Maybe this is the time to get out the old Encyclopedia Britannica CD and use that for training input.
If they're doing surveillance they're not doing a good job of it, I make no effort to hide from them and approximately none of their ads are personalized to me. They are instead personalized to the search results instead of what they know from my history.
Meta is the one with highly personalized ads.
If simple keyword matching was enough, why would they spend literally billions a year on other tactics?
It does help with their Doubleclick business - ads on websites other than Google. I don't find these too personalized either, but they do try.
And of course, many people actually like that Chrome saves their browsing history.
Google did well in the old days for reasons. It beat alta vista and Yahoo by having better search results and a clean loading page. Since perhaps 08 (based on memory, that date might be off) or so, Google has dominated search, to the extent that it's not salient that search engines can be really questionable. Which is also to say, google dominated, people lost sight that searching and googling are different, that gives a lot of freedom for enshittification without people getting too upset or even quite realizing - it could be different and better
Encyclopedias, textbooks, reputable journals, newspapers and magazines make sense.
But to throw in social media? Reddit? Seems insane.
I didn't say you could, but that a machine can't decode the mountains of text doesn't mean that the answer isn't (perhaps only) on Reddit. I don't think people would be that interested in search engine that just serves content from books and academic papers.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Edit: there was also a discussion on HN about that article.
This is an attempt to reduce hallucinations coming full circle. A simple summarization model was meant to reduce hallucination risk, but now it's not discerning enough to exclude untruthful results from the summary.
Two reasons. The first, even ignoring that truth isn't necessarily widely agreed (is Donald Trump a raping fraud?), is that truth changes over time. eg is Donald Trump president? And presidents are the easiest case because we all know a fixed point in time when that is recalculated.
Second, Google's entire business model is built around spending nothing on content. Building clean pristinely labeled training sets is an extremely expensive thing to do at scale. Google has been in the business of stealing other people's data. Just one small example: if you produced (very expensive at scale) clean, multiple views, well lit photographs of your products for sale they would take those photos and show them on links to other people's stores; and if you didn't like that, they would kick you out of their shopping search. etc etc. Paying to produce content upends their business model. See eg the 5-10% profit margin well run news orgs have vs the 25% tech profit margin Google has even after all the money blown on moonshots.