this post was submitted on 26 May 2024

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Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same (www.bbc.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 5 months ago (2 children)

It's concerning to see how much power Google really holds over small websites

"I understand that Google doesn't owe us or anyone else traffic," says Navarro, of HouseFresh. "But Google controls the roads. If tomorrow they decide the roads won't go to an entire town, that town dies. It's too much power to just shrug and say, 'Oh well, it's just the free market,'" she says.

As we've seen so many times, they got their foot in the door by actually being the best, but now only really keep that position by paying to be the default on most devices. Given how Microsoft were forced to offer browser choices on Windows, is there hope that Google are forced to offer choices on Android and Chrome?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago

Actually Google has been forced to offer choices on Android in the EU, but for existing devices the prompt only consists of a permanent notification that you can easily ignore: my partner has been ignoring it for the past month.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

Google controls one set of roads, people choose which roads to use.

On Android, you're free to install any browser and search engine you wish. For example, "Bing for Android" is already a thing.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago

People choose not to choose. They're not interested in engaging with the space or technology any deeper than the default.

Exploiting this fact to the point of defacto monopoly should still be considered wrong.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Just because there is a choice doesn't mean that the casual user is aware of it. You could always chose to install Firefox on Windows, but Microsoft still got done for pushing IE as the default.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

MS got dinged because they claimed Windows couldn't work without MSIE, which was a lie... and they had a large market share.

Nowadays Apple forces everyone to use Safari on iOS, and nobody bats an eye.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I'm not sure the choice between Bing or Google, two search engines controlled by giant corporations who make money from advertising, is enough of a choice for a truly free Internet. And as the Bing outage last week showed us, most other search engines are just Bing repackaged.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Search engines are not baked into Android, they get exposed through apps like everything else.

The choice is limited to every search engine out there... which are not many, but what can you do, it takes a lot of resources to spin up a search engine.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I just love all the google seach AI memes that have sprung out of this change. They're all unhinged, but the fun thing is that you can't tell which one is real.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

I've seen suggestions that many are just faked with the browser and your ability to edit the page as shown to you because if you search what was searched in the image you get a different result; but it's generating the responses real time when you search so even if you yourself search the same phrase multiple times, you get different results.

Which is bad enough on its own. The same queries should not give different results each time.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I have seen one that was definitely genuine. It had taken information from websites related to an art and writing group I'm a member of, essentially treating several works of fiction (mostly from the 20+ year old content that was written when we were teenagers) as containing factual information about real animals. The person who posted the meme was not a member of the group, but was just pointing out how stupid it was that such obvious fiction was presented as fact. We found it amusing because the AI was pointing to several of the group's sites as places to get more information about these real animals. There is definitely no legit information on those sites.

Remember, folks, the AI's have gobbled up decades worth of teenagers' fanfic and original stories. All the weird shit in those stories is getting regurgitated as though it were real.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

Yeah what could go wrong when training AI on any random internet data indiscriminately. It's all fun until the AI proposes home remedies for appendicitis.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

In my experience, it has not generated results in real time. I've either gotten the exact same response, or a prompt asking "would you like to generate an AI response to your search?"

So it seems like, and would make sense, that in a given time period they only generate a response once per given search, and reuse that response in the future, since that's far more efficient

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago

So their cynical move is to send more traffic to reddit at the same time reddit's quality has gone down the toilet. Sounds like Google alright.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Wasn't Google's original appeal the lack of clutter?

[–] [email protected] 35 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yes

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I meant, the "no ads" thing was only feasible in the very beginning, when they were solely funded by venture capital.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

Ads are fine in the form of search results that are clearly marked as sponsored. The issue with ads are when they are manipulative, intrusive, obnoxious or have sketchy data collecting

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

It is incredible looking back to 2005 and realizing that the world has 1.5 billion MORE people today and the number of internet users grew by ~5.5 billion. Doesn't really explain Google's changes - still remarkable how different the internet was that Google built its search platform around.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

This just shows that too many people are dependent on google, even though their search results are shit. The power of defaults and brand names.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

Click here to see the summary

Over the last two years, a series of updates to Google Search amount to a dramatic upheaval to the Internet's most powerful tool, complete with an unprecedented AI feature.

Last week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai stood in front of a crowd at the company's annual developer conference and announced one of the most significant moves in the search engine's history.

Going forward, Pichai said, Google Search would provide its own AI-generated answers to many of your questions, a feature called "AI Overviews" that's already rolled out to users in the United States.

"Our recent updates aim to connect people with content that is helpful, satisfying and original, from a diverse range of sites across the web," a Google spokesperson tells the BBC.

Over the past few years, swaths of savvy internet users started adding the word "Reddit" to the end of their web searches in the hopes it would bring up people sharing their honest opinions, as opposed to websites trying to game Google's system.

Katie Berry, owner of the cleaning advice website Housewife How-Tos, assumes users will just end their searches if Google's AI answers questions for them.

Saved 92% of original text.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

So I tried it. And where did that image come from?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

where did that image come from?

Just ask Google's AI...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I didn't make my point clear. My question wasn't really where the image was sourced, it was more about the value of what Google is doing matching an essentially random image next to the text it scraped from a website. Why did it choose that image? Adding a random image like that seems like what a low-grade SEO would do to tick the needed boxes not a high-quality product from a multi-billion dollar company. The image in no way enhances the meaning of what I asked. In fact, it does the opposite. It is a bit of Google becoming what it mocked.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

It picked an image from a website talking about AI, and slapped it next to a response talking about AI.

Theoretically, a website with a text related to the response, "should" have an image related to the response... but yeah, it looks kind of like cheap box ticking, like the AI didn't check whether the photo content itself was relevant or not.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

U think stuff like this would be more appropriate for voice control devices, namely Google Assistant