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Google is no longer asking — feed the AI or you’re not in search results (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 4 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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[-] WatDabney@sopuli.xyz 55 points 4 months ago

It's as if Google hasn't merely stopped at prioritizing profit over providing a service that people actually value, but has set out with the deliberate goal of actively eliminating any and all possible value they might provide.

It's almost like a dare - "Let's see if we can arrange things so that we provide absolutely nothing of any value to anyone and still make billions."

[-] tempest@lemmy.ca 27 points 4 months ago

I mean as a public company their end goal is to find the spot where the profit line crosses the satisfaction line. The goal is not to provide good service. It is to provide just enough service that you don't go elsewhere.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 17 points 4 months ago

provide just enough service that you don’t go elsewhere.

It's not even that, is it? As long as they can force you to use their stuff it doesn't even have to provide any service.

If there was a way for Google to hold you at gunpoint via internet until you pay them $100 every day they'd have a fiduciary duty to do so.

[-] imadabouzu@awful.systems 17 points 4 months ago

It's... it's almost as if the law about shareholder value as intended as a metaphor for accountability, not a literal, reductive claim that results in ouroboros. Almost like, our economic system is supposed to be a means, not an end in of itself?

No. Definitely can't be that.

[-] primrosepathspeedrun@lemmy.world 7 points 4 months ago

capitalism: a simulacrum that signifies the absence of value

[-] self@awful.systems 54 points 4 months ago

But don’t worry! Google’s AI summaries will soon have ads!

dear fuck, pasting ads onto the part of Google search that’s already known to be unreliable and annoying at best seems like a terrible idea. for a laugh, let’s see if there’s any justification for this awful shit in the linked citation

Ads have always been an important part of consumers’ information journeys.

oh these people are on the expensive drugs huh

[-] OhNoMoreLemmy@lemmy.ml 36 points 4 months ago

It's going to be so much worse than pasting ads if it ever actually works.

Rewriting the search results with LLMs let's you seamlessly mix the adverts into the text people are trying to read... That's why I need to sip a refreshing glass of coke zero(TM) when I'm contemplating the collapse of the internet into pure advertising drivel.

[-] sc_griffith@awful.systems 5 points 4 months ago

if there was ever a reason for going full ted kaczynski and enjoying the crisp taste of coke zero™ that would be it

[-] SomeGuy69@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago

Yeah, people who want a recipe for anything will get all the paying companies shoehorned in. To a point your result doesn't even match with your question, but at least it recommended you to pour some Brawndo™ into your cake mix.

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 14 points 4 months ago

dear fuck,

i saw this first and immediately guessed the poster correctly

[-] self@awful.systems 10 points 4 months ago

me visually: morning meeting poker face, unfireably cheerful when called on

me internally: dear fuck,

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 10 points 4 months ago

I have long written those sort of internal business emails by first writing the "RIGHT THEN YOU FUCKER," version then euphemising it

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 11 points 4 months ago

sometimes I even have to write/edit these outside of mail client, just in case

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 10 points 4 months ago

every time

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 4 months ago

Shout out to my senior teammate at Microsoft who sanitised my comments for external consumption.

We'd have a group chat with some folks from another team, they'd say something stupid, so I'd private message my teammate "jesus fucking christ what the fuck are they talking about I swear to god those fuckers don't read any docs we send them I'm going to print them out and staple them to their bloody foreheads" and he'd laugh and then post "Hey, thanks for your comments, we discussed this previously here [attachment], but we can go over it again on our Wednesday meeting, cheers".

I swear he was the only reason I wasn't fired and forcefully escorted out of that building.

[-] brbposting@sh.itjust.works 13 points 4 months ago

Wow

Also this:

is great. It should be taught in schools. When you have a problem, buy the first thing you see on your screen for a solution.

PS (O/T): anyone know of an easy tool to do screen recordings like that for non-evil purposes?

[-] acausal_masochist@awful.systems 2 points 4 months ago

Is this video enormous for anyone else?

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago

yeah it presents hyooj on my laptop screen, bigger than display port

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 9 points 4 months ago

Wait, are those people so fucked in the head they genuinely tricked themselves into thinking users... Like ads?

[-] self@awful.systems 8 points 4 months ago

I swear every VP of Marketing at ShitCorp on mastodon shows up with that exact take in every adblocker thread. some of them follow it up with “…and the modern web wouldn’t exist without ads”, which is how you know they’re on the expensive drugs — these marketing geniuses haven’t noticed the fediverse’s got a pretty fucking dim view of the modern web as a whole

[-] barsquid@lemmy.world 8 points 4 months ago

I think people will stop using AI if it has ads. People like LLMs because search engines return a bunch of Amazon affiliate link spam articles as the top hits under their own sponsored results which are also spam articles. Something that gives a straight answer is preferable even if it is often confidently wrong. If they put ads in the AI it removes basically the one thing it does better.

Ads have always been an important part of customers' information journeys.

Yeah; the fucking hazards obstructing the path to the destination.

[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 36 points 4 months ago

On the one hand, Google's still the dominant search engine, having used every dirty trick in the book to reach that position and maintain it. If you aren't on Google, you arguably might as well not exist.

On the other hand, Google's already under heavy scrutiny since being officially declared an illegal monopoly, and the public is pissed with how Google's declined in search quality - and deliberately so.

Part of me says we're about to see some truly wild shit go down.

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 17 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

also they're about to start squeezing even harder on the chrome-side control (along with some continuing sketch in android)

I'm an extremely cynical bastard but I also feel like there might be light in the tunnel. just hoping it's not a train ~~I~~ we can't hear yet.

[-] primrosepathspeedrun@lemmy.world 7 points 4 months ago

part of me would like to see it involve pitchforks. maybe some torches.

we can be really california about this. I might still know where my old childhood pitchfork I used to turn compost is, and I can make it an acetylene torch hanging off a drone, if you want.

[-] mjs@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago

I changed to kagi 3 months ago and first was weird paying for a search engine but now it makes complete sense. Love being a customer and not a product!

[-] circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 28 points 4 months ago

"Don't be evil"

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 12 points 4 months ago

"be utterly reprehensible"

[-] SirSoy@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago

You know they removed that from their motto... That's not their motto anymore cause $$$$$

[-] imadabouzu@awful.systems 21 points 4 months ago

If they squeeze this rock hard enough, maybe it'll bleed.

[-] SomeGuy69@lemmy.world 18 points 4 months ago

Google is so full of themselves, they don't even notice how they are slowly replaced by other means of searching. Not long and we'll say "Google used to be a search engine"

[-] ginza@lemmy.ml 5 points 4 months ago

While I disagree. I hope like hell you're right.

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 17 points 4 months ago

for about twenty years

This all just makes me miss Jeeves.

[-] penquin@lemm.ee 16 points 4 months ago

And they JUST lost a law suit for this same exact fucking reason and others. Gotta love capitalism

[-] probableprotogen@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 4 months ago

How to piss off every artist with a website in a 5 mile radius:

[-] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 6 points 4 months ago

But why they pay Reddit then? If they pay Reddit for having the permission to feed their user generated content to the ai, then they should pay every single site on the internet

[-] FredFig@awful.systems 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

This seems incredibly shortsighted even in their own framing. The SEO spammers who care about being on top of Google the most are the ones generating fake AI websites en masse, so wouldn't this just cause immediate AI inbreeding?

this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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