Over the last two years, a series of updates to Google Search amount to a dramatic upheaval to the Internet's most powerful tool, complete with an unprecedented AI feature.
  •  taanegl   ( @taanegl@beehaw.org ) 
    6•5 months ago

    So basically Google is on the take, because they are literally dependant upon the ad industry.

    As such, advertisers don’t want the consumer to be informed, but just to buy whatever they make the most off, and that’s usually subpar crap sold through a chain of fake media outlets. Real closet stuffers.

    As such, the AI problem is added on top of the ads based industry basically trying to overrun and take over tech journalism, which is a marketing departments wet dream.

    So yeah, the conflict of interests is too great. You can never really trust Google or Bing, but even so Bing is better nowadays than Google.

    I just use Qwant instead of DDG because I don’t care who gets the data, even though both are just Bing lol

    I think I’m going over to SearXNG - if I’m transitioning to anything, simply because big data vendors and ad agencies should not have control over people’s queries or answers. FFS. I believe the Americans have an idiom, “letting the fox watch the henhouse”? Yes, that.

    Let’s not.

  •  AutoTL;DR   ( @autotldr@lemmings.world ) B
    1•5 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Over the last two years, a series of updates to Google Search amount to a dramatic upheaval to the Internet’s most powerful tool, complete with an unprecedented AI feature.

    Last week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai stood in front of a crowd at the company’s annual developer conference and announced one of the most significant moves in the search engine’s history.

    Going forward, Pichai said, Google Search would provide its own AI-generated answers to many of your questions, a feature called “AI Overviews” that’s already rolled out to users in the United States.

    “Our recent updates aim to connect people with content that is helpful, satisfying and original, from a diverse range of sites across the web,” a Google spokesperson tells the BBC.

    Over the past few years, swaths of savvy internet users started adding the word “Reddit” to the end of their web searches in the hopes it would bring up people sharing their honest opinions, as opposed to websites trying to game Google’s system.

    Katie Berry, owner of the cleaning advice website Housewife How-Tos, assumes users will just end their searches if Google’s AI answers questions for them.

    The original article contains 2,410 words, the summary contains 189 words. Saved 92%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!