• Sludgehammer@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Riiight… Next headline: “Pusher claims that his drugs not the cause sleepless nights and bugs under the skin”

  • Dave@lemmy.nz
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    4 days ago

    AI is driving more searches

    This is hilarious. People are searching more because they aren’t getting results they need from AI, which drives ad revenue so Google’s doing great!

    • Cypher@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Search engines are so significantly worse than they were a decade ago. The golden age of accurate searches is over, now it’s all SEO piss and AI slop.

      • Dave@lemmy.nz
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        3 days ago

        To give credit to the people trying to make good search, the internet is so much worse than it was a decade or two ago.

        Over that time the ad driven internet has encouraged low quality, high volume websites full of articles designed around common search terms.

        It started before AI, but now you can drum up an article in seconds it has got much worse.

        • anomnom@sh.itjust.works
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          7 hours ago

          Yup I ran into this last week, looking for a wiring diagram of a relatively obscure part.

          1st page of results on DDG and Google were both AI ‘blog’ style results of random diagrams unrelated to the part. All the same “loading…” text and I’m pretty sure all generated on the fly as I opened them.

          It didn’t even give me the manufacturer’s site in the first 2 pages. And because I got upset and clicked through every result to vent to a co-worker, it decided to give me MORE slop results. I watched the useful info vanish from the results on reloads of the same search term.

    • BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk
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      3 days ago

      Do people still use the most popular search engine for search? I get you’re trying to be factitious but it comes across as naff.

      • ragas@lemmy.ml
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        3 days ago

        I just tried to use google a few hours ago and it got me the same bad results as other search engines, only that it gave me a bunch of advertisements and AI slop first.

        • BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk
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          3 days ago

          Right… But you’re not operating under the misapprehension that Google is somehow an uncommon choice for search. I agree it’s gotten crap in a lot of cases, but equally I also know just about everyone uses it for search.

      • billwashere@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        It might be the most popular but it is utter crap and has been for a while. It has reached peak enshittification. You used to be able to say you absolutely wanted a term in the search or you didn’t want other terms. It ignores all of that now. Google stopped being about able to search years ago and is more about showing you the most relevant ad. I’m either DuckDuckGo or I self-host my own searxng. I’ve also tried using a locally hosted perplexica (running on my own local LLM) which uses searxng underneath the hood I think.

        Btw: I’m a yank so I had to look up naff so I learned some cool new slang! Now I’ll admit I was being slightly flippant but serious in the fact that Google really sucks as a search engine now.

      • SpacetimeMachine@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Maybe I just am using it wrong, but DDG consistently gives me completely irrelevant results, while Google still gives me what I’m looking for about 70% of the time. Maybe I just need to learn the proper way to search with DDG but so far it’s been next to useless in finding me relevant info.

        • burrito@sh.itjust.works
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          2 days ago

          DDG also seems to exclude some websites from search even if you specifically give terms that should give results for a site. Try searching for any model from Bad Dragon’s website like “bad dragon nova” or another sex toy maker “mr hankeys beefcake” and the first result should be for the item on the maker’s website. I can’t ever get DDG to give results and safe search is already off. It has been like this for years.

  • DaddleDew@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Search clicks were dead already from 19 out of the top 20 results being AI generated SEO garbage pages and “articles” that contains information that is blatantly false and even contradictory. AI just gives you that same garbage right there without having to click anything. The real info is probably buried somewhere two search pages down.

    • MudMan@fedia.io
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      4 days ago

      Honestly, the guy is absolutely full of crap, but this is a solid point. The question is where the clicks AI summaries are absolutely killing are coming from.

      I can’t imagine this will survive forever, considering that Google has already gone through the loop of getting nuked from orbit by the EU by summarizing news content once. Even if AI wasn’t involved in this at all, it’s of very dubious legality in… well, wherever Google News got swiftly shut down.

    • BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk
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      3 days ago

      I believe it, chiefly because I read the slop answer and then have to check 5 more pages to figure out if it’s spouting nonsense or not.