All these companies need to get rid of the finance people that are running them and get back to something different I don’t care put a construction worker in charge

You know those graphs that show a dramatic shift at a single point in time? I feel like there’s a similar graph for the quality of the internet and the dropping of do no evil.

In zero-sum games, it can be the case that short term profit is the winning choice. One example is Go.

When AlphaGo was created and got good enough to beat world champion Go players, it did so largely by making moves that seemed to humans to be wildly aggressive and focused on small territorial positions (the game is won by surrounding territory and secondarily by capturing pieces, which reduces the opponents score). These small, highly territorial moves tend to force the human to respond locally, preventing big strategic moves, and then the AI just maintains its aggressive posture, keeping the human on defense while the AI keeps making points.

Most humans would have ignored these small battles for territory and focused on larger, more “strategic” moves that gain regional “influence” or help create opportunities to score more points down the line. But the computer’s moves were “correct” in the sense that they won games against the best players in the world.

BUT there’s a reason AplhaGo isn’t allowed in tournaments, for instance. So if the goal of AlphaGo was something like “be the top rated Go player”, it would have failed dramatically since it can’tplay in ranked tournaments.

Long story short, if you’re optimizing for 1 variable, like points/wins/money, it may be only logical move to focus on aggressive incremental gains that give up other strategic objectives. So, Google is optimizing for something that is clearly incorrect from the perspective of providing the best service - but likely correct from the perspective of making the most money even at the cost of the service being worse. And Google has a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders to maximize profits, basically guaranteeing this type of behavior

Are search engines hard to make? An open source, white hat, search engine would be amazing. I’m not sure if I’m using the white hat term correctly, but what I mean is, a search engine that looks for real people and not corporations first. Basically, 90’s search engines.

So is the issue that they dont project far enough into the future? Or do they never correctly predict the size and impact of the negativity?

That, but with 800% error margins.