[arionhardison]

I'm old enough to remember when "Google" was something that ended conversations. People — myself included — would literally say "Google it," the facts would be located, and that was that. Now that Google wants to be the conversation, I'm worried there will no longer be a bias-free source of information for the masses.

This is all new, so I may be a bit hyperbolic, but the reason OpenAI introducing ads bothers me is the implicit (or even explicit) bias that can be smuggled into a chat in ways that simply aren't possible when you're just clicking through to an external source. There are all kinds of implications to Google no longer being that source of truth, even by default. Maybe this has quietly been the case for a long time, but this feels like the final move — pushing their ad bias (i.e., whoever paid the most) into a conversational system, where dark patterns are far easier to implement and much harder to detect.

One answer to this might be domain-specific agents — narrower, accountable, ideally something you (or your community) actually run. But even then it all falls back on trust: you being a good-faith actor, and others trusting that you are one. Which is to say, we're back to the same problem, just at a smaller scale.

[renegat0x0]

Actually I have thought about it and I am running my personal search index.

Links

- https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database - Internet places

- https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-feeds - RSS feeds

- https://rumca-js.github.io/search - demo search

- https://rumca-js.github.io/feeds - demo for feeds

- https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-top - top places

[brokencode]

With sponsored links and aggressive SEO, “Google it” has been falling apart as a source of facts for a long time.

There is an incredible gap in the search literacy between different users of Google. Some will accept what they find in the top links, no matter how dubious the source.

[muddi900]

I wrote about this just over 5 years ago: https://chapra.blog/search-is-dead-352/

Google had already transformed the open web to the point of uselessness anyway.

[Forgeties79]

>I'm worried there will no longer be a bias-free source of information for the masses.

There was never anything bias-free about google search. It "ranks" information based on all sorts of qualities. At our most generous we can call it somewhat of a "consensus" check. Historically it was a tool for quickly getting you in the vicinity of an answer that most would consider correct.

Remember "google bombing"? Hell SEO alone invalidates any assertion that google search is a valid source of truth and that's be going on for a long time.

[WarmWash]

My takeaway is that the internet would be a dramatically cooler place today if people were just willing to pay for stuff.

The ad version of the web, where ~60% of people carry the ad burden for everyone, and defacto aligns the service providers with advertisers, is just a guaranteed bad outcome. The only real upside, which frankly people take for granted, is that the ad-web is classless web. Broke or rich you get the same (crappy) services.

I remember those mock web service package flyers from the net neutrality days. Where people made fake marketing material showing website packages you could access with different paid tiers, something reminiscent of the cable TV days.

Back then it was horrifying, but 20 years later, I think I would entertain a subscription to a wide array of web services if it meant they worked for me and not advertisers.

[Forgeties79]

My other main issue with the no-net neutrality world is that it also means websites would have to pay ISP’s or be artificially throttled. That’s a huge problem.

It’s one thing to say we need to pay. It’s another for ISP’s to get 3 pulls at the hose (paid for a connection, paid for what we can browse, paid for who provides the sites) when some of those elements don’t even require more (or at least much) effort or infrastructure on their part. I don’t like the idea of their picking winners and losers. We’ve got enough of that as it is.

[chadgpt3]

Net neutrality was always about your ISP. It never meant pay sites couldn't exist.

[Forgeties79]

Not pay sites. I’m talking about site owners having to pay ISP’s or risk being artificially throttled in favor of those who do pay them.

[chadgpt3]

I'd be careful with the phrasing. Site owners paying more to get a faster connection is how business works. It's not neutral if it's anything more than the technical capacity of the connection or if they're restricting it, like unreasonably refusing to peer.

Peering is complicated too. It means an ISP carries your site's traffic without you paying them. Is that reasonable? I'd say common sense is: yes, if the traffic is only between you and the ISP's users, since the ISP is then getting paid. But who carries the cost of setting it up? Common sense would say the site operator should pay but the ISP shouldn't inflate the cost.

[Forgeties79]

it’s not a faster connection issue. Bandwidth at your location is a different issue.

What I am talking about is websites that do not pay the toll being artificially slowed down. A pillar of neutrality is that “all packets are equal.” As long as we have stable connections and are using decent services, your blog should load as fast as any major news site. Without net neutrality, ISP’s can put their thumb on the scale and make it so your blog takes 5 second, 10 seconds, whatever they want. They can throttle load times despite both of us paying for high speeds and using quality services. Think: governors in golf carts, if you’re familiar with that. Under net neutrality this is not permitted.

[WarmWash]

I'm in no way arguing to get rid of net neutrality, it was mentioned purely to reference the common image circulating the internet back when it was a constant headline.

[macic]

Google is not bias-free, and has not been for a long time.

[Forgeties79]

Never has been. No source or tool is. It’s a noble dream that can’t be achieved

[kulahan]

Nobody is reasonably expecting perfectly unbiased information, just reasonably unbiased, and that’s pretty easy to find

[Forgeties79]

It’s not “reasonably unbiased” or whatever we want to call it. Even if we want to believe it’s possible, the very existence of SEO invalidates it. You push yourself to the top by using techniques that have little (often nothing if we’re honest) to do with the merits of the information. Rankings literally do not correlate with quality or lack of bias. It’s about the specific words you use, the way your site is formatted, engagement, etc. None of that is reflective of the quality of information.

As I said in another comment, just look at “Google bombing.” There was a time when people would mount public campaigns to artificially drive pages to be associated with certain words, like I remember when people made it so if you search “failure” you got “George W. Bush.”

To use a different example: it would be like saying we know the quality of a car because of how many units sold. The driving force could be many unrelated factors, like the visual aesthetics, the feel, etc. which don’t tell you anything about the MPG, the upkeep, and other info most of us would consider key indicators of quality.

For a long time there was a decent correlation with the quality of the information and how far up the Google search it sat. But you are putting way too much stock in the quality of that information. It has always required heavy scrutiny.

[notatoad]

and even if it was, when a search engine takes you to another website, that site is also not bias free.

just becuase somebody publishes something on a website, does not make it a fact. google has always been good at finding things that look like facts, and their AI iteration is also good at that.

[micromacrofoot]

never, actually - any ranking algorithm is inherently biased because it ranks

[einpoklum]

Google has been actively biasing their search results for commercial purposes for decades, and have for quite a while been censoring or soft-censoring results for political reasons. WSWS' Andrei Dimon wrote about this extensively back in 2017, and I believe it also made the mainstream press once or twice - but has been mostly glossed over.

[sota_pop]

I agree with the sentiment, but native ads i.e. blogs, reviews, articles, etc. that do their best to hide that they’re a sponsored product review have been around for a long time. Admittedly, LLMs WILL make it even more difficult to discern the difference.

[agmater]

I'm reading a book on Vim and the author mentioned the old "Google is your friend". That aged poorly as well :')

[mghackerlady]

eh, for vi you can limit your search to stackexchange

[makeitdouble]

> Google" was something that ended conversations.

Yes, but not because of facts or bias-free sources. It was the equivalent of staring deep at your wrist watch while someone's speaking: a clear signal that you were done with whatever they wanting to talk about.

I kinda like that "let me Google it for you" in Japan was more popular as "Google it loser" (ググレカス), a rare instance where the common phrases was more expressive than it's western counterpart.