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by dpark 87 days ago
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.
1 comments
swed420 87 days ago
These things are not mutually exclusive.
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dpark 87 days ago
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.
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swed420 87 days ago
No it isn't. Try again.
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dpark 87 days ago
> We saw it begin years ago with Google etc gradually reducing the quality of search results. Then ChatGPT etc arrive shortly thereafter, and people are led to conclude "it works so much better than traditional search." Hard to believe these two events are unrelated.

So Google ruined search so they could give their market share to ChatGPT. 4D chess. Maybe 5D even.

If you have some explanation for how doing this makes any sense at all, please share. But I think you’re basically engaging in conspiracy theory by claiming Google intentionally reduced the quality of search to drive AI adoption.

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swed420 87 days ago
It's not that hard to synthesize how business leadership would both optimize for the present of the pre-AI era while also continually refining their strategy as AI became clearer on the horizon.

You're jumping through hoops when this really isn't that complicated or far fetched in a business sense.

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dpark 87 days ago
It makes no sense that Google would intentionally degrade their search quality now (and even years ago) for some hypothetical future where they have replaced it with AI.

It is extremely farfetched because it would provide no present or future advantage to Google to do so. If they hypothetically wanted to intentionally degrade their search, they could always do that when they are ready for the switch to AI.

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