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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

#151

Post by CJefferson »

berkes wrote: post #139
halflings wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Favoring old articles might work, but it would wouldn’t work for any articles written more than 12 hours after SEO types find out it’s an important ranking.

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

#152

Post by jabradoodle »

berkes wrote: post #139
halflings wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

> 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.

And what if I change a tiny amount of the article, or post it on a second domain I own? Do you think you can match up all the near duplicates at the scale of the internet?

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

#153

Post by Freedom5093 »

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.

Wasn't he was fired or asked to leave from DeepMind, then Google?

I interviewed at Inflection (his startup), and my interview with him (final stage, founder interview) was the worst interview I've ever had. He did no small talk, he immediately (and awkwardly) asked a question off his question list. It lasted 15 minutes. I was immediately put off by his questions, wondering if I should just hang up now. His co-founder interview was not as bad, but still asked an awkward question. They definitely want you to work very hard, including sacrificing your personal life.

The product itself (Pi, the assistant) doesn't seem to have traction. Has anyone found it useful?

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

#154

Post by jokethrowaway »

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 hate ads as much as everyone else (and actively block the hell out of it)

At the same time, ads made a lot of the free web possible.

I run services making money with ads: I would not be able to work on them without.

Or maybe the revenue I would make is too little to bother with all the stupid EU regulations around VAT - ads offer a simple solution and you get a single B2B transaction, while providing values to Customers.

If we had easy to use cheap (or free? I'm sure we can work out a model based on profiting off the analytics alone if we streamline the service and don't become as bloated as VISA / Mastercard) microtransactions with low fees and no ***ing bureaucrauts, maybe ads would not be needed as much.

But we don't. And a big chunk of the last 20 years of internet innovations was sponsored with ads money.

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

#155

Post by hef19898 »

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…

It would be ironic, if Google search, SEO and LLMs would make the internet so unusable as to give redacted content in the form of books and physical journals a second life.

Well, my white list of sites providing good content for my interests actually is incredibly short by now anyway, in total maybe a handfull.

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

#157

Post by matheusmoreira »

I agree but the root cause isn't Google, it's advertising in all its forms, Google's ads just happen to be the most profitable ones. Kill advertising and the web will be fixed automatically and permanently. Using uBlock Origin is everyone's duty towards a better web. It should come pre-installed in Firefox.

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

#158

Post by ramraj07 »

Jensson wrote: post #140
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.

As I said we are still in the Lycos era of this paradigm. But I’m not sure what you mean, the LLM is the index of the entire internet, so not sure why it’s hard to imagine it becoming a much smarter answering machine (answers being either the actual answer or a link to a website that’s actually useful).

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

#159

Post by hef19898 »

MourYother wrote: post #129
ryanjshaw wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If general AI, let's call it Heavenweb or Netsky, comes along and it is based on the knowledge of the internet I am not that worried so. GPT4 is trained on SEO crap, parts of it have been propably already written using GPT3. So by the time Skynet comes along, it will assume the bot-to-bot SEO crap content to be actually true, SEO contebt written by AI for AI trained on AI created SEO content. Eith that, Skynet would never be able to achieve anything, no decent scrambled egg let alone a T-100.

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

#160

Post by ramraj07 »

onion2k wrote: post #37
ramraj07 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sites with actual useful information don’t need much effort to create and maintain. If it was all just wikis it’s perfectly great. The problem only became when “entrepreneurs” realized they can game this system to gain money.

I'm struggling to think of a site I use regularly that could function without either adverts or someone else (businesses, donations, or the site owner) putting money to fund it, and I honestly can't think of one. The modern internet just wouldn't function if we took entrepreneurship out of it.

Almost Every single useful site I use is not powered by business. It’s either government funded or donation based.
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