Hacker News Reader

They very much killed the golden goose. It's a real failure to think in terms of systems. Google relies on a healthy open web, yet as arguably the biggest single influencer of the web it has completely failed to maintain that let alone improve it.

As commercial enterprises currently are set up, they have no incentive whatsoever to preserve the ecosystem they are thriving on. Worse, they profit more when harming it. As seen here with Google, that is true irrespective of the nature of the affected system.

It's not just the quality of websites that is negatively hit either. The real victims are us, civil society and our future.

The information realm that is the internet should provide not only some basic tidbits, it should inform to the full extent of human knowledge. Even more than that, it should provide us with the freedom to discuss among ourselves and reflect on ourselves, humans and humanity, about the future of society.

Without such self-reflection, there is only stagnation and retardation. We cannot change what we do not understand and we understand ourselves the least.

> Even more than that, it should provide us with the freedom to discuss among ourselves and reflect on ourselves, humans and humanity, about the future of society.

I usually hear this "freedom of speech" stance until somebody hears something they don't like, then it's out the door and censorship gets a foot in the door.

As long as there is no consensus in society what speech is ok and what's not, we won't get anywhere. Currently, we are mainly leaving this to platforms to decide, and they cater to their customers (which are ad clients), not to what is best for society. Obviously there needs to be some moderation and banned contents. But a line needs to be drawn and anything beyond that needs to be free. No matter if some individual gets hurt by it or not.

I don't get why this is supposed to be Google's fault. I mean it doesn't matter of course: this is happening, and the only real question is if it will continue, maybe if something can be done. Who's fault it is ... Google is doing a lot to preserve the web. It's not enough, perhaps. Probably. But it's quite unclear to me what they could do to reverse this.

Plus we've all seen what this has lead to in meat-space. Information is one sided. BBC is supposed to be the paragon of neutrality, for example, and while it is pretty neutral on the situation in many places, it's not exactly neutral on UK and Australia political issues for example. And it suffers from the same problem as pretty much every other meat-space information source outside of libraries: the only information you can get from it is really quite superfluous.

Their recent "is AI evil?" series, for example, is neither neutral nor does it give enough information for people, even if someone wanted to go really in-depth on the issue, and have a really well-considered opinion, the only place where you could collect enough information to do that would be Youtube imho. With some blogs and maybe a scientific paper or two. Oh wait 3 out of those three work with a lot of help from Google (just try finding scientific papers without Google scholar)

I agree the situation is bad. But frankly, while Google perhaps has some blame in this, I'm very sure the situation would be 10x worse without Google.

It is mainly Google's fault since Google is the main actor in this space.

You put up a false dichotomy, as if Google disappearing would mean a void to wander the world eternal.

The internet is very much like public infrastructure. It is crucial to explicitly determine what functions there are indispensable for society to thrive.

Ironically, finding available information is just such an indispensable utility. Imagine roads only being present or usable when conducive to advertisement.

> Imagine roads only being present or usable when conducive to advertisement.

There's also a big interest in tracking people for reason du jour.

> They very much killed the golden goose

I suspect that thanks to android phones collecting all of our offline data, and chrome collecting everyone's browsing history, Google no longer needs our web searches to collect the most intimate details of our lives which is why they aren't interested in spending time and money on their search product. In fact, the more useless google search is the more google can make companies pay for ads placed at the top of listings because if those companies don't pay up, their customers may struggle to find their site at all through all the spam.

This is basically the premise of "The Age of PageRank is Over" blog post that is now sort of a Kagi manifesto.

https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over

Honestly, this blog post made me think Kagi has no clue what they’re doing. Nobody in 2022 would claim that Google uses raw PageRank and doesn’t do “user personalised queries”.

Perhaps you are simply not the target audience any longer ...

I mean, if they can make billions by serving 99% of people, why would they spend billions on making the remaining 1% happy?

You are totally right.

Google makes billions from advertisers - the companies who pay for ads, the companies who create those SEO-optimized marketing-pages. Those are the target audience, that Google wants to make happy.

Why would they care about us users? We don't pay for search.

One would think that given the purported depth and breadth of our economic system, it would be possible for that system to address all audiences instead of just catering to the most common denominator.

But we've been on a race to the bottom in most sectors for a long time now.

How could any system address all audiences of anything? Human wants are unlimited and unfixed. Might as well chase fairies.

Clicks and impressions do not necessarily need to be human clicks or human impressions.

In the fable it is not a golden goose. This is significant because killing a golden goose would result in golden flesh.

The (not golden) goose lays golden eggs. The recurring time-based nature of the eggs is the key aspect of the fable.

You're right! Mistake on my part

The other day I searched for "canned cabbage soup". The mobile website locked into a mode I've never seen before.

It would only provide blogspamish recipes for canning your own cabbage soup linked through the tiled suggestion interface. Not a single text-style link was returned and none of the results were pre-canned soups. I scanned though page after page without getting anything else.

Oddly, when I searched "canned cabbage soup history" it switched modes and started providing normal results, including the product and Wikipedia.

What strikes me about this is that I was actively searching for a product I wanted to buy. If there's any business case for ruining Google with weird specialty searches it would be selling products.

Why is there a "provide blogspam" mode?

Also, I'm now asked if I'm a robot at least five times a day.

> Why is there a "provide blogspam" mode?

Because blogspam sites all implement Google Adwords for monetisation, meaning Google can now show you 30 ads instead of just 3 at the top of the search result.

Remember, Googles customers are the advertisers and the site-owners implementing Google Adwords, not you.

You're the product being sold.

This bothers me so much. I’ve run into it a few times, exclusively on mobile, and it is completely useless and completely frustrating.

I actually thought some of the “google is dying” handwringing was overwrought until I experienced this. It was just, bad.

Yeah, I've seen that. I'd have called it "recipe mode" but I like your name for it better.

Last night I searched for a phrase that was the title of a page. Zero results. I changed my search and what I was looking for was the first result. Google has really gone down hill severely.

> we need AI to generate something more concise, more to the point, more digestible.

This is what I don't want from a search engine. What I want from a search engine is a list of links to places that have relevant information. I don't want the engine to summarize or distill what those places are saying. Too much knowledge and understanding is lost by not doing that myself.

> Humans simply can no longer digest it - we need AI to generate something more concise, more to the point, more digestible. Without the marketing, fluff and bait and filler.

I think one of the fears some have about AI/machine learning/etc is that they realize their entire advertising & marketing world could become irrelevant. Users could get short, accurate answers without having advertisements in the way.

Kind of like how things were many years ago.

AI LLMs are just curating what content to train on vs indexing the www. It’s actually even more gatekeeper-y

What exactly does gatekeeping mean in the context of LLMs? One has several options: you could directly use a search engine, employ an LLM equipped with a search engine plugin for queries outside the training set, or personally fine-tune a LoRA with your specific data in a matter of hours. We have easy, moderate, and complex solutions at our disposal.

Rather than gate keeping, LLMs actually compress the search index into a manageable size, enabling easier sharing. While it's impossible to download the entirety of Google, you can conveniently download a LLaMA, promoting both privacy and autonomy. This marks a departure from the days of having every click and search keyword tracked.

Perhaps the advent of LLMs and Generative Image models by 2030 could allow us to cut the cord and navigate a virtual internet, have a room of our own to dream and be free, essentially functioning as an augmented imagination where we set all the rules.

Local LLMs solve the old problem of accessing information without leaking out what you are looking at, something that bothered me every since BitTorrent and copyright wars.

The entire internet has become a market for ads traded among corporations, and that the ads themselves are useless to 70% of the audience is meaningless because the market has its own momentum now.

The side effect is that the below-median brainpower of the 30% of the audience who doesn't know any better than to watch ads and click on them is now the driving metric for content.

In a world where programming revenue comes from ads, and only idiots see ads, the programming will cater evermore to the tastes of the most-idiotic viewer.

Can you give me an example of something you can't find and I'll try to find it?

There's nothing I can't find with Google.

If I do scroll through the search results, select a few promising ones, wait for the page to load (slowed down by multiple fat ads), click away the cookie warnings, reject the GDPR consent, disagree with the newsletter popup,switch to reader mode to remove the visual clutter, scroll down the page skimming the content for the right paragraphs... then I will eventually get the same information, that ChatGPT could just have provided me instantly without all the hustle.