The title of this piece is clickbait as all hell, but I viewed it as more of an anti-Google piece rather than an anti-AI piece. Like, I do think AI has some merits, but those are massively outweighed by the nefarious Silicon Valley ghouls(like Google) abusing it to make all of our lives worse.
But I think this begs the question of whether search was any good before. It wasn’t. It isn’t.
Yeah, I agree. Google had such a stranglehold on search for so long that they could make their product worse and not lose any meaningful marketshare. They knew damn well that people weren’t going to switch to Bing or anything, so they could enshittify the hell out of search to wring as much profit out of it as possible.
I’m really hopeful that federation continues to grow and bandwidth and storage costs can allow a simple hobbyist to maintain a site/node for minimal cost while contributing to the greater ecosystem. Smaller communities where reputation actually matters instead of being gamified into upvotes and downvotes as some sort of facsimile of trustworthiness or quality. I think with a more personal internet, AI becomes less of a threat anyway.
Absolutely. We’ve got to start cutting back on our use of corpo-internet, if possible. Especially considering that many of these companies are either collaborating with a fascist government or are enthusiastically supporting and influencing said fascist government.
Phen@lemmy.eco.br 2 days ago
Search WAS good when it was a simple search. Sites were indexed by the search engine and if you searched for the words you wanted to find, the results would be exactly that. In that context, it worked perfectly.
But the problem was that most people used search engines in a different way. They weren’t searching for specific content, but searching for answers to questions. And for that, search engines would only show results that had that same question and then you’d need to hope that the question had been answered.
Over time, search engines kept shifting into trying to better support the questions and answers format, making the basic content search worse as a result. Where we are now, neither or them works too well. Google is now better at understanding what people are trying to search, but worse at finding it.
AI is just expanding this with yet another layer: it might make Google better at understanding what you search and maybe even might be better at finding it than the engine is now, but it’ll add the ability to misinterpret the results too.
Honestly I’d be pretty happy if I had a simple indexed search again.