Google has plunged the internet into a “spiral of decline”, the co-founder of the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) lab has claimed.
Mustafa Suleyman, the British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind, said: “The business model that Google had broke the internet.”
He said search results had become plagued with “clickbait” to keep people “addicted and absorbed on the page as long as possible”.
Information online is “buried at the bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff”, Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can “sell more adverts”, fuelled by Google’s technology.
I’d really like it if we stopped blaming the corporation and start blaming the people that make the decisions there and the people that implement those decisions. From the CEO’s to the programmers. Put their names everywhere, show the world who actually ruined it. Google was the best resource humanity had to access information. Now, more often than not, I can not find anything related to my search. The search algorithm they used 20 years ago was better than this new junk.
I’d rather we build something better ourselves than hoping that companies turn “good”. A whole lot of the modern Internet’s problems are simply the result of leaving everything up to big companies instead of building our own better stuff. In the software world we have Open Source, Linux, GNU and all that, in the content world we have Creative Commons and for online services we have basically nothing. No licenses, rules or even best practices. Worse yet, whenever there is some effort in that direction, it’s often fundamentally broken (e.g. Signal requiring a phone number, Fediverse giving full control to the server not the user, etc.).
PS: If you want old school Google, try kagi.com. It’s expensive, but the closest thing to good search we have at the moment.
Kagi is fantastic. It’s worth every penny and imo paid search means they are incentivized to provide the best results. Unlike Google, who is an advertising company masquerading as a search engine. When you sell ads, and you make money for displaying them, where do your loyalties lie? The best results, for me, aren’t their goal. It’s the “how can we show this guy an ad he’ll click on?”. Is it the best result, no. Does Google get paid, yes.
I use Kagi and it’s great. But I’d also throw in a big honourable mention for Qwant. Imo it’s better than DDG. Throw in some NextDNS ad blocking and you’ll practically never see ads in your search again.
I agree with most of what you said except I don’t expect companies to turn good. They don’t do good or evil, they do profit by whatever means. It’s intrinsic!
I’d like to help build some shit, got any recommendations? I can do the type type beep boop as long as that neural net is left out. Fuck that black box shit. I think it is the real reason for the shit algorithms these days. Which leads me to my next point. I get the exact same results from Kagi as I do from DDG. They are identical >90% of the time. Kagi does provide features that are worth paying for but I want better results, they existed before.
Once upon a time I could search for something incredibly specific and find an obscure forum with the answer. These days all I get, even with Kagi is the same results from SEO optimized garbage to AI generated dribble.
I really do not understand why Kagi is so promoted here. I really have not found it to be any better.
The problem with DDG is that it is just marketing on top of Bing. It doesn’t improve the Bing search results in any way, adds no new features and has no ambitions to build its own index. Never quite understand why it got popular in the first place when you can just use Bing instead and get literally the exact same thing.
Kagi is much closer to Google, bigger index and more up to date results than Bing, it has a lot of old features Google removed over the years, it removes a lot of the SEO spam that fills up Google and so on. It feels like modern version of Google without the enshittification. And yes, you can find most of the sites in any other search engine just as well, everybody is searching the same Web after all. It’s not magic, it can’t fix everything that is broken with the Web, but Kagi is a much cleaner more user focused experience.
What makes Kagi interesting in the end that going from Google to any of the alternatives always felt like a downgrade, Kagi is the only one I ever tried that felt like an upgrade.
I’d also argue there’s a lot more shit and garbage on the internet that google needs to sift through. Tons of duplicate pages, ad infested websites and whatnot.
SEO optimised webpages are often also ad infested, clickbait webpages.
But yes. I’m using duckduckgo because it actually gives me better search results than google most of the time. So the non-personalized results are better than their personalized results.
Chatgpt has also given me better results when searching for tooling. Looking for wiki alternatives is just page after page of fucking confluence. At least chatgpt manages to list different wiki tools (including confluence ) but I don’t have to go through the first 90 google pages.
I need a “distinct” checkbox in my search engine. And a plugin that rates pages based on ad presence and how clickbaity the article looks. Maybe that’s a good idea for a new fucking search engine all together.
/Endrant
Sorry.
Why not just shoot them at the spot?
There is nothing better than lazy internet mob attacking individuals for shit they don’t like, while don’t knowing the whole picture.
(For anyone who thinks this is above is a good idea, please think about the guy who created Minecraft, made a huge success and then got depressed by just reading comments from all the kids who didn’t like something about the game)
The amount of potential targets is NOT a limiting factor for the hate mob. There will not be more hate mobs as a result of more transparency.