I wanted to consolidate a few thoughts on google, misinformation, large language models, enshittification, and the fate of the web as we know it.
It started when Carl Zimmer shared this remarkable example of Google being fooled by machine-generated bullshit online.
One issue is Google's degree of culpability. Google is a search engine, not an encyclopedia. Ask a stupid question? Get a stupid answer. And seriously who is going to ask are there countries in Africa that start with K?
My view is that Google's culpability was radically transformed when it went from simply returning web pages as search results to presenting results from web pages as definitive answers, via its "featured snippets", "knowledge panels", and "people also ask" feature.
Designing algorithms to return definitive results and then getting duped by conspiracy theorists is embarrassing; doing the same and getting pwned by the hapless stupidity of large language models is malpractice.
IMO this is not simply a matter of Google's algorithms being no good. What's going on here is that Google is playing a losing game by trying to extract true information from the web algorithmically. Why would Google choose to play a game it could only lose?
This is where enshittification comes in. The search engine business is a curious internet business. The better you are at it, the less time people spend on your website—and the less ad revenue, among other things, you receive.
Google knows thisl. If they can give you the definitive result that you are looking for without you leaving the page, they win.
It also, IMO, explains part of the motivation for Google in deploying an utterly second-rate large language model—Bard—in production code.
And in doing so, Google becomes a *bullshitter* in the exact sense we wrote about in our book Calling Bullshit.
They have designed a system that generates "language, statistical figures, and data graphics intended to persuade by impressing...a reader or listener with a blatant disregard for truth."
If google wasn't big enough to move the market, this would just be a story about google's downfall and vulnerability to competition.
But if google succeeds in keeping people on-site instead of visiting links, the incentives for people to create high-quality content fall through the floor. Whether you are a commercial provider funded by ads or an academic trying to disseminate something more than soundbite "featured snippets", google's efforts undercut your motives to create quality content.
Meanwhile the cost of creating content with the superficial appearance of well-considered text has fallen off a cliff, thanks to ChatGPT.
So filling the web with quality material is less rewarding than ever, and filling it with shit is orders of magnitude cheaper than ever.
Maybe someone unseats google before the web becomes a wasteland of ChatGPT-authored, search engine-optimized babble.
But the clock is ticking because google is so big and so powerful that its own internal enshittification process has massive spillover effects on the entire WWW.
For the first time in a quarter-century I can imagine the death of the web as we know it, into a wasteland of GPT-6 content—the output of a model trained on mostly on the output of GPT-5—trawled only by chatbots pretending to be human readers to scrape up what ever remnants of long-term contract ad dollars are left to be had.
/fin
@juulcat @fishidwardrobe @BruceMirken It's a mix of different data sources, but DDG has been using Bing a lot in the past. They were using the business focused search APIs, at least based on what I have read and heard from different people.
Wikipedia describes it as a mix:
"DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google."
@maxwainwright @BruceMirken Problem with SearxNG is that you have to trust the (unknown) service operators.
"Public instances are open to everyone who has access to its URL. Usually, these are operated by unknown parties (from the users’ point of view)."
https://docs.searxng.org/own-instance.html
@ct_bergstrom The evil part here is this kind of AI-generated content undermines any effort to create an independent search engine.
But I see the problem as being economical, we need to start treating the internet as a collective resource and start caring for it without relying on an ad market. If you incentivize simply getting clicks you end up with everyone wanting to make SEO crap, and all these LLMs just scale up their process.
We went further than that and allowed a single corporation to become almost like an institution, it controls search, one of the two major mobile OSes, resources like YouTube which has over a decade of internet video held hostage, and lots of other things.
@ct_bergstrom Thanks, Carl. Things to think about.
My take prior to this was that it's actually really hard for Google to return reliable results for search generally, and when Don't Be Evil got put into the dustbin of history back in 2018, their search results started doing tricks like adding market-based search terms to your search query to bias results and thus goose client sales. Clients loved it. Users, not so much.
@ct_bergstrom Featured snippets is a marketing tool, serving Google's actual job of selling you merch, not their pretend job of giving you useful search results.
In that context, the LLM enshittification is previously highly ranked sites (Google still uses PageRank under the hood) now taking up LLM output for content. These are then viewed as authoritative and returned as good results.
@ct_bergstrom not to make a prediction, but just trying to look on the bright side, I don't think it will be a wasteland.
I hope that once Google as we know it is dead, solving the problem of discoverability will provide a magnificent feast of whalefall for a lot of much smaller creatures.
And it shall be called SkyNetGPT.
@Oozenet @ct_bergstrom incidentally, it might actually be thematic webrings in combination with AI-assisted directories that are able to generate some sort of domain specific vetted knowledge scraping at scale. Sifting through the pre-taint-archives and surfacing that information along rhematic prompts "find me all manuals for cameras on the web" so that this index can later be searched by regular users.
at least in principle. I'm unsure about sociotechnological incentives to get us there.
Everyone else in this thread is really pessimistic, but I find myself agreeing with you
This isn't that bad, if all the big corpo social sites go down or whatever people will be motivated to try something new or different
Profit motivation has ruined the quality of content on the big social sites, but that doesn't mean we can't have our own sites that don't have that profit motivation! We're on one now!
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