[rurp]

I don't know, I think a simpler explanation for Google's behavior is that monopolies act like monopolies. Combating spam and SEO junk is hard and expensive. Once they became synonymous with web search for most people they gradually cared less and less about product quality. If people will keep using the product no matter how bad the results get and how many ads get jammed in it's hard for a corporation like that to care.

[swed420]

Possibly, but it makes more sense when viewed through the lens of "Google is an advertising company" rather than a search company.

Also, it's not like Google went on autopilot and pursued nothing in recent years. Clearly they've dedicated resources to AI, so it's not hard to believe they foresaw potential resistance to selling the concept of AI to users and took measures to funnel them into the behavior Google desired, all the while making it appear as a choice the user was making.

Google famously solved the search problem and the spam problem, and technology has only gotten more capable since then. Suggesting that blogspam etc are too difficult to defeat is a tough sell imo.

[dpark]

> it's not hard to believe they foresaw potential resistance to selling the concept of AI to users and took measures to funnel them into the behavior Google desired

I find that very hard to believe because it implies a level of foresight that we have not observed from Google. The notion that they degraded their own search on purpose for years to funnel people to AI seems very implausible, especially since they don’t have a good model yet for replacing that ad revenue within AI, and that level of foresight would also imply that they should have beaten OpenAI to the punch instead of reacting to ChatGPT.

[swed420]

> especially since they don’t have a good model yet for replacing that ad revenue within AI

This would be a calculated financial bet on their part. This kind of risk taking is not limited to SV startups.

I realize companies under late stage capitalism aren't typically known for having foresight past one quarter, but that doesn't mean some of them can't have somebody optimizing for the long-term in a financial sense.

It's seems premature to rule this possibility out entirely.

[dpark]

Occam‘s razor says prefer the simpler explanation.

It is possible that Google as an organization had enough foresight to see that search would eventually be eaten by AI chat bots and so intentionally degraded the experience of search to encourage movement in that direction. And also that Google was too dumb to actually ship their chat bot first and capitalized on their choice to sabotage search.

It seems a lot more likely that the the decline in the quality of search is due to a combination of hyper-optimization for revenue and difficulty combating large scale spam farms.

[swed420]

These things are not mutually exclusive.

[dpark]

Your thesis would seem to be that Google is playing some 4D chess, but also kind of sucks at it. I mean, that could be the case, I guess.

[hulitu]

> that monopolies act like monopolies

duckduckgo is also serving crap from some time, so no, it is not about monopolies.