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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

#101

Post by willvarfar »

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…

The LLMs are encoding the 'knowledge' they learn from scraping the clickbaity ad-ridden sites.

And, in the near future, the LLMs will start encoding the 'knowledge' they learn from scraping clickbaity ad-ridden sites _that were written by LLMs_?

Soon, shady SEO firms will be offering a service to get your product placed as the answer to normal questions people ask ChatGPT etc.

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

#102

Post by bmitc »

_the_inflator wrote: post #84

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. Conten…

> 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.

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

#103

Post by Roark66 »

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…

I wonder, does reddit have all their servers in the US? Seems like such a large site would have some POPs in the EU. If so, they should fall under the GDPR which let's users ask for a copy of all their data (a-la Google takeout)

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

#104

Post by safety1st »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #49

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 f…

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.

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

#105

Post by evertedsphere »

Gareth321 wrote: post #60
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.

“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.”

"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 ..."

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

#106

Post by kmlx »

Roark66 wrote: post #89
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, b…

> when you search for something like "how to reverse a pushed commit in git"

i use chatgpt for those kinds of questions. i don't have time to read an article or select a non-spam site or even look at the stack overflow answer.

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

#107

Post by Roark66 »

Fricken wrote: post #81
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 ki…

I use chatgpt for such things(and I'm working hard on getting an equivalent service quality from my local models as I hate the not-at-all-OpenAI, but they have the best model now). Then again I never know if the thing it says are true recipes or hallucinations. If you think about it, it's exactly like on the general Internet.

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

#108

Post by simpaticoder »

Roark66 wrote: post #98
simpaticoder wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think step 2 has been figured out a long time ago: personal not for profit blogs and sites with an rss feed and a "links" section (preferably divided by interests). Such sites still do exist, but usually around various hobbies.

Yeah but we need a name and a recognizable advocacy position. The open web, the indie web, minimalists, even luddites are related terms, but nothing really fits. Then there is the community, the scene - like a webring, but better. Dignified, driven by a simple, solid technical aesthetic, capable, self-sufficient, independent, rational, (classic) liberal, etc. Those are some adjectives I associate with these ideas. I don't know the answer, I'm thinking out loud. (I was excited by the indieweb label but it sounds good but its off-putting with levels of compliance and weird microformat stuff. It's not focused on the important universal qualities and distracted by details of technical implementation.).

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

#109

Post by simpaticoder »

radicalbyte wrote: post #87
simpaticoder wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well I mean welcome to hacker news I guess.

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

#110

Post by berkes »

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?

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