Google Search used to direct users to web sites; AI Mode will keep them in Google's garden
  • Evotech@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17 minutes

    Honestly I think Google is pretty fucked in the long term

    Nobody google anymore. They just ask chat

  • BrightCandle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7 hours

    The death of Stackoverflow is one of these events where the site has been completely killed by AI and yet its contents is completely necessary for AI to know about solving programming problems. Its death will mark the end of AIs ability to learn how to solve programming issues. Its cannibalizing itself in the process, as it destroys its sources it destroys its own ability to learn.

    • artyom@piefed.socialEnglish
      5 hours

      It’s not just that, it’s shitting where it eats. People are using it to fill the internet with disinformation, then it trains itself on it’s own disinformation, and breeds even worse disinformation. This is why AI can never be smarter than it was in 2021.

      On top of that, due to the indiscriminate DDOSing of the entire internet by AI bots, websites have been blocking any web crawlers that are not Google, which just contributes to their monopoly.

    • Rhaedas@fedia.io
      6 hours

      I can’t remember the name, but when the internet was just starting and there were a lot of search engines with no dominate ones, there was an aggregator program that you could input many search engines into, then use it as the searching tool. It would query all the engines and combine, sort, rank, and remove duplicate finds.

      The reason I mention it is because we’re sort of back at that point. Google is failing, Bing never was great, and all the alternatives have their issues, usually with not having the same database to work with. So if you gathered all the best ones, the ones without ties to corporate or AI, then put their results together, maybe you’d have something like what Google was at its peak before “do no evil” got painted over.

      Incidentally, Google became what it was/is because it gobbled up a lot of those early search engines’ databases. I miss you, Hotbot. You were a good one.

      • PlantJam@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6 hours

        Search used to be so good. I had an old Honda civic that suddenly wouldn’t start. It wasn’t the starter, alternator, or battery. I managed to find a forum post with my exact issue, which was that a small rubber piece on the clutch pressed a button to “tell” the starter it was okay to start. Twenty minutes later I had zip tied a piece of plastic into place and had a working car again.

        If I tried to diagnose that same issue today, it’d be dozens of SEO garbage slop sites without any actual useful information.

        • unglueclass23@programming.devEnglish
          2 hours

          I was thinking the same thing recently. It’s not the place it once was. But in general the internet has changed a lot. And it’s not just AI.

          1. All sorts of paywalls especially in news sites.
          2. Everything is getting centralized into a few sites and they’re usually either not poorly indexable or not at all (Discord, facebook, X, Instagram and so on)
          3. Fediverse (Lemmy, Mastodon) also struggles with search engines.
          4. People trying to sell you shit, create a brand even more than before. Because of this all sorts of SEO optimization crap is done like writing BS articles nobody cares about.
          5. AI slop.
          6. Search engines have gotten better of getting rid of “illegal stuff”.
          7. A lot of sites are just presentational bloat with no substance. Very cool looking landing pages with all sorts of cool animations but when you need to actually find the information that you need… the same UI usually gets in the way.

          Oh and now we’re getting into age verification crap also yay

          • PlantJam@lemmy.worldEnglish
            53 minutes

            An example of number 4, there’s a poster I’ve seen on reddit that’s posting very relevant content, but then every post ends with “@xxxxxxxx on all socials”. It just takes the whole thing from content I might want to engage with to the exact opposite.

        • SillyDude@lemmy.zipEnglish
          5 hours

          I asked gpt5 and it told me to check the clutch safety switch. The thing you fixed.

          • PlantJam@lemmy.worldEnglish
            45 minutes

            I tried giving minimal information and still got similar results.

            When I think about what got worse about the internet, it’s mostly the life stories before recipes, the novel length pages to maybe answer a simple question, and pretty much anything else related to SEO.

          • skulblaka@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            3 hours

            5-10 years ago, you could be pretty sure this was a thing that actually needed checked, since the post about the clutch safety switch was posted by a real person who presumably had the same problem as you and fixed it with this method.

            Now, there’s no way to know if that’s actually the case, or if “clutch safety switch” is just a likely string of words to feed someone who is having car trouble. You might get lucky, or you might get sent on eight consecutive goose chases because an LLM fundamentally doesn’t know what factual knowledge is, it only knows how to reorder and regurgitate things that other people have said in other contexts.

      • FarraigePlaisteaċ (sé/é)@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7 hours

        Ecosia have planted 250,000+ trees so far and publish their accounts every month. I can’t think of a better option, unless there is a niche requirement.

          • FarraigePlaisteaċ (sé/é)@lemmy.worldEnglish
            6 hours

            Isn’t that hyperbole rather than truth? They’re still carbon negative.

            They don’t provide AI by default (at least, I don’t get it). So people like us can continue to not use AI and the hundreds of million who use it every day can still support tree planting.

            I don’t like AI, but if they don’t add it they could risk limiting their reach and environmental goals.

            • RiverRabbits@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
              48 minutes

              AI companies do not release any numbers themselves for carbon emissions. Therefore, companies that use AI cannot in any certainty claim to be carbon negative or neutral, because they have to count the supply chain emissions as well.

              not adding AI does not stifle environmental goals, in fact you can only truthfully claim to strive for carbon goals if you do not use AI. After all, there is a reason that Microsoft abandoned their emission goals with AI as the cited reason first and foremost, which shows how incredibly dirty AI can be, even if no one releases any sensible metrics.

            • squirrel@cake.kobel.fyiEnglish
              6 hours

              Go to https://ecosia.org/ in a private browser window. It says “AI that answers to the planet”. Search something and the AI Overview on top is enabled by default.

              I use them with AI disabled, but it should be the default setting.

              Edit: I just did a couple test searches and didn’t get the AI overview. Don’t know what triggers it.

              • unglueclass23@programming.devEnglish
                2 hours

                Go to https://ecosia.org/ in a private browser window. It says “AI that answers to the planet”. Search something and the AI Overview on top is enabled by default.

                For what it’s worth i’ve been using them for like a year and I clear my cookies often and never got this AI overview thingy you’re talking about. I actually have no clue how it even looks like.

              • FarraigePlaisteaċ (sé/é)@lemmy.worldEnglish
                4 hours

                It’s not me downvoting you, by the way. Anyway, AI is the antithesis of eco-friendly so I share the criticism. But given their success to date I defer to their sense for pragmatism and results.

  • Schwim Dandy@piefed.zipEnglish
    7 hours

    It’s the same arc every monopolistic corporation has taken before it, AI is just accelerating the pace of consuming your customer/product because profits must always increase.

    There will be no large scale shift from these experiences because most people are either ok, apathetic or blissfully ignorant to the situation, the best you can do is to remove yourself from the exploitation of the userbase. Linux instead of Windows or Android, Almost any search engine other than Google, fediverse instead of reddit, etc.

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7 hours

    We put this real question to AI Mode, “Why does Google Search suck now?” And you won’t believe the answer! (Actually, you won’t be surprised.)

    The Chocolate Factory’s AI search substitute offered this completely trustworthy reply:

    "You are definitely not imagining it. Users, tech critics, and researchers have documented a measurable decline in Google Search quality. The core issue is that the search engine no longer feels like a tool designed to find the best corner of the web; instead, it feels like a vehicle designed to keep you on Google-owned properties or clicking on monetized links.

    “The degradation of Google Search stems from a mix of aggressive monetization, an ongoing arms race with web spammers, and the disruptive introduction of AI features.”

    AI is gonna be the same path. Once people trust it, it’ll stop mattering if it give the best info, what matters is if people buy products and believe advertisements/propaganda.

    There just will never be as much money in providing nonbiased and accurate answers as there is in manipulating people. So as long as capitalism runs everything, the end goal will always be manipulating people for someone’s profit.

    It’s not an accident, it’s not “enshitification”, it’s the natural and inevitable result of unregulated capitalism. The only way to avoid it, is to heavily regulate capitalism. Acting like it’s a separate problem that can be avoided without regulating capitalism just makes people think we can make unregulated capitalism work, if we could it would be working already.

    • FartsWithAnAccent@fedia.io
      3 hours

      Maybe keep your head on a swivel so the cannibal babies (sponsored by Google) don’t eat you? Stay alert, stay safe.

    • Deebster@infosec.pubEnglish
      6 hours

      Are you referring to the photo of a baby eating meat from a bone?

        • binux@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          6 hours

          Do you faint whenever you hear about the existence of meat-eating animals?

            • mabeledo@lemmy.worldEnglish
              46 minutes

              The baby is not feasting on a human corpse. I don’t see the problem here.

              • GreenKnight23@lemmy.worldEnglish
                10 minutes

                as a human who barbecues other humans, I can say without a doubt that is not a human.

                the bone however looks like a scapula which can have human meat quite tough unless it’s from a white collar worker like a banker or a data entry specialist.