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Google has sent internet into ‘spiral of decline’, claims DeepMind co-founder (www.telegraph.co.uk)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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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[–] 45 points 2 years ago (5 children)

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.

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  • [–] 23 points 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Obligatory mention of Kagi (which is actually brilliant).

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    You have to pay for kagi so they are not incentivized to serve ads. They are incentivized to give you a good set of search results so you keep paying.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Exactly. The simple fact is, people need to get more willing to pay for things with money instead of personal data. Nothing is free, but we like the idea that things don't cost money, and instead we've allowed corporations to literally buy and monetize our very selves.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago*

    Problem is, a lot of people don't have a lot of money because of how the world has been allowed to go. Everything is funnelled towards the worst people who go unpunished somehow. There needs to be an uprising or something.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Just curious, in the hypothetical situation that 100% of users on the web used Kagi how is it any different? They'll demand more growth at that point but how would they achieve it? I don't see how paying for the service avoids the issue of the product becoming worse as a result of peak market penetration and needing new methods of growth

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Well, if your argument is: "any company that becomes a monopoly will abuse monopoly power", then sure I agree with you. You got me there!

    My argument is: "given a reliable financial alternative to advertising, a company will be able to resist enshitification for a long time, as long as there is no absolute tyrannical monopoly."

    I assumed the last part was implied and I'm sorry for the confusion!

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Makes sense, but yea it didn't really answer the overall question of "if it hits peak market penetration how will it avoid going the Google route" since google also started with the same premise. I suppose the answer is hope it doesn't become a monopoly

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It's also privately owned by one guy, so it doesn't have to submit to investor pressure.

    Steam, for example, is basically a monopoly for PC game sales, but hasn't enshittified because it is privately owned.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    While I agree that this does avoid enshitification, it's always possible for a privately owned company to IPO. That's why all of us are even here to begin with

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    It's probably as good as we are going to get.

    The best options would be an open source, donation supported search engine, but the money required to host/develop that is immense.

    We are all freeloading off of Lemmy right now, unless you are donating to the people who are running the servers. The cost to run a search engine is much higher though -- kagi pays (iirc) double digit cents for each search, even before development costs, with the average user doing 700 searches a month. The costs are way higher.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    They can't be spending $70 per user per month, let alone more than that, their pricing won't make sense

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (1 child)

    I looked it up*

    https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#kagisearch

    It's $.0125, so 1.25 cents not double digits like I thought. They also average 27 searches per day per user. So an average of 821.25 searches per user per month, meaning a cost of $10.27 per month.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    I find the results to be cleaner and more relevant at least. With Kagi the relevant link is usually first or second link (like Google used to be) and the same search on Google I sometimes have to scroll down about 3-4 pages till I get to something relevant. Worse some of the ads Google is pushing to the top are misleading or completely contrary to what I'm looking for.

    Kagi allowing me to ban domains (bye bye pinterest) and boost others has also been pretty helpful.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago

    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.

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