Another problem is they ruined their own search with AI.
Kicked themselves right in the nuts.
They ruined it without AI before AI was commonplace. They ruined it with higher profit margins. 🥹
Avid Amoeba is right that Google ruined their own search before LLMs entered the public consciousness (this does not mean LLMs didn’t exist before this, but that they were not widely available for the general public to use or became part of the zeitgeist).
If you don’t agree please listen to the Better Offline podcast episode “The Man That Destroyed Google Search”. The episode goes through the rollbacks/changes Google made to their search Algorithm well before AI was commonplace.
Better Offline: CZM Rewind: The Man That Destroyed Google Search: https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/czm-rewind-the-man-that-destroyed-google-search
Yeah. Also I’m guessing their AI additions to search made their profit margins worse since they take a lot more computation to produce. Although they probably cache a lot of them for common searches.
Probably made the margins better because investors apparently still love hearing the word “AI” attached to shit
Even though that surely results in them being able to access more money and makes shareholders richer, that’s not a factor in profit margins. Profit margins are just about revenue vs cost. In this case - how much the make from each search vs how much it costs to produce that search.
I hope AI is the new metaverse. I’ll have a good chuckle when it all implodes.
Many people around me are using LLMs in many parts of their work al the time. Neutral networks are used in many useful situations. I feel exactly like you, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to cope with it.
The US National Weather Service releases updated 84-hour forecasts every 6 hours. Even with supercomputers at their disposal, due to the computational complexity of simulating physics, that is their best possible effort.
Google, meanwhile, is “developing a machine learning model that it says can accurately predict weather in seconds – not hours – and outperforms 90% of the targets used by the world’s best weather prediction systems.” Using a single desktop computer, they can generate a highly accurate 10-day forecast in under a minute.
More information:
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/12/ai-weather-forecasting-climate-crisis/
Given this information, and given the enshittification of Google search, would you still make the same guess about their profit margins?
Yes. Search generally pulls data from databases. It doesn’t compute weather forecasts. The addition of AI results is net addition computation. In the worst case scenario where the generation of the AI results happens on-the-fly, that’s a lot more computation. I’m sure they pre-compute a lot of them so they’re not in the worst case scenario. However in the best case scenario they still have to do this new additional heavy (check LLM compute usage) computation once per result. So the profit margin for search is very likely lower than it used to be when isolating for this variable. If they’re somehow increasing their revenue from these results, that’s another variable that might offset it. I’ve no idea. What I’m certain about is the cost is higher after AI results were introduced because more energy is used.
They ruined it by setting themselves as untouchable and wanting bigger profit margins than “richer than God” money.
They specifically made search less accurate so that users would search multiple times to boost the number of ads that get displayed to juice their numbers for quarterly earnings. You can blame Prabhakar Raghavan.
Their search was shit before AI. Unless you like pinterest and quora spam.
Their search algorithm was great.
It’s fucking awful with our without AI in 2024.
I do like how AI works for referencing articles. You can tap on any sentence in the summary and it will display all links that contain that source information. It’s actually pretty useful.
I find that in many cases, if you actually click the link to find the sourced information, it’s not there. I’ve experienced this with nearly every LLM front-end platform.
They’re even shoving AI into Youtube by placing a summary in plain text below some videos now. Don’t know if it’s opt-in or just randomly placed for testing but so far I’m not impressed because it skips over important things. I’m honestly puzzled as to why the hell they’re doing this.
They get revenue from the pre roll ad while you read the summary. Then they don’t have to pay the creator when you click away before watching.
And then they’ll stop having creators creating free content for their advertisement sceme to work. Genius!
My younger sister searches tiktok for information and by that I mean she doesn’t even use the search feature. The topics just show up in her feed. She thinks she’s choosing/finding but is actually getting fed topics.
Its sad because everytime she tells me something she learned on tiktok I do like 2mins of research and find its not true or misleading. People lie about the most mundane things on that platform and I don’t know why.
That’s why I think those platforms should be banned, especially for children.
We’re creating a whole new generation of misinformed people.
I’d argue a different approach: Teach critical thinking and scepticism to children. Banning things makes it a race to keep up with whatever new thing comes up; it’s not a sustainable solution so much as a constant fixing of new holes without tackling why these things are so destructive.
I dont think critical thinking is enough. If you apply critical thinking to a media landscape full of lies you will still come out wrong.
What else do you suggest?
I dont know its a hard problem to solve. Above my paygrade thats for sure.
I really think we need a monitored internet for under 13s. The internet is just to fucked up at the moment. I never thought I would be someone advocating for this because i grew up on the wild west internet watching people getting beheaded and stuff. But all that is nothing compared to being bombarded with friendly, trustworthy (seeming) people that constantly spread lies and misinformation that shapes your world view.
100% agree. I also grew up on the wild west, websites and things that were shocking or straight up illegal and are harder and harder to find nowadays (especially if you’re a kid that only uses apps on his/her smartphone).
When I was a kid, I knew that the things I was seeing were horrible, it was clear. But now kids watch complete misinformation that’s presented in a serious and interesting way. They have no way to tell the truth from a lie anymore.
This is partially why I kind of agree with the government ban. Tiktok does have some good information but it’s a lot of lowest common denominator stuff like all social media, the worst part is for non Chinese users ‘the algorithm’ pushes only dances and this misinformation or fights/arguments, while in China it’s more educational and musical stuff that’s promoted.
Ya my little bro is the same. He’ll announce some thing he’s learned and it collapses under the barest scrutiny… I only hope that the rest of us are able to teach him to apply that scrutiny himself. It’s pretty scary how kids just accept shit, if you take that into adulthood… Well, I think we see the results all around us in the world.
They say stuff that isn’t true because it gets them engagement from people who come to correct them. We figured out how to generate profit from misinformation.
Oh my… searching TikTok for information is so misleading and so encouraged by the platform…
It’s because the truth is boring, sad, and unnoteworthy. That doesn’t make for good you know what viral videos.
Younger generations are using other platforms to gather information.
What’s not being talked about here is that young people don’t seem to give a damn if the information they research is accurate or not, it’s whether or not it’s peddled by their preferred streamer. Those “other platforms” are apparently Tiktok and Netflix, not exactly places known for speaking truth to power.
I’ve spent twenty years trying to believe that the children will be the saviors of the future, but I think maybe the conservatives actually succeeded in murdering education in it’s crib. I am now nearly fully on team “You know, maybe these kids actually are a bunch of dumb fucks who won’t save us after all.”
It’s not so much that they don’t give a damn, but that they can’t tell. I taught some basic English courses with a research component (most students in their first college semester), and I’d drag them to the library each semester for a boring day on how to generate topics, how to discern scholarly sources, then use databases like EBSCO or JSTOR to find articles to support arguments in the essays they’d be writing for the next couple years. Inevitably, I’d get back papers with so-and-so’s blog cited, PraegerU, Wikipedia, or Google’s own search results. Here’s where a lot of the problem lies: discerning sources, and knowing how to use syntax in searches, which is itself becoming irrelevant on Google etc. but NOT academic databases. So why take the time to give the “and” and “or” and “after: 1980” and “type: peer-reviewed” when you can just write a natural-language question into a search engine and get an answer right away that seems legit in the snippet? I’d argue the tech is the problem because it encourages a certain type of inquiry and quick answers that are plausible, but more often than not, lacking in any credibility.
Is it the tech? Or is it media literacy?
I’ve messed around with AI on a lark, but would never dream of using it on anything important. I feel like it’s pretty common knowledge that AI will just make shit up if it wants to, so even when I’m just playing around with it I take everything it says with a heavy grain of salt.
I think ease of use is definitely a component of it, but in reading your message I can’t help but wonder if the problem instead lies in critical engagement. Can they read something and actively discern whether the source is to be trusted? Or are they simply reading what is put in front of them then turning around to you and saying “well, this is what the magic box says. I don’t know what to tell you.”.
I think my kid is gonna be just fine. He rarely believes anything i tell em without follow up evidence…He’s 5.
But Ive always focused on critical thinking skills from as early as possible.
You must understand that you are part of an infinitesimal minority.
It makes me sad as I observe the wider population 😭
Youre gonna have to write fully cited and sourced academic papers to convince him to clean his room.
Heh, it’s been a struggle of complying with authority on simple/mundane task. But slowly its getting away from it
No, they also dont give a shit.
This isn’t a young person problem and it isn’t new, it’s just getting worse. See Fox news on Trump 8 years ago or more through now
This is the big problem. Kids are trusting search results from a Chinese propaganda platform, and they don’t give a shit.
Its the older folks who muddled the walls between editorial and factual reporting, and now thats come home to roost. There are no facts anymore, and very little real journalism anymore. Theres no truth, justice, democracy, or human dignity either. Its not tiktok or youtube who led us where we are, its the double-be-damned boomers and centrists.
at least it’s not American propaganda
This implies TikTok would have some incentive to propagandize their users that Google wouldn’t also have. Google does corporate American propaganda, which many Americans have been acclimated to and thus don’t perceive as propaganda.
You could argue a state has a right to propagandize its own citizens to counter foreign adversarial influence. I’m not saying it does but a state should have its populations best interests in mind compared to a foreign adversary.
States don’t have rights, people have rights.
Kids are as smart as we used to be. And we didn’t save the then-future, now-present. Same deal with boomers.
Names will change, corporations will change, investors will stay the same. For us things won’t get meaningfully better or worse than they are.
I can see your point when talking about broader topics that people tend to absorb over time (politics, social dilemmas, economical condition) but this is more about users intentionally searching narrower topics. What’s wrong with my code, how do I fix my car, what computer should I buy, what’s the best way to get rid of termites - those kinds of things.
I unashamedly call myself an expert about exactly one car. I learned everything from it’s most popular forum from 2010-2015. I admin a Facebook group for it. When I started just on the dedicated forum, we’d get basic questions all the time about super common issues but a few links to good threads and recommendations about using Google with site:thisforum added helped avoid “repeat customers” in the future. That’s gone. The forum is forgotten because original owners have sold and new owners don’t know about it. No one wants to make an account on a site for just one topic these days when Facebook and reddit are so easy to use. Shitty answer sites following in the footsteps of Yahoo Answers (such as quora, fixya, and justanswer) have dominated normal Google searches. Google often suggests appending “reddit” to searches which is an improvement over those sites, but still atrocious for unpopular niche topics such as my forgotten car, in comparison to the forum. Having an existing account on reddit or Facebook promotes joining a relevant group/sub, not even knowing how to vet them for accuracy, and just blind-firing questions into the void. Google can sparse reddit, but the internal reddit search is rough. Facebook is locked down and the search is even worse. As I’ve joined other groups for cars I know less about, I can’t beleive the abysmal quality of answers I’ve gotten myself. People act as if I personally sent them a letter requesting information and I get answers that are overly generic, downright useless as they say they don’t know, or tell me to try something I said in my main post I already tried. This is the state of the world. None of these platforms value solutions, they value interaction for the sake of user volume. Wanna know why FB Marketplace is continually awful to sift through? Because every minute spent groaning about irrelevant listings and ignoring search parameters is another minute not given to Craigslist, kajiji, or any other classifieds. They don’t need you to win, they need the competition to lose.
I don’t want to hear anyone’s bullshit about ditching reddit and meta. We’re a microscopic niche of the internet, here on the fediverse. Our little bubble is not swaying half the fucking planet off meta. Do not act smug and say just go back to the original forums when they’re dead/devoid/deactivated because a handful of corporations socially engineered the ideal content streaming platforms.
Blaming kids for being dumb is a cop out. You have niche knowledge from your era about vetting content and avoiding scams/misinformation. You’re saying new kids are dumb in those regards. I bet you think older people are dumb in those regards too. Please realize both of those groups have their own niches and think you’re dumb, too, in some other topic. You are the peak of a decade, not a century. I don’t know your age, you don’t know mine, but consider this quote:
“Our youth now love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders, and they love to chatter instead of exercise. Children are now tyrants not servants of their household. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”
Sound accurate? Look up who said it.
There’s a big difference between “all kids are terrible today” and “some people have very successfully dismantled the education system, and it’s impacting our youth to a point where we can’t trust their levels of education can protect them against capitalism run amok.”
To be clearer: failure to educate is squarely on adults not on children.
That’s not what I see in your parent comment. “young people don’t seem to give a damn” and “I’m nearly fully on team ‘young people are dumb fucks and won’t save us after all’”
People of all ages have great people and awful people in them. Always has been so and always will be.
"I’ve heard of RFK Jr. and he says vaccines are bad. He’s more famous than scientists, so I believe him for exposing their corruption. "
I can’t wait for humanity to go extinct.
Can’t read this article thanks to shitty paywall. Yet it has 28 trackers even tho it just need pure HTML
Edit: thank you for archive link OP!
What? I Google stuff all the time. Just not on Google (DuckDuckGo or Qwant)
I hate to say it, but DDG results are shit. The only half-decent competition I’ve found is yandex, and I don’t really trust it.
Googling is for advertisers…
Old people are the only ones with any money.
The average American spent just over $60,000 a year in 2021, but spending habits vary significantly between age groups. Those born from 1965 to 1980 – spent the most money last year, with average expenditure of $83,357.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/10/americans-spend-their-money-by-generation/
Which is why old people are the only ones with money.
They’ve paid off their houses. They’ve paid off their cars. Their income is higher, but their living expenses are lower, so their savings and investments are higher. They ultimately hold the notes on everyone else’s home loans and car loans.
Old people are the only ones with the disposable income accessible to advertisers. Old people are the only ones with money.
i was stuck having to watch traditional cable television over the holiday with the family, and jfc are there a lot of medication commercials spewed out of that thing.
I’ve almost forgotten how shitty Google has become. Been using kagi search for a year now.
It’s so nice to get clean unbiased search results.
Have you seen a Gen Z-er trying to research something on the internet?
Honestly it usually starts with chatgpt or ai. I’ve been watching my younger coworkers.
It’s not a bad thing per-say but sometimes it’s wildly wrong and they don’t question where it comes from. Which bites them when we do reviews/code.
per-say
I think you mean per se.
https://www.dictionary.com/e/per-say-or-per-se/“sometimes it’s wildly wrong and they don’t question where it comes from”
A stark difference from google results surely
Article is behind a paywall, what does it say “young people” do instead of “googling”?
This shift is due largely to users’ bypassing Google to start their search for goods on Amazon. It’s handing Amazon billions in advertiser dollars. Meanwhile, TikTok has less than 4% of U.S. digital ad revenue, but significant potential to expand its share of the pie. A recent TikTok pitch to advertisers reported on by The Wall Street Journal said that 23% of its users searched for something within 30 seconds of opening the app, and its global search volume was three billion a day. The second threat is the rise of “answer engines” like Perplexity which, well, do what they say on the tin. OpenAI has added internet search to ChatGPT, Meta Platforms is exploring building its own search engine, and even AI chatbots that can’t search the internet are proving increasingly capable at addressing many questions. They’re also becoming ever more widespread, as Microsoft and Appleintegrate them directly into the operating systems of all the devices they make or support.
Non paywalled version: https://archive.today/?run=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Ftech%2Fgoogling-is-for-old-people-thats-a-problem-for-google-5188a6ed
I would like two search engines displaying results side by side whenever I do a search. There’s so much empty space on a wide screen display anyway.
Maybe I should check if there’s an addon for this…
Not sure if it’s what you’re looking for, but a searx instance can return commingled results from multiple engines
Thanks - I’ll have to look into this!
I guess you’re too young to remember the good old days of dogpile searching on four engines within one page.
Remember ask Jeeves?
I’d have Ask Jeeves, Hotbot, and Yahoo opened when I was trawling the Internet for porn while my parents were out for 30m when I was 14 years old. There were always substantially different results, though somehow they always ended up the same: with me infecting my parents’ computer with some shit. Let’s say I did a lot of learning from my mistakes.
Remember the porn networks that tried to get you to download their software to connect, and then it ended up being a dialer to a 900 number?
That is funny, and sounds like it’d be pretty expensive. I actually didn’t encounter this fortunately, because I was already costing my parents a fortune because I just couldn’t stay under 300 texts a month.
Hah! It would seem so!
This is an excellent idea. Did you happen to find any?
Not really no!
There was a “Multi Web Search” by Oleksandr for Firefox but it was last updated five years ago. It also intermingles the results whereas I would’ve liked to see them side by side (to compare how different search engines rank the sites)
The SearX feature the other guy mentioned might be the best bet!
Stopped using google some time ago.
I don’t even know why people use Google anymore besides maps and restaurant data. The rest is all SEO corporate junk.
I search directly on medical and research / studies sites now. The rest I use AI.
You are seriously saying that AI is better than a normal Google search.
I understand there’s a lot of gaming this system going on but that’s better than AI. At least with a Google search you can read the sources and see how relevant they actually are, ai is just a black box.
Honestly, i felt so multiple times.
Often, after googling and going through top results, when unable to find anything relevant… I ask perplexity and it gives a tailored answer and gets relevant sources. I had been googling for more than a decade.
Not only that, but AI is a blackbox that doesn’t know anything and feeds you with random words in a plausible way. It’s just made up text with no knowledge whatsoever.
That’s why you use something like perplexity.ai instead of an LLM
It lists the sources where it found the information, so you can always doublecheck. The AI part is mostly just summarises of the websites that bypass the SEO bullshit.
I use it when shopping online because DuckDuckGo is shit for shopping in Holland.
I believe DuckDuckGo uses Bing as it’s underlying search engine, which explains a lot.
I still use Google search without an issue, just de-bullshitted by the whoogle frontend.
The second threat is the rise of “answer engines” like Perplexity which, well, do what they say on the tin. OpenAI has added internet search to ChatGPT, Meta Platforms is exploring building its own search engine, and even AI chatbots that can’t search the internet are proving increasingly capable at addressing many questions. They’re also becoming ever more widespread, as Microsoft and Appleintegrate them directly into the operating systems of all the devices they make or support.
That is not an improvement, it’s just also not really any worse.
it’s an improvement in a way. today marketing for most businesses is 80% google ads, 20% facebook ads. google is massively manipulating google ads to practically steal money because they’re the only player in town. if adspace is spread thinner, google is fucked, and small business owners actually stand a chance against the big behemoths with infinite pockets.
But in terms of actual information it could be worse thanks to AI hallucinations and poor training materials.
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