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.
DDG to the rescue! It’s astounding how in this day and age, duckduckgo gives much more meaningful results than google. Exception made for local businesses, but for technical info and issues, DDG is way better.
Unfortunately DDG has gone downhill quite a lot in the last year or two.
Exception made for local businesses,
It’s funny you say that, because in the last year or so suddenly my search results are being polluted with completely unrelated links to local businesses that don’t even contain a single one of my search terms.
They’ve obviously struck some deal where they’re shoehorning these ads into search results now. Very frustrating because they serve them as regular links so they bypass adblockers.
Really scummy move on their part, and it’s made their service worse to boot.
I’ve used it this month a bit for the free 100 searches, but found it rather similar to my Google results. Can someone enlighten me in how they provide a better service?
I find the results to be cleaner and more relevant at least. With Kagi the relevant link is usually first or second link (like Google used to be) and the same search on Google I sometimes have to scroll down about 3-4 pages till I get to something relevant. Worse some of the ads Google is pushing to the top are misleading or completely contrary to what I’m looking for.
Kagi allowing me to ban domains (bye bye pinterest) and boost others has also been pretty helpful.
Mmm, but what’s their plan to resist enshittification? After all, Google started out as “fundamentally different, user-centric.” What will Kagi do when their market penetration peaks and the business managers demand more growth?
You have to pay for kagi so they are not incentivized to serve ads. They are incentivized to give you a good set of search results so you keep paying.