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.

  • crystalmerchant@lemmy.worldEnglish
    19926·
    1 year ago

    Google?? No, not Google. Capitalism. The same forces that drove the internet’s growth are making it so much worse than it could be. Profit motive trumps everything and drives the hellscape of engagement monetization

    • Rodeo@lemmy.caEnglish
      7710·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, let’s absolve the individuals working at the companies who did this from all responsibility by blaming an abstract concept instead.

      Capitalism may be the game, and Google may have only been one of the players, but they’re still playing dirty.

    • pete_the_cat@lemmy.worldEnglish
      239·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, this guy just seems butthurt. If anything, Google was a prime mover and “Good guy” for about a decade or so. The Internet was fundamentally broken around the mid to late 2000s when broadband became ubiquitous and social media became popular. Tons of people online and zero way to control anything. The Internet and WWW simply weren’t built for this scale.

      • banneryear1868@lemmy.worldEnglish
        211·
        1 year ago

        I think it’s the centralization of services that broke what the internet was in the mid-00s, and increasingly monetized every facet of it. What was internet culture in the 00s became nerd identity in the late 00s-early 10s, which over the decade became completely appropriated and commodified by capital interests.

        More of the internet now is intentionally constructed to cater to a market demand. In the 00s anyone could afford to run a publicly accessible web page fully designed by them. Now that’s just having a profile on an existing social media site. Google was incredible because it helped you find the most niche type of internet site, but when everything became so consolidated it pivoted to advertising, cloud services, and venture capital. Now it’s just a monster that seeds any technology they think would help them make profit and focuses the entire sector around that motivation.

        More people are now on the internet to turn a profit as well, because it’s now the primary place for business. Things you used to do on the internet for fun in your spare time are now career paths.

    • Kichae@lemmy.caEnglish
      144·
      1 year ago

      Sure. But also the tech bro culture of “I’m not responsible for the consequences of my choices, so long as there is a computational layer between those consequences and me”.

      Silicon Valley, and it’s legion of brown nosers, all love to believe that “I didn’t think…” is a valid excuse, not a self-indictment.

      • Fades@lemmy.worldEnglish
        13·
        1 year ago

        culture of “I’m not responsible for the consequences of my choices, so long as there is a ~~computational ~~layer between those consequences and me”.

        yeah because that’s totally unique to techbros who definitely ushered it in and not simply most capitalists in general