Comment on DuckDuckGo poll says 90% responders don't want AI

• RedstoneValley@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  It’s not that wild of a conspiracy theory. Hard to get definite proof though because you would have to compare actual search results from the past with the results of the same search from today, and we unfortunately can’t travel back in time.

  But there are indicators for your theory to be true:

  • It’s evident in UI design the top area of the screen is the most valuable. AI results are always shown there. So we know that selling AI is of utmost importance to Google.
  • The Google search algorithm was altered quite often over the years, these “rollouts” are publicly available information, and a lot of people have written about the changes as soon as they happened.
  • Page ranking fueled a whole industry which was called SEO (Search Engine Optimization). A lot of effort went into understanding how google ranks its results. This was of course done with a different goal in mind but the conclusions from this field can be used to determine if and how search results got worse over time
  • It’s an established fact that companies benefit from users never leaving the company’s ecosystem. Google as an example tried to prevent a clickthrough to the actual websites in the past, with technologies like AMP or by displaying snippets.
  • If users rely on the AI output Google can effectively achieve this: the user is not leaving the page and Google has full control over what content the user sees.

  Now, all of the points listed in above can be proven. If you put all of that together it seems at least highly likely that your “conspiracy theory” is in fact true.

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  • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I’d argue that SEO was one of the biggests causes of search result degradation and consider any complaints coming from them as highly suspect due to conflicting interests. Eg, a change that makes it harder to game the search engine algorithms is good for searchers but bad for SEOs.

    I hope the whole industry dies (or already is? I don’t hear much about it these days lol). They are just marketers whose whole job is to get you to look at their shit instead of the most relevant results.

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    • RedstoneValley@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Yeah, I think SEO is pretty much dead by now, and probably because web search as we knew it is kind of dead as well. You’ll probably need to spend ad money if you want visibility. But I’m no expert on SEO and I could be wrong.

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    • redditmademedoit@piefed.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Yeah, search has degraded along with the Internet, you almost need an LLM now to filter out all the garbage hits. For a while, adding “reddit” to your search term was an OK high level filter to remove blogspam and e-commerce sites, but interacting with reddit is so annoying now that it’s barely an option and many of the quality reddit posters have moved on while the state and corporate astroturfers are running the show. Never mind that the “reddit filter” also removed results from much better sources, like specialist forums.

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• msage@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  They WANT you to use Ai so they can cater the answers sell you ads and stop you from using the internet.

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• A_norny_mousse@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  the search results have slowly yet noticeably degraded

  You mean Google.

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  • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    And Bing, and searches that use google and Bing results (DDG, ecosia)

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  • SendMePhotos@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    All of them. I use DDG as a primary and even those results are worse.

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    • redditmademedoit@piefed.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      In Google Search’s prime DDG was still terrible and not a viable competitor even with the privacy advantage. Now both services are almost comparable, so it’s kind of a no-brainer to ditch Google.

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• Womble@piefed.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Search results have been degrading for a lot longer than LLMs have been a thing. Peak usefulness for them was around a decade ago.

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• Honytawk@feddit.nl ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  SEO has been fucking up searches long before LLMs were a thing.

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