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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

#331

Post by knaik94 »

bad_username wrote: post #245
NL807 wrote: post #199

Earlier 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.

Yandex is a genuinely good alternative. For text search, it isn't overly censored in relation to DMCA risks. Appending terms like 'torrent' actually work. For exact text searching, I found Yandex results to be better.

And Yandex is leagues ahead of Google and Bing in terms of reverse image search.

Google is generally better if you have a more abstract or conceptual query, or if you're not sure what the best term would be.

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

#332

Post by sneed_chucker »

bad_username wrote: post #245
NL807 wrote: post #199

Earlier 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.

I would not be surprised if there is some astroturfing going on.

But I've personally found that Yandex to give better search results than Google on some topics. But I also don't trust the company and assume that everything they make has FSB backdoors in it.

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

#333

Post by dalbasal »

jdub wrote: post #244
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…

Vint Cerf

Apologies. I did know that at some point.

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

#334

Post by p3rls »

yterdy wrote: post #212
rwmj wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://twitter.com/KProfiles_com/with_replies

What's amusing is they think it's "rival websites" hacking them with redirects to russian purse sites

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

#335

Post by TacticalCoder »

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

I wonder for how long that's going to work: the cost of translating with LLM are now basically $0 and LLMs are exceptionally good at doing that. So basically: have LLMs generate complete, total and utter crap in english. Then have LLMs decline this crap in all the world's languages.

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

#336

Post by matheusmoreira »

beej71 wrote: post #308
mycologos wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kill advertising and the web will be fixed automatically and permanently Is the implicit logic here "kill advertising and the web will be like what it was before widespread advertising: mostly for and by nerds"?

Yes! Not just computer nerds, but nerds of all kinds. I want to read things by recipe nerds, not people trying to make money on ads. I want to read about cars from car nerds and home repair from home repair nerds and writing from writing nerds. I want to read things from people who share them for the pure joy of sharing them.

Completely agree.

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

#337

Post by p3rls »

gardenhedge wrote: post #280
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…

So kprofiles provides a service - providing information to those looking for it - be it fans or journalists. I don't get why it shouldn't be ranked high since it's been a valuable resource since 2016?

It's not a question of "ranked high" - it's that they're far and away #1 in our niche when they are quite obviously just another garbage SEO website.

If you can't understand that I'm afraid I don't see a point in continuing.

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

#338

Post by 6510 »

nsagent wrote: post #251
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…

Ironically, the title of the article is literal clickbait. The first four paragraphs (out of 21) of the article are related to the title. The majority of the article (11 paragraphs) are dedicated to AI safety. I avoid companies like Google as much as possible, but is it really their fault that so many people fall for clickbait? If that's what a majority of people click on, shouldn't users share the blame?

It's a choice, A) you make something yourself or B) you have the user create the product. There is probably more money in the later but if you look at it objectively from perspective A it will look like an ever declining turd.

We've had the same plot with TV. It was definitely possible to fill countless channels with the many lectures given all over the world. Countless people who though much effort managed to learn and discover useful and interesting things. You would need complimentary programming to allow the viewer to access or understand the different fields - which is entirely doable.

It's not different from watching a lengthy series of seasons and episodes with a modestly complex plot.

Instant gratification [by definition] has very little to offer in the long run.

If you get sucked deep enough into some.. well... useful topic (like most here know enough about programming) development in that area is going to be more interesting than Ow my balls!

Wheel of fortune isn't going to create any kind of scientific/economic/social revolution.

With any product you work on you can ask yourself what kind of people it creates. Who is the audience, what will I make them into?

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

#339

Post by mnky9800n »

livrem wrote: post #220
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.

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).

https://www.cameronsworld.net/

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

#340

Post by moritzwarhier »

manmal wrote: post #272
moritzwarhier wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant the sentence I quoted, or the part > [...] especially on Wikipedia. Of course, transformer models have the same issues I agree that one should be critical of all sources, including Wikipedia. I don't agree that GPT is an information source comparable to Wikipedia or scientific studies. Both can be wrong, biased or incorrect though. In other words, I would never consider the usage of any LLM worth to cross-che…

Using Wikipedia to cross-check can be dangerous since it often is the source of the content you‘re trying to verify.

This is surely true and can be a danger in many cases. Still, Wikipedia is curated by humans and in most cases I would argue that articles improve over time, errors get corrected etc.

I'm not arguing that Wikipedia is a good primary source, I still think it is very suitable as a point of entry if you want to cross-check information from other sources.

A user-editable encyclopedia is not perfect, but it is not comparable to automatically generated text that has no regard for correctness, that only tries to fit its training data and prompt.

For example, I wouldn't trust GPT when asking for the height of some building in my city. I would consider it likely though that it confidently gives ke a wrong number.

Without all the RLHF training to refuse "best guess" answers, situation would be even more bleak.

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