this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
614 points (98.3% liked)
Privacy
32111 readers
580 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I…. Don’t really get why they think this is better. Google search was good…. Other companies can copy AI technology anyway. AI is really just predicting words and wasn’t designed for search, but their old algorithm was.
Whyyyyyy
Google hasn't understood the internet for a long time. They created an excellent search algorithm by treating the internet as a single information system that warranted analysis and indexing for convenient traversal.
These days that's not... Something they're interested in anymore. The goal is to collect user data for targeting advertising and resale. Their core product is still the search bar, sure, but that's just a hook to reel you in. They'll attach whatever buzzword to it it takes to keep it in the zeitgeist. "Ai" is hot right now so that's the buzzword.
I don't get the impression technical competency is something Google values anymore...
There's been some former Google employees with stories about being told by the ad team to scrap mostly completed projects that increased search functionality because in testing it negatively impacted impressions on the "sponsored" search results.
That really says all you need to know.
Beyond that, Google is notorious for having terrible metrics for promotions. It highly incentivises creating new projects and disincentivises maintaining or improving existing systems.
One of my favorite articles about that last part is "I am not a maker"
My theory is that Google wants to move towards vector symbolic representations for pages in search rather than page caching. It would make index storage and retrival orders of magnitude cheaper for them if they can design a scheme that works well.