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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

#211

Post by lovemenot »

p3rls wrote: post #191
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…

I dreamed of building a website like the type I grew up on in the late 90s and early 2000s. The gamefaqs, mrfixitonlines and casterrealms-type websites for me were at the forefront of making this internet medium to be better than books, voice or anything else for that matter for the transmission of information. Fast forward 20 years later. I think I've spent close to 300k on the website and team to help with it. I do…

I see your point and mostly sympathise. It's relevant to the topic and provides a personal perspective.

>> ran by non-native English speakers

I feel this clause doesn't help promote your grievance. A big promise of the Web was that it was World-Wide. If a site in say Thailand could exceed say a USA site's quality, all the better. I get that your specific competitors didn't excel - except in ranking. But, in principle, good wishes to global competition.

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

#212

Post by yterdy »

rwmj wrote: post #204
p3rls wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dreamed of building a website like the type I grew up on in the late 90s and early 2000s. The gamefaqs, mrfixitonlines and casterrealms-type websites for me were at the forefront of making this internet medium to be better than books, voice or anything else for that matter for the transmission of information. Fast forward 20 years later. I think I've spent close to 300k on the website and team to help with it. I do…

I don't get it. kprofiles sounds like it provides a service. It might not be a great one or one I'm interested in, but collating all that information about K-Pop bands and publishing one or two articles a day is non-trivial.

>ran by non-native English speakers that gets hacked every few months with a redirect to porn or russian sites.

I imagine that this would be a problem.

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

#213

Post by ykonstant »

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.

Precisely my predicament; I had contributed a lot of technical and mathematical content in Reddit, and got tons of content in response; but I can no longer engage with it in good faith.

Unfortunately, none of the alternatives capture or even understand the point of reddit. They focus on secondary features like decentralization, when the primary appeal of reddit is the network of communities (that are, furthermore, properly threaded, moderated forums) at the same place, using the same format, accessed with a single user identity.

In fact, precisely this aspect of reddit is what made it accumulate so much genuine information, and the reason it has replaced raw Google search for many kinds of questions. (well, it is definitely not the horrible facebook-post-like-with-no-discussion functionality they have been pushing forever).

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

#214

Post by brucethemoose2 »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #178
MourYother wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT4 is trained on mostly garbage optimised for SEO though.

Maybe, but there is plenty of non-garbage information encoded so I don't understand the argument. I only ask it questions whose answers I can verify e.g. if I ask it how to do something in F#, a language I'm not very familiar with, I can easily confirm whefher the code does what I need it to or not. You can pump as much SEO garbage out as you want, it doesn't change the value of LLMs to me in this context.

Clean datasets are critical in machine learning. Its kind of a miracle that LLMs work as well as they do now, but every drop of garbage (like SEO garbage) makes them worse and less efficient.

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

#215

Post by clnq »

nologic01 wrote: post #194
clnq wrote: post #163

It has become quite difficult to find experts on Google. Google is probably catering to the "entertainment" category of reader now more than it was in 2013. This opinion stems from my experience. And my experience is that I'm an old school technical blogger who writes articles certainly not for the "entertainment" crowd, but for the professional crowd. My readership stays high from Monday to Friday and drops to nearl…

A lot of people would corroborate your statistics and observations. The problem is that there is no "entertainment" category of reader. Just different domains and special interests. Nobody likes accessing the internet with a low signal to noise ratio or fighting cut-and-paste "AI" websites that have been engineered to rank on Google.

I think there is an "entertainment" reader in some broad sense. There are many physical tabloids, online tabloids, and buzzfeed-style bloggers online that cater to this reader. I would also lump in the cocktail party knowledge[0] seekers into this category, as they are seeking knowledge for fun or entertainment. And a few other groups that spend time online for no other purpose than their amusement.

I want this to not come off as condescending in text, I know that tabloids do not have the best reputation for their content. But I think there is a lot of value in emotional well-being, of which entertainment is a part. So I do not pretend to know whether Google promoting more of this type of content over hard technicals is a change for better or worse, just observing the shift I see from my perspective.

[0] https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/

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

#216

Post by flenserboy »

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 Useful Web.

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

#217

Post by Ylpertnodi »

clnq wrote: post #163

It has become quite difficult to find experts on Google. Google is probably catering to the "entertainment" category of reader now more than it was in 2013. This opinion stems from my experience. And my experience is that I'm an old school technical blogger who writes articles certainly not for the "entertainment" crowd, but for the professional crowd. My readership stays high from Monday to Friday and drops to nearl…

>I have observed that my readers come from referrers like Google.com or Google.de less frequently.

I hide as much as i can, and i never link direct, but please top tracking me?

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

#218

Post by brucethemoose2 »

hef19898 wrote: post #155
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.

> Books

Greedy publishers, Amazon and LLMs are already killing that hope.

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

#219

Post by anovikov »

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…

Sadly, for smaller languages, usually pay of copywriters is also much smaller than English, so they aren't protected from it at all.

How bad are things? Bad indeed. I even buy my airline tickets from a traditional brick-and-mortar agent with whom i built a relationship over years and who finds good deals for me and knows the pitfalls better than the internet could suggest.

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

#220

Post by livrem »

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.

I can get lost for hours some nights surfing that kind of sites on web.archive.org. There is probably more of it there than still live on the web. Go back to 1997 or so on some site on an interesting topic and begin clicking links.

Gemini can also be fun for some mindless browsing, but has only enough content for one or two short visis per week (for better or worse).

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