The British entrepreneur says search results are plagued with ‘clickbait’

Google has plunged the internet into a “spiral of decline”, the co-founder of the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) lab has claimed.

Mustafa Suleyman, the British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind, said: “The business model that Google had broke the internet.”

He said search results had become plagued with “clickbait” to keep people “addicted and absorbed on the page as long as possible”.

Information online is “buried at the bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff”, Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can “sell more adverts”, fuelled by Google’s technology.

      • m_randall@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        42·
        1 year ago

        At the risk of sounding like a shill sure! (I’m not, just a happy user)

        Kagi is a paid search engine. They just introduced a 10/month plan that made the news which led me to their trial. I signed up a day later.

        Because I’m paying money I have the feeling that I’m not the product unlike other free search engines. There’s likely no nefarious manipulation of search results and it’s refreshing to see new features rolling out.

        It’s not all roses tho. Your searches are now tied to you and who really knows what’s going on with your data behind the scenes. Everyone needs to make their own decisions based on their priorities.

        • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caEnglish
          5·
          1 year ago

          It’s not all roses tho. Your searches are now tied to you and who really knows what’s going on with your data behind the scenes. Everyone needs to make their own decisions based on their priorities.

          Exactly. It feels like we aren’t the product but we don’t actually know what it costs to run Kagi and whether the $10/mo is sustainable or just a way to reduce the losses till they get sufficient market share. Upon which they might start doing things to recover the losses. I’m also paying for it but this has been at the back of my head. Until they’re a non-profit with similar transparency to Wikimedia, it won’t rest. Speaking of, if one of the established, reputable internet non-profits like Wikimedia or Mozilla starts a paid search engine, I’d be all over it. I’d pay for it for as long as I can afford it.

          Edit:

          A bit about this from Kagi.

          • m_randall@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            The few times I wasn’t sure I did the same search in google and got similar results so I’m 100% happy.

            They even have some nice features like location aware searching, instant answer results (eg a box to convert currency), etc.

            Additionally you can weight or even blacklist domains so you can completely remove results from Instagram.