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

telegraph.co.uk

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

#81

Post by Fricken »

leobg wrote: post #31

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

Going back to the 1950s, there were futuristic concepts renderings of "the kitchen of the future" in which wifey could use her computer terminal to easily call up recipes.

My trigger point arrived about 3 years ago when I couldn't find a basic brownie recipe using Google. Just page after page of SEO shit. Google failed at the future.

Although, to be fair, I'm so accustomed to being able to effortlessly access some kinds of information that one forgets there was ever a pain point there in the first place.

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

#82

Post by panta »

dageshi wrote: post #75
mattlondon wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, I think the clickbait sites are done long term, people will just ask the AI on their phone. The people who were capable of writing those large detailed posts on subjects have most likely already moved to youtube or moved on. The data that's actually useful to the LLM's will exist in places like Discord, reddit, twitter. It's pretty obvious that twitter and reddit are going to sell their data to the LLM companies…

Advertisers will simply begin to pay more money to inject their content on those platforms, to have it end up inside LLM models. It could be even worse, because it will be less obvious that the content we'll be consuming through LLMs is polarized/paid for. There will be less transparency.

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

#83

Post by LtWorf »

manmal wrote: post #45
joosters wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

It requires competence and time to self host.

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

#84

Post by _the_inflator »

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.

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

#85

Post by rightbyte »

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.

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

#86

Post by RandomLensman »

mattlondon wrote: post #63
dageshi wrote: 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…

Quality typically costs money because its valuable, short of providing it as a public service, most people - like today - will not be able to afford it (who has a Bloomberg terminal at home, for example?).

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

#87

Post by radicalbyte »

simpaticoder wrote: post #78
mnky9800n wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've recently deleted Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, etc from my phone and it's like night and day. I basically only go to hacker news now or look at my own websites. Suddenly all of the noise of the internet was silent.

That's great but there's a step 2. The sub-culture of people who like things better that way need to sustain each other and itself. Ideally, to grow in happiness and other measures of strength such that the surrounding dominant culture cannot destroy it, and in fact can influence the dominant culture to become more like it. It's that step 2 that I think we haven't figured out yet. Without step 2 we are merely opinion…

I've been thinking for some time that we could do with having a sort of private internet for the nerds. The internet itself used to be like this back in the late 90s.

Nowadays 95-99% of the web is the general public which means that it has turned into what TV was - the happy happy box to keep the dummies occupied.

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

#88

Post by ryanjshaw »

donatj wrote: post #52

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…

> 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.

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

#89

Post by Roark66 »

dageshi wrote: 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…

>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

IDK, for me it seems the worst plague are the sites that when you search for something like "how to reverse a pushed commit in git" don't give you a single sentence answer you seek, but you scroll and scroll over, what is git, how it works, why do people use it, how to install it, if you're lucky the answer will be at the very bottom after you clicked through the infuriating cookie consent and you closed two full page video ads. If you're unlucky the answer is hidden somewhere in the "content"...

Oh and comparing mobile with desktop? What is it on the desktop with all the shitty sites that try detecting you're moving to close it(often when you just move your mouse while reading) and they suddenly try to take over the entire window with some full page flashing modal dialogs. Insanity...

My take on why this happened is twofold: 1- Google, yes. 2-the stupid cookie consent law of the EU. Yes, it made launching a huge window obscuring the entire site's content on entry acceptable. It was all downhill from that.

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