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…
Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
311–320 of 390 posts
Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#312Earlier 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 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…
Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#313I am interested to here what Kagi users think. Kagi is searching the same web. If the web is now garbage, then I wouldn’t expect improved search to yield improved results.
I found a link to the age of a very minor lava flow in Oregon on the third link on Kagi. The answer was nowhere on the first 3 pages of Google, which is where I stopped looking.
If you deprioritize stuff that works for Google's SEO, you'll get different (better) results.
Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah, they likely didn't bother trying to ask GPT-4 and imagined hypothetical answers which could lead beginners to shoot themselves in the foot. ChatGPT Plus with a short custom instruction to answer in steps, respond tersely, ask clarifying questions where needed, and make recommendations wherever possible replied to "how to reverse a pushed commit in git" with: --- To reverse a pushed commit in Git, you can either…
You are correct! I was fantasizing how a bad GPT answer could look like, similar to the errors that were in the answers to my prompts to GPT-3.5 for imagemagick. These prompts where precise and in good faith, with some rounds of clarification. I am sure newer GPT versions will do better, and I think for a tool as ubiquitous as git the answers from ChatGPT would have been perfectly fine too. Just wanted to illustrate…
Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#315Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#316Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm rather shocked how the quality of their search results has tanked over the years. I used to be able to find decent academic content, or programming related topics quite consistently 5 years ago. Now I'm getting only a few vague results either from stackoverflow, math stackexchange, reddit, or apple, and the rest is just utter garbage. Yandex, of all search engines provide consistently better results. Fortunately,…
The Russian search engine pops up in the comments whenever Google search quality is discussed here. I am sure this is non-organic astroturfing.
Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. YouTube's stuck in its own algorithm hellhole. Mostly due to their insistence that creators have to post on a regular basis, creative block or lack of things to cover be damned. So if your niche has nothing to talk about right now, well you'll need to find something, anyth…
Hmm, Jesse Michels posts videos so infrequently (he just did the first one in a year) and he still got 2 million views instantly..
That’s why there are so many collabs now
Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I think the clickbait sites are done long term, people will just ask the AI on their phone. The people who were capable of writing those large detailed posts on subjects have most likely already moved to youtube or moved on. The data that's actually useful to the LLM's will exist in places like Discord, reddit, twitter. It's pretty obvious that twitter and reddit are going to sell their data to the LLM companies…
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.
Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use chatgpt for such things(and I'm working hard on getting an equivalent service quality from my local models as I hate the not-at-all-OpenAI, but they have the best model now). Then again I never know if the thing it says are true recipes or hallucinations. If you think about it, it's exactly like on the general Internet.
How well does that work? I would imagine recipes iate really hard to entrust to chatgpt. At least for baking, where ratios and timing is crucial. LLMs have very bad sense of numbers generally. How would you verify it’s not all bogus hallucinations? At best it’s a source of inspiration, for ingredients you can freestyle from yourself.
At least if you LLM them on your own you know to be dubious and also you're more likely to use a 70B model (or GPT4) which is a little more likely to get them right, vs whatever garbage the spammer used.
It would probably be pretty interesting for someone to make a concerned effort to digitize every recipe in print prior to 2005 or so-- the relevant threshold time isn't when LLMs came on the scene but when google made low effort content farming so profitable.
It wasn't guaranteed that every recipe printed pre-internet had actually been cooked by anyone, but it was a lot more likely.