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

telegraph.co.uk

61–70 of 390 posts

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

#61
post #2

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…

[dead]

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

#62
post #29

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…

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?

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

#63
post #29

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…

It is interesting to think about where this will be headed in the future with LLMs. Will people just ask the AI in their phone for their immediate answer and the click baity articles lose a bunch of traffic as a result? I think that is kinda inevitable.

What will that mean for bona fide quality sites? I don't know but part of me hopes that those detailed sites will flourish to offer more details than can be offered in a single LLM response. Wishful thinking perhaps.

They'll be a huge backlash of course from the click-bait sites - just like with news sites protesting about losing traffic.

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

#64
post #2

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…

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

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

#66
post #2

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…

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.

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

#67
post #37
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#68
post #31

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

Had the exact same experience time and time again. Ended up having to literally write my own recipe app https://mu.app/recipes. Every so often I copy one from the internet and store it there. Saves me so much time not having to wade through a ton of Ads. The web is unusable at this point.

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

#69
post #2

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…

> 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 t…

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.

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

#70
post #29

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…

It is interesting to think about where this will be headed in the future with LLMs. Will people just ask the AI in their phone for their immediate answer and the click baity articles lose a bunch of traffic as a result? I think that is kinda inevitable. What will that mean for bona fide quality sites? I don't know but part of me hopes that those detailed sites will flourish to offer more details than can be offered i…

Don't worry. There will be click baity LLMs soon.
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