news

한어Русский языкEnglishFrançaisIndonesianSanskrit日本語DeutschPortuguêsΕλληνικάespañolItalianoSuomalainenLatina

New Intelligence Report

Editor: alan

【New Wisdom Introduction】For decades, anyone who wanted to know anything could ask Google — but is the platform losing its edge? Can we still trust it to tell us the truth?

Find yourself dead when searching for yourself on Google?

Freelance writer Tom Faber recently wrote in The Guardian that a Google search had confused his photo with the biography of another person with the same name.

"A picture of me smiling with the words: Tom Faber, physicist and publisher, who was a university lecturer at Cambridge University for 35 years, died on 27 July 2004, aged 77."

“I didn’t know I was dead until I saw the news on Google.”

Tom Faber isn't the only one who's frustrated with Google.

Google Search, which once achieved great success with its innovative algorithms and simple interface, now faces many problems.

For example, algorithms confuse user information, the quality of search results declines, the search results are flooded with spam and error information, the confusing interface affects users' search for answers, and the advertising business is accused of damaging the user experience.

On the other hand, the rise of ChatGPT has been called a search engine killer by many. Bill Gates said last year that once a company perfects an artificial intelligence assistant, users will no longer search for websites.

Dragon Slayer and PageRank

It's hard to imagine anything replacing Google.

Last year, Google celebrated its 25th anniversary, with its parent company Alphabet having a market value of over $2 trillion and Google accounting for 90% of the global search market.

Google has gone far beyond being a tool to becoming an infrastructure, because everything depends on the internet's eyeballs to function.

Google thus wields enormous power to influence politics, social attitudes, and the fate of countless businesses.

Origin myth

In the late 1990s, a pair of computer geeks, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, founded Google in a garage.

At the time, the Internet was developing rapidly and competition among search engines was just beginning. Page and Brin's idea was to rank web pages not only based on their relevance to the search query, but also based on the quality of the information on the web pages.

They created the famous PageRank system, which prioritizes web pages based on the number of other pages that link to them - if a lot of people link to a particular source, then the quality of information in that source must be high.

The effective approach, coupled with a simple and clean interface, made it clear to everyone that Google’s search results were much better than those of other companies.

Google quickly won a lot of trust and goodwill, and its mission of "organizing the world's information" was even more inspiring.

If you want to know something, “Google it,” and most of the time it will give you the answer you want. So other search engines gradually died out, search became synonymous with Google, and “Google” became a verb.

Forget your original intention

With its success, Google has collected a large amount of user data and used this data to improve its search algorithms.

At the same time, Google realized that its users’ data could be commercially valuable because it captured their thoughts, desires, and innermost concerns, and it used that information to reshape the advertising industry.

Many of Google's products, from YouTube to Maps, collect user data to personalize ads, a mainstay of Google's business, with parent company Alphabet generating 77% of its revenue ($237.85 billion) from advertising last year.

In this context, Google's search is also quietly changing.

If Google is a library, then before when you wanted to borrow a book, the library would immediately bring it out; now, the librarian will try to sell you a magazine subscription, show you a few different books that other people liked, and finally bring out a pile of bulky books with the book you wanted awkwardly sandwiched in the middle.

In fact, Google's founders realized early on that commercial incentives could undermine the integrity of search results.

In a 1998 student paper, Brin and Page wrote that ad-funded search engines were “inherently biased toward advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”

Yet Google has been hell-bent on showing ads, which, as one academic put it, is the only good way to monetize search.

So, on the road to success, Google gradually lost the public goodwill it had won in its early days, and its motto of "Don't be evil" became ironic.

Struggling to cross the river, countless garbage

Critics call Google's latest search results "trash."

In addition to Google's own problems, two other cancers are spam and search engine optimization (SEO).

The goal of an SEO company is to get a website higher in the Google search rankings, so the content of the webpage is tailored only to please Google's algorithm.

For example, when searching for recipes, users might expect to see them displayed succinctly at the top of the page, but most food blogs bury their recipes beneath long anecdotes because Google’s algorithm prefers this format, even though readers may dislike it.

The so-called "black hat" SEO produces Internet spam through technical means, such as "domain name squatting", "reputation abuse", "obituary spam", "keyword mass mailing" or "parasite hosting".

Spam pages usually have no meaningful content and are created just to get to the top of Google search results and profit from every visitor click by hosting intrusive ads.

On the other hand, spammers have also kept up with the times, making it a never-ending battle for Google.

Every time spammers come up with a new technique, Google tweaks its algorithm to make it ineffective, and then the spammers come up with something else.

In this age of AI, the Internet is facing the threat of a new wave of AI-powered spam, which could be the last straw that breaks the camel's back for search engines.

Monopoly Market

If Google's search results are bad, why do people still use it?

The Justice Department argues that Google uses its wealth to operate anticompetitively in an illegal monopolistic manner, primarily by paying other tech companies to be the default search engine on their devices (such as paying Apple $20 billion in 2022).

Google’s biggest competitor, Microsoft’s Bing, has only about 3% of the global search market. Many other startups have only 1% and can only survive in their own lanes: Perplexity provides answers to written questions, Kagi adopts an ad-free paid subscription model, and DuckDuckGo focuses on protecting data privacy.

“Competing with Google is off-limits,” said Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity. “They can give you everything you offer for free and overwhelm you.”

Platform Decline Theory

Does it really matter whether there is competition on Google's search engine?

Writer Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" to explain the state of modern large tech companies.

“Here’s how platforms die: First, they’re good to their users; then they abuse their users to provide a better service to their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to recoup all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

Doctorow said algorithmic systems are particularly vulnerable to this because their workings are opaque to users and can be easily tweaked without warning.

Who knows why you see this content at the top of a Google search result, an Instagram feed, or a TikTok For You page? Is it because it’s deemed the best content for you, or because the platform thinks it’ll bring in the most revenue?

Doomsday predictions are also the decline of the Internet

People have been enthusiastically predicting Google's demise for years—there's even a Wikipedia page called "Google Doomsday Predictions," with examples dating back to 2007.

Maybe what really bothers people is that in 2024, the internet feels worse.

Those who grew up online in the late 90s and early 00s probably remember openness, community, and free thought. Today, we might be more inclined to associate the internet with anxiety, loneliness, and stress.

Maybe we miss a time when the internet was more human, with big, messy forums like Reddit, where you could get someone else's honest opinion, weird as it was, untainted by vague brand associations or affiliate links.

OpenAI's Attack

If the search problem wasn’t tough enough, many people today predict that the emergence of new AI technologies will change everything.

Ever since OpenAI launched ChatGPT, technologists have been wondering whether AI assistants could one day replace search engines, and last year Microsoft announced it would integrate ChatGPT into its search engine results.

Google panicked.

Although it was at a disadvantage in the war of big models, it had to bring the AI ​​that had been used in the background for many years to the table.

But today's LLM is still hovering between reliable and unreliable.

How many stones should I eat?

Google says LLM is useful when combined with search, and is particularly well suited for queries that require a lot of specific variables.

For example, you are looking for a vegetarian restaurant in Paris where you can dine with your family, open at 7am and within walking distance of a metro station. These questions may have previously taken 10 minutes of clicking through a large number of searches, but now AI can complete them in seconds.

However, AI, which has deeply grasped the essence of human abstraction, will not work for you obediently from the beginning.

If you ask “How many rocks should I eat?” Google’s AI might tell you “According to UC Berkeley geologists, it is recommended to eat at least one small rock a day because rocks contain minerals and vitamins that are important for digestive health.”

There is also "how to stick cheese to pizza", and AI suggests "adding about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to make it thicker."

These false information were all learned by AI from the vast Internet. Eating rocks came from an article in the satirical website The Onion, while the idea of ​​glue pizza came from a post on Reddit 11 years ago.

In response to the ridicule from the entire Internet, Google said, "These are all growing pains."

Will search engines disappear?

The new direction heralded by ChatGPT and AI Overviews is that instead of seeking out answers ourselves, we get a single, supposedly balanced answer that has been pre-chewed by an algorithm.

“Summarizing or simplifying search is a bad thing for society as a whole. It’s important to gain a range of different perspectives from searching, from your own trusted or new sources, to practice critical thinking and form your own opinions.”

Reference: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/20/google-is-the-worlds-biggest-search-engine-broken