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.

  • @QuaternionsRockEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    I don’t trust a computer to select my sources for me.

    I’m not sure what you think modern search engines do, but this is pretty much it. Hell, all of the popular ones have been using AI signals for years.

    You can request as many sources from an AI as you would get from Google.

    • sab
      2•1 year ago

      Of course there are always challenges, especially with how results are ranked. I have been extremely dissatisfied with the development of search engines for years now. I find Duckduckgo to at least be less bad than Google. Currently I’m checking out Kagi, which at least lets me rank sources myself. Still on the fence though - it does seem to flirt more with AI than with transparency, which has me worried.

      But absolutely, it’s not that I think the current state of search engines is great either - it just seems to me everything is getting worse and the Internet has entered a death spiral between AI and the enshittification of social media.

      Then again, maybe I just reached that age where you start hating everything.