361–370 of 740 posts
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Like how americans are convinced they invented the telephone because the patent office said so?
Ok I'm curious. Who's the real inventor
There's no AI preview in that screenshot, so it's not everything that's wrong with Google Search.
* a whole page of sponsored-yet-indistinguishable-from-organic results
* a confidently incorrect AI snippet
* the below-the-fold top organic results being all content spam
* the first actually relevant result from a reputable source being then paywalled with a "you ran out of stories for this month" overlay on a website I have never browsed in a year
* the 2nd actually relevant result prompting a "login with google" overlay with prefilled identity that gets clicked by accident 20% of the time
* all of the above in a Chrome browser, requiring a quadruple opt-out before allowing you to use GMail without also starting a browser-wide session to keep track of your every keystroke
* or alternatively an app based mobile interface where links can't be copied and pasted to prevent loss of tracking
* something with AMP
This is not even close to everything that is wrong, if anything it should be called "barely the tip of the iceberg of everything that is wrong".
In their defense it does feature a bunch of other invisible things (lack of cached results, lack of direct links you can obtain with a right click, etc)
If I may offer a devil's advocate perspective. I just googled Toyota Highlander (my car) and the ad in the search results is "please consider the Honda Pilot." Now it's unlikely that I am shopping for a midsized SUV and am not aware of the major competitors, but squinting that away for a second - if I am searching for a car I think I want and Google informs me of a perfectly viable alternative that might be cheaper o…
If you squint they may look like the same thing, but their subtle difference is important. One is a tool suggesting "Hey I see you're trying to do A, but I think B might also fit your needs", and the other is "You want A? Ok, I'll eventually point you towards A, but only after you consume this message from our sponsor."
Google's not genuinely thinking "Hey this will help the user more!" and building that into their tool - it's an ad platform that mimics being helpful, in the name of growing profits.
(That's fine for them to do btw; They're a company and they need to make money somehow.)
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In hindsight, we should have known this would happen eventually. At this point, we have to be actively be against free services. Every time its just a ticking time bomb. There's literally no incentive for them to be an actual good service, just good enough that you tolerate it and not consider other options, but shit enough that they can extract value out of you.
> At this point, we have to be actively be against free services. Nah, GCC is free, Linux is free, Debian is free. What we need to be against is free stuff provided by for-profit entities , because the love of money is the root of all evil.
What I’m saying is that, hypothetically, if the entire business-world suddenly ditched Linux overnight and went back to IBM and Burrows like it’s the 1960s again again (and let’s pretend Android isn’t a thing either) then no-one would be funding significant Linux dev/eng work, and as much as we value the hacker-spirit of unpaid community/volunteer projects, I feel it isn’t enough to keep Linux viable and secure (especially in high-visibility, high-exposure scenarios like desktops and internet-facing services).
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Like how americans are convinced they invented the telephone because the patent office said so?
Ok I'm curious. Who's the real inventor
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> at least ChatGPT attempts to give a paid option. Again, I don't think that'll stop them... Netflix also attempted to give a paid option, but now we have an "ad-supported" plan. I think that same logic of maximizing profit means that even if there are some people paying for ChatGPT, the amount of free money that is sitting on the table means that we will see "ad-supported" ChatGPT pretty soon once the low-hanging fr…
I think the coexistence of ad supported plans is orthogonal to the above. E.g. Netflix still has an ad free plan, regardless of the other plans, but Google gives you no option.
Its sad but I think at this point its kind of a safety issue not to use an ad blocker. Those results are not clearly ads and I've clicked on fake links in the past when they were.
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> move them over to ChatGPT OpenAI has even more VC money to pay back than Google ever did. Practically all the large tech companies so far have turned to ads and monetizing users rather than charging enough to remain more neutral. I suspect one day, when you ask ChatGPT "Can you give me a link to mid journey", you'll instead probabilistically get a link to whichever competitor paid OpenAI for the best placement.
Just imagine all the gigawatts cooked to just serve ads via LLMs
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they didn't - hence the ads
It's a very common story in industry. You start nimble, and disrupt bloated platforms. Then, as you grow, pressure grows and you also bloat. Then new company comes that brings nimble product and disrupt you. Search, TV->internet video, newspapers->internet - all of them go through those cycles.