I feel like Google’s crap results predate the AI tech by at least five years. It has been garbage SEO stuff for a while.
I feel so bad for the younger folks these days.
Way back when, if Google couldn't find it and we did some good Google Fu, it probably wasn't readily available online.
Now, you know it probably is there, just buried in nonsense generated purely by layer after layer of people's selfishness. And they never even knew it could be any other way.
It's a sick joke that we've celebrated being in the "information age" for the last 20-25 years, and now that information is being obfuscated by various means again.
SEO, censorship, paywalls.
it's not the information age, it's the data age.
Information implies usefulness. Data is just data. Could be right, could be wrong, who knows.
Now we have graduated to the disinformation age:-(
Woah, with 5 years you guessed correct, google decided to kill search accuracy for profits 5 years ago, in 2019
It does.
Straight out of college in 2015 I did some SEO sidehustling. We'd get blogs writing for cheap by fiverr people, adjusted it a bit, and they ranked high very easily based on certain keywords for the industry. Those blogs were just random bullshit (AI does a better job for a short story), jargon was on point but the content was just snakeoil. Business went thriving.
This unironically is what I/my peers do with resume/cover letters for job/internship applications nowadays. My friend actually has a decent beer moneymaker for building optimized resumes for other people on campus.
The whole system we're playing in is so fucked.
But the SEO garbage sites active up to 2023 have updated since 2023 to keep up with each other.
So it works really well.
It has been garbage SEO stuff for a while.
garbabe SEO has been there since almost the beginning. More recently google started to promote sites base on their profitableness.
Remember when you could suppress sites from Google search results? Due to "unknowable reasons", they got rid of that feature. Enshittification is real.
This has the bonus side effect of being able to ignore any news that happened since 2023 to gaslight yourself into thinking that we're not all living in a hellscape of a world
I think the news in 2022 was still pretty hellish. I'm going to go with (before:2013). Some hell still, but a naively optimistic hell
You'd need to go back to pre 2012 for that
Little further than that. Further... Keep going until you see fish legs.
And then SEO optimiser add the tag "before:2023"
Thanks, I hate it.
I know its a joke but using Google dorks has always been the most effective way of searching. There was a period of like 4 or a bit more years where you didn't need them anymore because engines actually got good. Now though they're more useful than ever.
nowadays, all tabs look like the shopping tab
also the shopping tab, if you're actually shopping, is completely fucking useless.
Commercialization of everything.
That's what inevitably happens when you give a mega corp like Google all of that power over you, your life, and your data by simply using their products. Ultimately, they then get to decide who you are and how you act. And it's in their benefit to shape everything, including you, in their corporate image.
People don't notice how much they're getting fucked on an individual basis until the consequences of the actions of millions or billions of people adds up and comes back around in the form of something stupid and obvious like Manifest V3, SEO everywhere, WEI, or the doublespeak "privacy sandbox" comes to bite you in the ass. Enshittification everywhere and even then most people still don't care.
We're their cattle and we're choosing to walk into a slaughterhouse with our eyes wide open. In more ways than one. As fun as the game is, I really do not want to actually live in Cyberpunk.
ive been saying this for 20+ years, and people still don't fucking listen. fuck, apple users still exist!
also: what about a 'shadowrun' campaign gm'd by a severely concussed Kurt Vonnegut as he dies of dysentery at the table?
This beats using "reddit" because that site has also become full of ai generated and bot spam/product astroturfing
Google's slow demise is entirely expected late-stage enshittification.
What is frustrating is that search is mostly a solved problem. Crawling and indexing are solved problems. Fighting adversarial SEO is a continuous task, that Google Search is essentially refusing to perform but is clearly cheap enough for an upstart like Kagi to do reasonably well (their only added-value is the aggregation and filtering of other indexers such as google and mojeek, and let's be honest it's probably 99% google's index powering Kagi).
This shows that the lack of meaningful competition in the space is actually merely a matter of capital. There are too many webpages to scrape, process, and save and nothing short of "indexing almost as much stuff as google" is going to cut it.
In the software world we're used to seeing FOSS alternatives to most things, because software's capital costs are typically almost equal to manpower costs. However for search this doesn't work, just like it historically hasn't worked too well for some really expensive software (such as audiovisual creation tools, with the notable exceptions of Blender and to a lesser extent Krita).
There should be a well-funded non-profit building and providing a high-quality, exhaustive, transparent and open-source indexing service for the world. It definitely sounds possible, and even rather easy in the grand scheme of things. Yet current economic incentives do not favor such models. However I do wonder if there are not options to be explored, such as distributed crawlers or even a distributed index (after looking it up, YaCy seems to be doing just that though at a glance it seems, uh, old and clunky). Or maybe the EU should finally put a real focus on meaningfully funding indigenous FOSS R&D so the enshittification process of American tech giants doesn't crush us as well.
Just done 4 searches and got the exact same results regardless of "before:2023"
It's because these are two idiots trying to sound smart. I have used pre-2015 searches, because sometime between 2009-2016 is when SEO in general started being used. The AI generation just kicked it into high gear. Stuff before 2015 at least appears to offer information that isn't just reworded lists of advertisements.
I started switching everything to duckduckgo. So far it's been a much better experience.
I set DDG as my default a while back and I'm finding myself having to open Google all the time to get results.
Works great for old stuff, now how do I look up stuff on the bridge collapse near me last week?
go to the actual site, it's near you.
Oh good I am sure I can find out the eta of when the bypass will be built from the broken bridge.
The new episode of the Better Offline podcast is the first in a three part series on the death of the web. I'm halfway through and would recommend it. It's a good show just in general.
Is this podcast available online?
No you have to send a postcard to a PO box and then they send you back a cassette tape. With a free pencil to fix it when it inevitably unravels.
The year is 2235, and the warp drive has been invented. I go to search Google for the latest news on the tech but remember this old bit of advice from an old meme that was floating around almost 2 centuries ago I saw once while lurking in the Ancient Memes community. All I find are things taken from fiction. Only about 25% are factually accurate.
This only makes sense for a very limited set of things tho. The things where AI makes a difference are art stuff, news and creative writing stuff. What purpose do news from before 2023 have? Maybe for research purposes it filters out some bullshit but then you also miss out anything relevant that happened after 2022.
I think you've got it backwards. This only excludes new information from the past two years. Literally everything else is majorly improved.
I believe they're arguing that AI is particularly used in news, and when looking up news, you're typically seeking current events, in which case excluding post 2023 content doesn't work.
In my opinion, the place I encounter AI content the most is in list content, not just clickbait lists but also stuff where multiple products are compared. If I'm looking up what laptop to get, AI articles pop up comparing 10 products with inaccurate and messy details, but also I don't want to see old products.
Also IMO, in many cases Google search has been useless for 6+ years now. I think it was around 2018 where I started ending my search terms in 'reddit' because the first few articles were poorly advised clickbait, especially when looking for any advice (Reddit of course went to shit anyway). Google is only useful now for navigating to popular sites that will inevitably float to the top of any search query due to popularity. The only other common use for me is correcting typos when autocorrect is stumped.
Sadly, most of my searches need more recent answers. Software & hardware (when it comes to coding/tech/IT) and information about local businesses can change quickly and old information usually ends up being just wrong.
Google is really, really letting me down and wasting a lot of my time these days.
Just imagine - everyone who write content that's worth anything these days start dating their newest posts as if they were written in 2023, creating a community within still frame of a better time. It's like Old School RuneScape, but for the internet.
You could also just avoid Google. They haven’t been reliable for two decades.
For what? DDG results are just as bad, if not worse.
Ironically I find myself using Bing more often than not, for it's Copilot AI. It has a tendency to just repeat the same incorrect information when it can't find what you want, but it's still better than anything I get from a search engine, that is, not without adding site:reddit.com to my queries, and for obvious reasons, I don't want to have to keep doing that.
Please share your secret. What magical unknown search engine are you using that is immune to AI-generated nonsense?
An alternative that actually uses its own web crawlers https://mojeek.com
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
