31–40 of 155 posts
Has anyone built a search engine that uses LLMs to pre-grade every page with metrics such as: - Commercial bias (content compared to the source, which it learns about) - Insincere motives - Bloat (how many words it takes to say how little to penalize SEO bloat) I would assume that using LLMs, we can get a pretty good idea of what is SEO bloat and who the bad actors are by this point, and just penalize those results.
Google has an incentive to keep these links going. Google makes money by you continually returning back to Google. If you get the prefect result on your first click, then you move on with your day. If you get junk, then you go back to Google and click the next junk link and repeat. Each time someone visits one of these content farms and returns back to Google, then it is more advertising dollars for Google.
This is a classic argument and appears in many many forms: * "Psychologists don't want to fix your problems because then you'll stop needing therapy every week." * "Dating sites don't actually want you to find a long-term partner because then you'll stop using the site." * "The mechanic's not trying to actually fix your car, just get it running for a few weeks so it breaks down again and you come back." Etc. etc. Any…
Now think crime and police: without crime, the police would be out of a job.
A consultant has no interest that the project they are consulting on is ever completed.
Of course these examples aren’t to be taken seriously, they merely illustrate some potential conflicts of interest of roles within society.
Has anyone built a search engine that uses LLMs to pre-grade every page with metrics such as: - Commercial bias (content compared to the source, which it learns about) - Insincere motives - Bloat (how many words it takes to say how little to penalize SEO bloat) I would assume that using LLMs, we can get a pretty good idea of what is SEO bloat and who the bad actors are by this point, and just penalize those results.
We don't need to. We have LLMs now
> The only future of the internet is, sadly, proof-of-person and proof-of-residence on every public network interaction. I'm going to be that pedant and point out that the Internet is not the same as the Web, and it's the Web that's sick. The Internet is fine. It's a distinction that matters because the Internet is expensive things like satellites and undersea cables. It's an investment that's too large to just walk…
This kind of spam was already destroying the web before LLMs came along. Now it’s being accelerated by thousands of times. Mainstream web search is probably cooked. Kagi and other niche players might have a chance if the fact that they are not beholden to advertisers lets them introduce features to do things like downrank content with ads. Kagi has “small web” which I think includes this in its weighting. Open social…
The hyper-enshittification stages look like: 1. People get on the web and make real content with care because they're just excited to share stuff with each other. 2. Advertisers talk them into putting some ads on their pages so they can get some compensation for their work. 3. Shitty people figure out you can just make content where the main incentive is to get people to go to the page and see the ads. 4. Those peopl…
I’ve started trying to pay for good journalism, especially good indie journalism. I also Patreon a bunch of podcasts, buy high quality software if the price is reasonable, buy albums of my favorite music, buy films, and so on, while actively avoiding both gratuitous subscription models and the ad web.
Pay for it or it either doesn’t get made or it pays for you. Free is a lie and piracy undermines quality.
Edit:
All the paying for good stuff I outlined above averages out to around $100-$150/month. It’s less than I usually spend on restaurants and coffee shops and far less than groceries for our family. Restaurants in particular feel like a far more frivolous expense.
I’m amazed my medical websites… The top 5-10 sites all seem have identical wording for common conditions. In the age of copyright enforcement and DMCA antics, I don’t understand how this continues year after year.
Buries the lede. WHY would you make so many talanted instances of Jodie? Whats the upside. How do the financials work and is it a stake, or paid labour?
> WHY would you make so many talanted instances of Jodie? One name is twice as easy to invent as two names.
Buries the lede. WHY would you make so many talanted instances of Jodie? Whats the upside. How do the financials work and is it a stake, or paid labour?
The business model is very simple and requires 3 ingredients: web design, SEO, and copyediting. The first two are one-time costs. The 3rd one is a COGS and there is a whole market of professional blogwriters who charge something per 1000 words.
To answer your question, once you create a blog that starts printing money, it's in your best interest to just replicate it while changing as little of the "template" as possible, because you don't really know what element made it click.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't need to. We have LLMs now
I still would like to search and not get the dog crap that is Google's Internet, in addition to using LLMs myself.
Google has an incentive to keep these links going. Google makes money by you continually returning back to Google. If you get the prefect result on your first click, then you move on with your day. If you get junk, then you go back to Google and click the next junk link and repeat. Each time someone visits one of these content farms and returns back to Google, then it is more advertising dollars for Google.
This is a classic argument and appears in many many forms: * "Psychologists don't want to fix your problems because then you'll stop needing therapy every week." * "Dating sites don't actually want you to find a long-term partner because then you'll stop using the site." * "The mechanic's not trying to actually fix your car, just get it running for a few weeks so it breaks down again and you come back." Etc. etc. Any…
This isn't a law of nature. It's the result of particular conditions. Businesses in high-trust and low-trust cultures behave differently, and the descent of the US from a high-trust to a low-trust culture is going to have consequences.