2y ago

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

www.telegraph.co.uk

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.

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2y ago

Google has sent internet into ‘spiral of decline’, claims DeepMind’ Mustafa Suleyman

www.telegraph.co.uk /business/2023/10/14/google-internet-spiral-of-decline-deepmind-mustafa-suleyman/

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2y ago

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

www.telegraph.co.uk /business/2023/10/14/google-internet-spiral-of-decline-deepmind-mustafa-suleyman/

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2y ago

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

www.telegraph.co.uk /business/2023/10/14/google-internet-spiral-of-decline-deepmind-mustafa-suleyman/

163 comments

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.
- I'd say they at least give more immediately useful info. I've got to scroll past 5-8 sponsored results and then the next top results are AI generated garbage anyways.
  Even though I think he's mostly right, the AI techbro gameplan is obvious. Position yourself as a better alternative to Google search, burn money by the barrelful to capture the market, then begin enshitification.
  In fact, enshitification has already begun; responses are comparatively expensive to generate. The more users they onboard, the more they have to scale back the quality of those responses.
  
  ChatGPT is already getting worse at code commenting and programming.
  The problem is that enshitification is basically a requirement in a capitalist economy.
- I mean most top searches are AI generated bullshit nowadays anyway. Adding Reddit to a search is basically the only decent way to get a proper answer. But those answers are not much more reliable than ChatGPT. You have to use the same sort of skepticism and fact checking regardless.
  Google has really gotten horrible over the years.
  
  Most of the results after the first page on Google are usually the same as the usable results, just mirrored on some shady site full of ads and malware.
- I already go to ChatGPT more than Google. If you pay for it then the latest version can access the internet and if it doesn’t know the answer to something it’ll search the internet for you. Sometimes I come across a large clickbait page and I just give ChatGPT the link and tell it to get the information from it for me.
  
  Do you fact-check the answers?
  
  give it time, algos will fuck those results as well
  
  ChatGPT powers Bing Chat, which can access the internet and find answers for you, no purchase necessary (if you're not on edge, you might need to install a browser extension to access it as they are trying to push edge still).
  
  Do you fact-check the answers?
- Its already happening at my work. Many are using bing AI instead of google.
  
  Don't worry they'll start monetizing LLMs and injecting ads into them soon enough and we'll be back to square one
- Chatgpt flat out hallucinates quite frequently in my experience. It never says "I don't know / that is impossible / no one knows" to queries that simply don't have an answer. Instead, it opts to give a plausible-sounding but completely made-up answer.
  A good AI system wouldn't do this. It would be honest, and give no results when the information simply doesn't exist. However, that is quite hard to do for LLMs as they are essentially glorified next-word predictors. The cost metric isn't on accuracy of information, it's on plausible-sounding conversation.
- I suspect that client-side AI might actually be the kind of thing that filters the crap from search results and actually gets you what you want.
  That would only be Chat-AI if it turns out natural language queries are better to determine the kind of thing the user is looking for than people trying to craft more traditional query strings.
  I'm thinking each person would can train their AI based on which query results they went for in unfiltered queries, with some kind of user provided feedback of suitability to account for click-bait (i.e. somebody selecting a result because it looks good but it turns out its not).
- If you aren't paying for chatgpt, give a look to perplexity.ai, it is free.
  You'll see that sources are references and linked
  Don't judge on the free version of chatgpt
  Edit. Why the hell are you guys downvoting a legit suggestion of a new technology in the technology community? What do you expect to find here? Comments on steam engines?
- Okay but the problem with that is that LLMs not only don't have any fidelity at all, they can't. They are analogous to the language planning centre of your brain, which has to be filtered through your conscious mind to check if it's talking complete crap.
  People don't realise this and think the bot is giving them real information, but it's actually just giving them spookily realistic word-salad, which is a big problem.
  Of course you can fix this if you add some kind of context engine for them to truly grasp the deeper and wider meaning of your query. The problem with that is that if you do that, you've basically created an AGI. That may first of all be extremely difficult and far in the future, and second of all it has ethical implications that go beyond how effective of a search engine it is.
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
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  Well let's move on from the abstract concept and blame the people uphldng the system.
- 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.
- 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
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.
- We've come full circle. Back when search sucked before you had to remember the best site to search. Creating better queries is always a good skill.
- Thank you for this beautiful yet sad journey! TIL!
- This was very informative.
- I switched to DuckDuckGo and have had zero issues I had on Google that would require any additional filters.
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
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.
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,
- SEO might be the clearest example of Goodhart's law to ever exist
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
  
  Having a monopoly creates fewer indicators for the market and create problems
And if you follow the chain of causation to the top what do we find?
- 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.
  
  Hmmm, someone could write a book about 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.
  
  The modern stock market sucks ass. I'm convinced that most of the problems with companies is tied to focusing on stock price.
- 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
- Nope, Chuck Testa.
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.
- 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.
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 have noticed this too, DDG is giving me more of what i want, google always disappoints with random an unrerlated resutls, Some of the resultso of DDG are not even visible in first page of google results.
- Obligatory mention of Kagi (which is actually brilliant).
  
  Mmm, but what's their plan to resist enshittification? After all, Google started out as "fundamentally different, user-centric." What will Kagi do when their market penetration peaks and the business managers demand more growth?
  
  I've used it this month a bit for the free 100 searches, but found it rather similar to my Google results. Can someone enlighten me in how they provide a better service?
  
  $5/mo
  ... per person.
  Or $20 for 6 in your house. $240/yr for your family to use a search engine.
  I mean... Come on! There's no way that's under 95% profit.
- Unfortunately DDG has gone downhill quite a lot in the last year or two.
  Exception made for local businesses,
  It's funny you say that, because in the last year or so suddenly my search results are being polluted with completely unrelated links to local businesses that don't even contain a single one of my search terms.
  They've obviously struck some deal where they're shoehorning these ads into search results now. Very frustrating because they serve them as regular links so they bypass adblockers.
  Really scummy move on their part, and it's made their service worse to boot.
- I feel Kagi does both things
- I mean, I know David DeGea is a good keeper but I'm not sure he can save the internet too.
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).
- but google is editing your queries without your knowledge, so they can milk more money out of their advertisers.
  That came from a wired article which was quietly retracted because the author had misunderstood a slide from the Google anti trust trial and had the meaning nearly backwards.
  What Google is actually doing is allowing advertisers to match keywords to common synonyms and other relevant keywords. If you search for (insert brandname) infant sleepwear for example Google will also show ads from adverts from companies who selected the keywords "baby pajamas". And that specific keyword replacement was only relevant to advertising"..
  Google has long been transparent about the fact they interpret the meaning of keywords for searches to try to improve their relevance, and if you think about it if Google was replacing low value keywords with higher value ones it would be obvious, as generic searches would only turn up stuff from luxury brands and ads wouldn't have broad keyword matching.
  There are plenty of things to blame Google for, the low return on advertising that publishers get and the increasing need for the entire Internet to be locked behind millions of different paywalls, SEO optimization, click bait bullshit, link farms, but one of them isn't replacing keywords to maximize value.
  
  What Google is actually doing is allowing advertisers to match keywords to common synonyms and other relevant keywords.
  So they ARE replacing search terms. Or at least adding to them.
  And that specific keyword replacement was only relevant to advertising"..
  So they ARE doing it make more money.
  This was a good explanation but it doesn't really refute his point.
- Compare to Amazon.com. Same thing. Ever less relevant searches in favor of who paid most to promote their products (usually random Chinese company with super cheap low quality products). Nowadays even if you search for a specific brand and model, it will often be buried by crap. And there is no way around it with advanced search parameters or filters.
  It's a shame, I remember when Google literally revolutionized how we search the web, and Amazon did the same with ecommerce.
  
  Amazon was for a long time not available in my east EU country, first time I checked it a few years ago, I was baffled how people could find this useful. Now I live in west EU, so not many alternatives, I hate it for the same reasons you list. Unless you specifically look for smg and know the details, you get all the useless shit pushed forward in your search.
- This is what led me to Kagi. It’s been so liberating.
  
  Mind elaborating?
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
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.
- I value more the opinion of a worker in the field than that of a shareholder talking about their competition.
- More power to you!
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
- "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?
'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!
- These days, entrepreneur just means unemployed.
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.
- Why not a combination of both? Seems most realistic.
  
  I agree. Google opened the way to monetization by advertisements and certain requirements to achieve that monetization (SEO and other meta stuff)...
  
  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.
- 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.
- Well, to be honest, most of the ones you mentioned did it after Google started doing it, so the point stands.
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.
- 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.
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!
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.
Google is terrible. It is beyond me that the majority of the population is dumb/uneducated enough to use it.

163 comments