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.
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?
That depends strongly on which "public" we are talking about - some extremely intelligent people I have talked to don't even know what Reddit is. Old Google searches got bad, but if you scrolled down far enough, or added "reddit" to the search terms, they used to be salvageable. So it's less of a hard cutoff and more of a long process that brought us to where we are today.
Public in this term has nothing to do with intelligence, but rather people outside of companies working on AI/LLMs or doing AI research. It's why I mentioned it entering the zeitgeist.
I never mentioned a hard cutoff but said they ruined it before LLMs were in use by the general public. Essentially I'm referring to the starting of the degradation of Google's search which they made conscious decisions that deliberately put profit above all.
They ruined it by setting themselves as untouchable and wanting bigger profit margins than “richer than God” money.
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.
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.
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.
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.
where we can’t trust their levels of education can protect them against capitalism run amok
I've been dealing with more zoomer-and-younger kids and uh, it's less that we can't trust that their education level will protect them from the evils of capitalism, but more that we can't even trust that their levels of education are sufficient for them to be able to both read and write, nevermind more complicated things like determining the accuracy of factual data and be able to make a reasonable decision based on you know, critical thinking and analysis.
It's shockingly dire in a lot of places, and it's unlikely to improve, at least in the US, since nobody values education and nobody wants to fund education, and we just elected a pile of geriatric rich white people that think we don't need to do anything but add more Jesus.
And yeah, as adults we've absolutely failed the two most recent generations, and are going to epically, epically fuck up the next one too.
I was Googling just fine until Google ruined it with "SEO" and AI so that completely irrelevant results dominate the first 2 or 3 pages.
It's this last two years where it has gotten really bad in my opinion. Before you could at least navigate the ads ridden site. Now base Google search is tremendously worse.
YouTube search is SO MUCH WORSE now. it just gives up and shows random stuff after like 3 results
I searched "friends invited me to lethal company". I got 6 results (one of which is a song?) before it gave up and showed "people also watched this" and "you might like this" aka anything even semi related to Lethal Company
Don't get me wrong, fuck google, but how much can we blame google for SEO? That's just people gaming the system, and they'd be doing it no matter how google presented their results.
Maybe there is a whole cooperation aspect that I'm not aware of.
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)
And how do non-old people navigate the web? I mean I get it, you don't need to google the Wikipedia article about the French Revolution... You can ask AI. But how do you find business hours for the repair shop downtown? Which website sells the concert tickets? News from yesterday? The forum that tells you if 32GB of RAM fit into your laptop?
Hours and menus normally come from Maps. News often comes from social media, unfortunately. But Google rarely helps me there either. Concert tickets is probably an app or venue website (but I don't really go to many concerts because fuck Ticketmaster).
Not that I don't Google stuff, but it's way less useful than it used to be.
I'm over fifty (though fuck does it feel unreal to say that).
Hours and menus normally come from Maps
If it's Google maps, wouldn't it still be considered googling since it used the same search engine?
News from yesterday? You mean your social media feed of choice?
Forum that tells you if 32GB of RAM fit into your laptop?
Who has a laptop anymore?
RAM?
32GB? My phone has 128GB!
RAM?
32GB? My phone has 128GB!
Are you confusing RAM with storage?
I'm pretty sure it's tongue in cheek of the average person who doesn't know much about tech.
That's kinda what I thought, but the way it's presented made my question if they were serious or not.
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
I guess you're too young to remember the good old days of dogpile searching on four engines within one page.
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.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
