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 know I’m dreaming here, but central internet services like google search and youtube should be utilities controlled by the public.
The video pool that Youtube draws from, generated by the public, should be public property, hosted on public servers, internationalized somehow, with an opensource market of frontend interfaces and algorithms to deliver that content to people, instead of one youtube algorithm and one interface designed to meet the profit incentives of google. People should be free to use the algorithm and interface they find most useful.
This was started over two decades ago, but never came about because the copyright cartel destroyed it. It was called peer to peer (p2p) tech.
The cartel even tried to pass laws which would allow them to control what media you could have on your computer. (The SSSCA and later CBDTPA) This is where the term Digital Rights Management came from.
Former govt IT employee here. Trust me, you really don’t want the govt in charge of media platforms. So what’s the alternative? Well, at least in the USA, we have this idea of publishers and platforms baked into law, however, it’s mostly ignored because right now because the govt and media are on the same side. (Heyoo! The fourth estate aligns with the fifth column.) What we need is to fortify that idea AND entrench net neutrality into a formal perpetual law AND codify all wireless and wired communications as public utilities.
That’s genius.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ive had to start putting ublock origin on cuatomers systems by default. The web has become a far worse cesspool for scams than what it was a few years ago. The ads blend in with real content. The internet is a shit hole now.
Seriously, browsing the internet without an adblocker is a horrible experience. So Firefox with ublock origin is my go to.
(aside of social network’s disinformation, conspiracies, hate breeding and false news) this is prime example of what the internet ended up as, to a regular user: how-i-experience-web-today.com
I lol’d, this is great and too fucking accurate.
Google is terrible. It is beyond me that the majority of the population is dumb/uneducated enough to use it.
Oh yes, it’s Google who ruined the Internet… Not all the Content farms like facebook, instagram, twitter and online news. Its the search engine guys.
If we are trying to dig into the root cause? Then yes, honestly. It is Google. And don’t call them the “search engine guys”, that’s not what they are about. They are the “mass aggregation and correlation of user data guys”. Search has been a means to an end for Google for a very long time.
All those other things didn’t exist when google was developing their model. Google paved the way for the internet no longer being free, but being “free” with payment rendered in the form of user data. That in turn directly led to all those other evils you referred to. It is not an exaggeration to imply that Google is ultimately at fault for the way the internet functions today.
Nah. Disagree. I remember facebook gathering data to an extreme way before google pushed ads on search engine.
Thats like saying BP is at fault for climate change and ignoring exxon nd shell.Google’s advertising system definitely predates Facebook. It was the inspiration for Facebook and Twitter’s monetization models … There are interviews where people in those companies talk about being inspired by this Google model where they just give everyone away for free in exchange for ads being placed on their site.
Were you not there when Google Ads started?
Well, to be honest, most of the ones you mentioned did it after Google started doing it, so the point stands.
Why not a combination of both? Seems most realistic.
It is all of them. This is just scapegoating. The internet wasnt ruined by alphabet. It was ruined way before by increasing it’s value to companies.
I agree. Google opened the way to monetization by advertisements and certain requirements to achieve that monetization (SEO and other meta stuff)…
‘entrepreneur’ lacks the positive vibe it used to bring. like saying ‘visionary’ or ‘genius’. overuse has tipped these terms into ‘yeah right’ and ‘clickbait’ especially when appearing in headlines. blame google for aggregating clickbait headlines but they aren’t writing them. interesting that telegraph.co.uk hosting this is packed full with ‘clickbait’. designed with LCD appeal and low value content like this story
And why do you think they are written in this manner? Does it have something to do with ads? Praytell, who owns the ad platform as well as search?
Pretty balsy to blame the writers, they are simply chasing the algorithm Google makes. In the end, Google does really control it all. So if you wanna be mad at someone, I’d say start with the one forcing everyone to do this.
why can’t bing and ddg take more market share. simply poor algorithm design or is one actually better. G haters unite!
Because they both pull the same censorship so there’s no discernable difference where it matters?
Gimme a call when any website can exist purely on DDG traffic or Bing’s ad platform.
These days, entrepreneur just means unemployed.
Goolag went completely off the rails when they decided to drop the “Don’t Be Evil” pledge. There were whole projects dropped on a dime the moment anyone questioned if a certain project or action was “evil”. Now nobody at Goolag even cares anymore. It’s all about that $earch For More $$$; anyway they can get it.
It will ultimately be their downfall, mmw.
“Don’t be evil” is still the last line of Google’s corporate conduct. Seemingly not many people understand that Alphabet is Google’s parent company, not their direct replacement, and all they did was change it to “Do the right thing”, because generally when you’re broken up in anti-trust measures, you don’t want to just rename your company.
Note: I am not arguing that Google is a “Good” company. It’s just nonsensical to point to a completely arbitrary “Evil” in their policy and say that without that they would, y’know, be evil. Particularly when Google itself still has that policy.
Is this community really empty or is it just me?
Ecosia and DDG to the rescue!
I would gladly go back to 1990s Internet if it meant not having to deal with Google and data mining. I haven’t turned off ad-blocking in 20 years.
Pre-Google Internet wasn’t exactly great either. If you think current Google is bad, wait until you are stuck with AltaVista, a 5MB email inbox and video sharing without Youtube or services like AOL or MSN that try to outright replace the Web. Google got big in the first place because what they offered was substantially better than the competition.
If you travel back 15 years ago or so, you have Google at its best, providing lots of great services and still innovating.
wait until you are stuck with AltaVista
I got good query skills
a 5MB email inbox
So the emails don’t have tracking and images embedded in them? And I can just delete things after I’m done reading them? Sounds great.
video sharing without Youtube
I can count the number times I’ve wanted to share videos with the public on zero hands.
services like AOL or MSN that try to outright replace the Web.
So like how Facebook is for boomers now? And what Google is trying to do with their verified website bullshit?
It really wasn’t that much worse, unless you’re obsessed with over-sharing your life to strangers on social media.
I was there and can tell you we had a peak of quality maybe in the 00s and have been going backwards towards worse than the early Internet really fast in the last decade or so.
Sure, if you want to find info on something, now you can now watch a glitzy 1080p video with lots of fancy graphics on Youtube of some guy explaining it - it will have a clickbait title and be interspected with Ads, sponsor segments, and it will take half an hour to explain something which in the old days you could read all about on a website in 10 minutes and actually came out knowing more about it.
The funny bit is that the old website is still there, but if you use Google to search for it that video and another 20 like it will be shoved in front of you, along with “sponsored results” and a ton of SEO-optimized clickbait websites which you’ll have to wade through to find the one needle in between all that straw (and meanwhile the system is designed to distract you away from what you want, so you’ll have to battle your own subconscious pulls to manage to stay the course).
And don’t get me started on how you actually had a decent expectation of privacy on the Internet back in the late 90s and early 00s whilst nowadays all dominat players almost force you (in some cases actually do) to give them your phone number to better link your various online and offline profiles in multiple devices.
IMHO, the actual Internet in software, usability and software systems terms now is not superior to what we had in the late 90s, early 00s, it’s the electronics tech (mainly thanks to bandwidth and portable computing devices) that’s superior.
And if you follow the chain of causation to the top what do we find?
how would that situation have played out without capitalism?
Not everything is 100% capitalism or 0% capitalism In this case, unregulated capitalism and the basic human greed are responsible for this situation. Everybody wants to make a quick buck, never mind the consequences Also a full capitalist system would not have invented the internet as we know it or the World Wide Web or even the micro computing industry
Also a full capitalist system would not have invented the internet as we know it
We’d have had CompuServe, only bigger. Subscription only, walled garden environments.
Might have got something close to modern ubiquity with cable companies bundling search and forum functions in with the video, but it would still be heavily monetised and tightly controlled.
The purest Capitalism is Unregulated Capitalism: Regulated Capitalism means that there is some other ideology (in the basic sense of “set of ideas”) guiding the decisions about the where and how to regulate said Capitalism and having the power to impose itself on Capitalism (otherwise it wouldn’t be “regulating” it, just “advising” it, which would be promptly ignored) hence above it.
The problem is exactly that the dominant political system we’ve had for the last 4 decades, often known as neoliberalism, is all about removing regulations on Capitalism (hence neoliberalism), so a movement to make Capitalism the one and only political ideology with any real power for every and all political decisions in Society, not merelly the ones related to Trading. This is why it’s now common for mainstream politicians to harp all about “doing what’s best for businesses”, unconditionally and never once using the caveat that Society should only help businesses which are good for Society.
The problem is exactly that we’ve mostly moved to 100% Capitalism, with no other ideology above it providing oversight and correcting its problems.
Maybe Capitalism does work well as a means to optimize resource allocation and bottom-up economic coordination for optimal results in some markets, but it most certainly doesn’t work well at maximizing outcomes for the greatest number, in terms of systemic survival (Capitalism brough up Polution, which it most definitelly wasn’t solved by it, and now Global Warming) and doesn’t even seem to work well in markets which aren’t highly liquid with no negative externalities (i.e. naturally very competitive and non poluting or otherwise damaging).
Yeah…not so simple.
Our system based on infinite growth for the investors is what fucks everything up. The incessant need for MORE places pressure on companies to fuck someone over for money once the initial innovative growth stage ends and the market gets saturated. They buy or crush what competitors they can to squeeze the market. Usually the employees get it first with hiring cheaper labor, reduction in fringe and real benefits, rising costs for existing benefits, etc. Then the consumer gets hit next with enshittification. Shittier services, harder to access services, unbundling, more fees, shittier products, etc. often compounded with more in-your-face marketing.
The modern stock market sucks ass. I’m convinced that most of the problems with companies is tied to focusing on stock price.
Hmmm, someone could write a book about this!
Someone wrote a book about this.
And call it “The Money” or something.
You could make a religion out of this!
Another good examples of this I feel is how netflix is doing (and disney+ now as well). Year over year profits for shareholders have ruined what used to be good (or at least descent) businesses.
I figure it’s like cable companies. They get you hooked with a low price that puts the squeeze on competitors, then slowly jack up the fees on existing customers. It’s a safe bet when peer companies are also raising prices because where can the customers jump ship to that isn’t the exact same enshittified service? Plus, if there’s a series they’ve got you hooked on, are you going to want to leave or just rationalize that nobody else is better?
IMO we’re going to see more “subscribe for [extended time period]” and save $2/mo or maybe even timed contracts with abusive cancellation fees to keep customers on the hook.
Nope, Chuck Testa.
He said search results had become plagued with “clickbait” to keep people “addicted and absorbed on the page as long as possible”.
It’s not just Internet searches. Video games are designed psyop-like as well now, all to drive engagement, and more profits.
At this point we need legislation so companies cannot make products that are mentally manipulative and detrimental to their customers.
They’re getting dangerously close to “drug pushers” territory.
“dangerously close”?
“There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’: illegal drugs and software.” – Edward Tufte
“There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’: illegal drugs and software.” – Edward Tufte
lol! I had never heard of that quote before now, ty for sharing!
This has been going on for decades and Blizzard started using it almost exclusively with World of Warcraft. They made the game a virtual Skinner Box (look it up and read about the experiments if you’ve never heard about it, pretty much animals will prefer to do things that they derive pleasure from instead of necessary things, like eating), and other companies followed suit. Then loot boxes and IAPs became a thing.
This has been going on for decades
It seems like it’s a recent development in this decade, at least an accelerated form of it.
Almost like recently evolved in corporations got together and decided enmass to start treating their customers more like things to exploit.
Less win-win, and more win-lose.
It’s absolutely gotten worse, but it’s been a thing for decades.
Google?? No, not Google. Capitalism. The same forces that drove the internet’s growth are making it so much worse than it could be. Profit motive trumps everything and drives the hellscape of engagement monetization
Sure. But also the tech bro culture of “I’m not responsible for the consequences of my choices, so long as there is a computational layer between those consequences and me”.
Silicon Valley, and it’s legion of brown nosers, all love to believe that “I didn’t think…” is a valid excuse, not a self-indictment.
culture of “I’m not responsible for the consequences of my choices, so long as there is a ~~computational ~~layer between those consequences and me”.
yeah because that’s totally unique to techbros who definitely ushered it in and not simply most capitalists in general
Yeah, this guy just seems butthurt. If anything, Google was a prime mover and “Good guy” for about a decade or so. The Internet was fundamentally broken around the mid to late 2000s when broadband became ubiquitous and social media became popular. Tons of people online and zero way to control anything. The Internet and WWW simply weren’t built for this scale.
I think it’s the centralization of services that broke what the internet was in the mid-00s, and increasingly monetized every facet of it. What was internet culture in the 00s became nerd identity in the late 00s-early 10s, which over the decade became completely appropriated and commodified by capital interests.
More of the internet now is intentionally constructed to cater to a market demand. In the 00s anyone could afford to run a publicly accessible web page fully designed by them. Now that’s just having a profile on an existing social media site. Google was incredible because it helped you find the most niche type of internet site, but when everything became so consolidated it pivoted to advertising, cloud services, and venture capital. Now it’s just a monster that seeds any technology they think would help them make profit and focuses the entire sector around that motivation.
More people are now on the internet to turn a profit as well, because it’s now the primary place for business. Things you used to do on the internet for fun in your spare time are now career paths.
Not to mention he sold his company to Google. So he’s as much a contributor as Google itself.
Yeah, let’s absolve the individuals working at the companies who did this from all responsibility by blaming an abstract concept instead.
Capitalism may be the game, and Google may have only been one of the players, but they’re still playing dirty.
Well let’s move on from the abstract concept and blame the people uphldng the system.
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Because if Google didn’t exists, another company would have done the exact same. So yes, I think its pretty accurate to blame the system that make this business plan the only one to succeed.
So the people who made those decisions just get a free pass then?
Come on, let’s hold people accountable. The system sucks, I agree, but the issues are massively exacerbated by the rich and powerful not being held accountable. So don’t let them hide behind economic ideologies or legal entities; point your finger at them.
Not defending Google but the truth is legally, the directors at Google have to drive shareholder value and thus every legal opportunity must be explored. Not just a Google issue as many nations have similar laws that drive this sort of behaviour. Money wants to make money and the laws are structured in their favour.
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Exactly and yet few are really taking about this.
There are two opposing positions in this thread and I wholeheartedly agree with both of them.
both of you can be right at the same time. just saying.
But which one do you think will lead to change? Blaming abstract concepts, or holding the people who are responsible accountable?
I see no value in denouncing capitalism.
Capitalism isn’t the problem. It’s corruption. So rather than fix the problem and hold the corrupt individuals accountable, you’d rather stop the symptom. But then the source of the problem is still there and manifests itself elsewhere. But it’s easy just putting bandaids on things, so I can see why that would be the crux of your efforts.
Corruption is the natural end result of Capitalism.
Do you really expect that in a society were “Greed is good” Lawmakers and Law-enforcers would magically not be seeking to maximize personal upsides like everybody else and positions of power within the State that could be used for such personal upside maximization wouldn’t attract smooth talkers seeking to become filthy rich???!
You need to be pretty naive to expect that an environment where the greatest measure of success and discriminator for receiving superior treatment is having lots of money, the people who can get power from salesmanship (which is what politicians are: selers of themselves and of ideas) and being mates with said salesman (i.e. those who get nominated to positions by the politicians) would not be driven by maximizing their personal wealth and the prestige and superior treatment that is given to the monyed.
Given human nature, Capitalism without widespread corruption is about as realistic Communism (the whole utopia of everybody having the same, not the bullshit that the PRC and Soviet Union deem “communism”) and, funnilly enough. they both fail for exactly the same reason: Greed.
I’d have to agree. Morals and ethics (and the lack thereof) are what drives this perversion and the same can be seen in other economic models tried in the past like communism.
One might argue that companies are forced to do this “because of the shareholders” but in the past companies weren’t always solely focused on short-term gain with long-term term consequences (enshittification) and they made their shareholders plenty of money for longer. It seems the focus now is to burn bright and die out fast, but that path isn’t inherent to capitalism itself.
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99% of the time it has.
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I know Google is a big corpo but its hardly the only reason behind the state of the internet. It is a major factor, but to single out Google when Microsoft and others have played just as significant of a role is odd.
Disagree. Google is considerably more relevant to the Internet and especially advertising on the net than MS
