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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

#131

Post by dalbasal »

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…

That shift (pc to smartphone) represents a lot more "who and how many" users than how they use it.

As late as late 2000, web was still pretty exclusive club. I went to college mid-2000s. Even among students, it was a geeky minority that really "consumed" internet massively.

If the web was real life, we'd have recognised this very easily.

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

#132

Post by medion »

dalbasal wrote: post #121

"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 keep…

Amen.

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

#133

Post by moritzwarhier »

kmlx wrote: post #106
Roark66 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

So I understood you want to reverse a pushed commit on both your local repository and the remote. You can reverse that commit using just the following commands:

  git reset --hard HEAD~2
  git reflog expire --expire-unreachable=now
  git push -f
This reverses the most recent commit. The -f is needed to reverse the commit on your git server.

...

I apologize if my previous response wasn't helpful. I see that you meant "revert" and not "reverse". I apologize that two of your commits are now gone and I understand that you mean "revert", not "reverse"? You could try

  git revert HEAD
  git push
If you have any more questions, I'll be glad to help. :)

Maybe I'm underestimating GPT-4 here, but when I tried to get it to write my some CLI commands, it failed in often non-obvious ways (I was trying to resize and compress an image using imagemagick).

Seemed like a waste of time to try&error with the responses, compared to looking up the documentation.

But well, man yelling at cloud I guess.

For programming and computer questions, I'm still grateful for StackOverflow and its sister sites. Finding a conprehensive answer with lots of updates and comments describing different aspects of the problem, all for exactly the question I asked, is satisfying and it feels very time-efficient too.

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

#134

Post by bflesch »

majewsky wrote: post #127
pyinstallwoes wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Everything is a marketplace. In all situations, the human being follows incentices.

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

#135

Post by majewsky »

bflesch wrote: post #134
majewsky wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Everything is a marketplace. In all situations, the human being follows incentices.

The first does not follow from the second. Historically, incentives on human behavior have tended much more towards collaboration than competition. If all human behavior was framed as a competition, we would not have been able to construct communities.

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

#136

Post by Jensson »

mattlondon wrote: post #96
panta wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, although I suspect there will be "hook points" for AI-targeted ads while you enjoy the cool refreshing Coca-Cola taste as 6ou read your LLM responses.

Or you train to be embedded in the training data. Make it say brand names instead of generic ingredients in recipes "2 spoons of Star Olive Oil from Walmart" etc.

This will generate "organic" advertisement.

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

#137

Post by jorvi »

dalbasal wrote: post #121

"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 keep…

“site:reddit.com” saves the day, but I feel very uneasy doing so ever since they did their nasty API + demodding ploy.

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

#138

Post by seydor »

jorvi wrote: post #137
dalbasal wrote: post #121

"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 keep…

“site:reddit.com” saves the day, but I feel very uneasy doing so ever since they did their nasty API + demodding ploy.

It's odd that reddit has not surpassed google in profits

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

#139

Post by berkes »

halflings wrote: post #111
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)…

I probably wasn't clear. I truly meant "impossible to game".

If I crawl your site today, encounter article A, and crawl it again in a year and again encounter article A, I am sure that article A is a year old (Well, techcnically, what I am certain of, is that I encountered the exact same article two times a year apart). You cannot game that. Now if another year later I encounter article A' where some content on the page has changed, be it sidebars, a new design, or a few paragraphs, I might say, "some version of this article is two years old" and decide to rank that different from "this exact version is two years old".

Age is just one variable that I can think off. I'm quite certain there are more variables. But each and every one such variable must be completely controlled and verified by me- the search engine. Nothing external can be such a variable: not "amount of articles that link to X" nor "amount of people that click through".

Maybe such variables don't exist. Or maybe they do, but make for terrible ranking, IDK. But I do know that using variables that search-engines don't control make for a terrible search experience over time. As can be witnessed and as is written down in the linked article.

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

#140

Post by Jensson »

ramraj07 wrote: post #18

It’s not just Google. The idea of a search engine leading to web pages with useful information itself has existed long enough to be gamed to the bottom. A new paradigm has to emerge and take over. The LLMs seem like the first real viable alternative but I feel like we are still in the lycos days of this paradigm.

How do I publish data to an LLM? I don't see how it solves the issues the open web solved, so it doesn't seem like a good replacement to a search engine.
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