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.
I would gladly go back to 1990s Internet if it meant not having to deal with Google and data mining. I haven’t turned off ad-blocking in 20 years.
Pre-Google Internet wasn’t exactly great either. If you think current Google is bad, wait until you are stuck with AltaVista, a 5MB email inbox and video sharing without Youtube or services like AOL or MSN that try to outright replace the Web. Google got big in the first place because what they offered was substantially better than the competition.
If you travel back 15 years ago or so, you have Google at its best, providing lots of great services and still innovating.
I got good query skills
So the emails don’t have tracking and images embedded in them? And I can just delete things after I’m done reading them? Sounds great.
I can count the number times I’ve wanted to share videos with the public on zero hands.
So like how Facebook is for boomers now? And what Google is trying to do with their verified website bullshit?
It really wasn’t that much worse, unless you’re obsessed with over-sharing your life to strangers on social media.
I was there and can tell you we had a peak of quality maybe in the 00s and have been going backwards towards worse than the early Internet really fast in the last decade or so.
Sure, if you want to find info on something, now you can now watch a glitzy 1080p video with lots of fancy graphics on Youtube of some guy explaining it - it will have a clickbait title and be interspected with Ads, sponsor segments, and it will take half an hour to explain something which in the old days you could read all about on a website in 10 minutes and actually came out knowing more about it.
The funny bit is that the old website is still there, but if you use Google to search for it that video and another 20 like it will be shoved in front of you, along with “sponsored results” and a ton of SEO-optimized clickbait websites which you’ll have to wade through to find the one needle in between all that straw (and meanwhile the system is designed to distract you away from what you want, so you’ll have to battle your own subconscious pulls to manage to stay the course).
And don’t get me started on how you actually had a decent expectation of privacy on the Internet back in the late 90s and early 00s whilst nowadays all dominat players almost force you (in some cases actually do) to give them your phone number to better link your various online and offline profiles in multiple devices.
IMHO, the actual Internet in software, usability and software systems terms now is not superior to what we had in the late 90s, early 00s, it’s the electronics tech (mainly thanks to bandwidth and portable computing devices) that’s superior.