“We’ve ignored all the meaningful terms you were searching for. Now here’s a bunch of pinterest and quora spam.”
“hey, is that a brand name? Here’s 9 sketchy looking shopping sites selling things that have that brand name on them”
I installed the extension that removes Pinterest from searches… it’s great.
Which one are you using? I use unpinterested but its not open source and I want to add a few more sites to auto-exclude.
Those two sites are absolute skid marks.
Half the time I look at a website or article it is just AI generated crap anyway. Oh you want a product review? Here are a half dozen articles that have summarised the Amazon reviews of an item, with no first hand experience.
Google “Best vacuum cleaner”
Top 6 hits: “We evaluated the 5 brands that paid us the most and found that they all suck up your dirt. We can’t really speak ill of any of them because this is an ad and we signed a contract. Please use our embedded links so we can have more money.”
And the website is called something like Best-Vacuum-Cleaners-Blog.com
What’s worse is most of what comes up isn’t even a hands on review, it’s literally someone doing what I just did, which is type “vacuum cleaner” into Amazon and see what came up. Then they give it reviews based on the bullshit in the description.
I want a review from someone who sees these everyday and has a deep hatred of every vacuum in existence. He’s the one who knows that such and such used to be good until they replaced this part with plastic because they have a new CEO, and now it’s no better than a dirt devil.
At least with vacuums however, there’s a few guys out there with carpet swathes, children, and dogs at home that get to take vacuums from work and do youtube tests with them. Unfortunately they usually don’t try to game the algorithm so they’re pretty deep in there.
Search engine protocol:
Ignore first few results (ads)
Ignore next few results (bullshit spam comparison farms)
Ignore really annoying site you think is ok but is a usability nightmare
Ignore subsection of reddit links
Find 0-1 useful links on first page
Regret
The sad thing is the Reddit Links probably contain the most useful answers that google will show you
I know. But I’ll use them as a last resort
Use them, costs bandwidth and CPU cycles.
Yes but it will be offset by traffic boosts for advertisers
Use an adblocker. Unless, you mean people go on the internet without using protection?
That won’t make a difference. Reddit knows how much traffic they get and they use that number to sell ads
They do. Either due to technical ineptitude (like approximately everyone’s parents) or, and that might be worse, with the conviction of doing “the right thing,” like a friend of mine.
Junk data that costs the advertisement without a return on investment
That’s not how it works. Reddit is able to even get interest because of traffic counts. Same for IPO values
If you’re blocking their ads and not logged in, you are costing them.
Trying to find the tiny “show more results” button sandwiched between the first page of shit results and the weird AI bubbles of shit results just to find semi-decent shit on pages 2-3 makes me wish i was dead every single time.
Could be worse. Could be infinite scroll
This is especially frustrating when trying to find parts for vehicles or machinery. Used to, one could search for something like “1988 Suzuki Samurai Oil Filter” and get the answer for all the common filter brands. But now all you get is links to an auto parts website, where you have to use their shitty search function and hope they have what you need.
I know your pain, I’ve skipped it entirely and always go for the part number. There are great resources for BMWs with sites like realoem.com, but what about other manufacturers?
I have been experiencing exactly this with a Suzuki in the last week. It gives me links to parts stores that don’t even have the part I’m looking for. Come on Google, get your shit together!
The internet is unsearchable at this point. I feel like 99% of websites are fronts.
Product information search is now totally useless. I used to be able to use a part number to find a manual, now it is just scammers Amazon and eBay.
YouTube videos were once good sources for DIY, now the useful shit is buried behind product placement bullshitters.
Or websites showing the first page of a manual and requiring payment if you want to see the rest.
If it could be done, and done right, I’d love to see a couple wiki-like additions to the fediverse, one focused on products and product-specific information and care, with the other focused on the development of a catalogue of methodologies and tech for production and more general repair. Not tech news like the technology instances I’m aware of.
But I guess it’s not suited for the format, nor could we really hope for the task of building anything even close to exhaustive to be a surmountable one for us.
I had some ideas about UI/UX for something like this a while ago, though it wouldn’t work with Lemmy. I could probably find my notes and sketches, but effectively they’re just a bunch of wishful thinking born from my dissatisfaction with the limitations of Wikipedia, the chaos of Google, Youtube, and Reddit, and the ridiculousness that is WikiHow.
It’s been a few years tbat I’ve been crossing my fingers for a positive paradigm shift specifically for the online content about products and DIY.
Unfortunately I feel like if that ever got popular then it would inevitably become tainted by people trying to promote certain products.
There might be some kind of trust system that could work. I have no idea of course but I’m envisioning something like Stack Overflow’s system and a bit of community correction and authority à la Wikipedia.
What’s been pissing me off for years now is googling a specific company and getting a wall of advertisements for their competitors first. So. Dirty.
Once AI is handling search for us, many may never learn the concept of “search term”
“AI” is already handling the search for you. The big search engines are probably the first mass scale adopters of machine learning.
And they have lost the war with SEO spam to a hilarious extent. What makes you think the same won’t happen with chat bot AIs? Bad actors (including PR agencies) will inevitably figure out where and how to spam comments in order to bias the AI models in favor of their agendas or products.
If the data they consume is filled with something like “fossil fuels don’t cause global warming because XYZ”, the chat bots will repeat it. They don’t have the capacity to reason.
There hasn’t been a reason to flood the internet with low effort spam because it’s easily detected by humans who read it. But the ML algorithms will be a lot easier to trick.
Injecting stuff into the data consumed by LLMs is the new type of SEO.
Apologies, I used the overly vague term “AI”. Any company creating an LLM that has web search + scraping capabilities will be at the mercy of the search results.
That said, LLMs are actually quite skilled at ignoring noise (repetitive data), so gaming SEO may lose popularity. Hell, the practice will DEFINITELY lose appeal once LLMs are just browsing for relevant content and summarizing without any citations (links to the sites). And even of they do cite, no one will click them.
Convenience > Fact
tldr; This additional layer of obfuscation between search and result will reshape the fabric of the internet with time
You can already outsource a lot of this to Bing. If you need to know the right temperature for making french fries, you can google a bunch of “recipes” (AKA life story of the author + history + vacation photos + cooking instructions) read them through and… actually better make some coffee while you’re at it because this is going to take a while. Anyway, the other option is to ask: “Hey Bing, I’m making french fries, but I don’t know how hot the oven should be.”
Spoiler: 220 °C
The scary thing is, what happens when people start doing this for more important things, such as what to do if your child has swallowed something or how to parallel park your car.
200 or 220, depends on if you are using a convection oven. But that’s beside the point, I really hope AI finally kills SEO.
I’m making french fries, but I don’t know how hot the oven should be.
Contents:
- What French fries are
- Why you might want some
- The dangers of French fries
- Where to buy French fries
- Ways of preparing French fries
- Other names for French fries
And so on.
Quality content right there, if you don’t mind going down some rabbit holes.
French fries aren’t made in an oven though.
Oven cooked french fries are a thing, and have a surprisingly high popularity
In my just under 40 years on this rock, the only time I’ve seen someone deepfrying french fries at home has been on American TV shows. It’s a lot more popular to cook them in the oven around here.
Doesn’t the very nature of being fries, require them to be fried? Otherwise, they’re baked potato sticks.
Ours are pre-fried at the factory, then frozen and packaged. We typically then finish cooking them in the oven.
This is the way.
Yes.
Source: I’m a chef.
Correct. However, if you buy frozen ones, you do need to heat them up some way. I ran out of nuclear weapons again, my flamer was out of gasoline, so using the oven was my best option.
Good thing those frozen ones come with the required cooking temperature on the package.
Hey Spez, can you throw some more subreddits into the dumpster fire. The temperature is almost right for popping some popcorn.
I think communicating with AI will become an art form the same way googling was/is.
Tea. Earl Grey. Hot
In the Greatest Generation postcast they posit that you can actually get anything you want materialized at a certain temperature.
A Stradivarius violin. Luke warm.
Hm, and I guess in any variant state. Janeway always gets “Coffee. Black.”
Is is possible for something to be replicated that if one of its defining features is the person who built it?
If the violin was replicated, it was not built by Stradivari, and thus is by definition not a Stradivarius.
In the 24th century, where ownership is a foreign concept, I don’t think they give a flying fuck what ancient neck-beard built the instrument if it’s per-atom perfect. They don’t give a fuck about materials, only outcomes.
Until they’re sponsored
“I realize you seem frustrated from my responses. Nature’s Choice has a fantastic Stress Reducing gummy available at your local CVS”
Yeah, the gentle product hints at first will be driving people away quicker than a Monstered up Uber driver.
It already is. If you want to play a game of D&D with chatGPT, there’s a very specific prompt carefully crafted for that. If you want to chat with a with a total psycho, there’s a prompt for that. If you want your AI to do something it was specifically forbidden from doing, just craft a very specific prompt for that, and you’re good to go. You can even find sites that collect various prompts for just about any purpose you can imagine.
True but they will learn the concept ‘inefficency increases individual profits’. Google has been getting worse and so will AI search eventually.
Ask Jeeves was just ahead of its time
It’s the same idea I think, figuring out how to describe what you mean or phrase the question the right way to get the right kind of results.
I want to search for recipes that are not blog posts
This is a pretty good aggregator
oh, cool, thank you!
This is amazing. Thanks for that. Usually when I’m looking up a recipe I don’t want to scroll for miles about the history of the recipe, so this solves that nicely.
Often you’ll find a ‘print recipe’ button somewhere near the top of the page. Click on that, it’ll take you to what you’re looking for without all of the crap nobody cares about.
Yeah, I despise that every fucking recipe is a blog post. I don’t care that little Becky loved this soup, I just want to know how much salt I should add.
100% what I do. Print to pdf and then never go to the site, because they’re so over loaded with ads and pictures that will load and cause the page to bounce around.
Firefox+AdNauseam
Watching the numbers on each page go up is entertainment enough. Best part is that it stops the ad popping in the background so your page rarely jumps
How’s that compare with Ublock.origin?
AdNauseam integrates with UBO, so you’d get both. Basically, it virtualizes clicks on ads so ad sellers get charged for the click but it’s all hidden in the background from you.
That said, I kinda have mixed feelings about it. Ad clicks will help support sites you like, so even if you’re blocking ads you’re still getting ‘served’ and ‘interacting’ with them. On the other hand, it tells sites 'hey all these ads you’re serving aren’t making your website shitty and unusable (but they generally are) so keep it up! And it tells ad agencies and the industry ‘oh yeah we sure love clicking ads keep slapping them in my face at every corner’. And if ad buyers are realizing their clicks are all ghost clicks, they’ll stop buying ad space. Which just means shittier lowest common denominator ads in more places.
It’s different from the technical end but it works by clicking the ads and filling them with junk to cost. It essentially removes the ad for you
I’ve had good luck with whisk.com.
bbcgoodfood.com is another good one I check often
We need a Google successor.
Something non-profit.
The horrible reality is that Bing has actually become a competitor to Google, simply by Google getting worse and worse. Microsoft used to be the main bad guy, but these days they practically seem benign compared to the others. Not open source like you’re saying, of course.
The ai generated top reply on Bing pisses me off 90% of the time. Word salad with citations.
Often citations for fake books or rare print material the AI couldn’t possibly have had access to. ~Cherri
The infrastructure to crawl, store, and serve search results to billions of users is phenomenally expensive. A government might fund it (which comes with its own concerns), but a non-profit will struggle to compete.
I would pay a subscription if it were truly non profit and had no ads.
Did you sign up for Neeva? Because unfortunately it’s shutting down.
Federated search is possible but has not gotten a lot of attention yet.
If you’re talking about YaCY, apparently that’s pretty much useless right now from what I’ve heard. ~Cherri
There’s actually a lot of theory and early work out there on the topic of federated search. While existing search aggregators like Searx and YaCY certainly qualify as federated, search infrastructure built from the ground up with decentralization in mind would look very different.
When you factor out all the garbage content it’s suddebly affordable lol
Wikipedia probably has the resources to do it, wikisearch. Somebody talk them into it. But yeah, modern search engines, pretty amazing the ones from two decades ago actually worked better.
This could be interesting. The infrastructure required to scrape the internet though is going to be so daunting. Google got to build it up slowly as the internet got bigger. Bing is backed by a huge corporation that already has data centers. A new non profit player is going to take a huge coordinated effort.
I know P2P had become a dead buzzword, but what if people dedicated a portion of their computers to assisting an open search engine.
I would wait 30s for accurate results. It could also piggyback on a search aggregator.
There used to be an open source search aggregator, don’t remember what it was called
I think it was YaCY, but apparently it’s basically useless for everyday use. ~Cherri
Yeah that looks like it! Why do you say it is useless? I have cloud credits that I could theoretically burn hosting one of these
IIRC its results just aren’t that good? I haven’t tried it, this is just what I’ve heard. Maybe it’s gotten better? ~Cherri
Hmm… Interesting… That would be great… If only something like that exists now!
Yacy exists but it’s bad enough that it’s one of the few options I don’t self host.
I swear sometimes it feels like a superpower to have grown up in the 90s and learned the ground rules for multiple OSes, search tools, and file systems - the descendants of which are nearly all still in use today.
I defer of course to any oldheads who can still bang out a long .bat file or compile and configure Linux; I just mean it’s a very useful quirk of the era that skills learned on windows 3.1 or OSX are still broadly applicable, even in fields where ‘using the computer’ is a minor task of one’s workday.
I agree so much. It feels like I “understand” how a computer talks and interacts as opposed to most people I work with just learn processes by heart and have no clue what to do once their process breaks.
Reject Search engines, return to shoplifting For Dummies books from the local library
you should shoplift them from the book store instead
Why would you shoplift from a library? That seems immoral
Somebody mentioned something about a thing in outer space called a dark star. It sounded interesting so I googled it and got millions of links about a Grateful Dead tribute band called the Dark Star Orchestra. I’m sure I’ll be seeing ads for that for months. 😂 ChatGPT gave me a nice summary but of course I didn’t have any way of knowing whose work I was reading.
Or even if it was accurate.
The future seemed so much more promising when I was a teenager. Now I’m mid 30s and the present is very… corporate and lame. Very lame. They’ve even programmed the younger generation to be sanitized and accepting of blandness. Imagine growing up with only one or two genuinely creative movies being released a year. Zoomers don’t even have their own music genre, it’s all just nostalgia. Sigh.
Googling “dark star astronomy” comes up with plenty of info on it.
Knowing how to do what you did is vital for using a search engine effectively. It’s not possible for a search engine to know what you want when a word has multiple meanings (well, not yet, anyway). It could have just as easily have been the other way around, where OP wanted to search for a niche band but all they could find is astronomy things.
Adding context like “band”, “astronomy”, etc is important if you’re googling anything non trivial. Sometimes you even need to identify different words to search. Eg, there’s a programming language called Go. But “go” is such a generic word that it’s hard to search for. Searching for “golang” tends to help a lot.
It’s rather tragic that a tribute band called Dark Star gets priority over a scientific Dark Star. I don’t know if it’s because more people search for the band or because this search engine is trying to sell you albums by this band…
To be fair, the band puts a lot of effort into marketing and keyword targeting, and scientific teams researching dark stars only publish for specific spaces towards other scientific people that are already looking at those places.
I don’t mind it. I just think we all should value scientific research into astronomy, no matter the volume of interest, more than marketing strategies for a product, be it art or not. I might be wrong tho…
Did you use any search operators, like quotes or minus signs to get rid of the clutter?
A lot of the time those don’t even work anymore. ~Cherri
I totally agree with you, but googling ‘dark star space’ or ‘dark star science’ you get what you’re looking for.
my lil trick is I’d just add “Reddit” after most searches to find others in a similar situation or maybe a solution
2 months ago that was fine.
Now I don’t have an app for that, the website on my mobile doesn’t open my search and instead tells me to download the official Reddit app, or the subs are nsfw or private.
Sigh, so much for easy answers at a type of the finger :(
Not that I’m recommending anyone give reddit any more traffic or leverage, but I’ve been using Stealth app at the recommendation of someone else on here. It’s downloadable through f-droid and specifically is meant to keep you anonymous and avoid any trackers and other trash normally found when opening reddit links. You can’t even log into an account. I use it on the rare moments I’m looking for stuff on there, it makes me feel a bit better about it.
Solid advice m8, I downloaded that 1. Funny thing that the 1st thing I saw on the app once I entered was a message saying “in a few weeks Stealth will end due to end of free API”. Sigh, these last months all these huge internet companies are making such a mess.
Up until the API debacle, that was my solution too. Now even that doesn’t work. It’s so bizarrely hard to look something up on the internet now.
I use chat GPT 4 for a lot of things instead of Google now.
Same here, for the reason that I don’t have to scroll through crap pages that only exist to show ads.
It’s pretty amazing to search for something and actually see things you searched for.
Does this work any better than DuckDuckGo? People praise DDG, but imo it’s results are pretty shit and I could never end to sticking with it. It can’t even get basic quoted text syntax correct.
Yeah ddg is as bad as google imo. This works like the net used to be.
Damn, I’ve gotten so many good alternatives lately. Thanks for posting that.
Oh fuck man, that’s a great find! Thank you for sharing that. It’s actually providing really substantiative results which I haven’t seen from Google for at least 5 years.
I have definitely bookmarked that website, even though I use duck duck go I will probably use that as an alternate now.
Another good search engine that’s less useful for searches but for providing information is of course Wolfram alpha
Maybe that does work again after the thing with subreddits going nsfw has been somewhat resolved but not sure. It was my thing too. I heard good things about bing of all places. In general search just got worse over the last 5-6 years.
People talk about Bing and duck duck go like they’re good replacements, and I’ve given them honest good faith tries.
I always switch my search engine back to Google after simply not getting the results I’m looking for
you can use Google or Bing from duckduckgo using !bangs. g! (for google) or b! (for bing) then whatever you are searching for. I use g! all the time for non privacy related things. and since duckduckgo doesn’t use trackers and all that the results can be terrible so sometimes I just resort to using g!
Using DuckDuckGo to search through Google seems pretty damn pointless if you ask me. If the search engine is shit and I am just roundabout using Google then why even bother?
I know you said the thing about trackers, but a lot of us don’t really care about that. If the end result is just using Google anyway then I’d rather just start with Google and not use another site to use Google.
oh yeah. if you don’t care, there really is not a point to use duckduckgo. I should say IMO because I’m sure a much more technically minded person will have a better answer.
I disagree. A lot of the Google search results are based on your previous search history and your advertising profile the company has generated for you, which skews and promotes most of the front page Google search results as advertising links. And unless you’re searching for an actual product, they are not so useful.
Like if I want to search for comments, and all my search results are advertising me telescopes and astronomy software that’s not so helpful.
I think something broke with Bing’s advanced search. It doesn’t seem to respond at all.
I used Bing chat to plan my itinerary for my next vacation. These LLMs are the new best way to search, although the recent stories of their results becoming worse doesn’t bode well
Literally the only time I still use reddit
It really winds me up how results that match every search term aren’t prioritised any more. I often search for very specific pieces of hardware, and it’s been a nightmare since the late 2010s. You now have to pore over each result to check that it’s 100% what you’re are looking for.
SEO exacerbates the problem, but I’d say the root cause is the algorithm itself.
Have you tried putting your search between " " ? It usually helps improve my results.
Thought I’d add for people that may not know, the quotes mean exact match for what’s between the quotes and only give results if it includes that term (unless I mixed something up). Whenever you click on Google’s ‘must include’ it puts quotes around the term. Can be handy or make things worse depending what you’re looking for. Worse is while programming and tracking a specific issue, unless they used the exact words you won’t get a result. Better for part numbers if they never get changed.
Been awhile since I went into the nitty gritty of the searching functions so if this is incorrect please reply with the correct info, been awhile since I really had to think about what quotes does behind the scenes.
That used to work, but these days seems to do little other than sightly change the order of the same useless results.
If you have avoided learing how to use the internet/search engines till now you probably couldn’t learn if you tryed
wait until the AI chatbots are optimized with SEO spam.
