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.

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12 points

Obligatory mention of Kagi (which is actually brilliant).

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11 points

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?

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16 points

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.

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4 points

Exactly. The simple fact is, people need to get more willing to pay for things with money instead of personal data. Nothing is free, but we like the idea that things don’t cost money, and instead we’ve allowed corporations to literally buy and monetize our very selves.

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11 points

Lots of services are both paid and still show ads. Like cable TV

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4 points
*

Just curious, in the hypothetical situation that 100% of users on the web used Kagi how is it any different? They’ll demand more growth at that point but how would they achieve it? I don’t see how paying for the service avoids the issue of the product becoming worse as a result of peak market penetration and needing new methods of growth

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7 points

They’re not market-leading, but if they would be why wouldn’t they enshittify?

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7 points

They charge an assload to use their service.

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1 point

$5/mo

… per person.

Or $20 for 6 in your house. $240/yr for your family to use a search engine.

I mean… Come on! There’s no way that’s under 95% profit.

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2 points

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?

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2 points

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.

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