Google has sent internet into ‘spiral of decline’, claims DeepMind co-founder

The part about Google isn't wrong.

But the second half of the article, where he says that AI chatbots will replace Google search because they give more accurate information, that simply is not true.

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

Before Google there used to be shitty search engines like Altavista and Yahoo!, and there were many of them so you had to also use a "meta" search engine which was basically a program running locally on your computer which would take your search query and forward it to a dozen search engines and then shows you the aggregated results. That was one way of combining their strengths let's say since each one of them was complete shit.

The results were still shit though because many websites were gaming those search engines as SEO at the time was extremely easy: the search engines simply looked at your meta tags (where you could spam your keywords) and the keyword density of your pages.

Then Google came with its PageRank algorithm and obsoleted the meta tags altogether. Keyword density became also less important. Google basically assigned a score manually to a dozen trustworthy and high quality websites and then let those scores propagate with some decay through its graph representing all webpages it indexed and the links between them, so if a website A with a PageRank of 10 for example linked to your website B, you'd inherit part of that PageRank (how much will depend on how many outgoing links website A has, the more outgoing links it has, the less your website B will get). It was basically a measure of trustworthiness/quality and they then ranked the webpages in their results mainly according to that score.

Things went amazingly well for a few years and no one missed the old search engines, then the SEO community found a way to abuse that new algorithm again and the idea was very simple: massively exchange links and even buy them from platforms like TextLinkAds (it's dead now but you could look it up on Wikipedia). So we went back to the shitty results again.

Then you also have another big trouble maker: Google AdSense. The idea of this thing was to pay website owners if they accept to display Google's ads and they'd get paid something proportional to the number of clicks/impressions the ads would get on their website. The concept was okay, website owners could make some money, Google also wins, and the ads were mostly textual and none of the annoying popup ads you'd see at the time. Then it didn't take long for people to abuse that system too, especially with people like Joel Comm shilling the idea of making websites purely for AdSense and retiring from them, people began creating spammy websites with garbage content that's filled with keywords just so that they can put Google AdSense ads on them, those websites were called "Made For Adsense" (MFA), and that immediately polluted the search results because you started having millions of them.

Sure Google made improvements later on and incorporated AI to have the search engine also understand the content of the webpages, which in theory should help with relevance, but due to the cat & mouse between Google and the SEO (& the MFA) community things are still shitty and the only way you can get very good results today is if you insert a site:stackoverflow.com or site:reddit.com at the end of your search query.

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.

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.

He said search results had become plagued with “clickbait” to keep people “addicted and absorbed on the page as long as possible”.

No, that's the advertising that did that, the search results made a whole field of "SEO" possible which aimed to make the least useful page show up first in the results,

And if you follow the chain of causation to the top what do we find?

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.

DDG to the rescue! It's astounding how in this day and age, duckduckgo gives much more meaningful results than google. Exception made for local businesses, but for technical info and issues, DDG is way better.

I heard lot of complaints of google search and seen the decline, but it’s like it got significantly worse in the last 1-2 years. I read it’s not just ads and clickbait/seo “articles”, but google is editing your queries without your knowledge, so they can milk more money out of their advertisers.

It’s mostly unusable now if you want to search for smg new, I just use it to jump to already known pages (e.g. google “vodafone” to jump to the page with a few clicks an pay my bills, often simpler than typing/bookmarking).

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.

I've been saying this for years, but no one listens to a random dev. Now I can finally back it up with some authority.

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.

https://lemmy.world/c/goolag

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.

'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

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.

SearXNG or other self-hostable aggregators are a great alternative. And yes, you can disable google as an aggregated source.

Mirror without a paywall

Ecosia and DDG to the rescue!

Google is terrible. It is beyond me that the majority of the population is dumb/uneducated enough to use it.

I'll just use this opportunity to mention kagi.com, a search engine that you pay for, but which doesn't track you and gives you controls for customizing your search results yourself instead of letting an algorithm build a profile of your habits. I've used it for months now, and I'm not going back.