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My strong suspicion is that there is no way to make search good again, because the internet is a lot shitter.
If you go back to the original development and surrounding white papers that made Google the default search engine of choice, you’ll discover they weren’t bulletproof by any stretch. We had “Google Bombing”, Googlewashing, and other spamdexing techniques for most of Google’s existence.
But I might argue that Google had - for a time - created a virtuous cycle of reinforcing intentional traffic trends and linked search results, such that certain search results and domains considered “trustworthy” got more and more traffic while the junk was increasingly confined to the back end of the search log. Of course, YMMV - there was a strong English Language bias from day one, a lot of the “preferred” results were corrupted through corporate buyouts and manipulations, and Google had its own political agenda that would cause certain information to be particularly hard to find. But by and large, if you searched for “that horse with the white and black stripes that lives in africa”, you got back a bunch of useful links about Zebras. And - at a high level - that’s what Google was supposed to do for its user base.
Post-2018, the corporate heads at Google shifted their metrics for link results from “most popular” to “most recently popular”. Even ignoring the AI results (which I personally think the reaction against is overblown), this has been what’s royally fucked their returns. Now, when you go looking for the “white and black stripped horse”, you get back whatever is currently trending on social media. This reinvents the capacity for Google Bombing and other result manipulation techniques, which Google had ostensibly solved by moving away from its reliance on site self-descriptions. Add to that, the increased demand for revenue in exchange for prominence on the result feed makes non-profit sites like Wikipedia fall farther and farther down the search rabbit hole.
I don’t think this is a natural decay of internet content. This is an effort to undermine the improvements in search result optimization that Google had historically made.
Not explicitly shown, but important: the CEO’s brain being incapable of thinking beyond the current quarter, since better usage = long term stability
So is the issue that they dont project far enough into the future? Or do they never correctly predict the size and impact of the negativity?
The issue is they only care about short term profits. They don’t care about the negative impacts because it doesn’t actually affect them. They also fully believe they have a captive market in that people are so conditioned to it that they won’t go searching for alternatives so long as their service, regardless of how shit it is, remains the most convenient and habitual.
And, if shit does hit the fan, they’ve already made off with a king’s ransom and will just pivot their ventures after taking their golden parachute to leave some poor schmuck holding the bag.
They don’t care about the negative impacts because it doesn’t actually affect them.
How odd.
Wealth has a tremendous capacity to insulate, but nothing is unlimited.
Whose kids could be rich enough to live as safely or comfortably in a world that regresses/declines beyond various tipping points? (I also want their safety & comfort, we would all win)
See, that is an indirect consequence, not a direct consequence. There are degrees of separation in the logic from A event to Z outcome that they attribute to other causes which they believe they can mitigate by throwing money at it.
Or they are narcissistic and self obsessed people who literally don’t care about their kids. Their kids aren’t them, so they don’t care if they will have it worse. They will be dead before shit hits the fan.
Phrased another way, executives might come and go, but their short term profits are forever held in stocks, bonds, and real estate assets.
By the time the negatives hit, the CEO has their golden parachute and the investors have sold their stock at record highs. Off they go to ruin another company.
go to ruin another company.
That’s “value extraction” in the biz
basically run like A PE firm.
It’s even worse, the structure we have actively discourages them from doing so. Fiduciary responsibility is thrown up as a reason for a lot of things like this and knowingly picking an option that is less profitable on paper even if it’s obviously better long term is inviting questions.
Remember: Everything is securies fraud
If risk adjusted profits are judged to be greater in the long term, it’s fiduciary responsibility to go for it
Long-term gains from things like user satisfaction are hard to measure and predict.
That’s why you see these ‘Were you happy with our service?’ questions everywhere. Still, the people who answer these polls are in the minority and a specific subset of respondents, which is bad for statistics.
Until a bunch of unknowns and uncertainty are added because no-one knows the future.
And they almost always assume that their actions won’t lead to a decline in users, too.
Today’s high inflation discourages heavily discounted returns years in the future.
$250 billion in short term profits is slightly more than $248 in short term profits and they don’t care that it makes things worse for everyone.
There might also be a situation of if they don’t do that, some other company like openai will make an ai search and spend a ton into marketing and they will lose market, so they try to avoid this scenario.
Yes, the way the system works is that short-term success is prioritized above everything else. Because if you don’t prioritize the short term, and someone else will, you’ll lose out to them.
Sure, the one who prioritizes the short term will get fucked in the long term, but that doesn’t matter, because they were the short term successful ones, and the one that went long term is now out of business or a much smaller player.
yes
You know those graphs that show a dramatic shift at a single point in time? I feel like there’s a similar graph for the quality of the internet and the dropping of do no evil.
That, but with 800% error margins.
All these companies need to get rid of the finance people that are running them and get back to something different I don’t care put a construction worker in charge
In zero-sum games, it can be the case that short term profit is the winning choice. One example is Go.
When AlphaGo was created and got good enough to beat world champion Go players, it did so largely by making moves that seemed to humans to be wildly aggressive and focused on small territorial positions (the game is won by surrounding territory and secondarily by capturing pieces, which reduces the opponents score). These small, highly territorial moves tend to force the human to respond locally, preventing big strategic moves, and then the AI just maintains its aggressive posture, keeping the human on defense while the AI keeps making points.
Most humans would have ignored these small battles for territory and focused on larger, more “strategic” moves that gain regional “influence” or help create opportunities to score more points down the line. But the computer’s moves were “correct” in the sense that they won games against the best players in the world.
BUT there’s a reason AplhaGo isn’t allowed in tournaments, for instance. So if the goal of AlphaGo was something like “be the top rated Go player”, it would have failed dramatically since it can’tplay in ranked tournaments.
Long story short, if you’re optimizing for 1 variable, like points/wins/money, it may be only logical move to focus on aggressive incremental gains that give up other strategic objectives. So, Google is optimizing for something that is clearly incorrect from the perspective of providing the best service - but likely correct from the perspective of making the most money even at the cost of the service being worse. And Google has a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders to maximize profits, basically guaranteeing this type of behavior
And Google has a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders to maximize profits, basically guaranteeing this type of behavior
This is simply not true. Per the us Supreme Court, “Modern corporate law does not require for profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else”. On top of that, even if the standard did apply, doesn’t ensuring the long term interests of a company provide more total profit? Maximization is an inherently difficult standard to enshrine in the law.
Yeah that is technically true in that the law doesn’tsay that verbatim, but long term profitability is the goal since that is what is in the best interest of shareholders. The actual language is:
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Duty of Obedience - basically CEO needs to do what the board and bylaws dictate
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Duty of Information - don’t mislead shareholders
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Duty of Loyalty - put shareholders’ interests first. Meaning long term profitability
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Duty of Care - make business decisions with necessary forethought and planning, don’t be negligent.
This is basically interpreted as ensuring the long-term financial success of the company. Long term financial success = maximizing profit. Profit allows you to expand and make more profit. Therefore profit is the primary goal.
Saying profitability isn’t what the law dictates is sort of like “civil war wasn’t about slavery, it was about states rights”. To do what? Own slaves. “A public corporation’s fiduciary duty to investors doesn’t mandate profit-seeking, just acting in their best interests.” And their best interests are…? Profitability.
https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/fiduciary-duty-to-investors
You started by claiming maximizing short term profits was required and now you are claiming maximizing long term profits are required. On top of that you keep claiming profitability has to be maximized even though that isn’t stated anywhere. While you may insist on hallucinating standards that don’t exist it isn’t even possible to determine if any action maximizes profitability.
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That just means the judiciary won’t punish you, but the shareholders certainly will.
Yet another justification for enabling psychopaths.
Obviously it is logical and works, it’s literally what’s happening now. The question was never if it works, but if it’s morally right to do it.
Read. I said it is a bad goal for them to have, but the system requires them to have it.
It is a weird reaction to be surprised or indignant that a corporation would do this. It is literally their job and why the profit motive is bad.
Are search engines hard to make? An open source, white hat, search engine would be amazing. I’m not sure if I’m using the white hat term correctly, but what I mean is, a search engine that looks for real people and not corporations first. Basically, 90’s search engines.
Yes? Search engines that work well have been notoriously difficult to make. Google is one of the richest companies because 90s search engines were so dreadfully bad. The bigger the internet, the harder the problem. Working at the scale, efficiently, and giving useful information is just hard.
Kagi is a recent company that seems to be doing a decent job.
Oh also I want it for free
