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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

#231

Post by brucethemoose2 »

Roark66 wrote: post #107
Fricken wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going back to the 1950s, there were futuristic concepts renderings of "the kitchen of the future" in which wifey could use her computer terminal to easily call up recipes. My trigger point arrived about 3 years ago when I couldn't find a basic brownie recipe using Google. Just page after page of SEO shit. Google failed at the future. Although, to be fair, I'm so accustomed to being able to effortlessly access some ki…

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.

Yeah. LLMs+VectorDBs are great for many things, but when the information is not trivially verifiable (like with cooking), factual information retrieval is not one of them.

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

#232

Post by brucethemoose2 »

jonatron wrote: post #11

As an example, google are knowingly profiting from rip-offs: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56886957 Why are there still three ads before the official government site if I search for "apply esta"?

> Why are there still three ads before the official government site if I search for "apply esta"?

Because it is profitable.

Google is amazingly capable of solving problems that risk their bottom line.

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

#233

Post by clnq »

foooorsyth wrote: post #164
clnq wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is very wrong about almost every discipline I have experience in and can speak on as an expert. I feel like I'd suffer from Gell-Mann amnesia if I paid it any mind. I think there's a good degree of pseudo-intellectualism on the site. Not necessarily in the conduct, but in claims of knowledge and the certainty they present it with. There was a period in my life I've been active on Reddit myself. Looking back on…

Reddit is awful for anything controversial, but it’s good for uncontroversial hobby communities. If I need recommendations on new hockey skates, Reddit is a good place. It basically replaced independent phpBB forums of old — which were even better and less subject to sweeping centralized policy changes like all their subreddit replacements are now.

I disagree, but probably because we have different definitions of "good".

To me, "good" means quite high quality. Like an expert sharing their thoughts in their niche. If you wish to use these thoughts, they will be very reliable and correct.

If you consider "good" to be anything that is not "bad" or "harmful", then I would be more inclined to agree with you.

My niche of tech is full of hobbyists and enthusiasts who want to participate in it - it's a part of the video games industry. And there is a very large amount of misleading knowledge on Reddit. Of course, even misleading knowledge can push people generally in the right direction, so I don't see the discourse as harmful. But I also don't see it as of particularly high quality. It might be "good" on some terms, or "neutral" on others.

With hockey skates - I'm not an expert. But I would expect that the recommendation on Reddit won't have to do with materials, blade quality, ankle support, footbeds, tongue design, heat moldability, weight distribution, holders and runners, energy transfer, foot health features and similar things that you could find on expert forums. I would expect that the recommendation would be based on entry-level things, like what feels good, or what brand is popular. This is not to say that this advice has no value. There is value. But they might not consider how materials might limit skill growth, how there is a knowledge gap in fit assessment in most new skaters, or how different skates protect the skater's feet from injury.

There is value in some advice, just not enough to consider it "good", in my opinion. Others might have different opinions.

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

#234

Post by MereInterest »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #214
ryanjshaw wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For example, early versions of GPT would effectively treat the string “SolidGoldMagikarp” as a random word. It was the username of a prolific poster on the /r/counting subreddit, which consists entirely of posters counting upward. This subreddit was excluded from the training data for being useless, but was still used in making the tokenizer. As a result, the string “SolidGoldMagikarp” was a single token with no training data about it.

This was later fixed by updating the tokenizer, but it demonstrates the importance of clean datasets at all stages.

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

#235

Post by speleding »

amiga386 wrote: post #195
speleding wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but it's mostly in the poor implementation where that law fails, the idea behind it wasn't bad. I think it can still be fixed by stipulating: if the browser sends you an X-Privacy header with some well defined content then you are not allowed to show a popup and you should use the content of that header instead. The exact content of that header needs to be fleshed out but should offer a lot of customisation…

This was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track and it did not work. Surveillance capitalism is just worth too much to websites to even pay lip service to user privacy. The only thing that works is having your user-agent mercilessly chop the survelliance shit out of web pages. Don't evaluate it, don't render it. Because thw websites will forever be hostile to your interests while they can enrich themselves by dat…

I'm aware of that header, but respecting it is voluntary, which is highly unlikely to work if there is a strong monetary incentive not to comply.

It's also pretty coarse. I may want to allow a site I like to collect analytics to help them out, I may even want a search engine to keep track of my behaviour to give me better results. Just an on/off, where IE has set the default to off, was never going to work.

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

#236

Post by brucethemoose2 »

seydor wrote: post #141

Google created SEO and has an interest to keep increasing the size and cost of SEO because the cost of SEO is directly related to the cost of their Ads (which are the best kind of SEO) That doesnt mean that the content of the internet is usless, but it is now buried under 3 pages of useless SEO blubber

> That doesnt mean that the content of the internet is usless, but it is now buried under 3 pages of useless SEO blubbe

Personally, I stopped posting some useful findings in forums and other places. Why bother, when the sites are zombified or enshittified?

Also, I used to write small tech articles for a hard hitting PC hardware site. Garbage SEO (and Youtube) ran the whole site out of business.

I am a sample size of one, but this feels like a microcosm of what's happening to the web. Some of that good content is dying.

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

#238

Post by mrtksn »

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…

> I have to imagine the growth of large language models is only going to amplify this practice dramatically.

Funny enough, LLMs are actually for the very first time challenging Google’s utility as a knowledge engine.

I see more and more Non-techie people asking ChatGPT about receptors or locations instead of Google.

Also, if there’s anything that I need to research and it’s not a general knowledge stuff but something like “How long I can travel with a EU registered car in Turkey” I will use Bing Chat, Perplexity or ChatGPT. I gave up Google already, it’s just too much spam and low quality content that I have enough incentive to break my usual workflow and habits and try LLMs.

I’m sure Google is doing great monetarily with search as if everything is garbage Ads are quality content but the technology to bypass both the ads and garbage is here.

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

#239

Post by [deleted] »

Ylpertnodi wrote: post #217
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?

[deleted]

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

#240

Post by MereInterest »

wewxjfq wrote: post #122
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…

The cookie law isn't stupid, it even says that giving consent should be as user-friendly as possible - a browser setting even. The problem with this (for the ad-industry, not for the users) is that there is no such thing as blanket consent, so they have to harass anyone for their rotten business model to work and to piss people off, they made these modals as obnoxious as possible out of spite.

Nitpick: this is true of the GDPR, not the earlier Cookie Directive. The GDPR is incredibly well-written, and contains all the benefits you stated.

The Cookie Directive was (1) much more limited in its scope, applying only to cookies and not to any other method of tracking, (2) much more limited in its compliance, requiring an explicit notice even for strictly-necessary uses, and (3) much more limited in its consumer-protection, only requiring informing the consumer and not requiring consent.

The GDPR improves on all of these, but there’s a lot of conflation between the two.

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