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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

#111

Post by halflings »

berkes wrote: post #110

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 va…

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.

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

#112

Post by seanwilson »

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…

> 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.

Is there a way to improve the detection of posts like this so they can be deranked? If so, why isn't this done? You would have thought the original PageRank was meant to combat this because useless articles wouldn't get linked to.

For what it's worth, whenever I'm helping with SEO, it's generally only to encourage website owners to use semantic HTML tags properly and structure their content in a way (e.g. titles, headings, sections, new pages with links between them) that's easier for humans with and without screen readers, and for search bots to read. I don't like the practice of writing articles to target profitable keywords that aren't relevant to your site or writing bloated articles.

Unfortunately, all of this in lumped together as "SEO" so it's become a bad word.

> 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.

I think speed is only a small ranking boost. Maybe this will increase over time. If it was a big boost right now, it would have forced every website to make large immediate changes which would have been very controversial I'd think.

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

#113

Post by CuriousSkeptic »

simpaticoder wrote: post #108
Roark66 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How about “sustainable web”?

It could surf a bit on already established efforts in other domains and the narrative seem to fit with those ideas I think.

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

#114

Post by stavros »

simpaticoder wrote: post #108
Roark66 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The small web?

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

#115

Post by manmal »

LtWorf wrote: post #83
manmal wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At this moment, yes. A few more hardware cycles and those can be run in a browser plug-in.

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

#116

Post by wzdd »

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.

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

#117

Post by someidiot123 »

asim wrote: post #68
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.

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.

[dead]

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

#119

Post by manmal »

moritzwarhier wrote: post #93
manmal wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hallucinations have always been a problem with transformers. But with the replication crisis in many sciences and political meddling abound, I‘d be wary of any kind of critical information, especially on Wikipedia. Of course, transformer models have the same issues since they are trained on tainted info too.

> But with the replication crisis in many sciences and political meddling abound, I‘d be wary of any kind of critical information, especially on Wikipedia. Of course, transformer models have the same issues I think this is a bad comparison. The issues OP described are not limited to tainted training data. Being critical of Wikipedia and critical of science is not equal to treating text as a black box looking for the…

Can you point to where in my comment I asserted that hallucinations are equal to other sources of errors, or even compared them? Because I tend to agree with you. I tried to point out that info found externally always has to be cross-checked, no matter where it originates.

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

#120

Post by jakub_g »

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…

Desktop to mobile was also a big shift from the perspective of wanting to offer the "continue your journey" experience + having the same experience on both. Which initiated moving features from being done locally to "log in and sync in our cloud", or dumbing features down on desktop, or downright removing them so that "it's the same on desktop and mobile".

Which IMO is related to the next thing in chain:

- It was really easy to subscribe to an RSS feed in 2000s; if you had a proper meta tag in the website header, the browser UI would show up a prominent RSS logo in the URL bar. Firefox had this built-in. Apparently Chrome too [1]. At some point this was killed. Perhaps due to mobile gaining traction, lack of space on mobile, and Chrome's annoying minimalist approach? Or perhaps because Google wanted to promote its own (R.I.P.) Google Reader, (R.I.P.) Google Wave, (R.I.P.) Google+?

(Having said that, I must admit I have declared RSS bankruptcy at some point, after subscribing to _way_ too many feeds).

- I remember there used to be a lot of blog platforms and discussion boards, people would write a lot of good stuff there, each of those platforms would create a de facto community.

Then, Google managed to make Blogger/Blogspot UX terrible; and most of other platforms died and got replaced with Facebook and Twitter. (I'm still not sure why many of those seemingly thriving platforms have died).

- Facebook and Twitter over years slowly change the algo, to not show you stuff you subscribed to, but random viral crap which optimizes "engangement".

[0] https://www.chromium.org/user-experience/feed-subscriptions/

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