Google is redesigning its search engine — and it’s AI all the way down (www.theverge.com)
from alyaza@beehaw.org to technology@beehaw.org on 15 May 2024 16:05
https://beehaw.org/post/13819162

#technology

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ptz@dubvee.org on 15 May 2024 16:08 next collapse

Sigh. AI has basically added a rocket booster to the enshittification train.

Hopefully this doesn’t impact DDG.

godzilla_lives@beehaw.org on 15 May 2024 16:26 next collapse

Hopefully it doesn’t impact them too much. So tired of this AI train man.

ptz@dubvee.org on 15 May 2024 16:34 collapse

Same. I don’t mind it as an option if that’s what some people want, but stop “enhancing” the default experience with it and shoving it down my throat. No lo quiero.

Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de on 15 May 2024 16:46 next collapse

I mentioned this in another thread, but I do worry that google is eventually going infect the APIs that metasearch engines like DDG, Kagi, searchxng, etc depend on.

In my experience, a lot of the sysadmins who run high traffic sites will treat all bots as scrapers that have to be blocked or slowed to a crawl. Then they make special allowances for googlebot, bing/msnbot, and a few others. That means there is a massive uphill climb (beyond the technical one) to making a new search engine from scratch. With Google and MS both betting the farm on LLMs I fear we’re going to lose access to two of the most valuable web reverse indexes out there.

ptz@dubvee.org on 15 May 2024 16:54 next collapse

I fear that as well. I use Searx-NG at home, so am expecting that to start dying a death of a thousand cuts soon.

Was thinking about standing up (or contributing to) either YaCY or Stract, but you made a good point about the bot allowances for the Googlebot et al crawler UAs. Wonder how frowned upon it would be to spoof the crawler UA in a self-hosted one?

Butterbee@beehaw.org on 15 May 2024 17:45 next collapse

I’ve just started using Searxng… you expect it to die soon? Is it because you expect other search engines to follow suit until there are no search engines anymore, only hallucination machines?

ptz@dubvee.org on 15 May 2024 17:50 collapse

s it because you expect other search engines to follow suit until there are no search engines anymore, only hallucination machines?

Basically, yeah.

Butterbee@beehaw.org on 15 May 2024 18:52 collapse

I hope there’s enough of a market for non-ai content that it doesn’t come to that. I think we already reached the pushback stage with image generation.

Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de on 15 May 2024 18:32 collapse

When I was running a site, I had special rules in my firewall to look for things that said they were googlebot but which didn’t come from one of googles published public IPs.

ptz@dubvee.org on 15 May 2024 18:37 collapse

…yeah.

I had that thought after I replied when I realized that most of the reputable search crawlers will publish the IPs/ranges they use in addition to the UA. The disreputable ones (cough Bytedance cough Xiaomi cough) will just spoof Chrome on Windows 10 and flood you with requests from AWS datacenters in Shanghai or Singapore.

That said, I may still continue looking into working with one of the actual self-hosted search engines (vs meta search) and see how well that works.

MajorHavoc@programming.dev on 15 May 2024 21:21 collapse

Yeah. This is going to suck worse before it gets any better. The good news is that all the useful content (outside of sales gardens) is going to be here in the Fediverse.

The other good news is that the state of Cybersecurity investment is abysmal, and the walled garden content is going to get breached/leaked/pirated a lot, for a long time to come.

Ilandar@aussie.zone on 16 May 2024 00:24 collapse

Oh, it will impact a lot more than one private search engine. Watch The AI Dilemma presentation given by Asa Razkin and Tristan Harris last year if you want an idea of what could be coming.

jarfil@beehaw.org on 17 May 2024 01:08 collapse

Is coming, and more. Very good video, with good points. Slightly outdated already, with AutGPT being a thing. What’s coming, is going to be orders of magnitude more than what they predicted in that video.

Ilandar@aussie.zone on 17 May 2024 02:15 collapse

Slightly outdated already, with AutGPT being a thing.

That’s the really disturbing thing and what makes this challenge so different to all others humanity has faced to date. I think Asa even referenced in the presentation that some of his slides were going out of date on a daily basis, that’s how fast the technology was moving.

jarfil@beehaw.org on 17 May 2024 15:13 collapse

Yup.

They also correctly identify the function of LLMs as a glue between siloed AIs. We have barely seen the beginning of that, but as the AI race continues, it seems likely that some LLM models will be created that will have less human language, and more “interop language”. Where nowadays LLMs can be somewhat probed for words and relationships, we’ll have zero chance to probe an LLM using tokens that are part of some made up (by the AIs) interop language. Black boxes inside black boxes.

A naive approach will be to “democratize AI”, and that will surely be better than centralized AIs responding to every query… but won’t solve the deepening of inscrutability.

One point made me chuckle: when they showed the graphs for cualitative jumps above certain network size. Recently someone commented about the “diminishing returns” and “asymptotic growth” of making a LLM larger and larger… but also so it was in these models: diminishing returns all the way up to a point… followed by a sudden exponential jump until the next asymptote. The truth is we don’t know where the asymptotes and exponential jumps lie, we don’t even have a remote hypothesis about it.

Neato@ttrpg.network on 15 May 2024 17:22 next collapse

I’m getting Pixel 8a ads and I usually trade-in my older a if I start having problems or the new one has a feature. 8a finally has wireless charging (7 mightve, was too soon) but it has this bullshit now. Damnit.

sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al on 15 May 2024 17:37 next collapse

Google said, “yo, we heard you liked search, so we gave you AI with a slither of search and we will ram it down your throat until you feel like you can’t live without it, because walled gardens are the best and we can’t figure out a way to trap you in ours” 🥴

yournamehere@lemm.ee on 15 May 2024 18:08 next collapse

how seo game this? the sooner you start…

randomaside@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 15 May 2024 19:25 next collapse

Large language models are going to replace search. Naturally concise recommendations are easier for humans to interact with than a swath of web pages. The problem that you get here is this is going to disincentive the creation of new web content outside of the walled gardens we already have. The walls are just going to get higher.

sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al on 15 May 2024 19:33 next collapse

Google will be sued again by the big publications and will pay out. But little independent publications will die as people get used to not leaving the search engine.

anachronist@midwest.social on 16 May 2024 02:29 collapse

The appeal to google and friends is that it’s even less obvious when you’re being advertised to when a LLM tells you something than on their existing SERPs.

randomaside@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 16 May 2024 02:36 collapse

💯

azerial@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 15 May 2024 19:39 next collapse

And layoffs all the way down.

Fizz@lemmy.nz on 15 May 2024 19:56 next collapse

I wish more people would care about monopolies fucking up the infrastructure of our internet.

belated_frog_pants@beehaw.org on 16 May 2024 18:34 collapse

Government needs to give a shit instead of taking their money and doing nothing.

melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 15 May 2024 23:01 next collapse

Google destroys their own search engine by encouraging terrible SEO nonsense and then offers the solution in the form of these AI overviews, cutting results out of the picture entirely.

You search something on the Web nowadays half the results are written by AI anyway.

I don’t really care about the “human element” or whatever, but AI is such a hype train right now. It’s still early days for the tech, it still hallucinates a lot, and I fundamentally can’t trust it—even if I trusted the people making it, which I don’t.

anachronist@midwest.social on 16 May 2024 02:28 next collapse

Google was already going downhill but when they fired Matt Cutts and replaced him with an advertising person was the point where it was obvious they weren’t interested in search anymore.

belated_frog_pants@beehaw.org on 16 May 2024 18:34 collapse

You will never be able to consistently find the truth when AI optimizes for overfitting to get any result as long as something is show with ads next to it.

AI has no way of understanding truth. It’s autocomplete trained on just anything it can find truth or not.

jarfil@beehaw.org on 16 May 2024 23:52 collapse

AI can also understand extra weights for hand picked sources of truth. Whether you then agree with the choices of whoever is doing the hand picking, is a separate matter.

belated_frog_pants@beehaw.org on 17 May 2024 01:58 collapse

Would be a shame if different “truths” made more or less money and someone optimized for one of those.

jarfil@beehaw.org on 18 May 2024 00:32 collapse

Yeah, they call it A-Z testing, because A/B wasn’t enough, and AIs can fill A to Z cases with ease.

tesseract@beehaw.org on 16 May 2024 02:54 next collapse

I wish they undid a lot of their stupid redesigns instead of doubling down on it.

FluffyPotato@lemm.ee on 16 May 2024 03:12 next collapse

Google has been unusable in English for at least 2 years now. Searching in Estonian makes Google behave like it did when it was still good. I wonder how long that’s going to last.

DdCno1@beehaw.org on 16 May 2024 18:53 collapse

BRB, gonna learn Estonian.

boonhet@lemm.ee on 17 May 2024 01:57 collapse

See on väärt oskus, meid on lausa tosinaid!

RickRussell_CA@beehaw.org on 16 May 2024 03:21 next collapse

Oh good, now when I search I’ll have to wade through the effluent of AI-produced pablum to find an actual human journalism product.

twei@discuss.tchncs.de on 16 May 2024 18:45 collapse

Bold of you to assume you’ll find an actual human journalism product

bradorsomething@ttrpg.network on 16 May 2024 03:36 next collapse

I’d like to check in as part of the problem; I pay for google ads and I show up at the top of certain search screens. I’m in a small local market, and google is primed to make about $350,000 off about $3mm of work this year if things keep up the way they are. We have no choice but to play the game to reach our consumers. Sorry guys.

NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone on 17 May 2024 01:51 next collapse

Nope nope nope

onlinepersona@programming.dev on 17 May 2024 09:49 collapse

Yes please. Shoot yourself in the foot. It seems like it’s the only way people will even consider switching.

Anti Commercial-AI license