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Google changes its search box

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Re: Google changes its search box

#891

Post by theptip »

wmeredith wrote: post #880
yard2010 wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the problem with the current monopolistic system, the money won't go down the stream, it's like a dam. One big dam owned by a few people is worse than many small dams

That's a pretty sinister system when the dam builders are suing the work of those downstream to build their damn. What happens when everyone downstream has been starved to death?

Obviously the pitchforks come out before then.

But! Does Musk have his robot army or not at this time? That will determine how the pitchfork mob turns out.

Re: Google changes its search box

#893

Post by zackmorris »

yard2010 wrote: post #685
pflenker wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of years back I worked with a company which maintained specific data which was the main traffic driver on that page. Google approached them and wanted to pay for the rights to get the data and display it on top of the search results, a feature which was fairly new back then. This was an interesting dilemma because it was very clear that the money was way less than the loss in ad revenue due to traffic drop,…

That's the problem with the current monopolistic system, the money won't go down the stream, it's like a dam. One big dam owned by a few people is worse than many small dams

That's why if trickle-down economics were real, its proponents would also support antitrust enforcement

Re: Google changes its search box

#894

Post by Forgeties79 »

chadgpt3 wrote: post #869
Forgeties79 wrote: post #852

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not pay sites. I’m talking about site owners having to pay ISP’s or risk being artificially throttled in favor of those who do pay them.

I'd be careful with the phrasing. Site owners paying more to get a faster connection is how business works. It's not neutral if it's anything more than the technical capacity of the connection or if they're restricting it, like unreasonably refusing to peer. Peering is complicated too. It means an ISP carries your site's traffic without you paying them. Is that reasonable? I'd say common sense is: yes, if the traffic…

it’s not a faster connection issue. Bandwidth at your location is a different issue.

What I am talking about is websites that do not pay the toll being artificially slowed down. A pillar of neutrality is that “all packets are equal.” As long as we have stable connections and are using decent services, your blog should load as fast as any major news site. Without net neutrality, ISP’s can put their thumb on the scale and make it so your blog takes 5 second, 10 seconds, whatever they want. They can throttle load times despite both of us paying for high speeds and using quality services. Think: governors in golf carts, if you’re familiar with that. Under net neutrality this is not permitted.

Re: Google changes its search box

#895

Post by Robotbeat »

tremon wrote: post #799
Robotbeat wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are not a site. They are a clever person that can point you to sites. They, like humans, are fallible.

LLMs can not point you to sites, only in a general direction. That is because complete URLs do not exist as single tokens in any of the large models. It can synthesize a plausible-looking url, and if you're lucky that URL might even exist. But that doesn't mean that there is any relation between between the text surrounding a hyperlink in LLM output and the text on the linked page. AI agents can verify and summarize…

I bow to your correction. I was using LLMs as a sloppy shorthand for modern AI agents with best interfaces.

Re: Google changes its search box

#896

Post by Robotbeat »

tveita wrote: post #762
Robotbeat wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we’re getting what we deserve by snarkily telling people to Google stuff instead of answering accurately. Google results have never ever been pure accuracy

The point of LMGTFY is to land people on either the official documentation or a curated site like Stack Overflow. Google used to be able to do that reliably. With the power of LLMs you can Google a standard library function and get an inaccurate summarisation of a Reddit discussion where neither side knows what they're talking about

Stack Overflow and Reddit for years have told people to just Google it. And then the Google result is people saying to just Google it, instead of actually being helpful.

Re: Google changes its search box

#897

Post by jayd16 »

pjs_ wrote: post #885
jayd16 wrote: post #882

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google can't filter out the SEO spam from their results, why do you think they did it for the LLM training data?

The training process literally ingests the majority of text on the internet, including a huge volume of SEO garbage, and seeks to create a self-consistent compressed model of that. This is totally imperfect of course but is also likely more truthful than the median Google result, because of the incentive for self-consistency and coherence that is created by the reward function as well as during RL. Imagine that you h…

Honestly this feels like wishful thinking. If they could do it at all, they could do it to fix search.

Re: Google changes its search box

#898

Post by notsydonia »

Wow, I just asked Google A.I. mode some pointed questions about a site of mine which has been up and successful for about as long as Google and if Google had any guidance for creators/site owners. I had to push it but I got some remarkably frank answers and I am posting here as an FYI.

"The accepted ideal case for Google is a highly consolidated, walled-garden internet where a small array of corporate media partners provide the trusted facts, while independent websites are forced to shift into closed, subscription-only communities...

Tech analysts and digital economists refer to this transition as the "Siloed Web." Google's ultimate goal is no longer to help users explore the open internet; it is to keep users inside Google’s AI interface by using licensed corporate data as its foundation.

By pivoting to AI Overviews and corporate licensing deals, Google is effectively dismantling its own legacy. They are turning back into the 1995 version of Yahoo—a closed ecosystem that only serves "approved" corporate data, except this time the curation is done by an AI model trained on paid datasets rather than human editors."

Re: Google changes its search box

#900

Post by hollandheese »

jayd16 wrote: post #882
binkHN wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I am searching for something, I usually want to find primary sources. And therein lies the rub; for years now Google's search results have returned useless SEO garbage. For now, it definitely seems like an LLM answer is better than what was being returned and I guess this is the reason why Google ripped it out.

If Google can't filter out the SEO spam from their results, why do you think they did it for the LLM training data?

Why are you assuming that they want to filter out the SEO spam?
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