I never understood the previews, AI or otherwise. Why would a company pay you for placement when the preview steals your content and puts it above your ad?
Oh no, people are leaving us because the things we did well are getting worse!
PUT MORE AI IN IT!! TRIPLE DOWN!!! KISS THE CRUSTY ORANGE BROWN RING!
I was born to be evil. I’m a member of the Bar Sinister AND I was born on a dark Halloween night. My mother always told me I kept her up all night when I was born.
have they tried putting more more ai in it? the investors all agreed this was the best solution!
Technically they still made more money. They just made less than their projections by about a billion dollars.
Yeah, they made double-digit profits. They have been swimming in money for decades and their cash ocean is still getting bigger at an insane rate.
Revenue, however, rose 25% to an enormous $127.6bn. The figure was slightly below the roughly $128bn analysts had forecast.
Advertising revenue grew 11% to $82bn, short of expectations. Revenue from Google’s search business, still the company’s largest source of income, rose 12% to $63.4bn, slowing from 17% growth in the previous quarter.
Jesus, and that’s just from selling user data and ad placements? Yeah they are never willingly moving away from that business. Investors wouldn’t let them.
Thanks for posting the snip.
And users will never willingly move away either, so we’re stuck with them getting bigger and bigger until the system collapses.
I mean some will but I get what you mean. Many people will just never pay the opportunity cost to divest themselves, no matter how far Google falls.
Aside: this is what people like us are good for. You’d better believe that everyone I know well knows that they can come to me if they ever want help degoogling, decorporatising, or otherwise exorcising their tech. Sometimes they even do.
Trouble is, the web for which the PageRank algorithm was developed has long since died - its highly decentralized, interlinked network of freely available information has almost entirely been replaced by centralized, account-gated silos. Web search engines, in turn, have gotten progressively worse since long before LLMs had become computationally feasible.
much of that, both the centralization opposed to search and the search degradation to force more searches and serve more adds, like the removal of advanced search operators, was deliberate.
Eventually, yes. But many people don’t like hearing that the vast majority of them, the users, didn’t want to pay for the operating costs of a global search engine when the web got popular. Neither as customers of a company, nor via government spending as a public service, and definitely not through donations.
Hence, given the economic system we live in, the people running search engines had to find some means of funding, which turned out to be selling their users’ data and serving them ads. Once they had gone down that path the rest became more or less inevitable.
I don’t think users would ever be in a position to cover the many hundreds of billions in revenue that Google found. Yeah, somebody has to pay the running costs, but there’s a place where the search engine could exist by just covering the running costs, without making infinite profit on top.
Yeah, somebody has to pay the running costs, but there’s a place where the search engine could exist by just covering the running costs, without making infinite profit on top.
People have tried and went out of business, because users predominantly do not want to pay for something they could (supposedly) get for free, doubly so if the paid version isn’t even significantly better. It sounds nice, but it hasn’t been true for the last 20 years or so.
The current funding model didn’t come out of nowhere, it’s the consequence of user behavior. Personally, I would e.g. support a search engine as a public service funded through EU budget, but I’m in a tiny minority with that opinion.
Google’s AI results are what finally got me to switch my default search engine to noai.duckduckgo.
You can set it with
in your web browser settings.
Edit: posting here keeps adding a “25” after the percent sign and before “s&noai=”. You don’t need the number there.
Google’s AI results are what finally got me to switch my default search engine to noai.duckduckgo.
Yeah I used to DDG for a good while then when they rolled out the ai (before the noai subdomain I guess), I decided that something I use 10 to 30 times in a day might actually be worth paying for and just went with a paid service that lets me turn all that off.
The important thing is to get off the goog, though. They’re too big for all our good now.
Kagi, ecosia, quant, ddg! Searxng for the nerds
Running a local search aggregator that’s been great - degoog.
I ran ddg for a while it got crappy. I’ve since moved to kagi
I use Start Page with Mozilla. Or brave with duck duck go
The idea is cool but I think I’ll pass.
Pay for the product or be the product. I like having customizable search that works and isn’t filled with ads and features I don’t want. Or in the case of ddg, I like being able to search news and not ending up on MSN fucking constantly (because Bing)…
With that said, there’s also mojeek and searx, worth trying.
I just don’t trust anything that an AI Techbro Slopper company says or does. You mentioned their privacy policy? Well anybody who ships AI is sending your information to an AI Datacenter which inevitably ends up in the hands of both advertisers and fascists.
Of course if we’re comparing Kagi to other searches then they’re still better, and that has value, but it’s not for me.
Half of the time you pay for the product and you’re stillthe product
Yeah those half suck. Anyway, I told myself I wouldn’t shill but Kagi’s privacy policy spells it out pretty clearly where they stand.
Could they one day turn around and start storing or selling user data? Yes. But they would face such a user backlash that it would end them. Their entire revenue is from subscriptions so without happy paying customers they’re cooked.
Naturally not everyone can afford $5 a month for a superior product. Have you tried yahoo search?
It’s less about the price than what they offer: AI. Zero trust rating, throw them on the pile.
That’s a lot of sass to throw in this economy. You don’t know anyone’s financial situation. Good for you that you can spare the $5 a month, but don’t be a jerk about it.
Maybe if they drank less cappuccinos they could afford it.
Yeah DDG is really bad at filtering AI slop from the search results. You can turn the AI summaries off but 90% of the hits will often just be blogs written by ChatGPT
Try:
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%25ssame
deleted by creator
Not only make less money, but literally pay money for people to engage with it for free
They ruined their search engine too
Also the internet.
They did that even before AI. Sponsored links and worse results, so people go to the dreaded page 2 more often, showing even more sponsored links and ads. And they say capitalism makes things run efficiently…
you don’t understand! if everything only exists as byproducts of scams, we will get the best most efficient scams!
It wasn’t solely their fault, people gaming the ranking algorithms also did disastrous damage.
Because they wanted more clicks so they’d make more money from the ads served by… Google.
It was entirely their fault.
True, though it’s not like Google is/was the only company serving ads.
oh, there were two big pedophiles do Jeff EPs was actually fine and basically a good guy.
Not what they are arguing. :|
that’s not what your mom said.
It gets even better. The trillion dollar chatbot is not only killing the basis for search but its very own as well: All those content creators, small ones, large ones, commercial ones. They all are dying because of it, yet the chatbot needs constant feeding to stay alive, and will poison itself if fed on its own content. … This will be fun.
What you’re describing is cancer. Takes nutrition from neighbouring cells to grow infinitely ultimately destroying its own host. Kind of like AI and their constant need for water, energy, land and human data.
Not quite. Cancer can reproduce itself but it can’t sustain itself. AI cannot reproduce itself nor sustain itself. Even if AI bros would like to make it look as if they were not in control of their LLM while committing crimes, they are.
Oh, none of these companies make money! They parasite off from governments practicing free market “Liberalism” giving them cash and contracts and they do pump and dump stock trading schemes to get good valuations, big investments and big bank loans then just time the accruing and dispersal of their debts carefully.
At some point the investments and saving accounts just start self-reproducing money because we don’t have an economy that expects organizations to have a trillion dollars… So it’s for practical purposes an infinite money glitch.
They don’t make money they just acquire enough of it that the money starts reproducing.
if you believe in healthy capitalism, every billionaire needs to be killed in brutal public ways.
if you don’t believe in capitalism every billionaire needs to be killed and you probably have some anger you want to work out on them.
Also, I’m sure all of that doesn’t cause/contribute to inflation \s
I don’t run into or use much AI, but Gemini seems to be the worst I encounter. It does pretty well at presenting facts and summations, but I’ve found it wrong enough times to be leary.
It’s temporary. They’ll start shutting down the non-AI alternatives soon enough and there will be grumbling, but people will fall in line like they always do. This is a minor hit. It’s them mentioning that people aren’t feeding enough into the dumpster fire, but they’re simultaneously sealing off more and more exits.
Their search results have been unusable for years.
Bullshit. AI overview is the only thing that stopped the death of Google.
Your opinion != objective truths
