Wow some terrible reporting about Google's latest horrible ideas about how to distort information access in the name of "convenience" (or something):

[emilymbender@dair-community.social]

@arestelle I see what you did there!

[theakashmondal@mstdn.social]

@emilymbender I use #DuckDuckGo

[lindasgoluppiart@mastodonapp.uk]

@emilymbender In all honesty, I believe it has been over for some time.....

[shadsterling@mastodon.social]

@hamishb @emilymbender there’s an opt-out function??

[hipsterelectron@circumstances.run]

@emilymbender i want you to know your repeated scientific deconstruction of google's ideological warfare under the guise of a search interface has enabled me to extrapolate at great length how the entire formalisms of automata theory have been constructed to exclude any investigation that could ever produce a paper with more than 1% performance improvement over their state of the art. parsing and formal languages has been dead for several decades.

google calls it a "parser confusion vulnerability" when python maintainers use features of the zip file format in their own published releases that make it impossible for specifically google to insert a cryptograpic backdoor onto their users' machines (because google owns pypi), while at the same time the python METADATA file format actively right now supports an "ambiguity' intentionally invisible to human reviewers but instructs the standard packaging software to download and execute code that won't show up in the output.

just as you said:

We revisit foundational work related to information behavior, information seeking, information retrieval, information filtering, and information access to resurface what we know about these fundamental questions and what may be missing.

i very recently realized these questions can be quantified in the field of operating system design, in a really drastic sense that led me to switch my research focus because i'm confident i can convince people every computer should work this way.

just this weekend i realized (quite by mistake) that a fact i'd known since 2019, when google made mozila and twitter lay off their teams of scientists who had just publicly demonstrated that google chrome and bazel products were neither "fast" nor "correct", in ways that are easily and obviously quantifiable, also represented a shocking and obvious failure in the entire theory of operating system design. not just that computers are slow and fail to protect the user, but how demonstrate a thrilling counterexample

which is to say, after an intensive literature review (including "standards" for "portable" behavior that were neither), i'm confident i've identified a novel property for computer security which results from a computer performance property that i could already prove 12 ways from sunday. and i now know how to construct a system that achieves both.

i found a dissertation from the single person who tried something pretty close https://circumstances.run/@hipsterelectron/116602585443289491 but otherwise i have performed sufficient literature review to be confident i can express this result in a way that will convince any convince anyone familiar with the field that there's a whole other field they'd been missing this whole time.

and it will run on a computer or phone, to protect people from harm. it demonstrates how the temporal and spatial structure of computer memory in response to user input can be described as a correctness property of the operating system. like i did to google's bazel, it will defeat them in their own terms

thank you

[romli@social.vivaldi.net]

@ShadSterling @hamishb @emilymbender

Yes works for me https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/381948916/how-to-shut-down-and-delete-the-ai-mode-from-google?hl=en

[qybat@batchats.net]

@emilymbender Priority is on maximising usage. Sure, they lose money on every user, but they will make it up on scale.

[qybat@batchats.net]

@emilymbender Links become an afterthought. Websites see their traffic plummet because the LLM is summarising everything on the search page. No one sees the ads, sites go out of business, LLM has no new data to train on and starts to lag behind current events.

[shadsterling@mastodon.social]

@romli @hamishb @emilymbender for the AI overview that precedes any actual search results, that link doesn’t describe a persistent opt-out, only a per-search bypass with “ -ai”. Which is a start

[odd@mstdn.social]

@emilymbender the 'people acting on information' part is pretty dehumanising as well. As of humans are just a cog in their loop, rather than their product being in ours.

[tommi@pan.rent]

@emilymbender

SEO is going to be so dead.

To me, it’s Search Engines Ostracism now.

[alsvha@sunny.garden]

@emilymbender Google will not be satisfied until they control information and people are stuck on their landing page with their version of information.

It's been a ongoing trend to pull more and more into their page from sources and now even rewrite it.

[lcwander@toot.community]

@hamishb @emilymbender the best opt-out mode is using another search engine. Google search enshittification has been going on for at least 5 years. At this point it is just masochism to use it.

[setok@attractive.space]

@emilymbender yeah, even for someone who is pro-tech and interested in AI developments, this @TechCrunch piece read like a press release. It was journalistically extremely weak to the point I felt dumber for reading it.

[eurospoofer@mastodon.social]

@emilymbender 2.5 billion users a month they claim.
Having an AI summary forced into every search doesn't make the searcher a user of the tech. How many people simply ignore the summary?

[gerhardd@olching.social]

@emilymbender The good news: nobody needs #google. I've blocked all their MTAs, and resisted using their apps for quite some time. No problems so far.

[cockburn@mastodon.moule.world]

@emilymbender google is so unreliable now, it's time for them to lose their worldwide use of "google" as a verb.

[sharksonaplane@mastodon.sandwich.net]

@emilymbender Exactly!

I understand that business value propositions change over time, but going from "we disrupted search by making a simple interface" to "we ruptured search by making our simple interface complicated (and terrible)" is. well, it's certainly. a choice.

[turre@mementomori.social]

@emilymbender
Yeah, if somebody is still using Google Search, now is the time to get off it. There are other search engines out there.

[roadskater@mastodon.social]

@emilymbender I saw someone toot about that Tuesday afternoon, and my reaction to the article was, "So TechCrunch is rewriting Google press releases?" Not a critical thought expressed in the article. IIRC, no quotes from anyone at all, positive or negative. Just a list of supposedly useful features and enhancements.

Feh.