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.
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.
My apologies that me being hyperbolic did not add clarity and instead caused confusion:-). Ultimately I agree, but was adding the point that users who were either savvy or dedicated enough could still get a lot of use out of Google until more recently, whereupon it is now just a huge mess that makes it more worthwhile to abandon completely (in favor of e.g. DuckDuckGo) - even though it was the demise of Reddit rather than the addition of LLMs that caused the sharp decline (+ other things too, e.g. there was a strike of mods at StackOverflow), i.e. Reddit (& others) was propping up Google results for the longest time, which does not excuse Google for allowing such instability, but helps explain the timeline wherein Google results were both “usable” (even if less so than the past) and also “degraded” at the same time.
It’s all good, we both clarified our* thoughts on the matter and to be fair using “ruined” instead of “ruining” or “started to ruin” indicates a completed process or final state instead of a continuous one.
I agree that previously one could construct a search to sort the noise out, but as you stated this has become unfeasible without a sharp increase of queries needed to refine results which has shifted the thought from questioning if Google search is bad to now generally accepted belief - to the point where people are trying to quantify and provide evidence to back up the claim.
This article links to a research paper on the topic: https://www.fastcompany.com/91012311/is-google-getting-worse-this-is-what-leading-computer-scientists-say
*Fixed typo of ‘out’ to ‘our’
If I can go on a tangent: it is conversations like this that continually convince me that I need never go back to Reddit. Not EVERY SINGLE conversation needs to be full of snark and vitriol. Being able to discuss things rationally, calmly, and with kindness is possible, if only people will create the space within which they are allowed to happen:-).
And how that relates is: using DuckDuckGo convinced me similarly to abandon Google:-). Caveats include using Google Images, Google Maps, etc. e.g. to look up the hours of a shop (the SEO optimization there works for rather than against me, although tbf quite often I have to bat away unrelated results vying for my increased attention due merely to having paid for that exact privilege), but overall the results of DDG are just extremely much more worth my time than Google’s.
As an example, if you search for the keyword “Lemmy”, DDG pulls up Lemmy.World as the #2 hit (which notably has ~80% of all active users on Lemmy, so is overwhelmingly deserving of being listed so highly), after the #1 hit being the singer, whereas on Google the first instance mentioned is Lemmy.ml (that has 2,206 active monthly users, compared to Lemmy.World’s 17,122 that is roughly an order of magnitude higher, and also housing the most-used communities e.g. !technology@lemmy.world has 16.9k active monthly users compared to !asklemmy@lemmy.ml’s top community with 8.44K), and that not until the #4 hit.
i.e., not only are Google results commodified, but as you said they are “ruined” as well - to the point of representing actual & active disinformation (for the sake of $$$) rather than merely misinformation (aka oopsies). We can scroll past one, two, even ten ads, but how do we find our info when the sorting refuses to distinguish between SEO-advanced results and “real” ones? I dunno, perhaps the above one is a poor example (edit: b/c in the past, Lemmy.ml really was the top Lemmy instance, for so very long), but I think you know what I mean regardless:-).
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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
Have you seen a Gen Z-er trying to research something on the internet?
It’s almost like the tools they were taught to use were crippled out from under them in the name of serving more ads.
Well as the builders of the current distopian present we were told all the time that we needed to create user interfaces and services where people would not need to know anything about tech and there was always a “design for the dumb user” since forever.
This is what we get by pushing that narrative I guess.
It’s kinda wild to me. I used to think that as a millennial the next generation would be more technically savvy than mine for similar reasons to why my generation was more technically savvy than the last. That doesn’t quite seem to have panned out and I’m not sure if I’m just not seeing things right or if technical literacy is really that much on the decline.
I was totally unaware of how bad it is until I actually read some current teachers describe horrrors of how the incoming students were so unprepared about technical literacy. It’s freaking scary.
We really designed the society as it is and we’re going to suffer the consequences for a long time.
To me it just means job security. But I get you, some of those people will become your boss…and it generally sucks.
I’ll confess I’ve had the same thought… but I feel like the problem is deeper than that. If people don’t have basic awareness of the devices they rely on then they in danger of becoming victims of those who do. I’d point to your average boomer on Facebook to illustrate that point.
Ok, but answer me this! Without those ads, would you even know that George Washington crossed the delaware with delicious chunky cambells soup!
What?
Those chunky soups with 130 calories and 22% of your needs in protein, ideal for a hard day of work?
Ahh well, I didn’t know that!
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
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 still use Google search without an issue, just de-bullshitted by the whoogle frontend.
why jump through hoops to keep using Google instead of just using another search engine
I have gotten more reliable results from Google than other search engines even if it involves a middle man service that removes the bullshit
What’s a better search engine in your opinion?
startpage (basically hardened google), mojeek, kagi, ddg all solid
y thankyou!
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.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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.
