They very much killed the golden goose. It's a real failure to think in terms of systems. Google relies on a healthy open web, yet as arguably the biggest single influencer of the web it has completely failed to maintain that let alone improve it.
Perhaps you are simply not the target audience any longer ... I mean, if they can make billions by serving 99% of people, why would they spend billions on making the remaining 1% happy?
Clicks and impressions do not necessarily need to be human clicks or human impressions.
> They also didn't come up with ChatGPT, arguably the first LLM good enough that can perform non trivial tasks of data recall and organization. Not only did Google make the main breakthroughs that all LLMs still rely on today (mainly attention architecture, and large scale training of DNNs), but they had a chatbot similar to ChatGPT (Meena [1]) way before ChatGPT was a thing. Granted: they didn't release it to the pu…
Also, regarding search, there are simply worthy competitors now. This is a bigger deal than I think people credit for. There truly was a time, maybe even ~ 2 years ago where even though it was broken Google was still the best. Kagi, while costing money to use, it fantastic. YouTube is just bollocks now too, it contains a stunning amount of junk content and clickbait. If someone tells me they learned something from Yo…
I never, ever log in on YT, and I'll sometimes clear my cookies as well. I find that if I stick with channels I like and carefully consider the first two or three recommendations, I don't get too much junk. But yes, the clickbaitification of even good channels is getting pretty grating.
This is Google's inability to innovate. Google stated goal was the "organize the world's information". Nevertheless, they didn't come up with Wikipedia, the highest quality curated human-readable information repository. They also didn't come up with ChatGPT, arguably the first LLM good enough that can perform non trivial tasks of data recall and organization. Google had early success with search. Then decided to ceme…
> Google is dead man walking, unless something very substantial changes. Beyond search, they are controlling the Android ecosystem. Your predictions may be immature.
Android being open source means that any competitor can take it and run with it. Tbh, the main issue with that is the staffing required in terms of software engineers, but we’re Google to make the wrong move, I imagine Samsung would waste little time.
Being of the "highest quality", in this case, is comparative to the landscape we have available. With that said I believe it may be the highest quality open information repository. And if it's not - then what's better?
Your local university library and its ILL department.
Apples and oranges.
I don't see a way to access my local university library for that data in the same way Wikipedia is available.
As commercial enterprises currently are set up, they have no incentive whatsoever to preserve the ecosystem they are thriving on. Worse, they profit more when harming it. As seen here with Google, that is true irrespective of the nature of the affected system. It's not just the quality of websites that is negatively hit either. The real victims are us, civil society and our future. The information realm that is the i…
I don't get why this is supposed to be Google's fault. I mean it doesn't matter of course: this is happening, and the only real question is if it will continue, maybe if something can be done. Who's fault it is ... Google is doing a lot to preserve the web. It's not enough, perhaps. Probably. But it's quite unclear to me what they could do to reverse this. Plus we've all seen what this has lead to in meat-space. Info…
It is mainly Google's fault since Google is the main actor in this space.
You put up a false dichotomy, as if Google disappearing would mean a void to wander the world eternal.
The internet is very much like public infrastructure. It is crucial to explicitly determine what functions there are indispensable for society to thrive.
Ironically, finding available information is just such an indispensable utility. Imagine roads only being present or usable when conducive to advertisement.
Innovating is "easy", getting it in production is though. If the Google models are so genius and perfect, and nobody can use or see them, it's like if they don't exist.
That should be very strong quotation marks. I would say that it is the other way around. We should be glad that not everything is immediately turned into a product.
Bingo. Getting it into production is a non-concern for non-entities with no reputation, but Google has a lot more to lose. The big guys watch and wait, and use their sizeable wallets when the time comes. I have no doubts that Apple is going to eat Meta's lunch soon, for example — a lunch Meta didn't even realize was there, for all their innovation and go-to-market.
This is Google's inability to innovate. Google stated goal was the "organize the world's information". Nevertheless, they didn't come up with Wikipedia, the highest quality curated human-readable information repository. They also didn't come up with ChatGPT, arguably the first LLM good enough that can perform non trivial tasks of data recall and organization. Google had early success with search. Then decided to ceme…
> Wikipedia, the highest quality curated human-readable information repository I have some doubts about the quality of Wikipedia content. Everything that can be politicised is politicised , everything that can be played in order for someone to advance his/her plans or point of view is played. Apart from bad faith, some article lack relevant info or contain errors due the volunteer nature of it.
Highest quality !== great quality
Wikipedia suffers from massive bias and subjectivity issues, and also from accuracy problems. Yet, all the attempts to do better fizzled out so far, and most non-niche knowledge and information repositories have the same or worse issues.
I feel that Google search has been slowly dying for many years now. Where in the past I could find documentation, forum-posts, wikis - concise information - these days I find SEO-optimised marketing fluff, link-farms, clickbait, long-form articles with thousands of words that ultimately say nothing, political tirades that don't make sense for any non-U.S.-citizen, and ads - tons and tons of ads. It would seem that it…
Can you give me an example of something you can't find and I'll try to find it?
Oh man can you imagine Yahoo, playing the long game, brings back their user-managed indexes and becomes the dominant search engine again.
You might have stumbled onto a practical and useful application of LLMs. Yahoo (or whoever) could crawl the web, categorise each page, and provide a genuine "Index". Like in the back of a book, or an old subject based card catalogue ... Dewy-decimalise the web :) I've always felt that an index by subject would be more useful than string-match based searching. Of course, the index might rank links within each sub-sub-…
> Like in the back of a book, or an old subject based card catalogue ... Dewy-decimalise the web :)
Now that is an awesome idea. I really do think we need to have category-based indexing as well as page search.
Once someone had something for what he perceived as free, it's hard to convince that person to pay.
The evolution of cable television in the U.S. might be instructive. At first, TV (broadcast) was free, with ads. IIUC, when cable TV later rolled out, it was ad-free. Viewers paid for it instead. But eventually even those paying for cable TV were shown ads. So one lesson is that paying for a service might only delay its enshitification. EDIT: It seems I was wrong about cable TV starting out ad-free [0]. So my example…
On the other hand, when I was growing up, HBO, Cinemax, and The Movie Channel were all part of my local cable system's basic lineup. Feature-length, commercial-free movies were part of the basic cable fee. I guess that was the hook to convince people to sign up for cable, since this was not a fringe reception area. It was only later that the ad-supported channels began cropping up and ultimately taking over, cable fees be damned.