This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I've switched to startpage and have no complaints. Not that Google has deployed much of its latest crap in Europe, but it's been shit for quite some time anyway.
I’ve googled several things recently, the AI shit really sucks! It’s fine if you’re looking for something basic, like translations of words and what not. But if it’s something more specific it’ll easily bullshit you and claim it’s correct.
Yeah not using Google but duck.ai gave me some claim about a product I was looking up that had some categories. I asked how many of category x and it said 11 but the product only had 11 in total. Oh yeah oops I have actually no idea how many of category x there is out of 11. Cool, people who trust it would have just wasted money.
that's copium.
I see that google increase number of search ads, likely because people just stop scrolling and clicking entirely
One final nail in the open web coffin, just hammer it in there real good. RIP.
The internet was never designed to exist in a capitalist hellscape. It was designed for the free sharing of information by people putting random servers on the network.
Technically it was invented by Xerox then developed for the military. The 1990s version of the internet was more akin to what you described but I wouldn't say it was designed with that in mind.
I wouldn’t say it was designed with that in mind
In a sense it very much was. Al Gore as a young congressperson was shown the military version (Arpanet) and then pushed a series of bills that expanded this to the civilian world and created what became knows as the Internet. His explicit goal was to create an "Information Superhighway" that would allow for the free exchange of - wait for it - information. This phrase (popularized by Gore but probably not originated by him) was so well-known in the '90s that it became a standard joke format: "{fill in the blank} Superhighway" was sure to get a laugh.
Incidentally, during the 2000 presidential election cycle, Gore gave an interview where he said he "took the initiative in creating the Internet", which was a perfectly true and reasonable statement for him to make. In fact, all he was doing was emphasizing an achievement that he was already well-known for. Months later, Bush advisor Karl Rove found this quote and mangled it into the "Al Gore claims he invented the Internet!" bullshit that so many people still think was real.
I think you're both right, but one of you is talking about the internet, and the other is talking about the world wide web. Both technologies were intended to facilitate ease of access of information, which is incompatible with robber baronism.
As intended.
First they're going to collapse the ad model by eliminating most clicks.
Then they're going to put all of the information they've been scraping from the now-bankrupt websites behind paywalls.
Why would they do that, when they can charge advertisers to bias the LLM? How much do you think Adidas would pay to have their products advantages mixed into any response about sports gear, undetectable?
Joke's on them, I've already been working on that for decades. *pats ublock* This baby can bankrupt so many websites and I always hoped it could collapse the ad model completely.
In all seriousness, it's becoming increasingly clear that we're eventually going to have to build a new, free internet out of the wreckage of this one once the corporations are done with it. Technically it's already there, nascent but ever so slowly growing and taking root, hiding in plain sight. Like the so-called dark web of tor, it already exists in parallel to the existing structures of the internet. Call it the deep web, the indie web, nostalgia web, unsearchable web, I've heard countless terms and most of them aren't terribly accurate, but the web doesn't need ads and google search to exist, it never did. It just needs humans, which despite the best efforts of big tech many of us still are, communicating directly with one another and documenting our billions of lifetimes of diverse collective experiences and knowledge.
We are the wealth of information in the internet. Corporations don't own it. We are it.
I see your ublock and raise you Pihole.
The internet has always had ads, some of the most obnoxious were those mid to late 90s banner ads with sound. I’ll never forget loading a random page and my speakers screaming: Helllllloooooooooo.
Porque no los dos?
I genuinely forgot about the ads with sound.
I don't miss them.
Very much yes.
I have this great visual image of the corporate web, marked by neon signs and billboards and holographic ads, populated entirely by bots talking to each other while the humans sneak away, giggling and shushing each other.
As intended.
Yes. The secret to telling what a search engine wants you to do is whatever is on top of the search results.
You and I might scour the results to find the exact best results, but most people simply look at the very first thing they're presented with and call it a day.
When I saw all of the search engines putting AI answers first, I knew they were intentionally trying to stop people from clicking through.
I'm not sure I fully understand the play here. Like, what's the grand vision? Fewer click-throughs == less ad impressions, no? They just want you to see the AdWords ads only? I'm not sure it's a fully-baked idea. I'm not convinced they can really create a moat around all information on the web
Would welcome any additional insights
It's to keep you on Google as long as possible. Google doesn't care about ad impressions off-site. Look at it this way:
You search for something and AI surfaces full answers to you at the top. Now, Google can "alter the deal" in the near-future where "sponsored AI results" come into play and are incorporated into The Answer. THAT is the gold mine. Right now (and forever) it's been about being on the first page of results and now it's about being the first result "above the fold" so people don't even need to scroll. This is going to change to be the "AI answer" so your website / product / service is mixed into the answer. Pay-for-play just like everything else.
This method will rapidly train users to just search, view AI results, then click through those paid results or move onto something else. Those AI incporated impressions will make Google money and the possible click-through from the AI answer will yield more money.
Companies are already working to optimize so AIs will recommend their products and services when people ask things like "I'm going on vacation to the mountains for a week. What gear would you recommend?"
Google probably wants to keep you on google.com, where they have ads. By doing the AI stuff, you never click through to someone else's page. They get 100% of the interactions and can sell all the clicks.
It's monopoly stuff. They should be stopped, with whatever box of liberty is needed.
Any hope this takes SEO out with it, or are we just going to get to a point of PR companies flooding AIs with data to benefit their clients?
The original Google algorithm was powered by establishing 'reputation' by the number of links to that page. Would be cool to see an algorithm that started with that analysis, but also weighed pages by their Erdős distance to your Fediverse account(think 6° of Kevin Bacon) - basically much higher scores for links from you, higher score for links by your friends, moderate boost for friends of friends, etc.
Search results are shit now.
Our only hope is this opens the door to some competitor, who'll provide actually useful search results. I know that would be very expensive to start.
For the longest time I didn't understand why people were saying Google search had gone to shit. Worked for me! Now it cancerous.
I can search for a YouTube video I know well, nada unless I go directly to YT. Google can't even find shit in their own space!
Kagi. Kagi is the answer. Been using it for 3-months and it's absolutely worth the $5 a month.
Enshittify search to the point of it being nearly useless. Then introduce a little bot to find it for you. Predictable.
Google pushed out competitors using partnerships only they could afford, then intentionally made search worse so people would see more ads.
Some websites now are really shit. Won't load unless you allow JavaScript from 15 different domains, cookie consent, terrible privacy etc.
If I want to know things like what 10 kmpl in mpg, I often use DDG snippets.
right i stopped using "search" that muddles my answers with LLM so how would they get my clicks, they lost the customer
Looks like search will be dead soon.
