I have indeed noticed Google (and Google-based search engines like Startpage) has got worse in the past months. Even DuckDuckGo is better know (which as a long time ddg user is wild)
Comment on 🤔 Interesting
usernametbd@lemmy.zip 12 hours ago
Not to mention those same companies obsessed with AI are the ones who run the search engines that made finding all those tutorials harder for greed. They ruin search results with ads and easily gamed algorithms that they stopped trying to improve. All that made people more willing to let the AI find the answer.
plutopos@lemmy.zip 12 hours ago
Chronographs@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
Honestly ddg has also gotten worse (as it’s bing in a condom), it’s just that Google has shit itself even harder
NOPper@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 hours ago
Kagi is a paid service and feels weird to pay for a search engine, but things have felt so much better since I tried them out months ago.
TheMadCodger@piefed.social 10 hours ago
I don’t know if you use their Assistant, but you can limit it to specific sources. The first option after the entire web is the fediverse. They also have the small web, which just shows you things made by actual humans, not something trying to sell you something.
Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 10 hours ago
I pay for Metager and i do really recommend it. You pay a pittance per search while being free of the crap that infests the net. Kagi comes with it’s own set of issues.
k0e3@lemmy.ca 10 hours ago
I started noticing ddg search with the “” operator is wonky. Also ecosia seems to have a lot of sponsored results?
lichtmetzger@discuss.tchncs.de 11 hours ago
I’m at a point where I gladly pay for my search engine just to get good results.
But one could argue we were always paying, with our data.
merc@sh.itjust.works 9 hours ago
To be fair, Google has been fighting a war against SEO and spam basically since it was started.
I don’t think they intentionally degraded their search engine. I think they just diverted resources away from fighting spam and SEO and instead dedicated those resources to AI stuff. Intentionally degrading their search results would require work. They’d have to convince their high-paid employees that for some reason they should make the results worse. But, just letting the stuff rot naturally as SEOs kept up their attacks, that’s free.
4am@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
It all makes sense when you realize that AI isn’t the product, control is.
When everyone depends on cloud services, especially storage, because they can’t afford hard drives or RAM anymore. Do you think the average normie is going to “stand up for principles of privacy and freedom of computing” or are they gonna say “it is what it is” and buy a tablet with 8GB of RAM and an office suite in the cloud?
Do you think these companies are above scanning everyone’s stuff to find out who is against them? Who is developing some great new idea? Who dissents the government?
Do you think these companies are above editing all saved copies of a news article and replacing it with something AI generated that looks real enough to memory hole something? (Copies of things in the cloud are already de-duplicated)
They don’t want us to be able to point out their flaws anymore. They want us to be submissive to them.
usernametbd@lemmy.zip 9 hours ago
They’ve already broadcast their intentions to push cloud compute for home use. These data centers train AI - but chips are improving rapidly. Amazon and others have already stated they plan to use these for cloud compute services as they become obsolete for bleeding edge AI. Microsoft has a low local resource client to cloud version of Windows they are releasing. They want all compute to be subscription based and it will definitely lack any real privacy protections as long as they can keep corporate capture of congress.
ButteredBread@sh.itjust.works 11 hours ago
that sounds a bit too distopian, maybe in some 20 years but reakly at this point anything can happen.
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 hours ago
Where have you been the last 20 years?
ButteredBread@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
I would say at least 5 years for all of these things to be plausible, the world changes fast but like social media collaborating with every goverment to silence people against any of the 2 or even give them repercussions still has some years left to (if it is gonna) happen. Besides organizing with news companies and then replacing all news articles would take at least some months (besides from it being super noticeable and there being archives in other places).