Technology

"Don't be evil"

Shit writes itself.

In that process they went through a full circle of first establishing and then gradually reducing it's usability and the health of the web itself. Their sometimes obscure ranking of pages enabled SEO, then AI written articles and now they try to replace the need to click on any site at all with THAT. A very interesting saga.

I kind of assumed it was based on one of those 'how they photograph food' articles that pops up every so often with shaving cream instead of whip cream and motor oil instead of pancake syrup. Pretty sure I've seen one where they mix glue in the pizza cheese to make it more stringy.

They figured out that they make much more money just pandering ads and lying how they are related to people's interests than they would make when actually providing an invaluable service to humankind. Now, instead of information, we are stuck with paid-for results and SEO-optimized keyword spammers that want a crumb of that cake. I think the free market calls this "innovation" or some shit.

Yep, same here. Whereas ChatGPT and Perplexity would tell me it didn't know the answer to my question, Bard/Gemini would confidently hallucinate some bullshit.

It sounds.... impossible to defeat this darker side of human nature, in order to grow into a mature species worthy of restoring and responsibly maintaining this garden planet.

Yup. I think this is what always happens when the smart people leave a company and the only people left are "the line must always go up" business idiots who don't understand what they have or how it works.

Well its non toxic so its clearly edible, maybe, so fucksmith could have a valid point. I can not wait untill someone tries out the glue on pizza recipe!

Glue isnt toxic, but is it flammable?

Maybe the problem is a lot of their marketing relies on the dominance of their search engine (ie sponsored search results, and ads based on user searches, as well as tracking user web usage via their search click throughs and other cookies). If open ai's products become the go to for questions and basic searches, they will eventually be able to use that dominance to include marketing results in their answers. I think this threat is why they want to try to compete with them to be able to offer an alternative. Because it doesn't actually have to be better than chat gpt. It just has to be similar enough for people to continue using Google rather than change their habits to use chatgpt, or Microsoft's implementations of it. Especially with windows 11 where copilot (basically Microsoft rebrand of chatgpt) is built in and you can use it from the task bar. That ease of use may steadily decrease people's reliance on Google search, which will eventually hurt their ability to sell targeted ads.

DDG's results have been absolute garbage for me for the past few months. About half of the time I have to go to Google to get the results I actually need.

Just FYI, SearX is dead. Long live SearXNG

The fucksmith post in question has been removed by moderators, so I wonder if Google really is pressuring Reddit to remove jokes from their platform now. This person had no idea their shit post would be used to train AI over a decade later, and they certainly weren't violating any policies when they posted it. It's like nobody involved in this process knew anything about Reddit.

Pay $60 million to train on bad data.
Implement AI trained on bad data.
Panic when the AI returns bad answers.
Manually remove bad data.
Profit??

Edit: it was removed when I checked yesterday, but it looks like they restored it.

What do they think holds the chicken nugget together?

Mother nature?

I'm glad they went with sjo, at least she is alive and can fight back. Imagine they ruined all TNG trek by taking the omnipresent and beloved computer voice and made it a corporate sockpuppet we hear everywhere now, crudely regurgitating platitudes of consumption.

I like to melt a little pecorino into my glue, the salty sharpness really complements the glue flavor

I guess they are leading in E-Mail? Whatever that is worth I am not sure. And Youtube is pretty much toe to toe with TikTok so they have that going for them which is nice. But yeah they’ve done a pretty bad job at making themselves indispensable. If anything they‘re looking far more dispensable than ever. Still huge, but their future is rather uncertain.

Their integrated drive+mail+docs+forms+... cloud system is not the first or maybe the best one out there, but it's very popular and I like it more than the competition for some of their key decisions. More obscure things are their accessible API anyone can use, some free computing power they provide for experiments, their analytics system for marketing, and their benchmarks of how fast the page loads being a standard. There's probably Scholar somewhere here but I haven't used it. Android gets installed everywhere even if it's unreasonable. Search is their major brand, but they have fingers in many buckets.