They ruined it without AI before AI was commonplace. They ruined it with higher profit margins. 🥹
ArbiterXero@lemmy.world
on 30 Nov 16:09
nextcollapse
They ruined it by setting themselves as untouchable and wanting bigger profit margins than “richer than God” money.
ITeeTechMonkey@lemmy.world
on 30 Nov 16:13
nextcollapse
Avid Amoeba is right that Google ruined their own search before LLMs entered the public consciousness (this does not mean LLMs didn’t exist before this, but that they were not widely available for the general public to use or became part of the zeitgeist).
If you don’t agree please listen to the Better Offline podcast episode “The Man That Destroyed Google Search”. The episode goes through the rollbacks/changes Google made to their search Algorithm well before AI was commonplace.
Yeah. Also I’m guessing their AI additions to search made their profit margins worse since they take a lot more computation to produce. Although they probably cache a lot of them for common searches.
cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca
on 30 Nov 16:23
nextcollapse
Probably made the margins better because investors apparently still love hearing the word “AI” attached to shit
Even though that surely results in them being able to access more money and makes shareholders richer, that’s not a factor in profit margins. Profit margins are just about revenue vs cost. In this case - how much the make from each search vs how much it costs to produce that search.
Many people around me are using LLMs in many parts of their work al the time. Neutral networks are used in many useful situations. I feel exactly like you, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to cope with it.
The US National Weather Service releases updated 84-hour forecasts every 6 hours. Even with supercomputers at their disposal, due to the computational complexity of simulating physics, that is their best possible effort.
Google, meanwhile, is “developing a machine learning model that it says can accurately predict weather in seconds – not hours – and outperforms 90% of the targets used by the world’s best weather prediction systems.” Using a single desktop computer, they can generate a highly accurate 10-day forecast in under a minute.
Yes. Search generally pulls data from databases. It doesn’t compute weather forecasts. The addition of AI results is net addition computation. In the worst case scenario where the generation of the AI results happens on-the-fly, that’s a lot more computation. I’m sure they pre-compute a lot of them so they’re not in the worst case scenario. However in the best case scenario they still have to do this new additional heavy (check LLM compute usage) computation once per result. So the profit margin for search is very likely lower than it used to be when isolating for this variable. If they’re somehow increasing their revenue from these results, that’s another variable that might offset it. I’ve no idea. What I’m certain about is the cost is higher after AI results were introduced because more energy is used.
That depends strongly on which “public” we are talking about - some extremely intelligent people I have talked to don’t even know what Reddit is. Old Google searches got bad, but if you scrolled down far enough, or added “reddit” to the search terms, they used to be salvageable. So it’s less of a hard cutoff and more of a long process that brought us to where we are today.
ITeeTechMonkey@lemmy.world
on 30 Nov 16:59
collapse
Public in this term has nothing to do with intelligence, but rather people outside of companies working on AI/LLMs or doing AI research. It’s why I mentioned it entering the zeitgeist.
I never mentioned a hard cutoff but said they ruined it before LLMs were in use by the general public. Essentially I’m referring to the starting of the degradation of Google’s search which they made conscious decisions that deliberately put profit above all.
My apologies that me being hyperbolic did not add clarity and instead caused confusion:-). Ultimately I agree, but was adding the point that users who were either savvy or dedicated enough could still get a lot of use out of Google until more recently, whereupon it is now just a huge mess that makes it more worthwhile to abandon completely (in favor of e.g. DuckDuckGo) - even though it was the demise of Reddit rather than the addition of LLMs that caused the sharp decline (+ other things too, e.g. there was a strike of mods at StackOverflow), i.e. Reddit (& others) was propping up Google results for the longest time, which does not excuse Google for allowing such instability, but helps explain the timeline wherein Google results were both “usable” (even if less so than the past) and also “degraded” at the same time.
ITeeTechMonkey@lemmy.world
on 30 Nov 18:02
collapse
It’s all good, we both clarified our* thoughts on the matter and to be fair using “ruined” instead of “ruining” or “started to ruin” indicates a completed process or final state instead of a continuous one.
I agree that previously one could construct a search to sort the noise out, but as you stated this has become unfeasible without a sharp increase of queries needed to refine results which has shifted the thought from questioning if Google search is bad to now generally accepted belief - to the point where people are trying to quantify and provide evidence to back up the claim.
If I can go on a tangent: it is conversations like this that continually convince me that I need never go back to Reddit. Not EVERY SINGLE conversation needs to be full of snark and vitriol. Being able to discuss things rationally, calmly, and with kindness is possible, if only people will create the space within which they are allowed to happen:-).
And how that relates is: using DuckDuckGo convinced me similarly to abandon Google:-). Caveats include using Google Images, Google Maps, etc. e.g. to look up the hours of a shop (the SEO optimization there works for rather than against me, although tbf quite often I have to bat away unrelated results vying for my increased attention due merely to having paid for that exact privilege), but overall the results of DDG are just extremely much more worth my time than Google’s.
As an example, if you search for the keyword “Lemmy”, DDG pulls up Lemmy.World as the #2 hit (which notably has ~80% of all active users on Lemmy, so is overwhelmingly deserving of being listed so highly), after the #1 hit being the singer, whereas on Google the first instance mentioned is Lemmy.ml (that has 2,206 active monthly users, compared to Lemmy.World’s 17,122 that is roughly an order of magnitude higher, and also housing the most-used communities e.g. !technology@lemmy.world has 16.9k active monthly users compared to !asklemmy@lemmy.ml’s top community with 8.44K), and that not until the #4 hit.
i.e., not only are Google results commodified, but as you said they are “ruined” as well - to the point of representing actual & active disinformation (for the sake of $$$) rather than merely misinformation (aka oopsies). We can scroll past one, two, even ten ads, but how do we find our info when the sorting refuses to distinguish between SEO-advanced results and “real” ones? I dunno, perhaps the above one is a poor example (edit: b/c in the past, Lemmy.ml really was the top Lemmy instance, for so very long), but I think you know what I mean regardless:-).
They specifically made search less accurate so that users would search multiple times to boost the number of ads that get displayed to juice their numbers for quarterly earnings. You can blame Prabhakar Raghavan.
disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world
on 30 Nov 16:17
nextcollapse
I do like how AI works for referencing articles. You can tap on any sentence in the summary and it will display all links that contain that source information. It’s actually pretty useful.
I find that in many cases, if you actually click the link to find the sourced information, it’s not there. I’ve experienced this with nearly every LLM front-end platform.
CosmoNova@lemmy.world
on 30 Nov 20:18
nextcollapse
They’re even shoving AI into Youtube by placing a summary in plain text below some videos now. Don’t know if it’s opt-in or just randomly placed for testing but so far I’m not impressed because it skips over important things. I’m honestly puzzled as to why the hell they’re doing this.
And then they’ll stop having creators creating free content for their advertisement sceme to work. Genius!
Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
on 01 Dec 00:36
nextcollapse
Their search was shit before AI. Unless you like pinterest and quora spam.
Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
on 01 Dec 08:44
collapse
It’s fucking awful with our without AI in 2024.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 30 Nov 16:38
nextcollapse
Younger generations are using other platforms to gather information.
What’s not being talked about here is that young people don’t seem to give a damn if the information they research is accurate or not, it’s whether or not it’s peddled by their preferred streamer. Those “other platforms” are apparently Tiktok and Netflix, not exactly places known for speaking truth to power.
I’ve spent twenty years trying to believe that the children will be the saviors of the future, but I think maybe the conservatives actually succeeded in murdering education in it’s crib. I am now nearly fully on team “You know, maybe these kids actually are a bunch of dumb fucks who won’t save us after all.”
This isn’t a young person problem and it isn’t new, it’s just getting worse. See Fox news on Trump 8 years ago or more through now
XeroxCool@lemmy.world
on 30 Nov 17:13
nextcollapse
I can see your point when talking about broader topics that people tend to absorb over time (politics, social dilemmas, economical condition) but this is more about users intentionally searching narrower topics. What’s wrong with my code, how do I fix my car, what computer should I buy, what’s the best way to get rid of termites - those kinds of things.
I unashamedly call myself an expert about exactly one car. I learned everything from it’s most popular forum from 2010-2015. I admin a Facebook group for it. When I started just on the dedicated forum, we’d get basic questions all the time about super common issues but a few links to good threads and recommendations about using Google with site:thisforum added helped avoid “repeat customers” in the future. That’s gone. The forum is forgotten because original owners have sold and new owners don’t know about it. No one wants to make an account on a site for just one topic these days when Facebook and reddit are so easy to use. Shitty answer sites following in the footsteps of Yahoo Answers (such as quora, fixya, and justanswer) have dominated normal Google searches. Google often suggests appending “reddit” to searches which is an improvement over those sites, but still atrocious for unpopular niche topics such as my forgotten car, in comparison to the forum. Having an existing account on reddit or Facebook promotes joining a relevant group/sub, not even knowing how to vet them for accuracy, and just blind-firing questions into the void. Google can sparse reddit, but the internal reddit search is rough. Facebook is locked down and the search is even worse. As I’ve joined other groups for cars I know less about, I can’t beleive the abysmal quality of answers I’ve gotten myself. People act as if I personally sent them a letter requesting information and I get answers that are overly generic, downright useless as they say they don’t know, or tell me to try something I said in my main post I already tried. This is the state of the world. None of these platforms value solutions, they value interaction for the sake of user volume. Wanna know why FB Marketplace is continually awful to sift through? Because every minute spent groaning about irrelevant listings and ignoring search parameters is another minute not given to Craigslist, kajiji, or any other classifieds. They don’t need you to win, they need the competition to lose.
I don’t want to hear anyone’s bullshit about ditching reddit and meta. We’re a microscopic niche of the internet, here on the fediverse. Our little bubble is not swaying half the fucking planet off meta. Do not act smug and say just go back to the original forums when they’re dead/devoid/deactivated because a handful of corporations socially engineered the ideal content streaming platforms.
Blaming kids for being dumb is a cop out. You have niche knowledge from your era about vetting content and avoiding scams/misinformation. You’re saying new kids are dumb in those regards. I bet you think older people are dumb in those regards too. Please realize both of those groups have their own niches and think you’re dumb, too, in some other topic. You are the peak of a decade, not a century. I don’t know your age, you don’t know mine, but consider this quote:
“Our youth now love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders, and they love to chatter instead of exercise. Children are now tyrants not servants of their household. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”
Sound accurate? Look up who said it.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 30 Nov 17:20
collapse
There’s a big difference between “all kids are terrible today” and “some people have very successfully dismantled the education system, and it’s impacting our youth to a point where we can’t trust their levels of education can protect them against capitalism run amok.”
To be clearer: failure to educate is squarely on adults not on children.
XeroxCool@lemmy.world
on 30 Nov 18:24
nextcollapse
That’s not what I see in your parent comment. “young people don’t seem to give a damn” and “I’m nearly fully on team ‘young people are dumb fucks and won’t save us after all’”
schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business
on 30 Nov 18:29
collapse
where we can’t trust their levels of education can protect them against capitalism run amok
I’ve been dealing with more zoomer-and-younger kids and uh, it’s less that we can’t trust that their education level will protect them from the evils of capitalism, but more that we can’t even trust that their levels of education are sufficient for them to be able to both read and write, nevermind more complicated things like determining the accuracy of factual data and be able to make a reasonable decision based on you know, critical thinking and analysis.
It’s shockingly dire in a lot of places, and it’s unlikely to improve, at least in the US, since nobody values education and nobody wants to fund education, and we just elected a pile of geriatric rich white people that think we don’t need to do anything but add more Jesus.
And yeah, as adults we’ve absolutely failed the two most recent generations, and are going to epically, epically fuck up the next one too.
This implies TikTok would have some incentive to propagandize their users that Google wouldn’t also have. Google does corporate American propaganda, which many Americans have been acclimated to and thus don’t perceive as propaganda.
You could argue a state has a right to propagandize its own citizens to counter foreign adversarial influence. I’m not saying it does but a state should have its populations best interests in mind compared to a foreign adversary.
Its the older folks who muddled the walls between editorial and factual reporting, and now thats come home to roost. There are no facts anymore, and very little real journalism anymore. Theres no truth, justice, democracy, or human dignity either. Its not tiktok or youtube who led us where we are, its the double-be-damned boomers and centrists.
thesohoriots@lemmy.world
on 30 Nov 19:26
nextcollapse
It’s not so much that they don’t give a damn, but that they can’t tell. I taught some basic English courses with a research component (most students in their first college semester), and I’d drag them to the library each semester for a boring day on how to generate topics, how to discern scholarly sources, then use databases like EBSCO or JSTOR to find articles to support arguments in the essays they’d be writing for the next couple years. Inevitably, I’d get back papers with so-and-so’s blog cited, PraegerU, Wikipedia, or Google’s own search results. Here’s where a lot of the problem lies: discerning sources, and knowing how to use syntax in searches, which is itself becoming irrelevant on Google etc. but NOT academic databases. So why take the time to give the “and” and “or” and “after: 1980” and “type: peer-reviewed” when you can just write a natural-language question into a search engine and get an answer right away that seems legit in the snippet? I’d argue the tech is the problem because it encourages a certain type of inquiry and quick answers that are plausible, but more often than not, lacking in any credibility.
terminhell@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 30 Nov 20:26
nextcollapse
I think my kid is gonna be just fine. He rarely believes anything i tell em without follow up evidence…He’s 5.
But Ive always focused on critical thinking skills from as early as possible.
richieadler@lemmy.myserv.one
on 30 Nov 23:11
nextcollapse
You must understand that you are part of an infinitesimal minority.
terminhell@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 01 Dec 00:42
collapse
It makes me sad as I observe the wider population 😭
Youre gonna have to write fully cited and sourced academic papers to convince him to clean his room.
terminhell@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 01 Dec 16:35
collapse
Heh, it’s been a struggle of complying with authority on simple/mundane task. But slowly its getting away from it
Invertedouroboros@lemmy.world
on 30 Nov 20:56
nextcollapse
Is it the tech? Or is it media literacy?
I’ve messed around with AI on a lark, but would never dream of using it on anything important. I feel like it’s pretty common knowledge that AI will just make shit up if it wants to, so even when I’m just playing around with it I take everything it says with a heavy grain of salt.
I think ease of use is definitely a component of it, but in reading your message I can’t help but wonder if the problem instead lies in critical engagement. Can they read something and actively discern whether the source is to be trusted? Or are they simply reading what is put in front of them then turning around to you and saying “well, this is what the magic box says. I don’t know what to tell you.”.
Mental inertia. It’s the same kind of thinking that keeps some people using Windows. They’ve convinced themselves that the option with the familiar name will take less effort to learn than the one with the new name, when in fact the mental effort required to make the familiar-named thing work properly is greater.
switching OS and switching search engines are in completely different universes but I do agree with the point
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 30 Nov 18:39
collapse
Okay, it’s more like the people who all refused to leave Xitter until recently. It took something very like the original Twitter (Bluesky) for them to finally get the mental gumption to make the switch. Prior to that, mental inertia kept them in place.
scottmeme@sh.itjust.works
on 30 Nov 22:03
nextcollapse
I have gotten more reliable results from Google than other search engines even if it involves a middle man service that removes the bullshit
ijon_the_human@lemmy.world
on 30 Nov 16:56
nextcollapse
I would like two search engines displaying results side by side whenever I do a search. There’s so much empty space on a wide screen display anyway.
Maybe I should check if there’s an addon for this…
Carrolade@lemmy.world
on 30 Nov 17:19
nextcollapse
This is an excellent idea. Did you happen to find any?
ijon_the_human@lemmy.world
on 30 Nov 19:44
collapse
Not really no!
There was a “Multi Web Search” by Oleksandr for Firefox but it was last updated five years ago. It also intermingles the results whereas I would’ve liked to see them side by side (to compare how different search engines rank the sites)
The SearX feature the other guy mentioned might be the best bet!
I’d have Ask Jeeves, Hotbot, and Yahoo opened when I was trawling the Internet for porn while my parents were out for 30m when I was 14 years old. There were always substantially different results, though somehow they always ended up the same: with me infecting my parents’ computer with some shit. Let’s say I did a lot of learning from my mistakes.
That is funny, and sounds like it’d be pretty expensive. I actually didn’t encounter this fortunately, because I was already costing my parents a fortune because I just couldn’t stay under 300 texts a month.
ijon_the_human@lemmy.world
on 30 Nov 19:35
collapse
Well as the builders of the current distopian present we were told all the time that we needed to create user interfaces and services where people would not need to know anything about tech and there was always a “design for the dumb user” since forever.
This is what we get by pushing that narrative I guess.
Invertedouroboros@lemmy.world
on 30 Nov 20:18
collapse
It’s kinda wild to me. I used to think that as a millennial the next generation would be more technically savvy than mine for similar reasons to why my generation was more technically savvy than the last. That doesn’t quite seem to have panned out and I’m not sure if I’m just not seeing things right or if technical literacy is really that much on the decline.
I was totally unaware of how bad it is until I actually read some current teachers describe horrrors of how the incoming students were so unprepared about technical literacy. It’s freaking scary.
We really designed the society as it is and we’re going to suffer the consequences for a long time.
To me it just means job security. But I get you, some of those people will become your boss…and it generally sucks.
Invertedouroboros@lemmy.world
on 30 Nov 22:37
collapse
I’ll confess I’ve had the same thought… but I feel like the problem is deeper than that. If people don’t have basic awareness of the devices they rely on then they in danger of becoming victims of those who do. I’d point to your average boomer on Facebook to illustrate that point.
I was Googling just fine until Google ruined it with “SEO” and AI so that completely irrelevant results dominate the first 2 or 3 pages.
mesamunefire@lemmy.world
on 30 Nov 22:05
nextcollapse
It’s this last two years where it has gotten really bad in my opinion. Before you could at least navigate the ads ridden site. Now base Google search is tremendously worse.
TriflingToad@sh.itjust.works
on 01 Dec 13:44
collapse
YouTube search is SO MUCH WORSE now. it just gives up and shows random stuff after like 3 results
I searched “friends invited me to lethal company”. I got 6 results (one of which is a song?) before it gave up and showed “people also watched this” and “you might like this” aka anything even semi related to Lethal Company
Don’t get me wrong, fuck google, but how much can we blame google for SEO? That’s just people gaming the system, and they’d be doing it no matter how google presented their results.
Maybe there is a whole cooperation aspect that I’m not aware of.
They can only game the system because Google made a system like that possible and has never done anything to combat the gaming of it.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 02 Dec 01:35
nextcollapse
Right, but we know how people are (look at torrenting, piracy, drm, etc.), and people would figure out ways to gamify it no matter what, I believe. But you are correct that they don’t seem to necessarily have any interest in stopping it. Because of course not, it’s all about the bottom line.
skulkingaround@sh.itjust.works
on 02 Dec 07:58
collapse
Come on man I don’t like google either, but SEO exploitation has been a cat and mouse game since search engines were invented. They’re all varying levels of suck the last few years. It’s not an easy problem to solve, and AI has made it far more difficult.
Google did a rollback of anti-SEO indexing features because the intention is that users issue more searches. Ever since the ads side of the business won the war for the soul of Google the experience has gotten worse on purpose.
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
on 30 Nov 20:56
nextcollapse
Article is behind a paywall, what does it say “young people” do instead of “googling”?
AVincentInSpace@pawb.social
on 01 Dec 01:04
nextcollapse
I can’t see through the paywall either, but if it’s like any of the hundreds of other articles that have been written on this topic, the answer is probably TikTok
This shift is due largely to users’ bypassing Google to start their search for goods on Amazon. It’s handing Amazon billions in advertiser dollars. Meanwhile, TikTok has less than 4% of U.S. digital ad revenue, but significant potential to expand its share of the pie. A recent TikTok pitch to advertisers reported on by The Wall Street Journal said that 23% of its users searched for something within 30 seconds of opening the app, and its global search volume was three billion a day.
The second threat is the rise of “answer engines” like Perplexity which, well, do what they say on the tin. OpenAI has added internet search to ChatGPT, Meta Platforms is exploring building its own search engine, and even AI chatbots that can’t search the internet are proving increasingly capable at addressing many questions. They’re also becoming ever more widespread, as Microsoft and Appleintegrate them directly into the operating systems of all the devices they make or support.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
on 30 Nov 21:37
nextcollapse
And how do non-old people navigate the web? I mean I get it, you don't need to google the Wikipedia article about the French Revolution... You can ask AI. But how do you find business hours for the repair shop downtown? Which website sells the concert tickets? News from yesterday? The forum that tells you if 32GB of RAM fit into your laptop?
Hours and menus normally come from Maps. News often comes from social media, unfortunately. But Google rarely helps me there either. Concert tickets is probably an app or venue website (but I don’t really go to many concerts because fuck Ticketmaster).
Not that I don’t Google stuff, but it’s way less useful than it used to be.
I’m over fifty (though fuck does it feel unreal to say that).
TheRealKuni@lemmy.world
on 01 Dec 04:23
nextcollapse
(but I don’t really go to many concerts because fuck Ticketmaster)
You can often (though not always) buy tickets directly from the venue in person or over the phone. You avoid Ticketmaster fees this way, though they may end up emailing you the ticket in Ticketmaster anyway.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
on 01 Dec 10:30
nextcollapse
Sure. I'm living in a different filter bubble anyways. Ticketmaster seems to be big but it isn't the only platform where I live. I guess I'm not really mainstream and I go to smaller concerts, festivals, art museums. And a lot of them have different ticket services. So I usually end up googling them and following the trail of links to the individual ticket shop.
I'm 10 years younger than you. Maybe a bit more. I grew up with the rise of social media. I still despise how it confines me into a filter bubble. Makes my world smaller (despite connecting me with the world) by choosing my perspective. I take care to occasionally read local news. And not take my political perspective from platforms with an algorithm tailored to shape my perspective.
But I get it. Not everyone does it like me. But I think we have a big problem with algorithms and media literacy.
The filter bubble is absolutely terrible. I miss the days of having basically 3 equivalent TV news channels, plus newspapers. I trusted all of them, more or less, and their audience was everyone so they were fairly balanced and reasonable. These days everyone self-sorts into one media bubble or another because it’s completely fragmented and the people in other bubbles are painful to hear (“let’s just get rid of cars and force everyone to live in big cities!” or “Let’s talk to this former paste-eater about vaccines.”). It’s not that I want to live in a bubble, it’s that people are fucking crazy and I don’t want it around me.
But Google isn’t helping any of that. Google is full of ads and SEO and most of the time I go looking for things like product reviews there’s nothing remotely trustworthy in the results. I trust Wikipedia over a generic google search about most topics.
It’s so bad, I think I could get by with about a dozen bookmarks instead of Google. The signal to noise ratio for the internet as a whole is getting awful, and Google is keeping pace.
Sure. Mainstream media comes with it's very own set of issues. And I'm glad I have the internet available. But social media is bound to get you engaged in some drama or bubble instead of objective truth. I don't have any solution to offer. And I think the internet in general, is bound to get worse for some time to come. More AI, more noise, misinformation, enshittification. I think we're in for a dry spell in the near future. Maybe it get's better after that with some technological or societal advances. Maybe not, we're going to see. But it seems to me there are some people out there wishing for a better situation.
Well I’ll disagree with one thing: I give zero shits about gossip or internet drama. I’m not oblivious to it but I don’t care about the personal drama. There are trolls and heels of course, and much is made of them, but I don’t care.
Yeah I wish the situation was better, but it’s not going to get better. You said you’re happy to have the internet as options, and that’s what killed traditional journalism. We are probably all less well informed on the big stuff and much better informed on niche things these days. This is the direction of the world. Not global community and rising tides lifting all ships, but fracturing of the zeitgeist and growing division.
Good luck, world. I don’t know how to fix you, but I have faith that coming generations will figure something out after I’m gone, even if the future looks more like the Morlocks and Eloi from The Time Machine than Starfleet from Star Trek.
With "drama" I was going for the built-in drive towards negativity and sensationalist stuff. Like people complaining and sharing outrageous news that stirs them up. I think it's well established that people are more incentivised to engage with content they disagree with, rather than nuanced or positive things. I'm no exception. I've had a superb weekend, did a day trip with some friends, sports (climbing) etc. But somehow I don't talk about that on the internet but end up painting a dark picture about the near future. And my real-world conversations aren't like that. In face to face conversations I also talk about mundane stuff, what made my day, recommend positive things to friends... I think we have some unhealthy dynamics baked into internet talk, due to the way our platforms are set up and due to how attention works.
Sure. The internet killed newspapers. And there is no easy fix. We'd need easy payment methods, value the labour of the journalists... And that wasn't available when this happened. And nowadays we have a few other issues on top. Originally, the internet wasn't supposed to do any of that. It was supposed to connect people all around the globe. Make information available to everyone...
I think a lot of the unhealthy dynamics aren't baked into the internet itself, but due to people making everything about money and advertising. I think we (theoretically) could do without. And make the internet a very different place. It doesn't seem this is happening. But I still got some places (Linux forums etc) with a very different atmosphere. I'm not sure where we'll end up in like 15 years. Maybe after reaching rock bottom. I've also watched and read too much science fiction. Currently it looks to me like we're headed for the 2006 movie Idiocracy. But H G Wells is fine, too.
With “drama” I was going for the built-in drive towards negativity and sensationalist stuff.
Oh I got you. Yeah. That sucks. I’m probably going to have to keep myself less informed. I spent the first year of Trump arguing with people that every little thing he did wasn’t the literal worst thing in the world. He fired a bunch of political appointees, just like every President, and it was doomsday for a week. I can’t handle the handwringing every single day.
Even late in his presidency when he actually was doing terrible shit on a constant basis was so stressful. I swear it aged me ten years. I’m not doing that shit again.
We’d need easy payment methods, value the labour of the journalists
Yeah. The incentives are all fucked up in journalism now. No one pays for just solid news, it looks like. They pay for sensational bullshit with their wallets and attention.
I think a lot of the unhealthy dynamics aren’t baked into the internet itself, but due to people making everything about money and advertising
Yeah. Any fix which comes from changing people isn’t a fix at all. We aren’t going to change except through conditioning. Maybe education but that’s such a fucking uphill battle right now itself.
Worst part is, other than some wankery in the internet, most people aren’t interested in reflecting on this or making any attempt to solve it. I’m worried we’re headed into a cycle war and conflict after a hundred years of relative peace. Maybe that will change things, though that means change is in the other side of a lot of pain and suffering (which is a great catalyst for change but I don’t want my kids or grandkids to have to go through that).
In my case it’s Apple Maps, but to the larger question, to me it’s about the web search, which they have a custom algorithm and a monetary stake in gaming the results. You can certainly look at it differently, but “Googling” to answer questions is no longer useful the way it once was.
The thing with that is, it happily makes up business hours and venues. And you end up in some dark alley without any entertainment. Or a different kind than you envisioned...I doubt someone does this more than once or twice...
My younger sister searches tiktok for information and by that I mean she doesn’t even use the search feature. The topics just show up in her feed. She thinks she’s choosing/finding but is actually getting fed topics.
Its sad because everytime she tells me something she learned on tiktok I do like 2mins of research and find its not true or misleading. People lie about the most mundane things on that platform and I don’t know why.
Ya my little bro is the same. He’ll announce some thing he’s learned and it collapses under the barest scrutiny… I only hope that the rest of us are able to teach him to apply that scrutiny himself. It’s pretty scary how kids just accept shit, if you take that into adulthood… Well, I think we see the results all around us in the world.
That’s why I think those platforms should be banned, especially for children.
We’re creating a whole new generation of misinformed people.
luciferofastora@lemmy.zip
on 01 Dec 16:23
nextcollapse
I’d argue a different approach: Teach critical thinking and scepticism to children. Banning things makes it a race to keep up with whatever new thing comes up; it’s not a sustainable solution so much as a constant fixing of new holes without tackling why these things are so destructive.
I really think we need a monitored internet for under 13s. The internet is just to fucked up at the moment. I never thought I would be someone advocating for this because i grew up on the wild west internet watching people getting beheaded and stuff. But all that is nothing compared to being bombarded with friendly, trustworthy (seeming) people that constantly spread lies and misinformation that shapes your world view.
100% agree. I also grew up on the wild west, websites and things that were shocking or straight up illegal and are harder and harder to find nowadays (especially if you’re a kid that only uses apps on his/her smartphone).
When I was a kid, I knew that the things I was seeing were horrible, it was clear. But now kids watch complete misinformation that’s presented in a serious and interesting way. They have no way to tell the truth from a lie anymore.
This is partially why I kind of agree with the government ban. Tiktok does have some good information but it’s a lot of lowest common denominator stuff like all social media, the worst part is for non Chinese users ‘the algorithm’ pushes only dances and this misinformation or fights/arguments, while in China it’s more educational and musical stuff that’s promoted.
They say stuff that isn’t true because it gets them engagement from people who come to correct them. We figured out how to generate profit from misinformation.
You are seriously saying that AI is better than a normal Google search.
I understand there’s a lot of gaming this system going on but that’s better than AI. At least with a Google search you can read the sources and see how relevant they actually are, ai is just a black box.
Jocker@sh.itjust.works
on 01 Dec 09:54
nextcollapse
Honestly, i felt so multiple times.
Often, after googling and going through top results, when unable to find anything relevant… I ask perplexity and it gives a tailored answer and gets relevant sources.
I had been googling for more than a decade.
Not only that, but AI is a blackbox that doesn’t know anything and feeds you with random words in a plausible way. It’s just made up text with no knowledge whatsoever.
That’s why you use something like perplexity.ai instead of an LLM
It lists the sources where it found the information, so you can always doublecheck. The AI part is mostly just summarises of the websites that bypass the SEO bullshit.
iknowitwheniseeit@lemmynsfw.com
on 01 Dec 11:17
collapse
I use it when shopping online because DuckDuckGo is shit for shopping in Holland.
Jocker@sh.itjust.works
on 01 Dec 09:49
nextcollapse
Googling is for advertisers…
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
on 01 Dec 11:09
nextcollapse
Old people are the only ones with any money.
Halcyon@discuss.tchncs.de
on 01 Dec 11:43
collapse
The average American spent just over $60,000 a year in 2021, but spending habits vary significantly between age groups. Those born from 1965 to 1980 – spent the most money last year, with average expenditure of $83,357.
Which is why old people are the only ones with money.
They’ve paid off their houses. They’ve paid off their cars. Their income is higher, but their living expenses are lower, so their savings and investments are higher. They ultimately hold the notes on everyone else’s home loans and car loans.
Old people are the only ones with the disposable income accessible to advertisers. Old people are the only ones with money.
i was stuck having to watch traditional cable television over the holiday with the family, and jfc are there a lot of medication commercials spewed out of that thing.
The second threat is the rise of “answer engines” like Perplexity which, well, do what they say on the tin. OpenAI has added internet search to ChatGPT, Meta Platforms is exploring building its own search engine, and even AI chatbots that can’t search the internet are proving increasingly capable at addressing many questions. They’re also becoming ever more widespread, as Microsoft and Appleintegrate them directly into the operating systems of all the devices they make or support.
That is not an improvement, it’s just also not really any worse.
it’s an improvement in a way. today marketing for most businesses is 80% google ads, 20% facebook ads. google is massively manipulating google ads to practically steal money because they’re the only player in town. if adspace is spread thinner, google is fucked, and small business owners actually stand a chance against the big behemoths with infinite pockets.
threaded - newest
Another problem is they ruined their own search with AI.
Kicked themselves right in the nuts.
Their search algorithm was great.
They ruined it without AI before AI was commonplace. They ruined it with higher profit margins. 🥹
They ruined it by setting themselves as untouchable and wanting bigger profit margins than “richer than God” money.
Avid Amoeba is right that Google ruined their own search before LLMs entered the public consciousness (this does not mean LLMs didn’t exist before this, but that they were not widely available for the general public to use or became part of the zeitgeist).
If you don’t agree please listen to the Better Offline podcast episode “The Man That Destroyed Google Search”. The episode goes through the rollbacks/changes Google made to their search Algorithm well before AI was commonplace.
Yeah. Also I’m guessing their AI additions to search made their profit margins worse since they take a lot more computation to produce. Although they probably cache a lot of them for common searches.
Probably made the margins better because investors apparently still love hearing the word “AI” attached to shit
Even though that surely results in them being able to access more money and makes shareholders richer, that’s not a factor in profit margins. Profit margins are just about revenue vs cost. In this case - how much the make from each search vs how much it costs to produce that search.
I hope AI is the new metaverse. I’ll have a good chuckle when it all implodes.
Many people around me are using LLMs in many parts of their work al the time. Neutral networks are used in many useful situations. I feel exactly like you, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to cope with it.
The US National Weather Service releases updated 84-hour forecasts every 6 hours. Even with supercomputers at their disposal, due to the computational complexity of simulating physics, that is their best possible effort.
Google, meanwhile, is “developing a machine learning model that it says can accurately predict weather in seconds – not hours – and outperforms 90% of the targets used by the world’s best weather prediction systems.” Using a single desktop computer, they can generate a highly accurate 10-day forecast in under a minute.
More information:
weforum.org/…/ai-weather-forecasting-climate-cris…
Given this information, and given the enshittification of Google search, would you still make the same guess about their profit margins?
Yes. Search generally pulls data from databases. It doesn’t compute weather forecasts. The addition of AI results is net addition computation. In the worst case scenario where the generation of the AI results happens on-the-fly, that’s a lot more computation. I’m sure they pre-compute a lot of them so they’re not in the worst case scenario. However in the best case scenario they still have to do this new additional heavy (check LLM compute usage) computation once per result. So the profit margin for search is very likely lower than it used to be when isolating for this variable. If they’re somehow increasing their revenue from these results, that’s another variable that might offset it. I’ve no idea. What I’m certain about is the cost is higher after AI results were introduced because more energy is used.
That depends strongly on which “public” we are talking about - some extremely intelligent people I have talked to don’t even know what Reddit is. Old Google searches got bad, but if you scrolled down far enough, or added “reddit” to the search terms, they used to be salvageable. So it’s less of a hard cutoff and more of a long process that brought us to where we are today.
Public in this term has nothing to do with intelligence, but rather people outside of companies working on AI/LLMs or doing AI research. It’s why I mentioned it entering the zeitgeist.
I never mentioned a hard cutoff but said they ruined it before LLMs were in use by the general public. Essentially I’m referring to the starting of the degradation of Google’s search which they made conscious decisions that deliberately put profit above all.
My apologies that me being hyperbolic did not add clarity and instead caused confusion:-). Ultimately I agree, but was adding the point that users who were either savvy or dedicated enough could still get a lot of use out of Google until more recently, whereupon it is now just a huge mess that makes it more worthwhile to abandon completely (in favor of e.g. DuckDuckGo) - even though it was the demise of Reddit rather than the addition of LLMs that caused the sharp decline (+ other things too, e.g. there was a strike of mods at StackOverflow), i.e. Reddit (& others) was propping up Google results for the longest time, which does not excuse Google for allowing such instability, but helps explain the timeline wherein Google results were both “usable” (even if less so than the past) and also “degraded” at the same time.
It’s all good, we both clarified our* thoughts on the matter and to be fair using “ruined” instead of “ruining” or “started to ruin” indicates a completed process or final state instead of a continuous one.
I agree that previously one could construct a search to sort the noise out, but as you stated this has become unfeasible without a sharp increase of queries needed to refine results which has shifted the thought from questioning if Google search is bad to now generally accepted belief - to the point where people are trying to quantify and provide evidence to back up the claim.
This article links to a research paper on the topic: fastcompany.com/…/is-google-getting-worse-this-is…
*Fixed typo of ‘out’ to ‘our’
If I can go on a tangent: it is conversations like this that continually convince me that I need never go back to Reddit. Not EVERY SINGLE conversation needs to be full of snark and vitriol. Being able to discuss things rationally, calmly, and with kindness is possible, if only people will create the space within which they are allowed to happen:-).
And how that relates is: using DuckDuckGo convinced me similarly to abandon Google:-). Caveats include using Google Images, Google Maps, etc. e.g. to look up the hours of a shop (the SEO optimization there works for rather than against me, although tbf quite often I have to bat away unrelated results vying for my increased attention due merely to having paid for that exact privilege), but overall the results of DDG are just extremely much more worth my time than Google’s.
As an example, if you search for the keyword “Lemmy”, DDG pulls up Lemmy.World as the #2 hit (which notably has ~80% of all active users on Lemmy, so is overwhelmingly deserving of being listed so highly), after the #1 hit being the singer, whereas on Google the first instance mentioned is Lemmy.ml (that has 2,206 active monthly users, compared to Lemmy.World’s 17,122 that is roughly an order of magnitude higher, and also housing the most-used communities e.g. !technology@lemmy.world has 16.9k active monthly users compared to !asklemmy@lemmy.ml’s top community with 8.44K), and that not until the #4 hit.
i.e., not only are Google results commodified, but as you said they are “ruined” as well - to the point of representing actual & active disinformation (for the sake of $$$) rather than merely misinformation (aka oopsies). We can scroll past one, two, even ten ads, but how do we find our info when the sorting refuses to distinguish between SEO-advanced results and “real” ones? I dunno, perhaps the above one is a poor example (edit: b/c in the past, Lemmy.ml really was the top Lemmy instance, for so very long), but I think you know what I mean regardless:-).
They specifically made search less accurate so that users would search multiple times to boost the number of ads that get displayed to juice their numbers for quarterly earnings. You can blame Prabhakar Raghavan.
I do like how AI works for referencing articles. You can tap on any sentence in the summary and it will display all links that contain that source information. It’s actually pretty useful.
I find that in many cases, if you actually click the link to find the sourced information, it’s not there. I’ve experienced this with nearly every LLM front-end platform.
They’re even shoving AI into Youtube by placing a summary in plain text below some videos now. Don’t know if it’s opt-in or just randomly placed for testing but so far I’m not impressed because it skips over important things. I’m honestly puzzled as to why the hell they’re doing this.
They get revenue from the pre roll ad while you read the summary. Then they don’t have to pay the creator when you click away before watching.
And then they’ll stop having creators creating free content for their advertisement sceme to work. Genius!
Their search was shit before AI. Unless you like pinterest and quora spam.
It’s fucking awful with our without AI in 2024.
What’s not being talked about here is that young people don’t seem to give a damn if the information they research is accurate or not, it’s whether or not it’s peddled by their preferred streamer. Those “other platforms” are apparently Tiktok and Netflix, not exactly places known for speaking truth to power.
I’ve spent twenty years trying to believe that the children will be the saviors of the future, but I think maybe the conservatives actually succeeded in murdering education in it’s crib. I am now nearly fully on team “You know, maybe these kids actually are a bunch of dumb fucks who won’t save us after all.”
This isn’t a young person problem and it isn’t new, it’s just getting worse. See Fox news on Trump 8 years ago or more through now
I can see your point when talking about broader topics that people tend to absorb over time (politics, social dilemmas, economical condition) but this is more about users intentionally searching narrower topics. What’s wrong with my code, how do I fix my car, what computer should I buy, what’s the best way to get rid of termites - those kinds of things.
I unashamedly call myself an expert about exactly one car. I learned everything from it’s most popular forum from 2010-2015. I admin a Facebook group for it. When I started just on the dedicated forum, we’d get basic questions all the time about super common issues but a few links to good threads and recommendations about using Google with site:thisforum added helped avoid “repeat customers” in the future. That’s gone. The forum is forgotten because original owners have sold and new owners don’t know about it. No one wants to make an account on a site for just one topic these days when Facebook and reddit are so easy to use. Shitty answer sites following in the footsteps of Yahoo Answers (such as quora, fixya, and justanswer) have dominated normal Google searches. Google often suggests appending “reddit” to searches which is an improvement over those sites, but still atrocious for unpopular niche topics such as my forgotten car, in comparison to the forum. Having an existing account on reddit or Facebook promotes joining a relevant group/sub, not even knowing how to vet them for accuracy, and just blind-firing questions into the void. Google can sparse reddit, but the internal reddit search is rough. Facebook is locked down and the search is even worse. As I’ve joined other groups for cars I know less about, I can’t beleive the abysmal quality of answers I’ve gotten myself. People act as if I personally sent them a letter requesting information and I get answers that are overly generic, downright useless as they say they don’t know, or tell me to try something I said in my main post I already tried. This is the state of the world. None of these platforms value solutions, they value interaction for the sake of user volume. Wanna know why FB Marketplace is continually awful to sift through? Because every minute spent groaning about irrelevant listings and ignoring search parameters is another minute not given to Craigslist, kajiji, or any other classifieds. They don’t need you to win, they need the competition to lose.
I don’t want to hear anyone’s bullshit about ditching reddit and meta. We’re a microscopic niche of the internet, here on the fediverse. Our little bubble is not swaying half the fucking planet off meta. Do not act smug and say just go back to the original forums when they’re dead/devoid/deactivated because a handful of corporations socially engineered the ideal content streaming platforms.
Blaming kids for being dumb is a cop out. You have niche knowledge from your era about vetting content and avoiding scams/misinformation. You’re saying new kids are dumb in those regards. I bet you think older people are dumb in those regards too. Please realize both of those groups have their own niches and think you’re dumb, too, in some other topic. You are the peak of a decade, not a century. I don’t know your age, you don’t know mine, but consider this quote:
“Our youth now love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders, and they love to chatter instead of exercise. Children are now tyrants not servants of their household. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”
Sound accurate? Look up who said it.
There’s a big difference between “all kids are terrible today” and “some people have very successfully dismantled the education system, and it’s impacting our youth to a point where we can’t trust their levels of education can protect them against capitalism run amok.”
To be clearer: failure to educate is squarely on adults not on children.
That’s not what I see in your parent comment. “young people don’t seem to give a damn” and “I’m nearly fully on team ‘young people are dumb fucks and won’t save us after all’”
I’ve been dealing with more zoomer-and-younger kids and uh, it’s less that we can’t trust that their education level will protect them from the evils of capitalism, but more that we can’t even trust that their levels of education are sufficient for them to be able to both read and write, nevermind more complicated things like determining the accuracy of factual data and be able to make a reasonable decision based on you know, critical thinking and analysis.
It’s shockingly dire in a lot of places, and it’s unlikely to improve, at least in the US, since nobody values education and nobody wants to fund education, and we just elected a pile of geriatric rich white people that think we don’t need to do anything but add more Jesus.
And yeah, as adults we’ve absolutely failed the two most recent generations, and are going to epically, epically fuck up the next one too.
Kids are as smart as we used to be. And we didn’t save the then-future, now-present. Same deal with boomers.
Names will change, corporations will change, investors will stay the same. For us things won’t get meaningfully better or worse than they are.
This is the big problem. Kids are trusting search results from a Chinese propaganda platform, and they don’t give a shit.
at least it’s not American propaganda
This implies TikTok would have some incentive to propagandize their users that Google wouldn’t also have. Google does corporate American propaganda, which many Americans have been acclimated to and thus don’t perceive as propaganda.
You could argue a state has a right to propagandize its own citizens to counter foreign adversarial influence. I’m not saying it does but a state should have its populations best interests in mind compared to a foreign adversary.
States don’t have rights, people have rights.
Its the older folks who muddled the walls between editorial and factual reporting, and now thats come home to roost. There are no facts anymore, and very little real journalism anymore. Theres no truth, justice, democracy, or human dignity either. Its not tiktok or youtube who led us where we are, its the double-be-damned boomers and centrists.
It’s not so much that they don’t give a damn, but that they can’t tell. I taught some basic English courses with a research component (most students in their first college semester), and I’d drag them to the library each semester for a boring day on how to generate topics, how to discern scholarly sources, then use databases like EBSCO or JSTOR to find articles to support arguments in the essays they’d be writing for the next couple years. Inevitably, I’d get back papers with so-and-so’s blog cited, PraegerU, Wikipedia, or Google’s own search results. Here’s where a lot of the problem lies: discerning sources, and knowing how to use syntax in searches, which is itself becoming irrelevant on Google etc. but NOT academic databases. So why take the time to give the “and” and “or” and “after: 1980” and “type: peer-reviewed” when you can just write a natural-language question into a search engine and get an answer right away that seems legit in the snippet? I’d argue the tech is the problem because it encourages a certain type of inquiry and quick answers that are plausible, but more often than not, lacking in any credibility.
I think my kid is gonna be just fine. He rarely believes anything i tell em without follow up evidence…He’s 5.
But Ive always focused on critical thinking skills from as early as possible.
You must understand that you are part of an infinitesimal minority.
It makes me sad as I observe the wider population 😭
Youre gonna have to write fully cited and sourced academic papers to convince him to clean his room.
Heh, it’s been a struggle of complying with authority on simple/mundane task. But slowly its getting away from it
Is it the tech? Or is it media literacy?
I’ve messed around with AI on a lark, but would never dream of using it on anything important. I feel like it’s pretty common knowledge that AI will just make shit up if it wants to, so even when I’m just playing around with it I take everything it says with a heavy grain of salt.
I think ease of use is definitely a component of it, but in reading your message I can’t help but wonder if the problem instead lies in critical engagement. Can they read something and actively discern whether the source is to be trusted? Or are they simply reading what is put in front of them then turning around to you and saying “well, this is what the magic box says. I don’t know what to tell you.”.
No, they also dont give a shit.
People of all ages have great people and awful people in them. Always has been so and always will be.
"I’ve heard of RFK Jr. and he says vaccines are bad. He’s more famous than scientists, so I believe him for exposing their corruption. "
I can’t wait for humanity to go extinct.
I still use Google search without an issue, just de-bullshitted by the whoogle frontend.
why jump through hoops to keep using Google instead of just using another search engine
Mental inertia. It’s the same kind of thinking that keeps some people using Windows. They’ve convinced themselves that the option with the familiar name will take less effort to learn than the one with the new name, when in fact the mental effort required to make the familiar-named thing work properly is greater.
switching OS and switching search engines are in completely different universes but I do agree with the point
Okay, it’s more like the people who all refused to leave Xitter until recently. It took something very like the original Twitter (Bluesky) for them to finally get the mental gumption to make the switch. Prior to that, mental inertia kept them in place.
I have gotten more reliable results from Google than other search engines even if it involves a middle man service that removes the bullshit
What’s a better search engine in your opinion?
startpage (basically hardened google), mojeek, kagi, ddg all solid
y thankyou!
I would like two search engines displaying results side by side whenever I do a search. There’s so much empty space on a wide screen display anyway.
Maybe I should check if there’s an addon for this…
This is an excellent idea. Did you happen to find any?
Not really no!
There was a “Multi Web Search” by Oleksandr for Firefox but it was last updated five years ago. It also intermingles the results whereas I would’ve liked to see them side by side (to compare how different search engines rank the sites)
The SearX feature the other guy mentioned might be the best bet!
Not sure if it’s what you’re looking for, but a searx instance can return commingled results from multiple engines
Thanks - I’ll have to look into this!
I guess you’re too young to remember the good old days of dogpile searching on four engines within one page.
Remember ask Jeeves?
I’d have Ask Jeeves, Hotbot, and Yahoo opened when I was trawling the Internet for porn while my parents were out for 30m when I was 14 years old. There were always substantially different results, though somehow they always ended up the same: with me infecting my parents’ computer with some shit. Let’s say I did a lot of learning from my mistakes.
Remember the porn networks that tried to get you to download their software to connect, and then it ended up being a dialer to a 900 number?
That is funny, and sounds like it’d be pretty expensive. I actually didn’t encounter this fortunately, because I was already costing my parents a fortune because I just couldn’t stay under 300 texts a month.
Hah! It would seem so!
Stopped using google some time ago.
searx.space
Have you seen a Gen Z-er trying to research something on the internet?
It's almost like the tools they were taught to use were crippled out from under them in the name of serving more ads.
Well as the builders of the current distopian present we were told all the time that we needed to create user interfaces and services where people would not need to know anything about tech and there was always a “design for the dumb user” since forever.
This is what we get by pushing that narrative I guess.
It’s kinda wild to me. I used to think that as a millennial the next generation would be more technically savvy than mine for similar reasons to why my generation was more technically savvy than the last. That doesn’t quite seem to have panned out and I’m not sure if I’m just not seeing things right or if technical literacy is really that much on the decline.
I was totally unaware of how bad it is until I actually read some current teachers describe horrrors of how the incoming students were so unprepared about technical literacy. It’s freaking scary.
We really designed the society as it is and we’re going to suffer the consequences for a long time.
To me it just means job security. But I get you, some of those people will become your boss…and it generally sucks.
I’ll confess I’ve had the same thought… but I feel like the problem is deeper than that. If people don’t have basic awareness of the devices they rely on then they in danger of becoming victims of those who do. I’d point to your average boomer on Facebook to illustrate that point.
Ok, but answer me this! Without those ads, would you even know that George Washington crossed the delaware with delicious chunky cambells soup!
What?
Those chunky soups with 130 calories and 22% of your needs in protein, ideal for a hard day of work?
Ahh well, I didn’t know that!
Honestly it usually starts with chatgpt or ai. I’ve been watching my younger coworkers.
It’s not a bad thing per-say but sometimes it’s wildly wrong and they don’t question where it comes from. Which bites them when we do reviews/code.
I think you mean per se.
www.dictionary.com/e/per-say-or-per-se/
“sometimes it’s wildly wrong and they don’t question where it comes from”
A stark difference from google results surely
What? I Google stuff all the time. Just not on Google (DuckDuckGo or Qwant)
I hate to say it, but DDG results are shit. The only half-decent competition I’ve found is yandex, and I don’t really trust it.
I was Googling just fine until Google ruined it with “SEO” and AI so that completely irrelevant results dominate the first 2 or 3 pages.
It’s this last two years where it has gotten really bad in my opinion. Before you could at least navigate the ads ridden site. Now base Google search is tremendously worse.
YouTube search is SO MUCH WORSE now. it just gives up and shows random stuff after like 3 results
I searched “friends invited me to lethal company”. I got 6 results (one of which is a song?) before it gave up and showed “people also watched this” and “you might like this” aka anything even semi related to Lethal Company
<img alt="" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/89ae7d4c-bbb8-44ae-a594-d1c4edf22bf0.jpeg">
Don’t get me wrong, fuck google, but how much can we blame google for SEO? That’s just people gaming the system, and they’d be doing it no matter how google presented their results.
Maybe there is a whole cooperation aspect that I’m not aware of.
They can only game the system because Google made a system like that possible and has never done anything to combat the gaming of it.
Right, but we know how people are (look at torrenting, piracy, drm, etc.), and people would figure out ways to gamify it no matter what, I believe. But you are correct that they don’t seem to necessarily have any interest in stopping it. Because of course not, it’s all about the bottom line.
Come on man I don’t like google either, but SEO exploitation has been a cat and mouse game since search engines were invented. They’re all varying levels of suck the last few years. It’s not an easy problem to solve, and AI has made it far more difficult.
Google did a rollback of anti-SEO indexing features because the intention is that users issue more searches. Ever since the ads side of the business won the war for the soul of Google the experience has gotten worse on purpose.
Article is behind a paywall, what does it say “young people” do instead of “googling”?
I can’t see through the paywall either, but if it’s like any of the hundreds of other articles that have been written on this topic, the answer is probably TikTok
Non paywalled version: archive.today/?run=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.co…
And how do non-old people navigate the web? I mean I get it, you don't need to google the Wikipedia article about the French Revolution... You can ask AI. But how do you find business hours for the repair shop downtown? Which website sells the concert tickets? News from yesterday? The forum that tells you if 32GB of RAM fit into your laptop?
News from yesterday? You mean your social media feed of choice?
Forum that tells you if 32GB of RAM fit into your laptop?
Are you confusing RAM with storage?
I’m pretty sure it’s tongue in cheek of the average person who doesn’t know much about tech.
That’s kinda what I thought, but the way it’s presented made my question if they were serious or not.
It is tongue in cheek, yes.
Hours and menus normally come from Maps. News often comes from social media, unfortunately. But Google rarely helps me there either. Concert tickets is probably an app or venue website (but I don’t really go to many concerts because fuck Ticketmaster).
Not that I don’t Google stuff, but it’s way less useful than it used to be.
I’m over fifty (though fuck does it feel unreal to say that).
You can often (though not always) buy tickets directly from the venue in person or over the phone. You avoid Ticketmaster fees this way, though they may end up emailing you the ticket in Ticketmaster anyway.
Sure. I'm living in a different filter bubble anyways. Ticketmaster seems to be big but it isn't the only platform where I live. I guess I'm not really mainstream and I go to smaller concerts, festivals, art museums. And a lot of them have different ticket services. So I usually end up googling them and following the trail of links to the individual ticket shop.
I'm 10 years younger than you. Maybe a bit more. I grew up with the rise of social media. I still despise how it confines me into a filter bubble. Makes my world smaller (despite connecting me with the world) by choosing my perspective. I take care to occasionally read local news. And not take my political perspective from platforms with an algorithm tailored to shape my perspective.
But I get it. Not everyone does it like me. But I think we have a big problem with algorithms and media literacy.
The filter bubble is absolutely terrible. I miss the days of having basically 3 equivalent TV news channels, plus newspapers. I trusted all of them, more or less, and their audience was everyone so they were fairly balanced and reasonable. These days everyone self-sorts into one media bubble or another because it’s completely fragmented and the people in other bubbles are painful to hear (“let’s just get rid of cars and force everyone to live in big cities!” or “Let’s talk to this former paste-eater about vaccines.”). It’s not that I want to live in a bubble, it’s that people are fucking crazy and I don’t want it around me.
But Google isn’t helping any of that. Google is full of ads and SEO and most of the time I go looking for things like product reviews there’s nothing remotely trustworthy in the results. I trust Wikipedia over a generic google search about most topics.
It’s so bad, I think I could get by with about a dozen bookmarks instead of Google. The signal to noise ratio for the internet as a whole is getting awful, and Google is keeping pace.
Sure. Mainstream media comes with it's very own set of issues. And I'm glad I have the internet available. But social media is bound to get you engaged in some drama or bubble instead of objective truth. I don't have any solution to offer. And I think the internet in general, is bound to get worse for some time to come. More AI, more noise, misinformation, enshittification. I think we're in for a dry spell in the near future. Maybe it get's better after that with some technological or societal advances. Maybe not, we're going to see. But it seems to me there are some people out there wishing for a better situation.
Well I’ll disagree with one thing: I give zero shits about gossip or internet drama. I’m not oblivious to it but I don’t care about the personal drama. There are trolls and heels of course, and much is made of them, but I don’t care.
Yeah I wish the situation was better, but it’s not going to get better. You said you’re happy to have the internet as options, and that’s what killed traditional journalism. We are probably all less well informed on the big stuff and much better informed on niche things these days. This is the direction of the world. Not global community and rising tides lifting all ships, but fracturing of the zeitgeist and growing division.
Good luck, world. I don’t know how to fix you, but I have faith that coming generations will figure something out after I’m gone, even if the future looks more like the Morlocks and Eloi from The Time Machine than Starfleet from Star Trek.
With "drama" I was going for the built-in drive towards negativity and sensationalist stuff. Like people complaining and sharing outrageous news that stirs them up. I think it's well established that people are more incentivised to engage with content they disagree with, rather than nuanced or positive things. I'm no exception. I've had a superb weekend, did a day trip with some friends, sports (climbing) etc. But somehow I don't talk about that on the internet but end up painting a dark picture about the near future. And my real-world conversations aren't like that. In face to face conversations I also talk about mundane stuff, what made my day, recommend positive things to friends... I think we have some unhealthy dynamics baked into internet talk, due to the way our platforms are set up and due to how attention works.
Sure. The internet killed newspapers. And there is no easy fix. We'd need easy payment methods, value the labour of the journalists... And that wasn't available when this happened. And nowadays we have a few other issues on top. Originally, the internet wasn't supposed to do any of that. It was supposed to connect people all around the globe. Make information available to everyone...
I think a lot of the unhealthy dynamics aren't baked into the internet itself, but due to people making everything about money and advertising. I think we (theoretically) could do without. And make the internet a very different place. It doesn't seem this is happening. But I still got some places (Linux forums etc) with a very different atmosphere. I'm not sure where we'll end up in like 15 years. Maybe after reaching rock bottom. I've also watched and read too much science fiction. Currently it looks to me like we're headed for the 2006 movie Idiocracy. But H G Wells is fine, too.
Oh I got you. Yeah. That sucks. I’m probably going to have to keep myself less informed. I spent the first year of Trump arguing with people that every little thing he did wasn’t the literal worst thing in the world. He fired a bunch of political appointees, just like every President, and it was doomsday for a week. I can’t handle the handwringing every single day.
Even late in his presidency when he actually was doing terrible shit on a constant basis was so stressful. I swear it aged me ten years. I’m not doing that shit again.
Yeah. The incentives are all fucked up in journalism now. No one pays for just solid news, it looks like. They pay for sensational bullshit with their wallets and attention.
Yeah. Any fix which comes from changing people isn’t a fix at all. We aren’t going to change except through conditioning. Maybe education but that’s such a fucking uphill battle right now itself.
Worst part is, other than some wankery in the internet, most people aren’t interested in reflecting on this or making any attempt to solve it. I’m worried we’re headed into a cycle war and conflict after a hundred years of relative peace. Maybe that will change things, though that means change is in the other side of a lot of pain and suffering (which is a great catalyst for change but I don’t want my kids or grandkids to have to go through that).
Have a good one, mate.
If it’s Google maps, wouldn’t it still be considered googling since it used the same search engine?
In my case it’s Apple Maps, but to the larger question, to me it’s about the web search, which they have a custom algorithm and a monetary stake in gaming the results. You can certainly look at it differently, but “Googling” to answer questions is no longer useful the way it once was.
Under the “advanced” dropdown swap the search to ‘verbatim’ and that gets you like 80% back to the way Google used to work
You ask your AI assistant.
The thing with that is, it happily makes up business hours and venues. And you end up in some dark alley without any entertainment. Or a different kind than you envisioned...I doubt someone does this more than once or twice...
My younger sister searches tiktok for information and by that I mean she doesn’t even use the search feature. The topics just show up in her feed. She thinks she’s choosing/finding but is actually getting fed topics.
Its sad because everytime she tells me something she learned on tiktok I do like 2mins of research and find its not true or misleading. People lie about the most mundane things on that platform and I don’t know why.
Oh my… searching TikTok for information is so misleading and so encouraged by the platform…
Ya my little bro is the same. He’ll announce some thing he’s learned and it collapses under the barest scrutiny… I only hope that the rest of us are able to teach him to apply that scrutiny himself. It’s pretty scary how kids just accept shit, if you take that into adulthood… Well, I think we see the results all around us in the world.
That’s why I think those platforms should be banned, especially for children.
We’re creating a whole new generation of misinformed people.
I’d argue a different approach: Teach critical thinking and scepticism to children. Banning things makes it a race to keep up with whatever new thing comes up; it’s not a sustainable solution so much as a constant fixing of new holes without tackling why these things are so destructive.
I dont think critical thinking is enough. If you apply critical thinking to a media landscape full of lies you will still come out wrong.
What else do you suggest?
I dont know its a hard problem to solve. Above my paygrade thats for sure.
I really think we need a monitored internet for under 13s. The internet is just to fucked up at the moment. I never thought I would be someone advocating for this because i grew up on the wild west internet watching people getting beheaded and stuff. But all that is nothing compared to being bombarded with friendly, trustworthy (seeming) people that constantly spread lies and misinformation that shapes your world view.
100% agree. I also grew up on the wild west, websites and things that were shocking or straight up illegal and are harder and harder to find nowadays (especially if you’re a kid that only uses apps on his/her smartphone).
When I was a kid, I knew that the things I was seeing were horrible, it was clear. But now kids watch complete misinformation that’s presented in a serious and interesting way. They have no way to tell the truth from a lie anymore.
This is partially why I kind of agree with the government ban. Tiktok does have some good information but it’s a lot of lowest common denominator stuff like all social media, the worst part is for non Chinese users ‘the algorithm’ pushes only dances and this misinformation or fights/arguments, while in China it’s more educational and musical stuff that’s promoted.
It’s because the truth is boring, sad, and unnoteworthy. That doesn’t make for good you know what viral videos.
They say stuff that isn’t true because it gets them engagement from people who come to correct them. We figured out how to generate profit from misinformation.
I don’t even know why people use Google anymore besides maps and restaurant data. The rest is all SEO corporate junk.
I search directly on medical and research / studies sites now. The rest I use AI.
You are seriously saying that AI is better than a normal Google search.
I understand there’s a lot of gaming this system going on but that’s better than AI. At least with a Google search you can read the sources and see how relevant they actually are, ai is just a black box.
Honestly, i felt so multiple times.
Often, after googling and going through top results, when unable to find anything relevant… I ask perplexity and it gives a tailored answer and gets relevant sources. I had been googling for more than a decade.
Not only that, but AI is a blackbox that doesn’t know anything and feeds you with random words in a plausible way. It’s just made up text with no knowledge whatsoever.
That’s why you use something like perplexity.ai instead of an LLM
It lists the sources where it found the information, so you can always doublecheck. The AI part is mostly just summarises of the websites that bypass the SEO bullshit.
I use it when shopping online because DuckDuckGo is shit for shopping in Holland.
I believe DuckDuckGo uses Bing as it’s underlying search engine, which explains a lot.
.
Googling is for advertisers…
Old people are the only ones with any money.
The average American spent just over $60,000 a year in 2021, but spending habits vary significantly between age groups. Those born from 1965 to 1980 – spent the most money last year, with average expenditure of $83,357.
weforum.org/…/americans-spend-their-money-by-gene…
Which is why old people are the only ones with money.
They’ve paid off their houses. They’ve paid off their cars. Their income is higher, but their living expenses are lower, so their savings and investments are higher. They ultimately hold the notes on everyone else’s home loans and car loans.
Old people are the only ones with the disposable income accessible to advertisers. Old people are the only ones with money.
i was stuck having to watch traditional cable television over the holiday with the family, and jfc are there a lot of medication commercials spewed out of that thing.
I’ve almost forgotten how shitty Google has become. Been using kagi search for a year now.
It’s so nice to get clean unbiased search results.
Can’t read this article thanks to shitty paywall. Yet it has 28 trackers even tho it just need pure HTML
<img alt="Shitty Trackers" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c52c667b-4559-421f-b3e7-bbacd55b6e57.png">
Edit: thank you for archive link OP!
jakeukalane.github.io/archiving.html
That is not an improvement, it’s just also not really any worse.
it’s an improvement in a way. today marketing for most businesses is 80% google ads, 20% facebook ads. google is massively manipulating google ads to practically steal money because they’re the only player in town. if adspace is spread thinner, google is fucked, and small business owners actually stand a chance against the big behemoths with infinite pockets.
But in terms of actual information it could be worse thanks to AI hallucinations and poor training materials.