They ruined their search engine too
They did that even before AI. Sponsored links and worse results, so people go to the dreaded page 2 more often, showing even more sponsored links and ads. And they say capitalism makes things run efficiently…
It wasn’t solely their fault, people gaming the ranking algorithms also did disastrous damage.
Because they wanted more clicks so they’d make more money from the ads served by… Google.
It was entirely their fault.
True, though it’s not like Google is/was the only company serving ads.
oh, there were two big pedophiles do Jeff EPs was actually fine and basically a good guy.
Not what they are arguing. :|
that’s not what your mom said.
you don’t understand! if everything only exists as byproducts of scams, we will get the best most efficient scams!
Also the internet.
And mobile apps. And smartphones. And browsers. And image formats. And the general concept of privacy…
Oh no, people are leaving us because the things we did well are getting worse!
PUT MORE AI IN IT!! TRIPLE DOWN!!! KISS THE CRUSTY ORANGE BROWN RING!
I never understood the previews, AI or otherwise. Why would a company pay you for placement when the preview steals your content and puts it above your ad?
It gets even better. The trillion dollar chatbot is not only killing the basis for search but its very own as well: All those content creators, small ones, large ones, commercial ones. They all are dying because of it, yet the chatbot needs constant feeding to stay alive, and will poison itself if fed on its own content. … This will be fun.
What you’re describing is cancer. Takes nutrition from neighbouring cells to grow infinitely ultimately destroying its own host. Kind of like AI and their constant need for water, energy, land and human data.
Not quite. Cancer can reproduce itself but it can’t sustain itself. AI cannot reproduce itself nor sustain itself. Even if AI bros would like to make it look as if they were not in control of their LLM while committing crimes, they are.
have they tried putting more more ai in it? the investors all agreed this was the best solution!
Trouble is, the web for which the PageRank algorithm was developed has long since died - its highly decentralized, interlinked network of freely available information has almost entirely been replaced by centralized, account-gated silos. Web search engines, in turn, have gotten progressively worse since long before LLMs had become computationally feasible.
much of that, both the centralization opposed to search and the search degradation to force more searches and serve more adds, like the removal of advanced search operators, was deliberate.
Eventually, yes. But many people don’t like hearing that the vast majority of them, the users, didn’t want to pay for the operating costs of a global search engine when the web got popular. Neither as customers of a company, nor via government spending as a public service, and definitely not through donations.
Hence, given the economic system we live in, the people running search engines had to find some means of funding, which turned out to be selling their users’ data and serving them ads. Once they had gone down that path the rest became more or less inevitable.
I don’t think users would ever be in a position to cover the many hundreds of billions in revenue that Google found. Yeah, somebody has to pay the running costs, but there’s a place where the search engine could exist by just covering the running costs, without making infinite profit on top.
Yeah, somebody has to pay the running costs, but there’s a place where the search engine could exist by just covering the running costs, without making infinite profit on top.
People have tried and went out of business, because users predominantly do not want to pay for something they could (supposedly) get for free, doubly so if the paid version isn’t even significantly better. It sounds nice, but it hasn’t been true for the last 20 years or so.
The current funding model didn’t come out of nowhere, it’s the consequence of user behavior. Personally, I would e.g. support a search engine as a public service funded through EU budget, but I’m in a tiny minority with that opinion.
Personally, I would e.g. support a search engine as a public service funded through EU budget, but I’m in a tiny minority with that opinion.
I would get behind that, rather than pay some private company I do not trust. At least something EU-controlled, would be a bit more trusthworthy, than some shady business from who knows where and under what actual ownership. I do not trust company privacy policies at all anymore, all of them are lying as much as they can, since there are no real repercussions for it, except losing paying customers - which they will not lose, since they are able to lie as much as they want.
I grew up there. I remember very pointedly never having the option to pay for search. it wasn’t on my radar. shut your lying capitalist wind hole before you ruin your pants.
yeah free stuff without ads always enshittifies. people just aren’t willing to support that kind of thing.
Not only make less money, but literally pay money for people to engage with it for free
Technically they still made more money. They just made less than their projections by about a billion dollars.
Yeah, they made double-digit profits. They have been swimming in money for decades and their cash ocean is still getting bigger at an insane rate.
Revenue, however, rose 25% to an enormous $127.6bn. The figure was slightly below the roughly $128bn analysts had forecast.
Advertising revenue grew 11% to $82bn, short of expectations. Revenue from Google’s search business, still the company’s largest source of income, rose 12% to $63.4bn, slowing from 17% growth in the previous quarter.
Jesus, and that’s just from selling user data and ad placements? Yeah they are never willingly moving away from that business. Investors wouldn’t let them.
Thanks for posting the snip.
And users will never willingly move away either, so we’re stuck with them getting bigger and bigger until the system collapses.
I mean some will but I get what you mean. Many people will just never pay the opportunity cost to divest themselves, no matter how far Google falls.
Aside: this is what people like us are good for. You’d better believe that everyone I know well knows that they can come to me if they ever want help degoogling, decorporatising, or otherwise exorcising their tech. Sometimes they even do.
I wish we had a solution to bring up maps on Android Auto without google, lmk if you figure something out.
I don’t know what that is, so I don’t know what you mean. I just use CoMaps. It doesn’t have every business by name, but then I’ll just look up their address online.
So new model car consoles have a touch screen in them and it can show you the route on google maps if you connect your phone via “Android Auto”. The Android Auto works to a limited extent with GrapheneOS and CalyxOS (TBH idk if Calyx are still around even) but it’s getting worse with recent updates requiring you to enable their AI Assistant Agent to use it at all, and it has always require specifically Google Maps to work.
Jesus, and that’s just from selling user data
Technically no, at least not to other companies, that would be the dumbest thing for them to do
and ad placements?
Yeah, that’s the one.
Companies like Google and Meta prefer not selling your data because… why feed their own competition? Their product is access to the ad network which has profiles on everyone. If they sell that data to competitors, the competitors can build a good ad network too (though the space it can sell isn’t necessarily as premium of course).
They all will sell or even just share your data to some three letter government agencies though. Because those aren’t competition.
Right I’m oversimplifying—they sell their own programmatic “insights” on user data to let advertisers more creepily target and manipulate people.
lol they’re trying to undercut their entire profit model by spending billions on something nobody wants (well, the slop boys, but they’re never going to be able fund it by themselves) - groogle needs everyone on board and that’s never gonna happen. meanwhile it’s costing them dearly
I don’t.
Believe it or not, this was literally their motto. If you didn’t know, you’d never, ever think it was possible, right?
There was a time many tech companies were owned by idealists with fairly good intentions. Then they got rich, then they got greedy, and here we are.
You can absolutely debate whether their intentions were ever good, but that was their public face, at least. I think at least some of them meant it, personally, but maybe I’m still naive after all these years. I’m not the only one who took the statements at face value, though. Many employees at companies like Google have tried to stand for the old ideals and gotten shoved aside and/or fired.
Google doesn’t care about the profitability today. Just look at how they are integrating the AI into Maps, Android, Search and now those “Googlebooks”.
What they want is for you to die, and for a whole new generation that can’t interact with computers or information in any other way except a chatbot that can filter and control what they see. That’s when profits go through the roof.
Hey it worked with the introduction of tablets. There’s already a ream of people who don’t know how to search for file locations or manually save
Oh, none of these companies make money! They parasite off from governments practicing free market “Liberalism” giving them cash and contracts and they do pump and dump stock trading schemes to get good valuations, big investments and big bank loans then just time the accruing and dispersal of their debts carefully.
At some point the investments and saving accounts just start self-reproducing money because we don’t have an economy that expects organizations to have a trillion dollars… So it’s for practical purposes an infinite money glitch.
They don’t make money they just acquire enough of it that the money starts reproducing.
if you believe in healthy capitalism, every billionaire needs to be killed in brutal public ways.
if you don’t believe in capitalism every billionaire needs to be killed and you probably have some anger you want to work out on them.
Also, I’m sure all of that doesn’t cause/contribute to inflation \s
I don’t run into or use much AI, but Gemini seems to be the worst I encounter. It does pretty well at presenting facts and summations, but I’ve found it wrong enough times to be leary.
Gemini 4 Argon seems to be pretty damn good actually. But that’s not what you get in those search summaries, you get some smaller and possibly even quantized model because if they ran every single search on their frontier model, that would bankrupt them soon lol
Google’s got an image problem with their AI because of this. Unless you use Gemini on an Android phone (which not everyone even has), your primary way of encountering it is the quick and cheap model they use on the search page, whereas the other guys will serve you a decent model, but tell you to pay or piss off after a while
Yep, I only see the search page. Your opinion on converting my Google Home Minis to using Gemini? Sounds like I can do that now and the use has always been extremely limited.
It’s temporary. They’ll start shutting down the non-AI alternatives soon enough and there will be grumbling, but people will fall in line like they always do. This is a minor hit. It’s them mentioning that people aren’t feeding enough into the dumpster fire, but they’re simultaneously sealing off more and more exits.
Duckduckgo.com Ftw
I was born to be evil. I’m a member of the Bar Sinister AND I was born on a dark Halloween night. My mother always told me I kept her up all night when I was born.
