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.

  • NickwithaC@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    He said search results had become plagued with “clickbait” to keep people “addicted and absorbed on the page as long as possible”.

    No, that’s the advertising that did that, the search results made a whole field of “SEO” possible which aimed to make the least useful page show up first in the results,

    • frezik
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      1 year ago

      SEO has been around a long time, but Google fought against the most egregious techniques. You could have reasonable keywords that were genuinely tied to your content, but if you tried stuffing the keywords, they would drop you. You also had to show the Google crawler the same content that you showed visitors. Google used to summon lightning from heaven against sites that pulled that shit.

      At some point, they stopped caring, and SEO people got to do whatever the hell they wanted.