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.

  • GeekyNerdyNerd@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    411·
    1 year ago

    but google is editing your queries without your knowledge, so they can milk more money out of their advertisers.

    That came from a wired article which was quietly retracted because the author had misunderstood a slide from the Google anti trust trial and had the meaning nearly backwards.

    What Google is actually doing is allowing advertisers to match keywords to common synonyms and other relevant keywords. If you search for (insert brandname) infant sleepwear for example Google will also show ads from adverts from companies who selected the keywords “baby pajamas”. And that specific keyword replacement was only relevant to advertising"…

    Google has long been transparent about the fact they interpret the meaning of keywords for searches to try to improve their relevance, and if you think about it if Google was replacing low value keywords with higher value ones it would be obvious, as generic searches would only turn up stuff from luxury brands and ads wouldn’t have broad keyword matching.

    There are plenty of things to blame Google for, the low return on advertising that publishers get and the increasing need for the entire Internet to be locked behind millions of different paywalls, SEO optimization, click bait bullshit, link farms, but one of them isn’t replacing keywords to maximize value.

    • Rodeo@lemmy.caEnglish
      14·
      1 year ago

      What Google is actually doing is allowing advertisers to match keywords to common synonyms and other relevant keywords.

      So they ARE replacing search terms. Or at least adding to them.

      And that specific keyword replacement was only relevant to advertising"…

      So they ARE doing it make more money.

      This was a good explanation but it doesn’t really refute his point.

      • GeekyNerdyNerd@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        Except for the fact that they aren’t replacing keywords on the user end, simply matching advertiser keywords to a broader range of keywords specifically for the ad results.

        Claiming they are replacing user keywords for higher value ones is absolutely incorrect, which is what the article they got that info from specifically claimed before it was retracted.

        They aren’t taking watch searches and showing only luxury brand results, they are taking luxury watch searches and showing generic ads for “watches” alongside the relevant search results through the normal Algorithm which ties to find what it thinks is most relevant to those keywords.

        That latter one is something all search engines do and without doing so they wouldn’t be very useful to the average person who doesn’t know about search operators and advanced search refining tools… Simple keyword matching is too easily tricked by the SEO industry.