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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

#121

Post by dalbasal »

"Search results plagued with ‘clickbait’ would have been an understatement 20 years ago.

The parts of the open web you access from Google/search (most of it) is almost entirely made-for-google' ranking algorithims.

The situation is worse than it is on closed social media, including Google's YouTube.

Professional YouTubers are also making content for rankings above all, but the fact that it's their own face/voice keeps some of the rot at bay.

Google is literally content made by uninterested copywriters exclusively for Google rankings.

I was recently looking for general travel advice on Google. I found it completely impossible. The content is all written by people (or ais) that had never visited. Everything reads like a middle school essay.

I often resort to searches in a smaller language, where economic incentives are 100X smaller than English.

Google created incentives for littering the web with garbage. Then they took away incentives for anyone else to even bother.

Google killed the thing that gave them life. They gave Vince Serf a sinecure and a hows-your-mother for the rest.

Thieves.

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

#122

Post by wewxjfq »

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…

The cookie law isn't stupid, it even says that giving consent should be as user-friendly as possible - a browser setting even. The problem with this (for the ad-industry, not for the users) is that there is no such thing as blanket consent, so they have to harass anyone for their rotten business model to work and to piss people off, they made these modals as obnoxious as possible out of spite.

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

#123

Post by toldyouso2022 »

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…

Cookie law is seriously underrated in how much damages it has done. No visible gains for privacy either.

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

#124

Post by jwells89 »

pentae wrote: post #62
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…

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 tige…

I don’t think the thing about Safari naming tracks at all. Keep in mind that Safari has existed since 2003, during which Apple was in a very different place — back then there was no App Store or even any hint that such a thing might exist at some point and OS X was going all-in on open standards compliance, with things like RSS support being major touted features, and WebKit was quickly approaching Gecko in being a top class web engine (as opposed to the dominant Trident and Tasman in IE and IE for Mac, respectively).

As for in-app webviews, they’re not all made equally. Most apps use SFSafariViewController, which is an out-of-process Safari tab with its own app-specific cookies, local storage, etc that’s designed to give the user an opportunity to see if the page is really something they want to access and helps keeps their main browser’s tabs clean while also breaking several types of trackers. Of course though some notoriously nosy players like Facebook and TikTok don’t use this and instead implement their own which is chock full of tracking crap… this is probably an area where Apple could stand to be more heavyhanded (ban custom browser reimplementations except where those add demonstrable value or the app itself is a browser).

Also, web app devs aren’t blameless in user preference for native apps. For every web app done right, there’s three more that are shoddy and frustrating in ways that native apps generally aren’t (think breaking back button, scrolljacking, etc), some that are just plain badly built, and many that are unrepentant resource hogs. Often this applies even to web apps that have no counterpart native apps because their companies chose the web solely because it’s cheap to do so (resulting in cheap bad web apps). Are there crappy native apps too? Sure, but they’re somewhat less common and generally keep the crappiness somewhat bounded.

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

#125

Post by rcxdude »

Micoloth wrote: post #55
phendrenad2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All hail the paid web. It sure took a long time to get here, from humble beginnings 20+ years ago when salon.com toyed with the idea of charging a micro-fee per article view.

For what it's worth, here's my worry about this: - Micro-fees for the web are a good idea. Because "If you don't pay you are the product", etc. - BUT, they HAVE to be micro-fees. Because of the fact that, EVERYONE uses the internet now. Literally almost all of humanity. To charge 30$ per Month (like ChatGPT does) for such a basic service, would bring an Incomprehensible amount of money in the hands of a few providers…

> BUT, they HAVE to be micro-fees. Because of the fact that, EVERYONE uses the internet now. Literally almost all of humanity. To charge 30$ per Month (like ChatGPT does) for such a basic service, would bring an Incomprehensible amount of money in the hands of a few providers, which would make them even more dominant than they already are, I'm afraid. Technologically, we have now 0 problems to implement a solid micro-fee system.

It's worth pointing out that facebook makes on average $16 per month per US user, simply by selling ads to show them. And it makes $3 per month per global user.

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

#126

Post by pests »

pentae wrote: post #62
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…

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 tige…

> live inside the FB/IG/TT/X/Gmail/Google apps on their phones and don't even go on the web.

I agree with you. But I bet people 20 years ago were saying the same about the web, people never going on the real internet just being stuck in some "www.exe"

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

#127

Post by majewsky »

pyinstallwoes wrote: post #94
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…

SEO / billboards / paid-for advertising is basically legal propaganda (arguably a form of mind control or more neutral we can say reality shaping through narrative structuring). I think the only place advertising should be allowed is in a marketplace setting, anywhere else is "public domain" and shouldn't be allowed in my opinion. It is the root to many evils, it is the mechanism that trends towards hacking the user…

> I think the only place advertising should be allowed is in a marketplace setting

That's the horrifying beauty of it. Everything has been turned into a marketplace.

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

#128

Post by nologic01 »

> Mr Suleyman said chatbots could “take on Google” by providing more accurate information than internet search.

Excuse me for no longer taking any tech influencer promises at face value. More accurately, for taking them at zero value.

Tell me first 1) your real business model and 2) how other actors will respond to your business model

Enough with the half-truths and dishonesty.

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

#129

Post by MourYother »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #88
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 enc…

GPT4 is trained on mostly garbage optimised for SEO though.

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

#130

Post by aabhay »

wzdd wrote: post #116

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.

Exactly. Feels like such a blatant PR stunt to advertise (ironically) for his next company
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