This is kinda crazy considering the tremendous effort Google has gone to over the decades to shave milliseconds off their response time. They invented a whole TCP replacement to reduce page latency, and now this?
This isn't even about "happy users", though; it's about money.
Where does Google's ad revenue come from if users give up on waiting for their searches to complete before they're ever shown any revenue-generating sponsored links?
Actually, thinking about this more, I fundamentally don't understand Google's search experience strategy over the last 10 years. Even before AI answers, they were heuristic-ing answers into a little box that pushed sponsored ad placements below the fold. Why push sponsored results below the fold? How does Google make money from a search engine that just answers people's questions directly, rather than doing lead-gen for the rest of the Internet (with much of the Internet willing to pay for that)?
That would be kinda sad, given that Google would previously forgo showing ads, if they didn't arrive on time.
This is actually a problem I currently have with Ecosia on mobile. I search, get the result, and then the ads pop in, pushing the search results down, causing me to click the ad and not the result that previously occupied that part of the screen.
I don’t think that comment was in regards to AI, I think it was about the blurb that appears instantaneously from Google’s knowledge engine (e.g. when searching a celebrity’s age).
That's a really good point. Google has likely decided that some query categories are unprofitable-enough already that they can just drop the rest of the expected revenue from them, and instead use them as loss-leaders — aiming to give the customer a better (but zero-revenue) experience today, to increase retention, so they'll come back with positive-revenue-generating queries later.
They've just done a rather braindead job of it, with the experience of these loss-leader queries feeling perceptually† worse than a regular SERP page would.
It's like a grocery store running a sale on e.g. milk, selling it for below-cost — but then making you have to wait in a line for five minutes in front of the milk cooler to get it. It feels like so much friction that not only wouldn't lure people in; it would push people to avoid that grocer when its milk sales are happening, and shop at other stores instead!
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† I emphasize perceptually here. Even if the total time spent waiting for an AI answer is shorter than the time it would take to load a SERP page, read and select a link that looks like it'll have your answer, click it, load the resulting page, and read it — the AI experience could still feel longer, in large part because "the ball is in your court" for a lot of the self-navigated query, with you being given things to look at and click on; while "the ball is in their court" for the entirety of the AI response, with just a spinner and no indication of what's happening.
As such, I wonder if this could be solved by just running a cute little animation under the AI prompt window: make it look like it's automating the loading of a [blurred to non-identifiability] SERP page, scrolling down, clicking a result, loading an [again blurred] page, highlighting a few random fragments of it, and then transposing them together to form the paragraphs of the answer — before the answer actually snaps into place on top of that animation. If you can predict how long before the AI answers, you can even use that to determine how long the animation should spend dicking around on the pretend SERP page and answer page.
It is in their interest to keep destroying the open information marketplace because then advertisers are forced to buy through Google. (Much easier and more profitable than trying to make a good adtech product.)
I use Kagi, I bought the family plan so I could try convining my family to use it, did they? No.
Did my family want to use Signal for messaging? No.
Do my friends want to use something else than Discord for communicating with me? No.
Competition exists and in plenty but folk are too mind sucked to want to move platform. If its not broke, why change?
People don't want to change. And until such platforms close their gates or whereby something new comes along that isn't a clone; there will be no shift.
Doesn't this just mean that the vast majority of users don't care enough about these sorts of things? Doesn't that mean that the market is working?
If switching cost > perceived benefit why should we expect anything other than status quo? When a truly innovative platform that offers benefit > switching cost, users will naturally flock to it. We're already starting to see that with ChatGPT.
> Doesn't this just mean that the vast majority of users don't care enough about these sorts of things? Doesn't that mean that the market is working?
No. Network effects mean that there's not only a high cost of switching away from the largest network, but there's a high cost to use anything other than the largest network. When that bias exists, you cannot infer any preferences from market outcomes.
Lead by example, not by preaching. And taking a stance.
You won’t find me on any social media other than Linkedin and Twitter. And on those, I no longer post or interact with people. I keep Twitter because of announcements and Linkedin as a public CV. I also use WhatsApp because alternatives are not really viable (but I reduced its social aspect as much as possible). You’re free to make your choices. Just don’t complain about it, if you won’t heed my advices.
Your still part of the problem regardless if you use the services or not: the fact is these corporations are so ingrained with the weedy roots, you can't.
Google is testing on those as we test on animals. ML for only search? Naw.
If everyone turned off their droid, stopped using their email, switched to Firefox, they would still be on top.
Yes. It's better not to, and if your going to preach, yeah. As I use no services other than Signal but we are still just pawns in this game.
We are a just pittance of income of those who are keeping the empire's on top. And who do you run too? DDG is owned by Apple so your only fuelling their empire.
No. Google owns your phone and your browser, your email, your video feed and often your office productivity tools too.
All human eyeballs go through Google's advertising network first. (Unless you're an Apple-only person.)
So for advertisers it makes no sense to budget anything but Google first and foremost.
Maybe they'll add some Bing-Yahoo if they have spare money laying around and want to catch the remaining couple percent of the audience.
P.S. Search is only a small part of Google's advertising network, and not the most important one nowadays.
Admittedly I didn't read the whole page but a quick skim of the first several paragraphs didn't produce anything with obvious ties to national socialism, what am I missing?
genman is saying that critical evaluation of Israel’s automated targeting AI system (used for selecting bombing targets without human verification) is equivalent to supporting Hitler.
Their logic is that Palestinians represent a credible existential threat to Jewish people internationally in the same way that Hitler’s military did, so that criticism of IDF bombing campaigns is equivalent to Naziism, and Palestinian resistance is identified as genocide against Israel.
It is calling Israel "the so-called Jewish state" and 'Israel' what effectively means a claim that Jewish people do not have right for the state on their ancestors land and genocide against them (like genocide on 7th October, or earlier intifadas) is somehow justified.
I didn't realize the entire population was terrorists because a fraction of them committed terrorism and the rest lived in close proximity, so I trust you'll be totally fine with Vietnam nuking the States for everything we, you and me obviously, put them through.
And since you asked that question in bad faith now it's my turn. Is bombing hospitals, schools, and aid convoys terrorism, or is it terrorism unless it's the IDF doing it to Palestinians, specifically?
The overwhelming majority of the population you're defending supports the killing of Israeli civilians. This is according to their own polls.
The IDF, given the limited resources, comically unreliable allies, and the hostage situation, is doing a great job. You labeled your own argument to the contrary as being in bad faith because we both know that. :)
The overwhelming majority of the population you're defending supports the killing of Israeli civilians. This is according to their own polls.
False.
The PCPSR polls (the only ones anyone is talking about) do show broad support for the statement that the Oct 7th attack was "correct". But overwhelmingly (91%) they do not believe that atrocities against civilians occurred during the attacks. 81 percent also said they did not watch videos published by international organizations showing atrocities, for a variety of reasons.
Which is still troubling, of course. But the reality of what these people actually said is entirely different from what you're describing.
Unfortunately some news outlets (such as the Times of Israel, AP) chose to present misleading characterizations of second poll in particular, which of course then got pasted all over social media.
The IDF is doing a great job.
Meanwhile there's plenty of denial going around as to atrocities committed by the IDF as well, of course. But this is a different topic.
It is also highly likely that these people answering the polls are simply lying and know very well what actually happened. I watched a lot of raw footage around the time of Al-Aqsa Mosque storming and what I saw considerably differed from what Palestinians claimed had happened. Al-Aqsa mosque really was used as a base for violent attacks - there were piles of stones stored in the mosque. What especially shocked and disturbed me were people just hanging around in shoes like in a nightclub, showing no respect to the holy place.
So it seems your response is: on the basis of what you saw in some videos regarding an event in the Old City a little ways back -- most Palestinians are pathological liars, and that's all there is to it.
So you discount the possibility of widespread ideological indoctrination to claim that everything that is negative does not exist and is let's say - a Jewish propaganda? What about Russia? Still not possible to have completely different reality where everything negative is the fault of somebody else but themselves?
I saw the videos taken inside Al-Aqsa mosque, not just "some videos" and that considerably differed from what Palestinians claimed. And no, this is not an isolated event, just an example of very consistent pattern of lying.
Now about the 7ht October. Hamas paraded the captured civilians through Gaza and was welcomed by thousands of spectators. Honestly, the claim that 91% of the people are not at all aware of any atrocities against civilians can only mean two possibilities - they are lying or they do not consider it atrocities.
Your question was in bad faith so I responded in kind. Your argument is that it doesn't matter how many noncombatant Palestinians (or aid workers of the UN/etc) get killed because there is no other option and they hate the people killing them so they deserve it anyway, and my argument is, that's bullshit.
When supporters buy and repeat every Zaka lie that BBC, NYT etc launder even past being discredited even by Israeli papers like Haaretz, there’s not much hope in the back and forth
Russia is right now trying its best to forcefully assimilate all the small nations it keeps occupying, because it is afraid that in one they have to give all of it back.
Since that has nothing to do with what came previously, I'll be 100% uncharitable and assume that's a big old No and you support IDF bombing hospitals and schools and aid convoys unless you explicitly indicate otherwise. Glad we had this little chat.
My lumberyard of choice still uses DOS machines for their computers and POS. I'm not saying you'll change the world by revolutionizing lumberyard inventory management software but I wanted to illustrate just how low the low hanging fruit are.
But even if you redo the whole thing and it is efficient, it is still less than some minor performance improvement in Chrome can achieve for the world.
Spare parts, for one. BART for example is dependent on old computer parts from Ebay to keep the Bay Area's main mass transit system running: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32884814
Speaking as a customer, it's slow, annoying, and makes the shopping experience there miserable. If you innovate in that software space, you might be able to make a significant impact on the trade of certified exotic wood and maybe even save a few species of tree.
Yes but non-tech organizations are often a disaster for getting even simple things done--crap like filing tickets to get something simple approved like provisioning something via a Cloud provider paired with loads of bureaucracy and (often) lower skilled employees are not an ideal arrangement for picking said fruit.
Doesn't matter if the search results are shit, which they are. Not as bad as YouTube's search though, as the breakdown is 3 relevant results -> 12 irrelevant "people also watched" results -> then back to normal results. And that's assuming you have an extension installed to filter out everything related to Shorts.
Is it a deterioration? I don't disagree that results are getting worse, but I'd still say all else being equal faster results are better than slower results.
(I use Kagi, DDG, and OpenAI for search primarily, all paid for, so my first hand experience with Google Search is limited, intentionally; are faster poor results better than slightly slower good results? I can spare a few seconds for better, this is not high frequency trading)
How is this in practice? Normal GPT is entirely untrustworthy for a lot of it's information. How can you trust it's "search" results/summaries?
I've said it before, but it's like watching the news about a topic you know a lot about and realizing how wrong they are... yet you continue to believe the same people regarding subjects you know nothing about. GPT feeds you BS, and you have to be knowledgeable about the subject to detect it... yet we blindly trust it's output on subjects we know little about. That's... dangerous.
I don't rely on GPT output as canonical, I only use it to help surface big rocks I can refine with other engines and find primary sources. It's fancy autocomplete after all, but PageRank was just weighting links in a link web as well.
I've attempted to use it as a guided learning mechanism - and had some great success, but also it's sent me down some very deep, dark rabbit holes that turned out to be entirely wrong.
It frustrates me to no end... and then I go back for more punishment naively believing this time it'll actually be right.
With that said, the newer voice interactive version (using the app), I've found to be pretty slick for debating yourself on technical merits of designs/architecture, etc.
Keep in mind the whole "easy to read" over any network thing openai had going on early on. Theyve only gotten better at hiding their datamining. Theyre more interested in your mind than your wallet. dont reinforce other peoples' algorithm if they wont be straight up regarding what theyre really doing with it.
That does not matter one iota. Google's goal since they bought doubleclick has been to serve more ads and make more cash, and everything is subservient to that goal. If serving more ads reduces the user experience, they will not choose to stop serving those ads, they will choose to reduce the user experience.
Companies are not democracies. If every single dev thinks that the user experience matters, but the CEO wants more ads, you will get more ads. It's literally a tyranny.
You can get away with a lot of things even inside of a tyranny, if you are good at selling to your superiors. So in your example, a dev who wants to improve user experience might have to couch it in terms of how users are likely to come back more often an click on more ads, and if they do this well, they will often be allowed to do the improvements they want.
The fact that it has been reported by groups like Amnesty International that Facebook helped to enable the ethnic violence in Myanmar makes arguing this sort of point much easier. People want to treat complaints about attention economy companies like they are coming from whiners who just don’t like ad profiles. It is useful to have specific information to remind people of the actual stakes of uncontrolled, personalized propaganda and social manipulation that these companies can enable.
So if you have one for Google I’d definitely be interested in adding it to my collection. (I’ll admit some bias, I think they are a little better than Facebook, but that bar is so low, let’s be careful not to trip over it).
Some of the best examples are too sensitive to share on this forum. Other things get flagged and reported. Some new topics/sources that squeeze by invite the bots.
The best arguments for Google's algorithms making people crazy for lay people would be Aaron Swartz like individuals who just go unknown.
I can think of atleast 4 individuals new to me the last 6mo ive discovered who used to cover court cases, ran NGOs, or worked as journalists that have been seemingly swept up in what looks like delusions.
Lots of typos, egegious oversights, etc#. Its hard to personify these individuals as theyre hard to reach and anyone w ptsd or whom knows people w ptsd know how hard it is to provide support to someone locked in a fight-or-flight reflex. After a terror/fear/paranoia becomes familiar anything else feels foreign. Human connection becomes scary.
Read up on bateson-esque schizomogenisis and reflect on the CIAs relation with the "unabomber".
This is objectively false. "The" algorithm is designed to maximize engagement - so you will be shown content you are most likely to watch, click, listen to the most. As it turns out, "Outrage Porn" is highly engaging...
Scroll through enough YouTube Shorts, and just like TikTok, your "algorithm" slowly but surely reduces to outrage porn. All paths lead to outrage porn. All of them...
I was watching exercises for shoulder tendonitis and it escalated to surgeries of shoulder replacement - it seems to be good at upping the intensity (for lack of a better word) of whatever you're watching regardless of the subject.
n=1, but I've watch a fair bit of Youtube shorts and this has never happened.
The algorithm rewards what you watch, and someone addicted to politics and the culture of outrage around it, will get what they ask for.
It usually starts off with just content you're overtly interested in. Then, they'll sprinkle in random clips every so many scrolls to guard against overfitting the model and getting stale for the user. Some of those random clips are Outrage Porn designed to get a reaction out of you...
You scroll past, then scroll back because "wtf did I just see?" - and now you're in. The frequency starts to increase and pretty soon you're shouting at clouds feeling like you're the only one that realizes how crazy everything is...
It's hard to keep your feed "clean" and dialed into just things that bring you intellectual stimulation or enjoyment. It's not impossible, but it's quit difficult. You constantly have to realign your algorithm lest it goes off into the weeds.
> It's hard to keep your feed "clean" and dialed into just things that bring you intellectual stimulation or enjoyment.
The confusion happens because this can be very easy. All it takes is rarely watching youtube.
If you only watch a random video here and there, Google won't push all the bullshit at all. So the people watching many videos, getting the shitty recommendations, and complaining that the internet is crazy end-up sounding insane to everybody else.
This actually reads like a much better user experience than what I'm having: for me, the start page of YouTube, as well as half its search results, are just filled with nonsense. Not even slightly relevant, e.g. when looking for a gameplay video the other day, I got a Eurovision clip at the top of the search. (As much as I'd love to play a videogame where I get to shoot these monsters for ruining the pop music...)
The algo will only push outrage on you if you secretly like it enough to spend hours watching that shit.
I have consumed more than my fair share of content on Youtube, Instagram, Facebook videos, and TikTok. My timeline is all engineering, spaceships, jumping puppies, and comedians (and not the negative kind).
It's an algorithm, it wants you to watch more and click on all the ads. It doesn't care if the world burns, but it also isn't going to push you that way.
My statement will only be "objectively false" if the algorithm is somehow programmed for political extremism. In reality, each of us is in the driver's seat.
People have been spouting crap since time immemorial - doesn't mean you have to watch it.
I would suggest a heavy and sustained dose of puppy videos.
How do you use these short video services? Are you searching for content then watching, or just "doom scrolling" while on the toilet?
Searching then watching is effectively realigning the feed to your latest and most engaged preferences.
Doom scrolling will get worse and worse as time goes on - it appears entirely unavoidable. They pick up on "positive" interaction signals such as slowing down while scrolling past a video, scrolling back to a video, letting it play more than once, even downvoting can be a sign of engagement and a catalyst for more of the same...
You are right - the algorithm doesn't care if the world burns... it just wants to maximize engagement. That, for most of the human population, means stuff that gets immediate reactions. Unfortunately that often means outrageous material.
Yes and no, you're correct in that it feeds you more of the stuff you engage with, but that's not what it should be going if YouTube cared about the mental well being of it's users. The YouTube algorithm is notorious for not responding to deliberate user input. Say I know that the content I engage with is harmful to my mental health, first step in dealing with the issue. You CANNOT tell YouTube to stop enabling you, even if you try. There are things the algorithm isn't smart enough to understand, or if YouTube is evil, understand that it SHOULD NOT respond to.
Example: I wasted a lot of time on Shorts, and videos less than 2 minutes, junk content. So I start hitting "Not interested", the algorithm WILL NOT pick up on the thing these videos have in common, that they are short. You can block channels, that works, except that there are thousands of similar channels which YouTube will then just push instead.
What I would like to see is YouTube have settings for: What kind of person do you want to be? And then just push the hell out of relevant content, ignoring any level of engagement. I think everyone knows why YouTube won't be doing that.
YouTube is a company, they do what's good for the stock price / profit margin. If it hurts the users, they don't care. It's not that they are evil, they just don't give a crap.
I'm starting to consider creating different accounts / profiles for my different interests. The problem that I have with YouTube is that it can't know what I'm in the mood for at any given moment and it thinks that if I click on one single video about a sensitive topic that suddenly I want my entire home page to be overrun with recommendations about that.
To give a specific example, something that honestly kind of baffles and bothers me is the amount of firearms related videos in my recommendations despite the fact that I never watch them, I don't own any firearms and I keep clicking "Don't Recommend Channel" and they never seem to go away. It has to be because the topic is tangentially related somehow to something I've watched, or maybe people who are into firearms overlap with some of the content I watch. But it's the volume and the non-responsiveness to my feedback that annoys me.
Another example: my wife and I enjoy watching the Eurovision Song Contest every year. So naturally we've watched a lot of that content in the days and weeks leading up to it. Obviously the algorithm is going to recommend content related to Eurovision, but my home page is completely flooded with these recommendations to the seeming exclusion of most other stuff that I want to watch. And I keep clicking "Don't Recommend Channel" on the various "reaction" videos that are just feeder content featuring people reacting to the songs and performances ... because I CAN'T STAND reaction videos in general and NEVER watch them. But they keep appearing in the recommendations nonetheless.
Recommendation algorithms are a hard problem to solve, for sure. I'm not trying to be unfair to YouTube because I know these recommendations are somehow related to what I do watch. I just know that it feels like 90% of those recommendations miss the mark regardless. YouTube is starting to feel like cable TV these days ("200 channels and nothing to watch") where my wife and I often find ourselves just doom scrolling and refreshing the home page (we watch on our TV) hoping that something we're interested in watching at that moment will appear. Often times nothing does and we go do something else.
Replying to myself because I just thought of a 3rd example that is extremely common for me: news channels.
I don't watch news on YouTube, ever. If I see a video from a news outlet I automatically click "Don't Recommend Channel." And I've done that with all of the big major news channels like CNN, Fox News, MSNBC etc. But that doesn't stop videos from local affiliates showing up in a never ending game of whack-a-mole.
To be fair these do not tend to "flood" my recommendations. But I want them to go away all together and I can't seem to make that happen.
It ends up being a reflection in the flaws built into humans. We have many vices. Individuals overcome it, but as a group we are susceptible. We have a long history of deciding where to draw the line between exploiting a vice to control someone and where it becomes letting others live while minding ones own business. We might allow alcohol starting around 18-21, but we ban food companies putting certain addicting drugs in their recipes (but yet allowing others, not fully consistent). Where this algorithm's exploit falls is a new area we haven't really decided upon as a society. Is it like adding cocaine to soda or like adding caffeine to soda?
Holy shit folks, use a bit of your innate agency, and let others do likewise. Yes, Google, sorry, "Alphabet", is a dirt shitty company that engages in all kinds of ugly corporate and legal practices, but no, the YT algorithm isn't destroying democracy or ruining human thinking. The vast majority of us are cognitive beings with the ability to choose what kind of content we consume, or not. In most cases, people who watch a whole pile of garbage on YT are people who would find some other source of it anyhow and always would have throughout history. Those who can separate wheat from chaff will do so regardless of what the algorithm pushes at them. In fact, they'll generally find their own algo-generated suggestions to be in line with the higher quality they steadily pursue. And quite frankly, there is a great deal of excellent content on YouTube to be found. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Many of the comments here exaggerating the evil of the algo and claiming that it ruins people's minds unless they're "shown better" reek of elitism and an implicit desire to control other's belief/feedback choices for their own good. Aside from this being a morally weak viewpoint, it's also bullshit in a practical sense. The majority of such people with an intellectual superiority complex are little better at avoiding intellectual bias than the average person, they just sometimes learn to disguise it with more sophisticated looking justifications.
I think those people are the minority. Ux at Google has always been poor and they have never been able to ship a bug free product. Now they are bending over backwards to stay in the AI race but honestly it just seems like they are done. They are a huge balloon so it will take a while to come down but the gas gas started leaking.
Not surprising to me after their AMP initiative. Supposedly this was supposed to make the mobile web faster. Really the point was to make it more difficult to get different bid for ads. This is just one example of a pattern of behavior of saying you are doing something for the consumer but really its just to exploit a monopoly. If you are in a field with digital advertising you really should read the link below, and be very suspicious of Google.
It is standard with Bing and chat GPT to wait a few seconds before the result appears. Early adopters excuse this since they value the AI text, realize it's being generated at high expense, and there's no way to make it much faster on the backend. Non-adopters won't value AI text or the technical hurdles.
Google is in a hard place - they need to roll the feature out to stay relevant to early adopters of AI. But they can't give good results without making it a huge loss leader - their revenue comes from sending users to spam. They can't seriously commit to a loss leader that counters their entire business model, so they're going to half ass it. That stands to upset established users and early adopters alike, with an unfocused and executive sabotaged Hail Mary.
I call this the "decline of AOL" phase of Google's lifecycle. There's a big crisis about the value and necessity of the service, but rather than innovating, execs can only push annoying ads and gimmicks.
Remember the Not be Evil? And how minimal used to be the Google search (and gmail) user interface? This is just another step into that direction. All the other optimizations were intended to minimize the intrusiveness of those anti optimizations.
AI is a play to appease Wall Street. It is similar to the VR race, which has just ended and anyone investing heavily in it would not necessarily be praised by the stock market. Companies like Alphabet, Meta, or Apple have to be seen to be innovating or else their stock will suffer. So, even if they know it is all not going to work they are forced to show they are keeping up. So they suck life of the new tech by deploying billions of USD to hoover up talent and tech and thus asphyxiate competition, especially smaller players. Once the dust settles in a couple of years there will be some leftover tech that might be useful and a whole bunch of patents kept at the ready for the next round of crazy. Google could be doing nothing, but there would be no end to the comments that they are finished and have no future. Funny that nobody expects Oracle or Autodesk to out-hallucinate their competition. I guess they don't because bank ledgers or high-rise designs are best kept away from the tricksters selling another iteration of Mechanical Turk under the guise of "saving humanity". Unfortunately for us, unlike previous advances in IT this one make things slower, uses way more energy, and spits out BS. Give it a couple of years and a wider war effort where compute power might get nationalised for the purpose of fighting the enemy in a more efficient way or designing deadlier weapons faster and we will not see AI available to the general public for much longer. Not that it's a bad thing, SEO spammers trying to outdo one another in who can publish more crap is something I'd like to see less of.
If Google is interested in delivering useful results faster, HTTP response time is not the absolute measure. An AI generated result that saves you from having to go to another site (or multiple sites) saves much more time.
"They invented a whole TCP replacement to reduce page latency, and now this?"
What is the reason for the page latency. Is it TCP. No. It is pages laden with excessive amounts of advertising. Google is an advertising company. The problem is the advertising, which causes latency, not TCP.
Moreover, they did not "invent" this TCP replacement, they borrowed the idea from djb (CurveCP) who may have borrowed it from someone else. CurveCP does better as it encrypts each packet individually, does not require TLS and allows multiple websites to be hosted on the same IP address. No plaintext domainnames on the wire (SNI) required. Nor some elaborate, complex and cumbersome Band-aid like ECH.
Google's problem is how to deliver more advertising without affecting www speed, i.e., without web users noticing how much advertising slows the web down. But Google spins this problem as how to "make the web faster". It is Google's business, online advertising, that is slowing the web down. Google deliberately adds latency to pages when "loading" so that ad auctions can take place first. Advertising is the priority, not reducing latency.
And alternatives that I honestly think are better.
One reason I'm unwilling to move from Firefox right now: Recommended Extensions.
They're extensions that are checked by Mozilla employees for quality, security and privacy. Extensions have such unfettered access to my browsing, and so many have such nefarious practices that I'll only install extensions that Mozilla vets.
This argument of allegedly hostile addons is true to an extend. They theoretically do indeed have access to your browsing, just like your browser has access to your browsing.
However the security argument was used to inhibit ad blockers and get more control about browsers, an already quite restricted ecology. I gladly have the option to vet addons myself just like I do vet browser vendors. Some of the later and attached companies might have questionable goals.
For me this feature of Firefox is the least important, but demands differ I guess.
I’m not saying FF is perfect but just this week a coworker fixed this major lag issue on one of our pages and did a pull request. I tested it but that page didn’t have any issues on my machine, switched from FF to Chrome and the page was unusable. Apparently “border-radius” can cause absolute havoc sometimes (at least it did in Chrome)
Lots of people are getting paid by Google to be default.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai on Tuesday confirmed that Google pays Apple 36% of Safari search revenue, under the terms of a default search agreement that is core to the Justice Department’s antitrust claims.
There's no way Mozilla can win on this. You can't charge for a browser at the scale to compete with Google, not enough people will pay. When they start to open up alternative services that actually could generate revenue, people yell at them and tell them to work on the browser.
This is 100% on the consumers, over and over open source projects receive no funding and exist by virtue of big companies subsidizing them because nobody is willing to pay for their principles.
This is 100% on the government failing to regulate monopolies. This is 100% on Microsoft antitrust action over the browser war being allowed to degenerate into farce. This is 100% on people defending arrangements like this by guilt-tripping consumers: instead of Mozilla's relationship with Google being corrupt, it's actually the entire rest of the world that is corrupt.
If Firefox can't survive without Google, then at least they won't be able to beard for Google's monopoly.
First, Mozilla's execs killed ff and made the organization into basically a subsidiary of Google, dependent on its support.
Second, ff comes with Google as its default search - so that's going to suck.
I will be happy for you to yell at me to use Firefox when you have fired Mozilla's execs, and dropped Pocket and the Google default search. Until then, I feel like you're not facing reality about what ff has become due to it's cooperation with Google.
I hear there are heckling assholes here too. They talk some shit, but never make a real point. Have you seen any around?
Here's the deal. My elderly mom and dad are being eaten alive by software that takes advantage of their ignorance, and that needs to change. Mozilla's part of that, and they need to change.
Google pays for the default setting because it matters
Yes, it's so non-technical users will get stuck with Google
But that's a problem for those users
What's the problem?
It's inaccessibility caused by corporate corruption. Innocent users get stuck with a increasingly bad search, for a few million bucks a year.
Old people are very dear to me, and seeing them get taken advantage of on every digital platform is breaking my heart.
I have to fight, for the sake of my parents and other old folks, if for no other reason. Perhaps you feel me, perhaps you don't.
Thanks for your comment, it made me think of why I care about this.
Hope you have a nice day, and think of your own old peeps, and get to give them some love!
i tried to lure my parents towards the Matrix protocol but apparently having a connection error each other month is unacceptable... we returned to the well working Whatsapp! i wonder what would be their opinions if i took their Android devices and substituted all their apps for FOSS alternatives & an un-googled Lineage
but yeah, i think fighthing for what's right, specially when you can; is important... but the vast majority will just use what's the most convenient & shutdown all the doors with rude comments, despite if the are about freedom
Ad supported products aren’t free, if they were, Google would not be one of the world’s richest companies. Ad supported products are just priced in a sufficiently convoluted manner that the customers don’t know how much the ad companies are making off them.
Having a convoluted pricing scheme shouldn’t make a company immune to criticism.
Google, Alphabet needs to fund Mozilla because there are no other internet browsers available suitable for today's Internet standards. Microsoft gave up, Opera gave up and Webkit is the only other and that's now iDevice exclusive.
If they didn't they'd be vulnerable to an very large anti-trust lawsuit.
Tl;dr: Google needs to fund Mozilla because there are no other internet browsers available; suitable for todays Internet standards. Microsoft gave up, Opera gave up and Webkit is the only other and it's now iOS exclusive. It failed as a desktop browser.
Without Firefox, Alphabet would be liable to an anti-trust lawsuit. Apple not so, because they keep it to their iDevice.
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Firefox is Mozilla's and Mozilla is a non-profitable organisation.
The story as I know it is that in the early days Mozilla became the defacto internet suite as they produced a suite of applications. Email, FTP client and a browser and these were crafted and sustained by volunteers. (This is skipping the predecessor, Netscape).
The internet was simple then. HTML and CSS with an lil' bit of Javascript made the internet fine.
Everything was open and the rainbow coloured fence of your neighbour was pretty. You could even implement your own renderer and know it would work.
Introducing Google: they started out just as search engine and that it was. Pretty great at it what it was and their was no other. It's boasted feature was one of that you could rank pages with PageRank although in the long run became unprofitable.
The popped dotCom boom had made VC's scared to invest and Silicon Valley was still recovering from the aftermath.
Unlike Yahoo, Lycos and other service providers, who all had offered services like email and entertainment subscriptions, survived.
Google, as bankruptcy neared had offered to sell to Yahoo for $500k and what a different world we would be in. But this didn't happen.
Google then started their up-taking. By introducing advertising to their search engines.
The gimmick I recall is "buying nukes" as if you searched "nukes" you'd get a banner in the right hand side of the page of "buy nukes on ebay". Geeky college humour.
Eventually, they branched out releasing gMail with beta invites and insanely large inbox sizes where the latter only gave you small amounts of 20mb.
And folk flocked to this service. You didn't need 1gb of email storage but hey, you had it. They had it all, a feature rich simple email client. Simple being the key, Simple search engine and your simple website now possible to be seen. As well as vendor lock in. As to change email is as painful to change mobile phone numbers. Dark-UI.
You had a exclusive gmail email, a chance to be on top of Googles search and it thrived. The internet existed but wasn't something for everyday everyone but heck was it a good time.
Introducing Apple and the iPhone. This was the new strike to the internet. The internet wasn't an everyone thing but it was now. Apple created the iPhone from the previous based Java firmware driven non-smart phones with apps and Google introduces with Android a few years later with their apps.
Apple users already being an exclusive clique of the time flocked in masses and this boosted Apple sky high. Eventually major vendors started to suck up to Google as Apple as we know doesn't play ball with the BlackBerry being the business phone, tried! in the end lost as it wasn't innovative enough nor was designed for the consumer market.
We now had this fantasy tech but no future internet for it to work.
And so Google crafted the next-gen specifications for HTML. HTML5 for the internet - This was to enable the "future" and Chrome came with it to carry out these new features.
For their phone and for the desktop web browser prior to that you had Internet Explorer or Firefox. Even then Firefox was least popular because Internet Explorer was shipped in Windows and sabotaged.
This was a further blow for Mozilla because now as an volunteer organisation with less money now had to implement all these new features while Google already had their thing. This kept Firefox lagging behind and made FireFox less popular as the new rebranded Internet wouldn't work with it.
Google with that and advertising money as well as resources could afford to keep implementing, sabotaging and make it painful expiration for anyone to keep up the pace.
While this is excluding Mozillas mishandling and not greatest decisions but here we are now, Google dictating the latest internet splash of paint.
The younger crowds who adopted Google, adopted Chrome as the browser and the legacy keeps going.
Googles vendor lock in for gmail as the same with Canonical's Ubuntu, (which helped Firefox a bit) with its free-cd campaign, and so boosted Linux but ultimately with less money and community support has brought Mozilla to it's knees.
I'm shocked Google thought this tool was production worthy, since it mostly gives really wrong results, in a confident manner. I don't think you can reasonable expect all users to realize it is low quality nonsense, when it is presented at the top of the results.
It's one thing if you know you are using an LLM tool, but when using a search engine, people won't expect this.
> I'm shocked Google thought this tool was production worthy
Honestly, I would not be surprised if they didn't think it was. But thanks their "Code Red" they seem determined to get as much out the door as possible to avoid someone else doing it first.
> I don't think you can reasonable expect all users to realize it is low quality nonsense, when it is presented at the top of the results.
And that is the problem, we are training a large number of non technical people that these tools are supposedly reliable. When the problems with them confidently giving very wrong results are well understood. But we just don't talk about it anymore outside of certain circles.
If we did keep talking about it, all the AI hype would die off or at least he seriously hampered.
They're simultaneously both overhyped and underhyped because people aren't really thinking about them the right way, or using them the right way. They want to use it as an oracle where they ask a straightforward question, and get a straightforward correct answer. In reality they're more of a simulator- you describe a scenario with your prompt, and they play it out for you the way it would likely occur in real life. To accurately predict text as they are trained to do, they have to simulate the scenario generating the text, not provide the most correct and simple completion to the text.
This is why you can ask it a simple physics question for example, and the default might be to give a wrong answer based on a popular misconception. But tell it that it should answer as Richard Feynman, and it can give the correct answer. It "knows" that the first answer was incorrect, but it's still a more appropriate/likely answer given the default scenario, where it effectively assumes it is supposed to act as a random internet stranger when it answers.
You do simulations in a lab, you go to the library for information. Google search was supposed to be the web’s library, where you go looking for what other users have produced. Now, it’s a simulation lab, where the input is imprecise, the process unknowable, and the result unreliable. That’s a children’s playground.
Yeah, they are an awful replacement for a search engine... but I think their actual intelligence and abilities is much higher than people realize or expect, because of misunderstanding what they are, and hoping them to be something else.
Sure, but you're not in the business you think you're in: you're in the business your customers think you're in. Incredible products that don't meet customer expectations are about as useful as crappy products that don't meet customer expectations. They either need to change the product to meet them, or do a better job of communicating the real benefit and addressing the customers' difficulties. It's certainly not on their customers to independently figure out why their product is useful.
I would be rather embarrassed to spend $100 billion dollars creating a new feature that's not better than the legacy feature. (Notably, this isn't even a rewrite, this is greenfield work!)
For almost an entire decade, I forgot that bookmarks exist, why would anyone use them when you have Google?
Over the past year, I've fallen in love with my bookmarks again. They're curated. They take me right to the answer I want. You can set the "omnibar" up to search your bookmarks. They don't hallucinate themselves into existence.
So, thanks Google, I've gone back to 1999, for the total failure that your service is.
Identical experience! Though ironically, having useful bookmarks pushed me into turning on sync in chrome so they would be accessible one all devices, pulling me further into the Google tarpit.
A lot of my bookmarks from 2015 onwards (the year I bought my last laptop) are 404'ing. I wish I had the foresight to bookmark Internet Archive pages instead. But I too switched to just Googling instead of referencing my bookmark list.
The UI of bookmarks needs to be updated so it's more than just a favicon and page title. Google shows previews of the page content in its links, so it's easier to know if the link is the page you're looking for.
on macOS, I use anybox (I could do with a note app, but it’s neat). For the past year, any interesting link I come across, I add it there. The few I use daily, I add them to the browser as bookmarks. Most of my browsing is autocompleting from the history instead of search engines.
Time to switch your default search engine I guess then, dude? You can do that, even if you're using Google's browser, it's the first thing in the 'search' pane of the prefs of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
Click the URL bar. If on a page that provides a search engine, you can add it immediately. If not, click the cog on the right, then choose a new default search engine.
Really? Open Settings, there's a "Search" tab on the sidebar. Literally the first item is "default search engine".
At the bottom of that tab is the "Search shortcuts", which makes it trivially easy to have multiple search engines installed and use the one you want from your search bar. (I use @g for google, @d for DDG, and @k for Kagi, with an @v for DevDocs.io)
While I agree the AI answer is unnecessary, I'm more angry about how it forces itself into the top of the page, causing the actual search results to be forced further down the page.
There's a term for this; it's called "layout shift". And guess which giant search engine company actually punishes websites which include layout shift? You're damn right, it's Google:
These big companies supposedly only hire world-class developers; the cream of the crop. And yet they can't even get the basics right. Stuff that I would have avoided in my first Geocities site when I was a kid.
While I agree with the general message, I find it ironic that the author laments about Google wasting his time, yet wastes my time with two popups, one of which is extremely obnoxious, while simultaneously downloading 10s of JavaScript files and a needlessly large yet compressed-to-hell GIF.
It would do Google good to publish an AI integration philosophy to address critical issues related to AI in search. Such a document would allow for public scrutiny, which is crucial when your user base is a few billion strong and you are as influential player in the field. It would also serve as a good platform for other companies to study. Kagi has an AI integration philosophy [1], which, while modest, has successfully navigated us through the current AI cycle and I think helped our users understand what they can expect from us.
AI can enhance the search experience, but the core search functionality must be strong and robust first. An LLM grounded in search will only be as good as the search results it gets.
Google's "all-in" rollout of AI into search without first addressing these foundational principles and improving the core search experience is interesting - does it really mean they are betting the house on AI? The more I see things like this from Google and others, the more I want to go back to basics and just continue improving the core search quality.
I'll let the public record speak to my ability to execute and run the business. If you have any concrete points that you think I did not already adequately address, I am happy to do it. Just please do not slander publicly (and keep things on-topic if you can).
It's fine to have a philosophy, yes, but if GDPR and the right to be forgotten is not taken seriously enough[0] by a founder of a young product I'll have a hard time to see anything beyond just a mere marketing piece without any liability.
Kagi takes GDPR seriously. My personal relaxed attitude (also taken out of context) is due to the fact that we do not need or sell customer data, and have nothing to hide. Transaction with Kagi is as simple as it can be - you pay to be our customer, and we try to give you the best web search results. Happy to address any issues related to GDPR that you think are not already addressed by our privacy policy.
I continue to wonder about the economics of stuffing AI into everything. Compute isn't free - how are Google and Microsoft going to recoup the costs of running these models for every search?
That’s a secondary concern. Right now, the race is on, and while it is ongoing it’s acceptable to burn money. Later on, enshittification will kick in and make the end result of the race worse in order to stop burning money.
I just got sick of this yesterday and checked to see if there was a chrome extension removing it. There is, it just doesn't easily come up in searches right now. It works great though.
I would need this same extension in another browser. This comment would make sense if you said "the hoops people jump through to stay on google," but I'm not sure what this has to do with Chrome.
You can also use the same logic as that extension does instead: google.com##h1:has-text(AI Overview):upward(*)
The upside being you don't have to rewrite it every time the sites layout is updated with new random IDs, only when the AI Overview heading itself changes wording or style.
DuckDuckGo rolled out its own LLM results, "DuckAssist". At least they are very upfront about how to disable it, though; they link directly to the relevant setting from each LLM result.
So AI-generated answers will kill websites and then we'll be completely dependent on Google and LLM whimsy to find out what real information is. I assume end users will have to deploy their own AI of some sort to wade through the shit. Increase in complexity of one magnitude and increase in inefficiency and bullshit of greater magnitudes, but you can't back out because that lowers your guard and yet another global prisoner's dilemma is born.
This is what happens when you blindly worship at the altar of Progress.
A big part of the problem is illustrated by the fact we are now trained to google e.g. even basic information about our own podcast. Big tech gets so much more out of us than we get out of them - their products are entrenched largely by perception. You can use another search engine. Open a spreadsheet from your Documents directory. Run 7-13B models yourself with llama.cpp. Save a bookmark. Wait three seconds. Whatever you need to do you can do. The data brokers, ad men, media corporations etc. now identified as "the technology industry" are (explicitly) in the business of wasting precious time, not saving it.
Sick and tired of Google products. Why don’t they just pivot to being a hedge fund or something if they have more money than they know what to do with?
I wonder how this is going to play out. At a company I previously worked for, we ended up not rolling out personalized on-site search because while the results were better in theory, in practice it was so slow nobody wanted to use it.
Then again, Google is so dominant that many folks won't quickly bounce to an alternative...
I've been using DuckDuckGo for a while now on my personal machines, but still used Google on my work computer. I started getting the AI blurbs this week and they were so annoying, so I switched to DuckDuckGo on my work computer as well.
I read this title and instantly related to it from the business owner / SEM / SEO perspective
Google controls 90% of search and that's where most consumers start their journey
The current state of the union with Google for businesses, especially small business / local business, is a disaster
- Bidding on your own keyword, to prevent competitors from showing up as #1 - currently consumes 15 - 25% of total paid budget across a number of businesses we own. It's literally just a 1@%!@% tax.
- Google constantly rolls out tests in the name of "quality" - recently for local businesses "hours of operation" became a search signal. Pragmatic enough right? But instantly the spammers started doing 24/7 hours with fake phone numbers etc registered. The road to hell is paved with good intentions they say, this is a constant theme with Google where they come up with some great idea, and then can't figure out how to defend vs the spammers creating massive headaches, costs, etc.
- Google continually takes away visibility and contrl. EG their new AI budget manager takes further visibility away. Right now it drives a little efficiency. But when everybody has it? It will optimize SMB (and everybody else) to the fracture line.
And NOW we are going to spend our precious life trying to figure out how the !%!@ to engage with an LLM (that Google doesnt' even understand)?
I just want to give up.
Honestly it's no wonder that private equity is gobbling up everything from dental practices, to plumbers, to HOUSING
It's become such a crazy sophisticated game that nobody else can play and survive
The AI hype is so big and tech companies are blinded by this, is incredible that Google ship this to his first and flagship product on by default to many users, and not opt out option (I conclude that by the OP article).
I remember see Google launching features off by default with some nagging to turning on, but this is so greedy and dictated by the race on AI, every company want to have AI on their branding like the popular girls on Mean Girls want to be in that group.
Same. May i recommend Ecosia? Not only it doesn't want to be smarter than needed, I actually feel good clicking on ads as the revenue goes to ecological causes.
Why so many comments recommending switch browser from Google Chrome to Firefox? This is a Web Google Search feature right? If is only enabled on Chrome now I'm sure will soon be enabled on other browsers.
I also encourage to switch to Firefox, but in this case to escape this feature is changing the default search engine on your browser, which I recommend Kagi (paid without ads) or Duck Duck Go (free with ads).
They are now using one area, Search, where they have close to monopoly to compete in another, LLMs, because bard.google.com cannot compete fair and square.
Googlers will later proclaim that they won because they had the best product, and the new generations will believe them.
I use firefox, and I've never seen this before. Turns out that it's because it seems to be tied to using a chrome based browser. I just tried chrome and chromium, and it happens to me on chromium and chrome when I do a google search in them. (was assuming it was some flag on my account or some a/b test i was in)
Its ironic that this new feature may drive people off of chrome..
I had this annoying thing running awhile ago and finally shut it off. You can do it in the Labs button - https://labs.google.com/search. Well, I can, not sure if everyone can.
I recently switched from DDG back to Google, but now I need to switch back to DDG because it's quicker and easier to get to Google Maps via the !gm bang via DDG than it is through any direct typing mechanism made available by Google.
I personally am liking chatGPT (i know its not that but feels like it) rolled into Google search.
Overall im hoping OpenAI and Microsoft create a chatGPT phone to compete with iPhone and Android. Either they go the Android route (create a phone OS for manufacturers) or build a direct iPhone competitor. The UI/UX would be fairly minimal and ur chatGPT phone would be used as your 2nd brain / your AI friend. You wouldn't interact with the web so much .. maybe you still would with apps but not as much as your home screen 50% of the time would provide textually, graphically or audibly what you seek with minimal effort on your part. Your AI friend knows you well....
> ur chatGPT phone would be used as your 2nd brain / your AI friend.
That's what we need, a brain/"friend" that collects and analyzes every single thing we think/ask about to use against us later and/or sell to third parties. No thank you!
The only AI "friend" you'll ever have will be run locally entirely on your own hardware and will never send/share/leak any part of your interactions with anyone else for any reason.
Any AI personal assistant that is working for me should do everything short of illegality to protect any information about me, or what I do, that I haven't explicitly told it I want to be shared, and with whom.
You might say that's crazy, but that's just Overton. It's the expectation we have of librarians (and that they have of themselves.) It took PATRIOT to erode that norm (and many others.)
Right now, that at the least means running it locally, although that's not going to be sufficient.
Maybe time will tell (im betting yes on AI powered phone as noted above and via chatGPT/Microsoft) and there's two camps currently .... like myself i sing the praises of Meta RayBan's smartglasses ... i can take pics/videos way easier then pulling out my phone. Yet if i pull out my phone one isnt going to know 100% if they are being video(ed) or photographed unless it's very obvious (they are following the subject with their phone held up). Meta's Smartglasses makes it less obvious and i guess those in the camp against meta's glasses would argue it erodes privacy. Yet legally in public spaces we have zero privacy! I guess it's a control thing.
I want the polar opposite of this. I want an electronic device with local-only apps+browser, not a walled-garden panopticon that's constantly phoning home to let OpenAI know what I'm up to.
Unfortunately the version of capitalism we ended up with ensures that corps won't build anything like this lest it kill off opportunities for "services revenue".
AI-powered search is not a good idea as of today. Someday it would be, but that day is not today. Google knows this well, and hence that is why despite having their internal LLMs for a long time, they did not touch search with it.
Google's hand is forced by OpenAI-related news and investor pressure.
LLMs, on the other hand, are incredibly useful in their other products where we have to write text. I find myself relying heavily on Gemini to improve my grammar, emails, social media posts, and whatnot. This post too is spellchecked by Gemini.
So many folks here criticizing Google for this move. Can you really blame them? A year or so ago everyone was eulogizing them because of chatgpt. Damned if they do or don't.
The article mentions the "web" search, which is the "opt-out button" that link is talking about, but it doesn't acutally opt you out, it just turns off AI for that single query.
Well, there are a lot of things I don't want to spend my one precious life dealing with. Advertising, especially intrusive advertising. Spam. Misinformation, and people who believe it. Politics. Weeds.
Google's AI search, so far, is pretty far down on the list, at least for me.
I don’t really care about the tshirt drama or some type of ideological purity in their funding etc.
Kagi just works well and I really love the way that you can prioritize the sites you like and block the sites that you don’t in the search and that there aren’t any ads and I’ve used a lot of other search engines and this is the only one I’ve like well enough that I actually enjoy using it and don’t find myself subconciously back at google.
No one is forcing this person to use Google. His article drips with AI phobia. There's no nuance to it. For example, I love LLMs but hate AI music and think it should be banned. AI music solves no problems for us like LLMs are helping us do. AI phobics hate all AI. I'm starting to feel personally attacked by people like this because I am enthusiastic about some AI.
Where? The article drips with annoyance, not fear, at 3 second searches that no longer have the results that were previously returned in fractions of a second.
>There's no nuance to it.
Why does there need to be? Author is annoyed. Author explained annoyance. The end.
>I'm starting to feel personally attacked by people like this
That is a very strong indicator that you should divest yourself from the topic for awhile. The author does not attack you in any way.
>>I'm starting to feel personally attacked by people like this
> That is a very strong indicator that you should divest yourself from the topic for awhile. The author does not attack you in any way.
Before some stray AI evangelist leaps into the comments to promise the tech will get better, I want to be clear that even if it were instantaneous, I still wouldn’t want it. I didn’t ask for results from the plagiarism machine!
That doesn't sound like annoyance to me. It sounds like hate.
Three days ago from my comment history:
-4 points by labrador
Maybe AI will speed up the development process
afavour
Maybe AI will replace eyes
labrador
I'm not going to stop talking about AI just because some hate it
afavour
And I won't stop mocking AI hype just because some believe it
The author of the article is annoyed about waiting for the results to appear in a box that takes up almost the whole screen (obscuring the traditional non-AI results). The author also points out that sometimes the AI information is wrong.
Ah, Edge/Bing went through this phase recently. A split personality, where sensible stuff appeared on the left, and Copilot laboriously typing on the right. I disabled it, really did not add anything to the experience.
