“Notably, Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo all have the same problems, and in many cases, Google performed better than Bing and DuckDuckGo by the researchers’ measures.”
Click bait headline. I see they’re good at SEO themselves.
Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find
Submitted 9 months ago by jezebelley@leminal.space to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
designatedhacker@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Wogi@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yeah, DDG skips all the sponsored links but I generally find what I’m looking for faster on Google if I just skip half the page rather than trying to find the right incantation to bring up what I’m looking for on DDG.
0110010001100010@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I’ve tried, many times over the years, to use DDG and you are 100% spot-on. I find it damn-near impossible to find what I need without some deep voodoo magic to somehow craft the perfect query. It’s been a decade+ since I’ve gone to page 2 of a Google search. Using DDG I can be 3 or 4 pages deep before maybe finding the answer. There is SOOO much irrelevant stuff to filter through.
It sucks, I don’t want to use Google, but there doesn’t seem to be a great alternative.
victorz@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Would you be able to give an example of what you couldn’t find with DDG that was simpler to find with the help of Google? Sounds interesting to me, as I use DDG pretty much exclusively.
linearchaos@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I honestly think there’s something wrong with Google’s individual customization. They’re leaning in a little too hard on things you’re likely to be searching for rather than what you’re actually searching for.
DDG gives me better results for random searches on things I’m not usually looking for. When I was looking for Godot exercises yesterday every hit on DuckDuckGo for ages was just exactly what I wanted. When I went over to search Google there was a lot of more varied topics. Now, hands down if I need what time a certain store closes at a certain location Google will give me exactly what I’m looking for. Likewise if I need to know what’s near something else Google is absolutely superior to DDG. Google’s image search is also far more accurate and useful.
But then I come back and look for a medical condition for my cat that I’ve never heard of before, You passed by the sponsors and they’ve got a couple of random pages about it maybe a Reddit article or two that’s now blocked, but it quickly devolves to adjacent searches.
But if I go and search for any of my usual suspects, The rankings come back pretty decent.
Zoboomafoo@slrpnk.net 9 months ago
I’ve run into that, I recently started playing The Finals (which I recommend), and Google searches have a hard time not changing my searches to American football, even if I put “video game” in the search
Carighan@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yeah, the paper shows a startling lead for Google, more than I would have expected.
I try to swap to DDG every so often (usually once a year, giving it about a month), but every time search ends up being frustrating enough so I don’t stick around. Nevermind their boneheaded decision of using Apple Maps over something that actually wants to be useful like OpenStreetMap. But what I didn’t expect was just how big the difference between the two is when analyzed, damn.
FrankTheHealer@lemmy.world 9 months ago
This is what happens when everyone does ‘SEO,’
It really seems like nowadays that internet search is just people trying to game the system for clicks. But it has made everything superficial and fake. Not to mention, utterly useless.
I don’t know what the solution is really. It’s easy to say ‘dont do SEO’ but people will just find some way to game that system too. It was great when Reddit wasn’t complete shit, because the subreddits dedicated to a particular topic had great insights into whatever topic you wanted to know about. But now that it’s a cesspool, and Lemmy is tiny in comparison, id say get used to the Internet being like this for a while.
ratcliff@lemmy.wtf 9 months ago
IMO It’s not just optimization or monetization. It’s the abandonment of the open internet (blogs, forums, etc) in favor of walled garden apps that are closed off and operate like a black box. SEO itself is just metadata and helps find things during search nothing malicious about it, but the problem is due to web abandonment, the things there are to find are so low effort you stick to big tent apps like reddit instead of sifting through blog spam
laserjet@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
I agree. So much of the web now functionally happens on the socials which are not indexed/accessible to crawlers.
polle@feddit.de 9 months ago
Especially if you somehow tryout some popular program, for example wordpress. The most search results are just different best of xy plugins lists. Even if you search for issues. Its like you are suddenly in a whole different bubble of the internet and everything is broken.
cashews_best_nut@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Lemmy is tiny in comparison
Try asking Lemmy a question. I was fiddling with FF earlier and thought “I wonder what the best FF addons are atm”. Instead of Googling and getting a bunch of 3-10yo irrelevant blog posts I just posted in Ask Lemmy for peoples opinions. Lemmy may be small, but people like helping. Not only do you get your answer but you help Lemmy grow!
It’s a cliche but it’s perfect right now - Lemmy is at the perfect moment for you to “be the change you want to see in the world”
Carighan@lemmy.world 9 months ago
What I find is that Google is now still better for what I usually search (a mix of programming, gaming and random factoids) compared to Bing or DDG, but no longer by such a wide margin as it used to.
Best as I can tell, it’s because in the past Google constantly tweaked the parameters of their scrapers and models, in turn leading to SEO constantly having to re- and re-optimize, and making it difficult to artificially push your spam and crap content high. They must have stopped doing this, leading to this steady rise of generated spammy content, and now Google feels a lot like other search engines in that i have to very actively discard 80%+ of the results including the whole first page.
FlorianSimon@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Did they say they stopped?
Carighan@lemmy.world 9 months ago
No but it’s my gut feeling, and it matches with the temporal progress in the paper. Cannot truly know of course, but it’s what I would suspect.
frezik@midwest.social 9 months ago
Per your edit, there might be a blind spot in the study. Consider when you’ve searched for a recipe, and the top result you find always starts with "My cousins showed up one day and I had to scramble to make something . . . ". A big story you don’t care about before you can get to what you want. That’s happening because Google is giving those kind of recipe posts a higher rank. Ironically, adding this human story to the post is there for the sake of robots, not people.
I wouldn’t classify posts like that as spam, exactly. I still find the recipe I want. But they do make the experience worse.
ArugulaZ@kbin.social 9 months ago
Amazon's no longer any good at shipping, and Google's no longer any good at searching. What a terrible year to be a tech nerd.
ripcord@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Amazon’s not good at shipping?
I don’t like a lot of their business practices, but holy shit do they get stuff to my house fast and reliably. Most of the time, same or next day.
Carighan@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yeah same, they’re absolutely unmatched, and by a huge margin. Faster, cheaper, and more consistently arriving both on time and undamaged.
drphungky@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I think the key is not good at shipping compared to themselves in the past. Same with Google.
They’re still better than the alternatives, but they’ve gotten much worse in quality all around, and they squeezed out competitors years ago so there’s no viable alternatives that aren’t WAY worse.
misanthropy@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Nah last several times I ordered, I saw one date expected before I order. The next day the expected date changes and it takes a week to turn up. They’ve been trash for a while.
ratcliff@lemmy.wtf 9 months ago
That’s because of their contracts with couriers which is undermining employee safety
KpntAutismus@lemmy.world 9 months ago
don’t forget about every single device collecting as much information as possible.
Octopus1348@lemy.lol 9 months ago
It’s been that way for quite some time.
ratcliff@lemmy.wtf 9 months ago
They quit innovating so what tech?
TheDarkKnight@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It’s kind of shocking how bad it has gotten. I never thought SEO would win in the end, but they did and now Google is fairly useless. Like if AI doesn’t work out long-term what are they left with? A bunch of inferior products people don’t trust anymore or have better/comparable alternatives. GCP sucks compared to AWS and Azure, Android has more freedom than iOS but feels developmentally behind on most fronts in terms of end user experience. Google Search is now about even with Bing and otherwise privacy focused Search Engines have improved to the point of being viable for most cases. Gmail has let in more spam than ever and there’s a lot of alternatives now as well with bo meaningful improvements coming to it. Maps is still probably the market leader there, but more competition in this space too. Google harvests your data to an extreme amount and consumers are privacy aware than previous generations which adds to the distrust of a target demographic. Lastly Youtube is making the user experience worse with every update. While there is no real alternative right now given the overhead required, there is at least a desire for a good alternative should one ever come about.
Feels like Google is losing on every front and bet the farm that AI will save them. We’ll see I guess.
teichflamme@lemm.ee 9 months ago
I agree with most, but android has better UI than IOS by a mile. And I don’t really see a maps competitor coming close, maybe Apple maps.
RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yeah, I agree about Android. I’d never switch to ios, and Android is very polished these days.
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Android has more freedom than iOS but feels developmentally behind on most fronts in terms of end user experience
That’s the one point I strongly disagree with you: Android, for all it’s flaws, has free and open source spin-offs (LineageOS, for one), that are the ONLY chance you have as an end user to own your phone / privacy (barring hardware backdoors or installing stupid apps)
TheDarkKnight@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Lineage is cool. It’s an edge case though, and while relevant for folks on Lemmy, it is probably less than 1% of Android users and not really a selling point for the argument that Google is going in the right direction, no offense. I do love the project and ran it as my daily for several years, hope it gets more traction.
set_secret@lemmy.world 9 months ago
tell us you’ve never used Android without telling is you’ve never used Android lmao.
TheDarkKnight@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Literally used it for a decade plus until it got so shitty I had to switch.
ratcliff@lemmy.wtf 9 months ago
Apple’s UI looks better but Android feels better, maybe they’re talking about user experience
applebusch@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It doesn’t feel like there’s any real alternative to Google search. Most of the privacy based search websites are really just Google or Bing on the backend. The only other index is Yandex the Russian one, which, yeah. I’m happy to be proven wrong, but the internet search space is approaching peak enshittification, and it doesn’t look like anyone is stepping up to meaningfully change anything. No private companies seem willing to actually square up with Google, considering the investment it would take. Honestly I don’t see things getting better anytime soon. This is just another symptom of the erosion of the social contract in the US and the rampant greed that’s driving it. Nothing we can do can’t be enshittified by bad actors in this environment. Not to be too US centric, most of the big tech companies are based here so our garbage culture fucks over everyone.
lloram239@feddit.de 9 months ago
Brave has their own index as well. And if you want Google results in not-enshittified, try Kagi.
That aside, the biggest frustrating in the search space is the complete lack of innovation. All those search engines and their alternatives do the same thing and look the same. There haven’t been new features or new sources of information in about a decade. The whole space has been extremely stagnant.
The only new thing we got recently was ChatGPT, but as search engine replacement it really doesn’t cut it right now, it can enter Wikipedia-style general knowledge question ok’ish, but completely falls apart on anything even mildly obscure (e.g. summaries of lesser known movies are completely wrong). I hope that something good comes from all the AI development, but BingChat so far is a really lack luster and ham-fisted attempt at integrating search with AI, often performing much worse than plain ChatGPT instead of better.
dana@lemmy.world 9 months ago
The vast majority of Google’s revenue comes from advertising, which will remain relevant even if search more or less dies. They put ads in almost every other one of their products, not to mention the ad space they buy and then resell on other sites.
calypsopub@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Anecdotally, I recently had an issue with my printer and used Google to search for the exact error message (something like ’ “error 4308e ink absorber pad is full” Brother JW539DW ') and the first three pages of results were random garbage about other things. If other search engines are worse, we are doomed.
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
Other search engines are better. Subjectively mostly, but to the point where I think I van almost day objectively. I used DuckDuckGo for 5 years now, and it’s crazy to see the difference.
I’m a Linux user too and there it’s the dame thing. I look at windows users and just wonder why people put up with all that shit while o have this super nice, legally free, stable system that doesn’t fuck around with me.
It feels like people are crazy but obviously it’s not that. It’s just that people don’t know any better. You search? That’s Google. The company got their brand and logo cemented in so many people’s brains that they’ll never fail, no matter how bad they get
systemglitch@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Linux has been anything but stable in my experience, while windows has been exceptionally stable in the last decade
soEZ@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Microsoft office… Only thing keeping me on windows…and vr games…
Buffaloaf@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It used to be great for answering very specific, sometimes niche, questions. Now it just brings up irrelevant answers, outdated forums and Amazon ads.
GilgameshCatBeard@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
Just tried looking up if it’s safe to light a fireplace fire after having had a sinus surgery. (It’s very cold here in Seattle tonight and I had septoplasty/FESS/turbinate reduction yesterday afternoon.
All my results were about smoking cigarettes and a result for whether it’s okay to box after surgery. Not a single source to suggest a fire being safe or not.
cloudless@feddit.uk 9 months ago
This is why I use Bing Chat for specific questions.
“Hello, this is Bing. I’m sorry to hear that you had sinus surgery and that you’re feeling cold. 😟
According to some sources, it’s best to avoid exposure to smoke, dust, and other irritants after sinus surgery, as they can interfere with the healing process and cause inflammation. Therefore, lighting a fireplace fire may not be a good idea for your recovery.”
Bing Chat provides sources to the claims so you can verify:
realself.com/…/cambridge-ks-pain-sinuses-weeks-af… www.healthline.com/health/phantosmia
GilgameshCatBeard@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
That is really good to know! Thanks so much for the heads up on this! Never knew this was a thing.
lagomorphlecture@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Your story is obviously anecdotal but I think it pretty much aligns with what what we’ve all experienced. You search for something and get results for something else. You change your search to try to get results you asked for and get… literally the exact same results. It’s infuriating.
GilgameshCatBeard@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
Yep. Unless you’re looking for direct info like- what actor was in that one movie- type of thing….
Carighan@lemmy.world 9 months ago
For me the specific question remains unanswered. There are a lot of results about the health effects on respiration, but none about specifically after a sinus surgery. Might be a question so specific that the internet at large has no answer to it.
What I do not get (on Google, search from Germany) is what you describe, my results are all relevant on the first 3 pages barring 2 results about the surgery instead of the fireplace.
GilgameshCatBeard@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
Yep. It might just be a really weird ask. Like… no one has ever considered it. Meanwhile, I’m sitting here without a fire.
Octopus1348@lemy.lol 9 months ago
What about DuckDuckGo?
sir_reginald@lemmy.world 9 months ago
DDG uses Bing’s results. Bing has deteriorated less than Google but it’s also becoming worse every day.
EmergMemeHologram@startrek.website 9 months ago
I don’t the answers section very very hit or miss
Often it will link you to a highlighted section with noting relevant.
regbin_@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Despite how bad Google Search had become, DuckDuckGo and Bing are somehow still worse. While Google displays the result in the first few, DDG and Bing have no idea what I’m looking for.
Gotta try Kagi sometime.
ItsMeSpez@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I hear this a lot, but I changed from google to DDG about a year ago and haven’t even considered looking back. I can find everything I need quite easily and can only think of maybe a handful of times that I have had to resort to using a bang to try and find something using another search engine. I’m very curious what the difference is between my experience and that of others who have problems DDG.
habl@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I recently switched aswell and am surprised how well it works. I thought it didn’t worked good enough but I never failed to find what I was looking for so far. Very nice.
ikidd@lemmy.world 9 months ago
On technical stuff, I find DDG better than google since I don’t have to wade through their sponsored ad and results. Google is getting unusable that way. I try it every few months when I can’t get an answer on DDG and it doesn’t work any better.
SeekPie@lemmy.world 9 months ago
TBH I didn’t even notice that I was using DDG when switching to librewolf other than the icon on the top bar. I have found everything I have needed, thoigh I usually use “site:lemmy.world” (for example) anyways.
Cosmicomical@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yeah I can’t actually notice the difference. Granted I’m not paying much attention, but that means most of the times I’m finding satisfying results with ddg.
r_se_random@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Anecdotal evidence, but I swapped out Google for DDG about 5-6 years back and haven’t missed it. I do use Google sometimes but it’s once in 4-5 months when DDG fails me, which is acceptable to me.
Transcendant@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yeah I’m the same. I’ve got DDG set as my default search, if the results aren’t useful then I go to google as backup.
NocturnalEngineer@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Personally I’m noticing the opposite.
I tend to do a lot of technical-related searches. I’m finding I’m getting consistently better results from DuckDuckGo / Bing – what I’m looking for is usually available on the first page without having to faff around.
With Google however, it was drawing parallels to what I’m looking for but not what I explicitly queried. I had to either enable verbose search, or manipulate the search to look for specific words. Even then what I was looking for was in the 3-4 page.
ikidd@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It’ll be a frigid day in hell before I pay some company to store my search history keyed to my CC for the inevitable sellout day. I’ll get by with DDG, which frankly works better than a search engine that doesn’t track your clicks has any right to.
MashedTech@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I don’t know much my opinion matters: but the unique features in kagi honestly really help me find what I need. I can lower domains, or raise other ones, it can search archives and has a general set of features that make digesting and finding relevant results easier. It’s like a breath of fresh air, I can search and find not just endlessly search.
Snapz@lemmy.world 9 months ago
We need a google that uses AI/ML to hunt and de-rank the 1800 word essay web pages that answer the question, “how long should you microwave a baked potato for?”
“In 1863, county cork in Ireland, Shamus O’Toole created the world first commercial potato farm. He’d go on to…”
These scammy useless sites are numbing - they pad a thousand plus empty, filler words on either side of the buried wrong, weak answer you would have just glanced by in the past. They are so formulaic and obvious, that an AI could probably identify them as such 10 times out of 10 without an effort.
Google chooses not to fix things like this. Because fuck you.
brbposting@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
RE: potential astroturfing (my comment last time); from my comment downthread that one:
Anytime [paid search engines] are mentioned I suppose I’ll jump in and say…SearXNG is a popular non-commercial alternative. I wanted to throw Grasp in to give a commercial competitor a shout but they’ve “paused”.
Update on Grasp:
We will be back soon and will open-source our code.
Neat, wonder if SearXNG x Grasp would be synergistic.
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 9 months ago
One thing I have noticed is any search is more likely to pop up a news article with that word vs a good article on it. Look up say a band and I will get a lot of articles about some recent things they did vs the website for the band or an indepth look at the band. I really don’t need twenty versions of the same article from news networks all copying each other. It feels like it is favoring new stuff first and can’t see that it is repeating itself.
Duck duck go still works better.
RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world 9 months ago
The AI questions and answers that almost never seem to be answering the question in my search.
Q: Best tool to pull out a nail
A: The most common tool used to pull nails is a hammer!
No, Google. I fucking know what hammers are. I’m asking you for NAIL PULLERS. JESUS CHRIST.
doctorcrimson@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Looks like those theories about algorithms becoming recursive and ineffective will be proven sooner than we expected. I wonder if the emergence of crap AI sped the process up.
sylverstream@lemmy.nz 9 months ago
I switched to DDG and then to Kagi based on all the praise it gets here. So much better than Google!
Bonesy91@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Google has literally killed itself. Maps, Google.com, YouTube… It’s all garbage now.
frezik@midwest.social 9 months ago
LMGTFYWNMGSN
Let Me Google That For You, Wait, Never Mind, Google Sucks Now
Artyom@lemm.ee 9 months ago
My wife and I were looking up a specific calendar. The search query wasn’t particularly complicated and very clear. In Google, the first result was a 2023 version of the calendar, and the rest of the results were completely useless. In Duck Duck Go, the calendar we wanted was the top result. I can’t imagine what it’s like to use Google for a search that’s actually complicated.
Joker@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months ago
It really is terrible. I was a DDG early adopter and then Kagi. It’s been a while since Google has been my daily driver, but I do sometimes use it and the results are just bad. There’s so much spam and the results page is a mess. To my eyes, Google is worse than either Kagi or DDG in just about every way except speed. The only other thing I can really think of where Google is much better is in local search. They are damn good at that.
zingo@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
Google Maps as well. Very inaccurate at times.
ReaderTunesOctopus@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It seems there is an arms race between search engines and content creators. The latter come up with those pages that will tell you the life history of the writer and their dogs, and 20 ads, five popups, subscription offers, allow the site to access your location and send updates questions and 'read more’s later you might find out the thing you need. All this to have more ads and rank higher in various searches. 10 minutes ago I wanted to find out what the hell a float needle is. I couldn’t. ChatGPT gave me the answer I needed in two questions.
simonced@lemmy.one 9 months ago
Kagi is payd service, but the results are so good!
quams69@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It would be helpful if google actually responded and actioned on reports. i see malicious websites on search every day that I have reported numerous times.
Transcendant@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Is it just me, or has autocorrect on phones also gotten way, way worse? When would I ever want to type ‘thbnks’?
Mr_Blott@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Is this entirety Google’s fault, or is it due to the different people who send me ten emails a week saying "Good day to you dear sir. I have been checking your website and I see that you have a good ranking but I am an SEO specialist and I can make your website rank higher "
Bitch please I’m a lazy cunt, I don’t want the work 😂
bender223@lemmy.today 9 months ago
Yeah, Google search is useless now. I’ve switched to ddg , and it’s much better. Just not having all those sponsored links helps a lot .
Maybe a searx instance would be even better, but I haven’t found one that works consistently for me.
ratcliff@lemmy.wtf 9 months ago
SearX because Kagi is hailcorporate
JellyMuffins@feddit.nl 9 months ago
I’ve been using brave search since their early days. They used to suck, but I pushed my feelings aside and just kept trying. Now, brave out performs google on a lot of search results. Sometimes, you have to add a bit more context to your query, but it is worth staying private and not dealing with all the SEO garbage. If the results don’t fit your need, just leave feedback and it will probably be addressed soon.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Google has gotten really bad with the sponsored links. Not only are they only identified with a small “ad sponsored” disclaimer that is easy to miss on a phone screen but I’ve run into sponsored results that are blatant scams that I’ve had to report to google. Seemingly no effort on their part to screen these before they let them get posted.
I’ve also had to resort to altering my search engine results to always filter out quora and pinterest because they have gamed SEO so badly that they choke my results with garbage. Both demand you open accounts to see much (nope) and quora is a cesspool of bad answers and trolls.
lloram239@feddit.de 9 months ago
While Web search has gotten worse, Youtube has gotten pretty good at finding niche content with a few dozens views. In general it seems most user generated content these days is on Youtube as video, not on the Web as text. The typical Web SOC spam doesn’t really exist on Youtube outside of a few crypto scams here and there.
WhiteOakBayou@lemmy.world 9 months ago
At some point in the last two years I completely stopped using Google search in browser and just use Google maps to find businesses or ddg for searches. Actual Google search just has too many sponsored or promotional links
WeeSheep@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I just searched local restaurants near me and tried to sort by distance and the first option was 800 miles away, the second was 600 miles away. It’s not just Google search getting worse.
Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 months ago
Google has really been dropping the ball a lot more publicly lately
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Here’s the thing, Google has changed. Over time, they’ve restructured themselves.
Google still has amazing programmers and engineers.
The trouble is that their expertise is in crafting systems that harvest personal information, expertise in other areas has been left to rot because there’s no point in improving them.
Gmail is already entrenched, as is search, YouTube, maps, android, etc.
They aren’t going to attract a significant amount more customers, so their main avenue for continued growth has been to become better at harvesting and processing data.
For a while that was fine, but now that the expertise has been lost, Google can’t make good products. They don’t have the ability to do so. Not unless the product you want is a telemetry system.
It’s a part of why Google starts then kills so many projects. They want to expand to collect more data, but they don’t have the ability to create good services anymore, so it just ends up being an advanced data collector with a sub-par app/website on top of it. The company just isn’t structured to make things in any other way.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
they are probably putting sponsored results above the legit stuff.
didnt someone get caught recently doing that?
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months ago
Pretty soon the internet will be almost completely ruined. Within a few years. AI bots will have spammed everything. Searches and web pages will be entirely faked bs. Reddit and Lemmy will have enough ai Bots commenting and pushing agendas/products that no one will have a clue who’s a real person. Information that’s true will be almost impossible to verify online.
In short, if you think the web has gotten bad now, you ain’t seen nothin yet.
ParanoiaComplex@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I agree with the sentiment, but lack of AI has not stopped SEO hacking in the past. Sure it will help them go farther, but there are already tons of garbage websites hacking the top 1-5 results of any search
lloram239@feddit.de 9 months ago
I am more optimistic on that one. AI provides a pretty clear way out of this, since it allows you to automatically detect the bullshit. Meaning either the bullshit has to raise so much in quality that it is indistinguishable from good content, in which case it would not be bullshit anymore, or it will get filtered. AI can also transform bad websites into good ones, like a super-powered ReaderMode, so a lot of the “lets plaster everything with ads” will lose effectivness.
The problem over the last decade was that Google completely lost interest in being a search engine, they are just an ad company and as long as search leads you to more ads, they are quite happy. So the user experience went down the toilet.
clearleaf@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I think this is part of why Google holds on to youtube despite it not making them money. Without that Google would just be the map and email company. They would completely lose the appearance of “owning” any part of the internet.