Click bait and switch: has the internet swapped out knowledge for monetisation? Search engine optimisation, advertising run amok, users as customers: has the internet become a little bit crap and, if so, how do we fix it? In this podcast, we discuss the problem with the internet's funding model, whether it could learn a thing or two from the BBC, and continue a seemingly futile quest for a decent cheese-ranking website. A few things we mentioned in this podcast: - Is Google Getting Worse? https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf - Hacker News forum says ‘yes’ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39013497 - How Google is killing independent websites https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/ - Dead Internet Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory - The Eternal September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email [email protected]

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph, and this week we're discussing Gorgonzola. Please, please start us off.

Well, one of my friends who's Italian thinks Gorgonzola is better than Stilton. And obviously, I sort of thought, well, it isn't. And I wanted to prove it by finding a cheese review website. So what I imagined was a website where lots of cheese enthusiasts will contribute their own reviews. And we could look at the average rating of Stilton versus Gorgonzola. And what I've discovered is that there isn't one, or at least if there is one, it's buried 30 pages down on Google. And my search for cheese review website turned up a Reddit page saying, is there a rating website for cheese? That was the top hit, was another website talking about the lack of a rating website for cheese. Cheese.com, which does have cheese reviews, but is a company selling cheese as well. Yourcheesemonger.com, it's a blog about cheese by a guy selling cheese. Cheeseus.co, which is a cheese image recognition app. Honestlytasty.co.uk, it's a vegan cheese website. Then Serious Eats list of the top essential cheeses. A cheese review blog called Eat Farm Now, Trustpilot with ratings for cheese shops. Cheesegeek selling cheese. Tons of bloody listicles like what the 13 cheeses you need to eat before you die. And of course, loads of recipes with cheese. And it really made me realize how bad the internet is, which, sorry, cheese fans, we're not actually going to talk about Gorgonzola. We're going to talk about how bad the internet is and how we might fix it. But the real, I mean, I had this horrific image that in 20 years ago, the internet to me felt like going into this massive sprawling library with loads of weird subsections and strange little rooms full of obscure books about weird things. And you could walk for miles and you'd feel like you'd never be able to get to the end of it. And now it just feels like a shopping mall to me, the internet. It just feels like a shopping mall with a great big corporate cafe called Reddit and a big bookshop full of selling boring stuff called Amazon and a cinema called Netflix. And it just feels so boring and sterile now. And so now the question is, am I right? Is what's gone wrong with the internet? If it has gone wrong, is this some kind of inevitable process or is it something that is caused by something we can fix? And then, yeah, what might we be able to do to bring the old internet back? And then finally, where is this cheese website of my dreams and should I perhaps start it and give up my day job? Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think you're

onto something here, Nick. And actually, a quick answer might be canals. Okay. Go for it. That's how we fix the internet is canalisation. Because this makes me think a few years... Dump it all in the canal. Chuck it all in the canal. All the servers in the canal. About 10 years or so ago, I made a film about people who live on canals in Britain. And one of the things I was asking is, hey, why do you do this? Right. And one of the people said, what I love about being on a canal boat and travelling around is I've realised I never see any advertising. Yeah. And that was a real, it was refreshing for them. They'd found their outlet in life. And I thought about it. And it's true. Exactly to say we're surrounded by adverts wherever we go in real life, but certainly online. And just to say, I think everyone now and again, I catch myself I'm watching a YouTube video. You've always got your pre-roll advert, or often you do. And no one ever bloody watches it, or it's an irritation. And you've got one in the middle. Everyone hates it. And yet it's there. It's what pays for it, I guess. But none of us like it. And it's rather depressing. Yeah. Help me out of

my fog, please. Yeah. Well, I think we're starting to get onto solutions. I think we want to probably catch up. Are we right? Am I just being a kind of old fogey? 20 years ago, was the internet really

I've got a couple more factors, which you haven't really mentioned.

Yeah, so I think there's another couple of factors. I have a similar list of factors, another two more potentially, information overload, like just the amount of content out there, volumes of content, huge, much bigger than it ever has been just until a few years ago, people paid copy to be copywriters to write some rubbish story before a recipe or something completely irrelevant, you just want to get the recipe. And now it's all done by AI. So I think it's going to get worse. And, and the but also the search engine limitations, and it's not just technical limitations, but also like, and Fraser touched on this, the commercial, the commercial model for search engines, it's paid for by advertising, if it wasn't paid for by advertising, just a subscription model of some kind, or government funded or something else, then it wouldn't need to be pushing certain kinds of results, which degrade the overall quality of the content. And so I think there's a nasty feedback mechanism there that's sort of really causing this this decline, where, you know, the engines are paid for by ads, and the content is paid for by ads, just makes more content that's driven towards selling people.

Yeah, no, I mean, there's the kind of, and of course, the more you the more, you know, I know, everyone knows the biggest cliche on the internet, but I think people don't really take this on board. But the thing about, you know, if it's free, then you're the product means that if you have lots of users, you can attract more revenue. And with more revenue, you can work out better ways to attract users. And so, you know, sort of, and of course, the intent is very scalable, that doesn't hold, for example, for a restaurant, you know, a restaurant that has, you know, lots of diners, it's not necessarily very easy to just suddenly multiply that restaurant by 10. But it's very easy to multiply a website by 10, you know, the number of people, if you've got 10 users on Google, or a million users on Google, Google don't have to really do very much, do very much more to scale up to those 10 million, they just need a bigger server farm. So I think the scalability of the internet means that revenue equals growth equals revenue is a much more straightforward

kind of path. Yeah. So we need to talk about solutions. Well, I don't know, I feel like

there's a lot more problems that I want to... I've got a few solutions, but you keep going.

Let's hear more of these problems. Well, I think let's just drill into this. I mean, I think we've rapidly alighted on what seems to probably the nub of the issue, which is the funding model, which is not for internet users, you know, it's not, you're not funding. So looking at where the funding comes for the internet, so the amount of money that is kind of basically goes through the internet for things, about half is advertising. For Google, it's about 80%. For Meta, who own Facebook, it's an astonishing 97% of their funding is advertising, right? So that's the way that anything you experience for free on the internet, you're there so that the company who's giving you that stuff can sell adverts to people. And that's a huge part of their business. Without advertising, Google suddenly only has 20% of the revenue it has now, okay? So it's an enormous amount. About 25% is subscription services, that includes streaming and cloud storage, but also, you know, sort of subscription creators like Patreon and Twitch and so on. Only about 10% is eCommerce. So that's you're buying things from Amazon, Alibaba, eBay. And about 5 to 10% is the, actually goes to the ISPs. So that's the people who actually send you the internet through the phone. The people where you, the people who actually run the internet, they get about 5 to 10% of the kind of money that goes through the internet. So that's, you know, I think we've obviously, that's one of the key issues is that the internet is for advertisers to reach you. It's not for you to find things out that you're interested in. The people who are paying for it are not paying for it so you can get information. They're paying for it so that they can sell. Do you know when that

shift kind of occurred? Because it sort of originally, I think a lot of the consumer internet early or late 90s early, well I say mid to late 90s, was paid for by consumers via their ISPs. So you'd buy your monthly CompuServe package or your AOL package or whatever. That money would pay for the building of the physical internet but also pay for some of the content that was created on it. And then you as a producer would just produce, you know, you could stand up your own server and connect it and you'd pay the cost of that just by publishing your own website, your own blog. When did the shift occur to it being the majority of it being advertising

versus of subscription? Yeah, I don't know the answer. I mean, I would, I mean, I'm gonna bullshit a bit but my instinct would be advertising revenue is a function of the number of users, right? So as the number of users subscription wants to go down so we can get more users and then, you know, and of course I think only a fraction of the users that we have today on the internet, which is almost everyone in the world, you know, 20 years ago that it was a much, much smaller club of internet users who would have been a different demographic, you know, would have been more tech savvy and probably interested in different things. So yeah, I don't know. But Peter touched on this thing of easy to generate content. Of course, you know, that's another thing. It's not just sort of demand. The fact that it is so easy now to generate content and every website, well, it's a vast majority of websites seem to be full of SEO garbage, you know, trying to kind of reel in. And Google, you'd think, well, they kind of want, don't Google want to fix that with their ranking algorithms? Well, what Google want you to do is to be on Google. That's what they want you to do. And so, you know, I think their response, which you probably have on your phone now, I do, is now, you know, they will give you an AI generated answer. So it's almost like they're kind of abandoning search altogether, and just trying to answer questions. You know, I want a cheese review website. I do not want Google to tell me what the best cheese is. And so sort of, yeah, incentives all over the place. So and by the way, whether Google is crap is, I mean, to me, personally, it just feels obviously true. If you look at what people on the internet say, they say it's true, that Google has got a lot worse. I think the things that you used to be able to do with Google don't seem to work. Well, like, you know, things like putting these quotes, adding a hyphen to say don't search this, the kind of or and and. Google just has finally

killed off cache, the Google cache. Oh, right. We used to have recent versions of websites. If they were offline, you could still retrieve the cached version. Yeah, and so you would search,

you can search for things now. And you look at the website, there's nothing there. And it used to be that's because it's on the cached version, but you can't access that anymore. So so, you know, it just and it so it feels like the internet has it, Google used to enable you to get to the internet. And more and more, it's actively preventing you from getting to the internet, because it doesn't really want you to leave Google. Yeah, okay, Peter, but I think it's

not all bad news. Go for it. Oh, well, cheer us up. Okay, brilliant. Because before you do, just some random thoughts I wrote down on this. I mean, are we asking the impossible? Is this inevitable thinking about the nature of humans and the dominant economic model we have in the world at the moment? It was made me think about the BBC and why people one of the things people talk about the BBC being great, and I kind of support this, which is it's, it's not commercial now. It doesn't live in isolation, I know. But which leads you on to popularity versus quality, right? They don't necessarily equate trade off and going back to what humans are like, we're willing to put up with a lot of this stuff. And most people are maybe I'm as well, which all leads to either do we do we need as a solution, a reset. But also, it makes me think that the, you know, does it reach a breaking point is is the internet, the Venice of the internet, where it's, is the internet Venice? That's all I'm asking. Its success is a victim of its own

success. Yeah, I think it is worth saying that this is very much the life cycle of any new technology. And it's sad. I think we've covered it on previous podcasts, but there is, you know, and it's widely, it's widely observed, I think that, you know, what you get at the beginning of a new technology is creators, you get enthusiasts and tinkerers, and, you know, innovators who want to use it for interesting things. And they want to make their little website with the weird animations about the geometry and all of that kind of, and you know, here's my big list of reviews of all the different cheeses. And then of course, the general public discover it, and they come in and they enjoy it. Well, hang on. Now the genie's out of the bottle. Because once the public is in there, then companies start going, we can sell this. And they start mining it for cash. Yeah, and the psychopaths turn up. And then it dies. And I think we're at the death stage of the internet as far as I'm concerned, or at least the internet

as a repository of interesting information. The sort of prima facie internet. Yeah, there's just like the naive, I'm going to look stuff up on the internet, what do you do go to Google approach

to the internet. It makes me feel that almost the best version of the internet one might access at the moment might be in North Korea. And that's the way to go. Peter, solutions. So it's not all

bad news for you. Okay, so I think that there's there's more content of all kinds generated ever than ever before, including good shit, right. So there are, there are loads of people self publishing great blogs, either through a big blogging engine like medium or their own blog, they're hosting themselves in a not much more traditional way. But who are who are self made writer, researchers, thinkers who are publishing really good stuff. So any kind of any topic you like, for AI, for example, there's a whole slew of people producing very well thought out critiques and characterizations and comment on the AI world. That is is fantastic. The trick is finding that stuff. Right. So short term solutions, choose a different search engine, right? What do you recommend? We are not the we are, we feel like this, but we're not alone. There are other people like this, which means there is a sort of market for yeah, not shit search engines. So a few, a few,

for example, DuckDuckGo. Apparently they use Bing, there is no front end for Bing. I don't know if

that's true. That's what I've heard. Is it? I don't know. Maybe I've missed that memo. Quant, Quant, which is Q W A N T and SpearX, which I'd never heard of before, before I googled it.

There's also Kagi, Kagi search. I've seen, I've seen sort of nerdy people talk about Kagi search, which is a, you know, upfront about the fact that it's, you pay for it. Yeah. And, and I, I have used the free version and I quite like it. And I, and I'm kind of very tempted, I think I'm

one or two bad Google searches away from whopping up the credit card. Likewise. But yeah, so but in terms of search engines are, I hate, I hate to offer up the solution, but search, but AI systems, such as open, open AIs and Anthropix, but I'm a big fan of Perplexity. Perplexity is very good at getting into a topic. It does a very good job of sort of sticking plaster approach to a retrieval where it will, it will give you a summary of some topic you ask it about, but then also provide references to internet sources. But there are other search engines that are available. I think that that's the key thing. And some of them will be optimized to just give you a kind of very vanilla text, text matching view of the internet. Like the olden days.

Yeah. I mean, I think, I feel like the AI solutions are, they could go, they could feel like, you know, you go to a really good antiquarian bookshop and there there'll be a side-burned old chap, perhaps stuffing a tobacco into his pipe. And, and you'll say to him, oh, I'm really looking for something about, you know, astronomy from the 17th century. And he'll go, oh yes, that's over there. That's what I want. Right. But at the moment, the sort of AI tools feel a bit like an annoying chippy shop assistant who comes over the minute you walk in and starts asking you what you, what you're looking for. And sometimes you just say, well, I actually, I just want to browse. Do you mind if I just, you know? So yeah, no, I think that is quite, that is a good point. Like AI assistants to do what Google should be doing as long as it's not

where people are going, the internet looks like actually virtual shops. Kind of, but yeah,

you are actually working, you can, the faint whiff of stale tobacco that's in the air as you go and chat to this bloke. Just an aside, is it possible that as part of what you're saying that these other search engines and using stuff like, I don't know, chat GPT or whatever to filter it for you, you could pay for this stuff maybe? By which I mean, I know that YouTube's always trying to flog you subscription so that you don't get adverts. It must be possible in one way or another to, and if it's not, maybe it could happen that some sort of subscription service, yes, you're

paying, but that filters it in such a way. I would be absolutely delighted if Google started offering a sort of Google Prime where you paid a monthly fee and I would say I'd pay 100 quid a month for a Google search engine that wasn't shared. That's a big subscription because I use it for everything, all day. If it just cut out, if it basically just nullified any search engine optimisation, just sort of, they actively work to stop people gaming their engine. And no sponsored links and actually return hits for the search query that I put in and not what they think I meant. Then I would definitely pay for that. And I don't think I'm alone. It's such a crucial tool that is developing a nasty patina on it. I want to throw it away and get another one.

Yeah, I mean, it's not the only I mean, the other industries have gone this way. So you know, the problem is advertising is relatively new. I mean, people have always had, you know, people always put signs on their shops, and held promotional events. Apparently, they even had, they used to sponsor gladiators. Really? Yeah, apparently, a bit of an aside, but Ridley Scott was thinking of including a scene where the gladiators sort of talk about how great, you know, Crotullus's olive oil is or something, but it will be so jarring, because it would seem so anachronistic. Anyway, but I think mass sort of media advertising of the kind where you can make it into a business, I think it dates back a couple of hundred years. And he's kind of the, you know, the penny post, which competed with outcompeted really all the kind of newspapers, which are quite expensive, and only elite people read, and the penny post, which was, you know, started in the 19th century, you know, is suddenly you've got media being sponsored by advertising. You know, and I think largely disappeared. And similarly, on the internet, you have the sort of, I suppose, giants, NYT, Washington Post, are now paywalled, the Economist is paywalled, Spectator is paywalled, a lot of the really kind of high quality, people who want quality now, have to pay for it, but they're willing to do so. And I think there isn't, as Peter says, you know, actually, it's odd that there isn't a premium search option. Because I would, like music industry, similar, you know, has gone from revenue being, you know, primarily radio to, you know, and physical media sales to being a subscription model, you know, where users are paying to listen to the music, which, you know, obviously, that's something which, you know, has been re-enabled by the internet. And TV as well, you know, if you think about streaming services, the ones you pay for, cannot get away with throwing adverts at you to quite the same extent. And I'm willing to pay for, you know, I subscribe to about three streaming services, and because it's worth the money. Yeah, you know, and I, and so I guess it feels like this is not only is, on one hand, you might think, oh, how sad the internet's become commercialised. No, it's just, it's better. It's better for the internet to be the product than for you to

be the product, I guess. Yeah, I mean, an alternative, which is definitely not a serious one, would be that it'd be search, you know, search, internet search being such a crucial thing for everybody, perhaps it should be a government provided utility. But just imagine how awful it would be. Can you imagine how awful? Actually, the thing is... I'm picturing sort of

to chance. Yeah. You were gonna say something, Peter? Yeah, just, it does seem crazy that there isn't a sort of premium search, pay for, opt-in pay for option. I don't think I'm, I don't think I'm unique. And I think you're, you and I, the three of us are probably similar. Small, small sample. But that I, I don't, I don't think I've ever clicked on an internet advert and then bought the thing. No, I don't think. Ever. So I've been using Google search for free for 20 plus years. Thank you, Google. It's been great. Well, up to a point. It's been, it's been, it's been very useful. I've got so much value out of it. And I've given nothing directly back to it by buying the thing, which would actually then credit them, credit them part of the sale. So we can't be unique in this. I do everything I can to ignore the adverts. Just let me pay for a thing, which means I don't have

to. I think we've discovered the real villains and it's people who click on adverts. Yeah. For God's sake, stop doing that. I mean, on one hand though, they are paying for it all, you know, but occasionally they buy something and that's great, but no, you're right. I mean, I know everyone thinks they're not affected by adverts, but I mean, as Fraser said, you know, there's YouTube adverts that come on. I never know what they're for. They're always an American person sitting at a desk telling me about a new AI tool that can help manage my workload. And I do not, I cannot click on that skip button fast enough. Yeah, not quite. It makes me feel a little bit

less guilty when I'm too lazy to go from a Google search to go two or three posts down to click on the one that's not the advertising one from, because I know if I click, you know, I want, you know, whatever it is I want to go to, there's the advertised one first. I know that they're

paying for my click and I feel a bit bad. I feel less bad now. It's endless productivity tools, AI tools and various services like that. It's like, I'm not going to buy it based on your advert. Just write up what it can do and put it in a database so it can be compared with all the other services and I'll choose it based on feature and price. Yeah. You know what, they

won't do that, Peter. They'll just stick with the ukuleles and the clapping and the inspirational

tagline. Yeah. Before we wrap up, two things. One, I have to confess to a sort of mild hallucinatory moment whilst we're recording this, which is when I had a vision of Peter with the kind of his hair in buns at the side of his head because he was saying we are not alone. There are others who feel like us. I felt I was part of the rebel alliance and we were going to, you know, unite against the empire. That's the first point. Second point, obviously the big question we need to answer. What is the best cheese, Peter? Cheddar. Yeah. What kind? Is there kinds? Oh,

God. Just cheddar. You mean probably an extra mature pizza? Yeah, extra mature. The big blocks

you buy in supermarkets. It's really fantastic. OK. Yeah. Me too. Nice old crumbly, sharp cheddar. But you know, but maybe give me a nice quality digestive and a bit of, yes, cheddar, but also.

It stands up on a cheese board. It does. It stands up in cooking. It's just so versatile.

Useful. It's useful. Brie, a nice bit of creamy brie on a digestive biscuit is nice.

All right. I mean, I find that brie is just a little bit bitter and doesn't have enough to counteract that. I mean, I always have to put some sort of chutney on brie to round it out. But a cheese that I can never get bored of is good old fashioned Parmesan. Yeah, I feel like a bit of a, you know, a bit of a traitor picking Parmesan. I do love cheddar, but Parmesan is just just just a little tiny slice of that slither of Parmesan off a big lump of Parmesan. You just eat it. Yes, good eating cheese. Great to put on the old, great to put on the old pasta. Yeah, it's good for all sorts. You can grate Parmesan, put it in, put a little pile of it in the oven

and you've got a Parmesan crisp. Right. Let's wrap up there. I'm glad we put that to bed. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph. Until next time. Goodbye.