1035
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
193 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 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

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 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!

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 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

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 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

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 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

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •