users noticing how much advertising slows the web down. But Google spins this problem as how to "make the web faster". It is Google's business, online advertising, that is slowing the web down. Google deliberately adds latency to pages when "loading" so that ad auctions can take place first. Advertising is the priority, not reducing latency.
xnx 2y ago
If Google is interested in delivering useful results faster, HTTP response time is not the absolute measure. An AI generated result that saves you from having to go to another site (or multiple sites) saves much more time.

by wrs 2y ago

h2odragon 2y ago

"happy users" has not been on google's priority list for a long, long time. 20 years or more.

phreeza 2y ago
Google is not a monolith, there are plenty of people at Google trying to make a good user experience.
- buildsjets 2y ago
  The cafeteria ladies?
- _hcuq 2y ago
  Google is evil. Sorry. It is driving people mad via the YouTube algorithms. And it is destroying democracy.
  - FredPret 2y ago
    Which democracies have descended into dictatorships because of Google? All Youtube does is feed me engineering and astronomy videos. It's actually improving my life. Your algorithm is a reflection of you.
    - Alupis 2y ago
      > Your algorithm is a reflection of you. This is objectively false. "The" algorithm is designed to maximize engagement - so you will be shown content you are most likely to watch, click, listen to the most. As it turns out, "Outrage Porn" is highly engaging... Scroll through enough YouTube Shorts, and just like TikTok, your "algorithm" slowly but surely reduces to outrage porn. All paths lead to outrage porn. All of them...
      - supriyo-biswas 2y ago
        n=1, but I've watch a fair bit of Youtube shorts and this has never happened. The algorithm rewards what you watch, and someone addicted to politics and the culture of outrage around it, will get what they ask for.
        Alupis 2y ago
        It usually starts off with just content you're overtly interested in. Then, they'll sprinkle in random clips every so many scrolls to guard against overfitting the model and getting stale for the user. Some of those random clips are Outrage Porn designed to get a reaction out of you... You scroll past, then scroll back because "wtf did I just see?" - and now you're in. The frequency starts to increase and pretty soon you're shouting at clouds feeling like you're the only one that realizes how crazy everything is... It's hard to keep your feed "clean" and dialed into just things that bring you intellectual stimulation or enjoyment. It's not impossible, but it's quit difficult. You constantly have to realign your algorithm lest it goes off into the weeds.
        marcosdumay 2y ago
        > It's hard to keep your feed "clean" and dialed into just things that bring you intellectual stimulation or enjoyment. The confusion happens because this can be very easy. All it takes is rarely watching youtube. If you only watch a random video here and there, Google won't push all the bullshit at all. So the people watching many videos, getting the shitty recommendations, and complaining that the internet is crazy end-up sounding insane to everybody else.
      - silverquiet 2y ago
        I was watching exercises for shoulder tendonitis and it escalated to surgeries of shoulder replacement - it seems to be good at upping the intensity (for lack of a better word) of whatever you're watching regardless of the subject.
      - FredPret 2y ago
        The algo will only push outrage on you if you secretly like it enough to spend hours watching that shit. I have consumed more than my fair share of content on Youtube, Instagram, Facebook videos, and TikTok. My timeline is all engineering, spaceships, jumping puppies, and comedians (and not the negative kind). It's an algorithm, it wants you to watch more and click on all the ads. It doesn't care if the world burns, but it also isn't going to push you that way. My statement will only be "objectively false" if the algorithm is somehow programmed for political extremism. In reality, each of us is in the driver's seat. People have been spouting crap since time immemorial - doesn't mean you have to watch it. I would suggest a heavy and sustained dose of puppy videos.
    - AnnoyedComment 2y ago
      [dead]
    - legulere 2y ago
      One example of meta instead of google: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
    - SkyBelow 2y ago
      It ends up being a reflection in the flaws built into humans. We have many vices. Individuals overcome it, but as a group we are susceptible. We have a long history of deciding where to draw the line between exploiting a vice to control someone and where it becomes letting others live while minding ones own business. We might allow alcohol starting around 18-21, but we ban food companies putting certain addicting drugs in their recipes (but yet allowing others, not fully consistent). Where this algorithm's exploit falls is a new area we haven't really decided upon as a society. Is it like adding cocaine to soda or like adding caffeine to soda?
    - mrweasel 2y ago
      > Your algorithm is a reflection of you. Yes and no, you're correct in that it feeds you more of the stuff you engage with, but that's not what it should be going if YouTube cared about the mental well being of it's users. The YouTube algorithm is notorious for not responding to deliberate user input. Say I know that the content I engage with is harmful to my mental health, first step in dealing with the issue. You CANNOT tell YouTube to stop enabling you, even if you try. There are things the algorithm isn't smart enough to understand, or if YouTube is evil, understand that it SHOULD NOT respond to. Example: I wasted a lot of time on Shorts, and videos less than 2 minutes, junk content. So I start hitting "Not interested", the algorithm WILL NOT pick up on the thing these videos have in common, that they are short. You can block channels, that works, except that there are thousands of similar channels which YouTube will then just push instead. What I would like to see is YouTube have settings for: What kind of person do you want to be? And then just push the hell out of relevant content, ignoring any level of engagement. I think everyone knows why YouTube won't be doing that. YouTube is a company, they do what's good for the stock price / profit margin. If it hurts the users, they don't care. It's not that they are evil, they just don't give a crap.
    - gspencley 2y ago
      I'm starting to consider creating different accounts / profiles for my different interests. The problem that I have with YouTube is that it can't know what I'm in the mood for at any given moment and it thinks that if I click on one single video about a sensitive topic that suddenly I want my entire home page to be overrun with recommendations about that. To give a specific example, something that honestly kind of baffles and bothers me is the amount of firearms related videos in my recommendations despite the fact that I never watch them, I don't own any firearms and I keep clicking "Don't Recommend Channel" and they never seem to go away. It has to be because the topic is tangentially related somehow to something I've watched, or maybe people who are into firearms overlap with some of the content I watch. But it's the volume and the non-responsiveness to my feedback that annoys me. Another example: my wife and I enjoy watching the Eurovision Song Contest every year. So naturally we've watched a lot of that content in the days and weeks leading up to it. Obviously the algorithm is going to recommend content related to Eurovision, but my home page is completely flooded with these recommendations to the seeming exclusion of most other stuff that I want to watch. And I keep clicking "Don't Recommend Channel" on the various "reaction" videos that are just feeder content featuring people reacting to the songs and performances ... because I CAN'T STAND reaction videos in general and NEVER watch them. But they keep appearing in the recommendations nonetheless. Recommendation algorithms are a hard problem to solve, for sure. I'm not trying to be unfair to YouTube because I know these recommendations are somehow related to what I do watch. I just know that it feels like 90% of those recommendations miss the mark regardless. YouTube is starting to feel like cable TV these days ("200 channels and nothing to watch") where my wife and I often find ourselves just doom scrolling and refreshing the home page (we watch on our TV) hoping that something we're interested in watching at that moment will appear. Often times nothing does and we go do something else.
      - gspencley 2y ago
        Replying to myself because I just thought of a 3rd example that is extremely common for me: news channels. I don't watch news on YouTube, ever. If I see a video from a news outlet I automatically click "Don't Recommend Channel." And I've done that with all of the big major news channels like CNN, Fox News, MSNBC etc. But that doesn't stop videos from local affiliates showing up in a never ending game of whack-a-mole. To be fair these do not tend to "flood" my recommendations. But I want them to go away all together and I can't seem to make that happen.
    - borgdefense 2y ago
      [flagged]
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    Do you have a specific example for Google? The fact that it has been reported by groups like Amnesty International that Facebook helped to enable the ethnic violence in Myanmar makes arguing this sort of point much easier. People want to treat complaints about attention economy companies like they are coming from whiners who just don’t like ad profiles. It is useful to have specific information to remind people of the actual stakes of uncontrolled, personalized propaganda and social manipulation that these companies can enable. So if you have one for Google I’d definitely be interested in adding it to my collection. (I’ll admit some bias, I think they are a little better than Facebook, but that bar is so low, let’s be careful not to trip over it).
    - holonsphere 2y ago
      Some of the best examples are too sensitive to share on this forum. Other things get flagged and reported. Some new topics/sources that squeeze by invite the bots. The best arguments for Google's algorithms making people crazy for lay people would be Aaron Swartz like individuals who just go unknown. I can think of atleast 4 individuals new to me the last 6mo ive discovered who used to cover court cases, ran NGOs, or worked as journalists that have been seemingly swept up in what looks like delusions. Lots of typos, egegious oversights, etc#. Its hard to personify these individuals as theyre hard to reach and anyone w ptsd or whom knows people w ptsd know how hard it is to provide support to someone locked in a fight-or-flight reflex. After a terror/fear/paranoia becomes familiar anything else feels foreign. Human connection becomes scary. Read up on bateson-esque schizomogenisis and reflect on the CIAs relation with the "unabomber".
      - kridsdale3 2y ago
        What you’re describing sounds uncannily like the effects of Snow Crash.
  - southernplaces7 2y ago
    Holy shit folks, use a bit of your innate agency, and let others do likewise. Yes, Google, sorry, "Alphabet", is a dirt shitty company that engages in all kinds of ugly corporate and legal practices, but no, the YT algorithm isn't destroying democracy or ruining human thinking. The vast majority of us are cognitive beings with the ability to choose what kind of content we consume, or not. In most cases, people who watch a whole pile of garbage on YT are people who would find some other source of it anyhow and always would have throughout history. Those who can separate wheat from chaff will do so regardless of what the algorithm pushes at them. In fact, they'll generally find their own algo-generated suggestions to be in line with the higher quality they steadily pursue. And quite frankly, there is a great deal of excellent content on YouTube to be found. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Many of the comments here exaggerating the evil of the algo and claiming that it ruins people's minds unless they're "shown better" reek of elitism and an implicit desire to control other's belief/feedback choices for their own good. Aside from this being a morally weak viewpoint, it's also bullshit in a practical sense. The majority of such people with an intellectual superiority complex are little better at avoiding intellectual bias than the average person, they just sometimes learn to disguise it with more sophisticated looking justifications.
- mateus1 2y ago
  But the good people are being driven out while the good product are being killed.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  Leave and deliver somewhere it’s possible. You’re never going to win against corporate inertia and management interests at Google.
  - phreeza 2y ago
    Many people actually deliver things that are objectively improvements to user experience, such as latency improvements?
    - toomuchtodo 2y ago
      Serving ads and poor quality search results faster is an objective improvement? Agree to disagree. If the only thing gen AI delivers is killing Google’s search standing, it’ll have served a useful purpose.
      - phreeza 2y ago
        Is it a deterioration? I don't disagree that results are getting worse, but I'd still say all else being equal faster results are better than slower results.
        toomuchtodo 2y ago
        https://mashable.com/article/google-search-low-quality-research https://mashable.com/article/google-search-low-quality-resea... https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_20... https://fortune.com/2024/01/18/why-is-google-search-so-bad-spam-links-seo-ai-algorithm/ https://fortune.com/2024/01/18/why-is-google-search-so-bad-s... | https://archive.is/CLO4S https://archive.is/CLO4S https://searchengineland.com/google-to-cut-thousands-of-search-quality-rater-jobs-after-dropping-contract-with-appen-436739 https://searchengineland.com/google-to-cut-thousands-of-sear... (I use Kagi, DDG, and OpenAI for search primarily, all paid for, so my first hand experience with Google Search is limited, intentionally; are faster poor results better than slightly slower good results? I can spare a few seconds for better, this is not high frequency trading)
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  That does not matter one iota. Google's goal since they bought doubleclick has been to serve more ads and make more cash, and everything is subservient to that goal. If serving more ads reduces the user experience, they will not choose to stop serving those ads, they will choose to reduce the user experience. Companies are not democracies. If every single dev thinks that the user experience matters, but the CEO wants more ads, you will get more ads. It's literally a tyranny.
  - phreeza 2y ago
    You can get away with a lot of things even inside of a tyranny, if you are good at selling to your superiors. So in your example, a dev who wants to improve user experience might have to couch it in terms of how users are likely to come back more often an click on more ads, and if they do this well, they will often be allowed to do the improvements they want.
- hehdhdjehehegwv 2y ago
  Leadership however is a monolith: they are all 100% locked into quarterly stock market price as the single criteria for making decisions. Or, as I like to say, Google hired some of the best, and promoted all of the worst…and after 25 years here we are.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  I think those people are the minority. Ux at Google has always been poor and they have never been able to ship a bug free product. Now they are bending over backwards to stay in the AI race but honestly it just seems like they are done. They are a huge balloon so it will take a while to come down but the gas gas started leaking.
derefr 2y ago
This isn't even about "happy users", though; it's about money. Where does Google's ad revenue come from if users give up on waiting for their searches to complete before they're ever shown any revenue-generating sponsored links? Actually, thinking about this more, I fundamentally don't understand Google's search experience strategy over the last 10 years. Even before AI answers, they were heuristic-ing answers into a little box that pushed sponsored ad placements below the fold. Why push sponsored results below the fold? How does Google make money from a search engine that just answers people's questions directly, rather than doing lead-gen for the rest of the Internet (with much of the Internet willing to pay for that)?
- zitterbewegung 2y ago
  I think they just want to have your captured on their platform . If you get all of your answers then why pick a competitor?
  - theolivenbaum 2y ago
    They probably also know that some types of queries are not ad-worth (like age of an actor, etc), while others would never show a box
    - derefr 2y ago
      That's a really good point. Google has likely decided that some query categories are unprofitable-enough already that they can just drop the rest of the expected revenue from them, and instead use them as loss-leaders — aiming to give the customer a better (but zero-revenue) experience today, to increase retention, so they'll come back with positive-revenue-generating queries later. They've just done a rather braindead job of it, with the experience of these loss-leader queries feeling perceptually† worse than a regular SERP page would. It's like a grocery store running a sale on e.g. milk, selling it for below-cost — but then making you have to wait in a line for five minutes in front of the milk cooler to get it. It feels like so much friction that not only wouldn't lure people in; it would push people to avoid that grocer when its milk sales are happening, and shop at other stores instead! --- † I emphasize perceptually here. Even if the total time spent waiting for an AI answer is shorter than the time it would take to load a SERP page, read and select a link that looks like it'll have your answer, click it, load the resulting page, and read it — the AI experience could still feel longer, in large part because "the ball is in your court" for a lot of the self-navigated query, with you being given things to look at and click on; while "the ball is in their court" for the entirety of the AI response, with just a spinner and no indication of what's happening. As such, I wonder if this could be solved by just running a cute little animation under the AI prompt window: make it look like it's automating the loading of a [blurred to non-identifiability] SERP page, scrolling down, clicking a result, loading an [again blurred] page, highlighting a few random fragments of it, and then transposing them together to form the paragraphs of the answer — before the answer actually snaps into place on top of that animation. If you can predict how long before the AI answers, you can even use that to determine how long the animation should spend dicking around on the pretend SERP page and answer page.

gmuslera 2y ago

Remember the Not be Evil? And how minimal used to be the Google search (and gmail) user interface? This is just another step into that direction. All the other optimizations were intended to minimize the intrusiveness of those anti optimizations.

georgeecollins 2y ago

Not surprising to me after their AMP initiative. Supposedly this was supposed to make the mobile web faster. Really the point was to make it more difficult to get different bid for ads. This is just one example of a pattern of behavior of saying you are doing something for the consumer but really its just to exploit a monopoly. If you are in a field with digital advertising you really should read the link below, and be very suspicious of Google. https://texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/images/child-support/20220114_195_0_States%20Third%20Amended%20Complaint.pdf https://texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/images/...

christkv 2y ago

Not yet in Europe it seems. I can’t wait /s. Might have to finally sign up for kagi.

caesil 2y ago

Really seems like they are terrified and flailing wildly

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barfbagginus 2y ago

It is standard with Bing and chat GPT to wait a few seconds before the result appears. Early adopters excuse this since they value the AI text, realize it's being generated at high expense, and there's no way to make it much faster on the backend. Non-adopters won't value AI text or the technical hurdles. Google is in a hard place - they need to roll the feature out to stay relevant to early adopters of AI. But they can't give good results without making it a huge loss leader - their revenue comes from sending users to spam. They can't seriously commit to a loss leader that counters their entire business model, so they're going to half ass it. That stands to upset established users and early adopters alike, with an unfocused and executive sabotaged Hail Mary. I call this the "decline of AOL" phase of Google's lifecycle. There's a big crisis about the value and necessity of the service, but rather than innovating, execs can only push annoying ads and gimmicks.

pushedx 2y ago

They've invented multiple TCP replacements to reduce page latency. Remember SPDY? Not to mention improvements to TCP itself (BBR congestion control). This is really sad. Seems like a product team throwing many tens of millions of dollars worth of performance research out the window.

surfingdino 2y ago

AI is a play to appease Wall Street. It is similar to the VR race, which has just ended and anyone investing heavily in it would not necessarily be praised by the stock market. Companies like Alphabet, Meta, or Apple have to be seen to be innovating or else their stock will suffer. So, even if they know it is all not going to work they are forced to show they are keeping up. So they suck life of the new tech by deploying billions of USD to hoover up talent and tech and thus asphyxiate competition, especially smaller players. Once the dust settles in a couple of years there will be some leftover tech that might be useful and a whole bunch of patents kept at the ready for the next round of crazy. Google could be doing nothing, but there would be no end to the comments that they are finished and have no future. Funny that nobody expects Oracle or Autodesk to out-hallucinate their competition. I guess they don't because bank ledgers or high-rise designs are best kept away from the tricksters selling another iteration of Mechanical Turk under the guise of "saving humanity". Unfortunately for us, unlike previous advances in IT this one make things slower, uses way more energy, and spits out BS. Give it a couple of years and a wider war effort where compute power might get nationalised for the purpose of fighting the enemy in a more efficient way or designing deadlier weapons faster and we will not see AI available to the general public for much longer. Not that it's a bad thing, SEO spammers trying to outdo one another in who can publish more crap is something I'd like to see less of.

cyanydeez 2y ago

They ditched real search results for markrting 5 years ago. Why pretend theyre doing anything but making ads more than anything else

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

"They invented a whole TCP replacement to reduce page latency, and now this?" What is the reason for the page latency. Is it TCP. No. It is pages laden with excessive amounts of advertising. Google is an advertising company. The problem is the advertising, which causes latency, not TCP. Moreover, they did not "invent" this TCP replacement, they borrowed the idea from djb (CurveCP) who may have borrowed it from someone else. CurveCP does better as it encrypts each packet individually, does not require TLS and allows multiple websites to be hosted on the same IP address. No plaintext domainnames on the wire (SNI) required. Nor some elaborate, complex and cumbersome Band-aid like ECH. Google's problem is how to deliver more advertising without affecting www speed, i.e., without web users noticing how much advertising slows the web down. But Google spins this problem as how to "make the web faster". It is Google's business, online advertising, that is slowing the web down. Google deliberately adds latency to pages when "loading" so that ad auctions can take place first. Advertising is the priority, not reducing latency.

xnx 2y ago

If Google is interested in delivering useful results faster, HTTP response time is not the absolute measure. An AI generated result that saves you from having to go to another site (or multiple sites) saves much more time.