Here’s my theory… Google wants to artificially fuck up it’s search functionality. It wants to offer good performance for a fee. And it’s going to be doing that by giving it’s own AI the correct filters while at the same time tripping every other AI capable of searching the net such that the other AI results become garbage and only the Google one works correctly. Anyway that’s my conspiracy theory, fuck Google with a bunch of sharp forks.
Or they just cannot complete with literal millions of people attempting to optimize their webpages for discovery using Google.
If other services like kagi can offer better results they should be able as well, right?
I think it’s simply a question of what are Google’s interests. Users doesn’t pay anything to Google for the service, so that’s not where Google’s interests are. Advertisers pay Google, so that’s where Google’s interests are. Google has no interests to make the search better for users, they want to make it better for advertisers.
They still need to make the system appealing to users.
If users had higher standards, then Google would have to meet those standards or lose out on business.
I’m finding that LLMs are doing a better job for searching for new things. If I have a question, instead of going to google or bing I’ll goto chatGPT and ask some of that nature with some sources for further reading.
Never would I think that I would need to use AI to answer simple search and yet here we are because the sole purpose of a search engine doesn’t really exist anymore.
The problem is, you can’t trust ChatGPT to not lie to you.
And since generative AI is now being used all over the place, you just can’t trust anything unless you know damn well that a human entered the info, and then that’s a coin flip.
The newer ones search the internet and generate from the results not their training and provide sources.
So that’s not such a worry now.
Anyone who used ChatGPT for information and not text generation was always using it wrong.
Except people are using LLM to generate web pages on something to get clicks. Which means LLM’s are training off of information generated by other LLM’s. It’s an ouroboros of fake information.
plus search engines don’t lecture me as much for typing naughty sex words
OTOH, you also can’t trust humans not to lie to you.
That’s the coin flip.
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Perplexity is great for this. It gives like 5 links in addition to the text answer so it is imo the best of both worlds.
What is everyone else using instead?
Startpage.
I use Qwant for my searches. I find the results better than DDG. https://www.qwant.com/
I think they got removed from privacy guide unfortunately.
https://github.com/privacyguides/privacyguides.org/pull/342
I want to support a European based service, but unfortunately I have to stick with DDG for now.
I wonder why Firefox isn’t listed in their mobile web browsers.
I love science, like experimentally observed science or at least practical theoretical science, but Youtube tries to shove every crackpot nonsense they can at me. I watch one political thing and now they try and shove every conservative propaganda they can at me. It feels like when I was young, the internet was too much for conservitives to understand and control…not anymore. What’s the one true power conservatives have? Money. Now they’re ether buying up social companies or their CEOs left right and center - or at least bringing tech leadership into the ultra-rich fold. Where they are winning without exception, is in isolating the majority of their voters. Now, there’s no longer a shared reality and the divide seems to wide to close. Conservatives wanted brainwashed cult followers and did everything they could to make it happen. Now Idiocy seems far more real on the right with each passing year.
There’s some theory on this and it goes beyond conservatives.
Once, the internet was small enough that whatever happened on it could be seen by most users. Now, things can go viral in one ‘part’ of the internet and people in other ‘parts’ would have no idea what was going on.
The solution to this is to recognize that the internet should be treated as more of a local place, where we interact with the communities and people we want while ignoring the ones we don’t.
We can’t expect “the internet” to share any overarching views because there are too many people from too many places online now.
Search engine are pretty much over. They ate themselves
I haven’t used Google for awhile now. It just became an ad-ridden hellhole.
Do people not have ad blockers anymore?
That’s not what we’re talking about. Ad blockers don’t do anything to fix Google’s search algorithm
FCC should impose regulations on search providers to make searching with Google’s competition more cumbersome and less useful. You know, ‘level the playing field’
I think it would be enough if other search providers would be required to give a portion of their profit from each search to Google.
sometimes i think I’m smarter than i am… you’re a goddamn genius
