"Google is a monopolist, and has acted as one to maintain its monopoly."
August 5, 2024 12:45 PM Subscribe
After a ten week trial in which testimony was heard from major players in the tech industry like Apple and Microsoft, federal district court judge Amit Mehta has ruled that Google and Alphabet have acted as a monopolist in the realms of online search and online advertising, in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
Alphabet argued that their lead position was purely a result of consumer preference for their products, but testimony from Apple's Eddy Cue in which the size of the payments for search exclusivity on iOS was revealed seems to have put the lie to that for Mehta, who noted that few competitors could challenge the $20B Alphabet paid to Apple. The company also unsuccessfully argued that the field of search was overly limited in the case, claiming that things like Amazon's product search was a competitor for them.
Alphabet argued that their lead position was purely a result of consumer preference for their products, but testimony from Apple's Eddy Cue in which the size of the payments for search exclusivity on iOS was revealed seems to have put the lie to that for Mehta, who noted that few competitors could challenge the $20B Alphabet paid to Apple. The company also unsuccessfully argued that the field of search was overly limited in the case, claiming that things like Amazon's product search was a competitor for them.
correct.
[on edit: the ruling, i mean. clarence thomas is never correct]
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 12:53 PM on August 5 [8 favorites]
[on edit: the ruling, i mean. clarence thomas is never correct]
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 12:53 PM on August 5 [8 favorites]
Shares dropped 1.5% after the announcement, so the market seems to be either unsurprised or unconcerned.
posted by constraint at 12:54 PM on August 5 [2 favorites]
posted by constraint at 12:54 PM on August 5 [2 favorites]
I switched both my browser and default search to DuckDuckGo a few
Months back. Seems like Google search results are all AI and ads now. I have not noticed any issues with switching browsers from Firefox/Chrome.
posted by misterpatrick at 12:56 PM on August 5 [4 favorites]
Months back. Seems like Google search results are all AI and ads now. I have not noticed any issues with switching browsers from Firefox/Chrome.
posted by misterpatrick at 12:56 PM on August 5 [4 favorites]
To everyone affected by google search results going rotten, are you located in the US or is the phenomenon global?
posted by porpoise at 1:04 PM on August 5
posted by porpoise at 1:04 PM on August 5
Shares dropped 1.5% after the announcement, so the market seems to be either unsurprised or unconcerned.
That's on top of a broader tech selloff today, so investors had already reduced their stake in Alphabet before the news.
But even 1.5% is ~$30 billion in marketcap for Alphabet, which is pretty significant. The Microsoft antitrust case took two years to go from findings of fact to a final settlement agreement, then more time yet before the court formally accepted the settlement, so there's a long way to go before the full outcome of this case is determined. There's also, unfortunately, the possibility that a second Trump administration would drop the case or pursue it much less strongly.
posted by jedicus at 1:11 PM on August 5 [4 favorites]
That's on top of a broader tech selloff today, so investors had already reduced their stake in Alphabet before the news.
But even 1.5% is ~$30 billion in marketcap for Alphabet, which is pretty significant. The Microsoft antitrust case took two years to go from findings of fact to a final settlement agreement, then more time yet before the court formally accepted the settlement, so there's a long way to go before the full outcome of this case is determined. There's also, unfortunately, the possibility that a second Trump administration would drop the case or pursue it much less strongly.
posted by jedicus at 1:11 PM on August 5 [4 favorites]
Law… is real?
posted by Artw at 1:24 PM on August 5 [4 favorites]
posted by Artw at 1:24 PM on August 5 [4 favorites]
That $20B/yr was the fee for Apple to not develop its own search engine I guess.
Theoretically I see the LLMs displacing the traditional "search engine" stuff later this decade, as they'll be fully plugged into the live internet and doing the same sort of information collation.
I already greatly prefer interacting with ChatGPT, just hate that the results are still so unreliable.
posted by torokunai at 1:24 PM on August 5 [1 favorite]
Theoretically I see the LLMs displacing the traditional "search engine" stuff later this decade, as they'll be fully plugged into the live internet and doing the same sort of information collation.
I already greatly prefer interacting with ChatGPT, just hate that the results are still so unreliable.
posted by torokunai at 1:24 PM on August 5 [1 favorite]
I've also noticed I just can't find what I want on google anymore; glad I'm not the only one. But also in general, I can't seem to find exactly what I need on DuckDuckGo or Bing either. I sometimes end up asking ChatGPT or Gemini and they'll sort of point me in the right direction. I'm in the US btw @porpoise, I've been struggling with search engines for maybe all of 2024 so far.
posted by donuy at 1:25 PM on August 5 [2 favorites]
posted by donuy at 1:25 PM on August 5 [2 favorites]
ddg is a Bing wrapper.
posted by j_curiouser at 1:30 PM on August 5 [13 favorites]
posted by j_curiouser at 1:30 PM on August 5 [13 favorites]
Can anyone tell me if it’s worth paying for a search engine like Kagi?
posted by Jon_Evil at 1:31 PM on August 5
posted by Jon_Evil at 1:31 PM on August 5
Donald Trump hates Google just as much as the current administration does, maybe more. It's pretty amazing that Google went from feeling like an unofficial branch of the federal government in the Obama years to feeling like the most friendless tech megacorporation in Washington today.
I feel like the obvious remedy here is to just say "Google, you can't pay other companies to put you at the top of the search engine list". But it seems like Apple and Mozilla (especially Mozilla) depend on those "revenue sharing" payments to fund development and would really miss them if they were gone. I wonder if the actual most significant impact of this ruling ends up being the death of Mozilla.
posted by potrzebie at 1:33 PM on August 5 [5 favorites]
I feel like the obvious remedy here is to just say "Google, you can't pay other companies to put you at the top of the search engine list". But it seems like Apple and Mozilla (especially Mozilla) depend on those "revenue sharing" payments to fund development and would really miss them if they were gone. I wonder if the actual most significant impact of this ruling ends up being the death of Mozilla.
posted by potrzebie at 1:33 PM on August 5 [5 favorites]
I am neither a fan nor a detractor of either DDG or Google. I spend the majority of my time in the terminal so https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite/ gets a lot of work. But my Debian terminal runs in a container on ChromeOS so Google search is also only a few keystrokes away. The right tool for the job...
posted by jim in austin at 1:42 PM on August 5 [2 favorites]
posted by jim in austin at 1:42 PM on August 5 [2 favorites]
Good. I worked at Google until 2005 and its potential for monopoly power was quite clear. I think it's been actively abusing that power for at least the last ten years, if not more.
It's a really interesting time in the search engine business. There's a real opportunity for technical disruption. AI-enhanced search is very effective and Google is oddly way behind. Bing Copilot, Phind, and Kagi are all better for a lot of research than Google is, even with Gemini (RIP Bard). It's not clear whether a newcomer is going to succeed or if one of the old guard will, or some combination like Microsoft+OpenAI. But Google feels strangely behind technically.
The real money is in the ads business though.
Also going to be an interesting time in the browser wars. Mozilla's budget might be in a lot of trouble if the kind of payments they've been getting from Google become difficult or devalued. Apple might be tempted to go its own way with a search engine for Safari, too.
posted by Nelson at 1:44 PM on August 5 [8 favorites]
It's a really interesting time in the search engine business. There's a real opportunity for technical disruption. AI-enhanced search is very effective and Google is oddly way behind. Bing Copilot, Phind, and Kagi are all better for a lot of research than Google is, even with Gemini (RIP Bard). It's not clear whether a newcomer is going to succeed or if one of the old guard will, or some combination like Microsoft+OpenAI. But Google feels strangely behind technically.
The real money is in the ads business though.
Also going to be an interesting time in the browser wars. Mozilla's budget might be in a lot of trouble if the kind of payments they've been getting from Google become difficult or devalued. Apple might be tempted to go its own way with a search engine for Safari, too.
posted by Nelson at 1:44 PM on August 5 [8 favorites]
Christ, accelerating the AI cash grab would be a real monkeys paw result from this. You’re all depressing the fuck out of me.
posted by Artw at 1:46 PM on August 5 [28 favorites]
posted by Artw at 1:46 PM on August 5 [28 favorites]
I've also noticed I just can't find what I want on Google anymore... I can't seem to find exactly what I need on DuckDuckGo or Bing either.
When this happens to me I try searching on Lycos and often receive better results.
posted by Rash at 1:52 PM on August 5 [4 favorites]
When this happens to me I try searching on Lycos and often receive better results.
posted by Rash at 1:52 PM on August 5 [4 favorites]
Law… is real?
Only for the poor it would seem.
posted by evilDoug at 1:53 PM on August 5 [3 favorites]
Only for the poor it would seem.
posted by evilDoug at 1:53 PM on August 5 [3 favorites]
Wasn’t there an “old Google before ai and ad search munging” link someone posted a few weeks ago? Or months ago?
posted by nat at 1:53 PM on August 5 [1 favorite]
posted by nat at 1:53 PM on August 5 [1 favorite]
The real money is in the ads business though.
Keep your ad-blockers up to date, folks.
(A fundamental struggle in my life is avoiding advertising when- and wherever I can.)
posted by Rash at 1:55 PM on August 5 [6 favorites]
Keep your ad-blockers up to date, folks.
(A fundamental struggle in my life is avoiding advertising when- and wherever I can.)
posted by Rash at 1:55 PM on August 5 [6 favorites]
[insert my standard “search will never not be broken because indexing and reliably surfacing information from the entire web is neither possible nor a good idea” rant here]
that said, I’m very glad to see google potentially hypothetically actually facing consequences, in some future where they don’t get pet justices to throw out everything on appeal. they have done tangible damage to the creation and promulgation of human knowledge, and because as i see it those two things are the purpose of human life, the only things ultimately worth doing, with the value of other acts determined by their contribution to the project of furthering and distributing human knowledge, this means that they are a straightforwardly wicked organization.
google is a sin. <—- yr lowercase etc etc for the day
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 2:01 PM on August 5 [5 favorites]
that said, I’m very glad to see google potentially hypothetically actually facing consequences, in some future where they don’t get pet justices to throw out everything on appeal. they have done tangible damage to the creation and promulgation of human knowledge, and because as i see it those two things are the purpose of human life, the only things ultimately worth doing, with the value of other acts determined by their contribution to the project of furthering and distributing human knowledge, this means that they are a straightforwardly wicked organization.
google is a sin. <—- yr lowercase etc etc for the day
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 2:01 PM on August 5 [5 favorites]
Wasn’t there an “old Google before ai and ad search munging” link someone posted a few weeks ago? Or months ago?
https://udm14.com/
But the quality of search results sucks a lot more now than it did a couple of years ago because people are using AI to build pages about stuff. Keep scrolling and you'll keep getting the same basic information over and over and over, except sometimes it will conflict with whatever was above, and sometimes it'll insert irrelevant results in the middle.
posted by Foosnark at 2:03 PM on August 5 [6 favorites]
https://udm14.com/
But the quality of search results sucks a lot more now than it did a couple of years ago because people are using AI to build pages about stuff. Keep scrolling and you'll keep getting the same basic information over and over and over, except sometimes it will conflict with whatever was above, and sometimes it'll insert irrelevant results in the middle.
posted by Foosnark at 2:03 PM on August 5 [6 favorites]
Finally. and google search really sucks. Duckduckgo if you haven't yet.
posted by bluesky43 at 2:06 PM on August 5 [1 favorite]
posted by bluesky43 at 2:06 PM on August 5 [1 favorite]
I already greatly prefer interacting with ChatGPT, just hate that the results are still so unreliable.
Should be some RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) improvements with OpenAI Five or whatever they wind up calling it in November(-ish), but RAG improvements seem to be more of a steady, slow burn than a lot of things in ML. Actual verification is as far off as ever, of course.
You’re all depressing the fuck out of me.
Llama-3.1 70B, 405B and Mistral Large 2 all released in the past two weeks. Genuine (original flavor) GPT-4 equivalence in the hands of the proletariat is now a reality if you’ve got the hardware. In terms of minimizing aggregate human suffering this would be a perfect time for every major ML company except nVidia to, ah, suddenly burn down accidentally on purpose. Figuratively speaking, of course. Give everyone and everything a little breathing space / time to catch up.
Got a light?
posted by Ryvar at 2:07 PM on August 5 [2 favorites]
Should be some RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) improvements with OpenAI Five or whatever they wind up calling it in November(-ish), but RAG improvements seem to be more of a steady, slow burn than a lot of things in ML. Actual verification is as far off as ever, of course.
You’re all depressing the fuck out of me.
Llama-3.1 70B, 405B and Mistral Large 2 all released in the past two weeks. Genuine (original flavor) GPT-4 equivalence in the hands of the proletariat is now a reality if you’ve got the hardware. In terms of minimizing aggregate human suffering this would be a perfect time for every major ML company except nVidia to, ah, suddenly burn down accidentally on purpose. Figuratively speaking, of course. Give everyone and everything a little breathing space / time to catch up.
Got a light?
posted by Ryvar at 2:07 PM on August 5 [2 favorites]
I already greatly prefer interacting with ChatGPT, just hate that the results are still so unreliable.
I hate that every search I do is sent to Gemini for summary. It basically ups my carbon footprint by 1000x each time I search for "yellow running hat."
I am also starting to wonder, when I call customer support lines, how long it will be before the voice on the other end is an AI. If they aren't already. I do not like this future at all.
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:08 PM on August 5 [9 favorites]
I hate that every search I do is sent to Gemini for summary. It basically ups my carbon footprint by 1000x each time I search for "yellow running hat."
I am also starting to wonder, when I call customer support lines, how long it will be before the voice on the other end is an AI. If they aren't already. I do not like this future at all.
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:08 PM on August 5 [9 favorites]
AI for search: Your unreliable narrator.
posted by chromecow at 2:08 PM on August 5 [14 favorites]
posted by chromecow at 2:08 PM on August 5 [14 favorites]
Can anyone tell me if it’s worth paying for a search engine like Kagi?
I've been using Kagi and I'm pretty satisfied with it. It has some good features, the main one (for me) being that it lets you weight sites high or low or block them entirely -- so e.g. if you identify a search result as being from an SEO spam site, you can just mark it to not ever show that site again.
posted by rifflesby at 2:08 PM on August 5 [6 favorites]
I've been using Kagi and I'm pretty satisfied with it. It has some good features, the main one (for me) being that it lets you weight sites high or low or block them entirely -- so e.g. if you identify a search result as being from an SEO spam site, you can just mark it to not ever show that site again.
posted by rifflesby at 2:08 PM on August 5 [6 favorites]
This is the correct legal judgement. The correct remedy is really hard to suss out, though.
It's an open secret at this point that one of Google's best ranking signals is just "whatever everybody else clicked on and didn't bounce back from", which really just means that Google Search is running a CAPTCHA on the entire web. That might be one of the only things holding the wave of AI-generated slop back. Another big one of course is just comparing hashes of all the pages with each other and noticing which blocks of text have been repeated verbatim hundreds of times.
I truly want a competitive search landscape but this is one of those things where there is a natural "increasing returns to scale" curve that means the big get bigger. I'd love to see creative thinking about how to get a competitive landscape that doesn't lose some of those benefits.
Forbidding certain terms in browser search engine agreements would be a great start. SV scuttlebutt has certainly mentioned various onerous restrictions that Google has imposed on browsers in the past (no concrete knowledge here, sadly; maybe some other folks know more?)
posted by graphweaver at 2:10 PM on August 5 [5 favorites]
It's an open secret at this point that one of Google's best ranking signals is just "whatever everybody else clicked on and didn't bounce back from", which really just means that Google Search is running a CAPTCHA on the entire web. That might be one of the only things holding the wave of AI-generated slop back. Another big one of course is just comparing hashes of all the pages with each other and noticing which blocks of text have been repeated verbatim hundreds of times.
I truly want a competitive search landscape but this is one of those things where there is a natural "increasing returns to scale" curve that means the big get bigger. I'd love to see creative thinking about how to get a competitive landscape that doesn't lose some of those benefits.
Forbidding certain terms in browser search engine agreements would be a great start. SV scuttlebutt has certainly mentioned various onerous restrictions that Google has imposed on browsers in the past (no concrete knowledge here, sadly; maybe some other folks know more?)
posted by graphweaver at 2:10 PM on August 5 [5 favorites]
The future is artisinal, hand-curated, certified organic, made in the USA, cruelty free search results which take 36 hours to reach you in bespoke, scented envelopes with little hearts and affirmations written on them in glitter-sharpie by your searchista.
posted by signal at 2:14 PM on August 5 [16 favorites]
posted by signal at 2:14 PM on August 5 [16 favorites]
Rebar - yeah, that’s all garbage. Fuck that shit. I don’t want autocorrect output from a plagiarism bot, give me an actual functioning search.
posted by Artw at 2:16 PM on August 5 [8 favorites]
posted by Artw at 2:16 PM on August 5 [8 favorites]
I truly want a competitive search landscape but this is one of those things where there is a natural "increasing returns to scale" curve that means the big get bigger. I'd love to see creative thinking about how to get a competitive landscape that doesn't lose some of those benefits.
Search is a natural monopoly and needs to be treated as such.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:26 PM on August 5 [4 favorites]
Search is a natural monopoly and needs to be treated as such.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:26 PM on August 5 [4 favorites]
Agreed. The problem is that if you nationalize it, there’s this one political party that is going to recognize the existential threat posed by quickly directing people to good information sources, and…
cruelty free search results which take 36 hours to reach you in bespoke, scented envelopes with little hearts and affirmations written on them in glitter-sharpie
men Search engine companies will do anything to avoid going to therapy giving me boolean operators that actually work.
posted by Ryvar at 2:31 PM on August 5 [16 favorites]
cruelty free search results which take 36 hours to reach you in bespoke, scented envelopes with little hearts and affirmations written on them in glitter-sharpie
posted by Ryvar at 2:31 PM on August 5 [16 favorites]
The future is artisinal, hand-curated, certified organic, made in the USA, cruelty free search results which take 36 hours to reach you in bespoke, scented envelopes with little hearts and affirmations written on them in glitter-sharpie by your searchista.
Thanks, we’ve got librarians at home. (It’s me, I’m the librarian at my home.)
posted by Horace Rumpole at 2:40 PM on August 5 [20 favorites]
Thanks, we’ve got librarians at home. (It’s me, I’m the librarian at my home.)
posted by Horace Rumpole at 2:40 PM on August 5 [20 favorites]
Can anyone tell me if it’s worth paying for a search engine like Kagi?
I broke down and subscribed to Kagi a little while back (I had been using ddg for a long time but it took a bit of a nose dive), and I do not regret it. Ten dollhairs a month isn't a big deal to me, though if you're willing to futz with only using it when your standard ddg/google/whatever search fails you, then you can likely cut that price in half (that is, they have a plan where they will charge you $5 a month but limit you to 300 searches). Personally I couldn't be bothered to have to make a judgment call every time I search something (i.e., "are these results good enough to avoid burning one of my 300 kagi searches?") so I shelled out for unlimited.
Basically what you get is more-or-less what you used to get with google (minus ads) way back when, which is to say, results that are useful and not chock-a-block with bullshit. This is better than goog/ddg. I will say that their Chrome extension would not work for me (I use Vivaldi) so I had to manually set up their search engine in my browser. A small bother but a one-time thing.
posted by axiom at 2:52 PM on August 5 [3 favorites]
I broke down and subscribed to Kagi a little while back (I had been using ddg for a long time but it took a bit of a nose dive), and I do not regret it. Ten dollhairs a month isn't a big deal to me, though if you're willing to futz with only using it when your standard ddg/google/whatever search fails you, then you can likely cut that price in half (that is, they have a plan where they will charge you $5 a month but limit you to 300 searches). Personally I couldn't be bothered to have to make a judgment call every time I search something (i.e., "are these results good enough to avoid burning one of my 300 kagi searches?") so I shelled out for unlimited.
Basically what you get is more-or-less what you used to get with google (minus ads) way back when, which is to say, results that are useful and not chock-a-block with bullshit. This is better than goog/ddg. I will say that their Chrome extension would not work for me (I use Vivaldi) so I had to manually set up their search engine in my browser. A small bother but a one-time thing.
posted by axiom at 2:52 PM on August 5 [3 favorites]
Metafilter: that’s all garbage. Fuck that shit.
Can anyone tell me if it’s worth paying for a search engine like Kagi?
Give the free trial a whirl and decide for yourself. It was good enough to convince me. Best $10/mo I'm spending right now.
Mostly I use Kagi just as a better Google. I think it genuinely is Google under the hood, or at least a lot of the index, but whatever they're doing for ranking improves things. I haven't used the other features like customizing site penalties much, although I just deranked Pinboard and Fandom and my results are already better in those domains. Kagi also has a low key AI-enhanced feature called "Quick Answer" that I find more useful than not.
I already greatly prefer interacting with ChatGPT, just hate that the results are still so unreliable.
Try interacting with Phind or Bing Copilot instead. Both both heavily emphasize citations and links so you can quickly check the answeres. The AI still gets things wrong sometimes but at least you have a headstart exploring sources. It's like a better search engine with a natural language interface that can give synthesized answers.
posted by Nelson at 2:52 PM on August 5 [3 favorites]
Can anyone tell me if it’s worth paying for a search engine like Kagi?
Give the free trial a whirl and decide for yourself. It was good enough to convince me. Best $10/mo I'm spending right now.
Mostly I use Kagi just as a better Google. I think it genuinely is Google under the hood, or at least a lot of the index, but whatever they're doing for ranking improves things. I haven't used the other features like customizing site penalties much, although I just deranked Pinboard and Fandom and my results are already better in those domains. Kagi also has a low key AI-enhanced feature called "Quick Answer" that I find more useful than not.
I already greatly prefer interacting with ChatGPT, just hate that the results are still so unreliable.
Try interacting with Phind or Bing Copilot instead. Both both heavily emphasize citations and links so you can quickly check the answeres. The AI still gets things wrong sometimes but at least you have a headstart exploring sources. It's like a better search engine with a natural language interface that can give synthesized answers.
posted by Nelson at 2:52 PM on August 5 [3 favorites]
Can anyone tell me if it’s worth paying for a search engine like Kagi?
I pay for Kagi. I broke down after trying to use DDG and finding too many paper cuts for my assorted niche interests. I really enjoy Kagi's "Lens" feature.
If you end a query with "?" it kicks that over to its AI-driven Quick Answer feature, which includes citations. I haven't used that much. No comment on the feature's utility; I just haven't formed a habit.
posted by mph at 3:13 PM on August 5 [2 favorites]
I pay for Kagi. I broke down after trying to use DDG and finding too many paper cuts for my assorted niche interests. I really enjoy Kagi's "Lens" feature.
If you end a query with "?" it kicks that over to its AI-driven Quick Answer feature, which includes citations. I haven't used that much. No comment on the feature's utility; I just haven't formed a habit.
posted by mph at 3:13 PM on August 5 [2 favorites]
If paying for Kagi is making you balk, try Stract. Currently free (and ad-free) but an independent search index and also has the Lens concept (called Optics). It's still beta-ish, but a free alternative to Kagi.
Also, Kagi has started leaning hard into the AI BS that has degraded the other search engines, so buyer beware.
posted by youknowwhatpart at 3:29 PM on August 5 [7 favorites]
Also, Kagi has started leaning hard into the AI BS that has degraded the other search engines, so buyer beware.
posted by youknowwhatpart at 3:29 PM on August 5 [7 favorites]
Thanks, we’ve got librarians at home. (It’s me, I’m the librarian at my home.)
If you called yourself a searchista and the results 'risultatos', you could charge $10 a pop.
posted by signal at 3:36 PM on August 5 [8 favorites]
If you called yourself a searchista and the results 'risultatos', you could charge $10 a pop.
posted by signal at 3:36 PM on August 5 [8 favorites]
But the quality of search results sucks a lot more now than it did a couple of years ago because people are using AI to build pages about stuff. Keep scrolling and you'll keep getting the same basic information over and over and over, except sometimes it will conflict with whatever was above, and sometimes it'll insert irrelevant results in the middle.
Yeah, I broke down and installed uBlacklist in Safari so I could just punt all those AI bullshit sites to the void and it helped a bit, but isn't a real solution.
posted by Kyol at 3:36 PM on August 5 [1 favorite]
Yeah, I broke down and installed uBlacklist in Safari so I could just punt all those AI bullshit sites to the void and it helped a bit, but isn't a real solution.
posted by Kyol at 3:36 PM on August 5 [1 favorite]
NOW DO AMAZON
posted by latkes at 3:46 PM on August 5 [5 favorites]
posted by latkes at 3:46 PM on August 5 [5 favorites]
Hell yeah
posted by latkes at 3:57 PM on August 5 [2 favorites]
posted by latkes at 3:57 PM on August 5 [2 favorites]
Oh man, now it’s really ChatGPT’s time to shine.
posted by Going To Maine at 4:02 PM on August 5
posted by Going To Maine at 4:02 PM on August 5
Google is a monopoly ok Trumo stated he is getting rid of Google, problem solved?
posted by robbyrobs at 4:52 PM on August 5
posted by robbyrobs at 4:52 PM on August 5
> How will Justice Thomas rule on the appeal?
That depends on who's paying him this week.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 6:07 PM on August 5 [4 favorites]
That depends on who's paying him this week.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 6:07 PM on August 5 [4 favorites]
I identify the downfall of Google as coming from multiple sources, but all of them are due to the fact that a good in-depth exploration of the text internet on a subject, via Google, is no longer feasible, greatly because so many things now clutter the top of the search page. Used to be the top result would just get you what you wanted, now you have to scroll.
- Ads being at the top of the search page means frequently you have to scroll down an entire page or more to get out of Sponsored Land.
- Google will fall over itself to direct you to videos on a topic first, even if you use udm14. This is greatly self-serving, since Youtube is so much of video and seems to be prioritized, and means, even if the link has good information, you're going to have to probably sit multiple minutes to get to what you want, and it will probably be deficient in outgoing links, so using it to explore a topic instead of getting one person's say on it is not useful.
- Google tries to be everyone to every person. A lot of people use it just to get basic info or stuff that rightfully should just be searched on Wikipedia (which, hey, guilty). Wikipedia links are okay for exploring, but not if you want to get deeply in the weeds on a specific topic since Wikipedia has designed-in limitations.
- Web glurge, from misapplied SEO, content thieves, linkfarms, AI-generated garbage and the like. The stuff that most people identify as Google's biggest problem.
- Google actively prioritizing web design, especially mobile-friend sites, in their results is also largely harmful. The slick site that's really just three paragraphs pointing you to the author's for-sale ebook is much less useful than the HTML 1.0 site that tells you everything the author knows about a subject, so every result that's the former coming ahead of the latter makes that latter site much less findable. In short, the small press internet has become devalued.
- And finally, but significantly, because of the difficulty of finding good results from Google now and the rise of social media, there are actually fewer good independent links to find on the textual web now. Content aggregation and focus on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Pinterest/Reddit/StackOverflow/Quora/Fandom/Medium/Substack (a new demonology!) led people to believe that those things are the internet really is now, and it's self-fulfilling. Slowly, over the past decade, the good sites of the past have been going dark. When I find a site from the 2000s that's still up and has one of bombastic lowercase pronouncement's vaunted outgoing links pages, and it's probably worse than 50/50 that each of those links will still work, sending me to the Wayback Machine to find out what was on it, enough so that I find myself wishing for a way to automate those searches. Part of this is baked into the web: its structure focuses on getting to things, not finding them in the vast sea or keeping them alive. But because of that, it's become less likely that the information you search for even exists online anymore, and if it does, it's been contributed to a content silo that now seeks to profit off of gatekeeping access to it, in one way or another.
Solutions? Crowdsourcing links might help, but is also vulnerable to malign actors. A Yahoo-like directory could be useful of more people contributed links, but the truth is that it's also liable to get bloated up with low-quality links, and also needs to be actively pruned of dead links (or maybe have special pages in each category where dead links go to the Wayback Machine). I have hopes, if someone wanted to make it, that a kind of functions as a web sommelier, basically a bunch of knowledge individuals passing judgement on sites for inclusion on many topics, could work out. Huh, that starts to sound something like Metafilter....
These are the kinds of things that venture capitalists focused on the internet should be focusing on, if they weren't all hypnotized by Sam Altman and "AI."
posted by JHarris at 6:12 PM on August 5 [8 favorites]
- Ads being at the top of the search page means frequently you have to scroll down an entire page or more to get out of Sponsored Land.
- Google will fall over itself to direct you to videos on a topic first, even if you use udm14. This is greatly self-serving, since Youtube is so much of video and seems to be prioritized, and means, even if the link has good information, you're going to have to probably sit multiple minutes to get to what you want, and it will probably be deficient in outgoing links, so using it to explore a topic instead of getting one person's say on it is not useful.
- Google tries to be everyone to every person. A lot of people use it just to get basic info or stuff that rightfully should just be searched on Wikipedia (which, hey, guilty). Wikipedia links are okay for exploring, but not if you want to get deeply in the weeds on a specific topic since Wikipedia has designed-in limitations.
- Web glurge, from misapplied SEO, content thieves, linkfarms, AI-generated garbage and the like. The stuff that most people identify as Google's biggest problem.
- Google actively prioritizing web design, especially mobile-friend sites, in their results is also largely harmful. The slick site that's really just three paragraphs pointing you to the author's for-sale ebook is much less useful than the HTML 1.0 site that tells you everything the author knows about a subject, so every result that's the former coming ahead of the latter makes that latter site much less findable. In short, the small press internet has become devalued.
- And finally, but significantly, because of the difficulty of finding good results from Google now and the rise of social media, there are actually fewer good independent links to find on the textual web now. Content aggregation and focus on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Pinterest/Reddit/StackOverflow/Quora/Fandom/Medium/Substack (a new demonology!) led people to believe that those things are the internet really is now, and it's self-fulfilling. Slowly, over the past decade, the good sites of the past have been going dark. When I find a site from the 2000s that's still up and has one of bombastic lowercase pronouncement's vaunted outgoing links pages, and it's probably worse than 50/50 that each of those links will still work, sending me to the Wayback Machine to find out what was on it, enough so that I find myself wishing for a way to automate those searches. Part of this is baked into the web: its structure focuses on getting to things, not finding them in the vast sea or keeping them alive. But because of that, it's become less likely that the information you search for even exists online anymore, and if it does, it's been contributed to a content silo that now seeks to profit off of gatekeeping access to it, in one way or another.
Solutions? Crowdsourcing links might help, but is also vulnerable to malign actors. A Yahoo-like directory could be useful of more people contributed links, but the truth is that it's also liable to get bloated up with low-quality links, and also needs to be actively pruned of dead links (or maybe have special pages in each category where dead links go to the Wayback Machine). I have hopes, if someone wanted to make it, that a kind of functions as a web sommelier, basically a bunch of knowledge individuals passing judgement on sites for inclusion on many topics, could work out. Huh, that starts to sound something like Metafilter....
These are the kinds of things that venture capitalists focused on the internet should be focusing on, if they weren't all hypnotized by Sam Altman and "AI."
posted by JHarris at 6:12 PM on August 5 [8 favorites]
Oh man, now it’s really ChatGPT’s time to shine.
I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, ChatGPT is incapable of shining.
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape at 6:49 PM on August 5 [5 favorites]
I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, ChatGPT is incapable of shining.
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape at 6:49 PM on August 5 [5 favorites]
The AI generated knowledge panels presented by Google are full of mistakes - basic mistakes - here is an example, my Australian Sydney based compatriots will spot the problem:
https://www.google.com/search?q=ultimo+zipcode
[I've previously reported this through their feedback link, but it persists - just in case it updates in the meantime]
posted by a non e mouse at 7:57 PM on August 5
https://www.google.com/search?q=ultimo+zipcode
[I've previously reported this through their feedback link, but it persists - just in case it updates in the meantime]
posted by a non e mouse at 7:57 PM on August 5
Wasn’t there an “old Google before ai and ad search munging” link someone posted a few weeks ago? Or months ago?
I don't know about a link, but there was a 'hack' posted - changing the URL of your default search engine to https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 gets rid of all the sponsored links and does seem to generate slightly more useful search results.
Maybe things are worse in the US, but I find it pretty hard to get decent search results on most things these days (I'm in Australia) and most of the results are just endless repeats of the same SEO-optimised garbage on 50 different URLs.
posted by dg at 8:56 PM on August 5
I don't know about a link, but there was a 'hack' posted - changing the URL of your default search engine to https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 gets rid of all the sponsored links and does seem to generate slightly more useful search results.
Maybe things are worse in the US, but I find it pretty hard to get decent search results on most things these days (I'm in Australia) and most of the results are just endless repeats of the same SEO-optimised garbage on 50 different URLs.
posted by dg at 8:56 PM on August 5
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posted by sammyo at 12:48 PM on August 5 [8 favorites]