#Internet search engines

[thoughtportal]

search engines and abortion

https://jessica.substack.com/

[in-sufficientdata]

ok but how am i supposed to stop using google when the alternatives suck so bad

i switched to qwant but if i do a search and then click on the news tab it tells me there's no news items (this is usually when i'm 100% certain there is bc i just searched a news story i heard on the radio). i can't search by date there (i use that feature of google's search constantly). there is a drop-down where you can choose freshness but it's not very exact

i had a similar experience trying to use duck duck go

i basically end up re-running all my searches on google anyway and that's really not helpful for what i'm trying to do here

[lokislonelylady]

Tumblr has gotten way less enjoyable. Way more algorithm suggested content popping up in my feed and 80% of that not anything I am or have ever been into interacting with. I am overdue for updating the app even for fesr of new changes yet change it has and for the worst. I liked when people I followed or who followed me or things I definitely was into were what popped up in my feed. Now it is like Tumblr doesn't know me anymore? Little setting tweaks I try to make to change the experience just don't help either. Follow more new people? Don't follow new people? Or just don't expect much. I remember when Google and other search engines weren't sanitized, weaponized to just sell you things, and back when the internet was fun, free, democratizing, and informative.

[busylazy]

When Googling is not enough...

I’m sorry friends, but “just google it” is no longer viable advice. What are we even telling people to do anymore, go try to google useful info and the first three pages are just ads for products that might be the exact opposite of what the person is trying to find but The Algorithm thinks the words are related enough? And if it’s not ads it’s just sponsored websites filled with listicles, just pages and pages of “TOP FIFTEEN [thing you googled] IMAGINED AS DISNEY PRINCESSES” like… what are we even doing anymore, google? I can no longer use you as shorthand for people doing real and actual helpful research on their own.

[i-dont-watch-movies-or-tv]

I feel like the age of having a "burner email" is gone. Out of curiosity,

[richdadpoor]

Google Search AI Gives Ridiculous, Wrong Answers

Google’s experiments with AI-generated search results produce some troubling answers, Gizmodo has learned, including justifications for slavery and genocide and the positive effects of banning books. In one instance, Google gave cooking tips for Amanita ocreata, a poisonous mushroom known as the “angel of death.” The results are part of Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience. Google’s…

[queen-street-news]

Directories USA

Directories “Your Online Directory score is based on the number of places in which your listings are present and contain consistent information such as business name, and phone number.” There are a number of sites that will auto update or sync your info to theses directories. Here’s a list Synced as of AUG 2023 America’s Best…

[incognitopolls]

Answer based on what you typically use, even if you sometimes have to use something else.

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We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[prokopetz]

The funniest possible outcome of all these Google antitrust disclosures re: deceptively re-writing people's search queries in order to maximise Google's ad revenue would be if the corporations that paid for those ads decide that Google has been defrauding them the whole time. The ultimate "bite each other's dicks off" scenario.

[thoughtportal]

Reddit

[warakami-vaporwave]

Windows 94!

[destielmemenews]

DOJ is considering Breaking up Google for violating antitrust law, especially for its monopoly on online search

Other options would include forcing Google to share data with its rivals or paying large fines.

source 1

source 2

source 3

[probablyasocialecologist]

Google search really has been taken over by low-quality SEO spam, according to a new, year-long study by German researchers. The researchers, from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, set out to answer the question "Is Google Getting Worse?" by studying search results for 7,392 product-review terms across Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo over the course of a year.  They found that, overall, "higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality ...  we find that only a small portion of product reviews on the web uses affiliate marketing, but the majority of all search results do."  They also found that spam sites are in a constant war with Google over the rankings, and that spam sites will regularly find ways to game the system, rise to the top of Google's rankings, and then will be knocked down. "SEO is a constant battle and we see repeated patterns of review spam entering and leaving the results as search engines and SEO engineers take turns adjusting their parameters," they wrote.

[...]

The researchers warn that this rankings war is likely to get much worse with the advent of AI-generated spam, and that it genuinely threatens the future utility of search engines: "the line between benign content and spam in the form of content and link farms becomes increasingly blurry—a situation that will surely worsen in the wake of generative AI. We conclude that dynamic adversarial spam in the form of low-quality, mass-produced commercial content deserves more attention."

[blubberquark]

Auto-Generated Junk Web Sites

I don't know if you heard the complaints about Google getting worse since 2018, or about Amazon getting worse. Some people think Google got worse at search. I think Google got worse because the web got worse. Amazon got worse because the supply side on Amazon got worse, but ultimately Amazon is to blame for incentivising the sale of more and cheaper products on its platform.

In any case, if you search something on Google, you get a lot of junk, and if you search for a specific product on Amazon, you get a lot of junk, even though the process that led to the junk is very different.

I don't subscribe to the "Dead Internet Theory", the idea that most online content is social media and that most social media is bots. I think Google search has gotten worse because a lot of content from as recently as 2018 got deleted, and a lot of web 1.0 and the blogosphere got deleted, comment sections got deleted, and content in the style of web 1.0 and the blogosphere is no longer produced. Furthermore, many links are now broken because they don't directly link to web pages, but to social media accounts and tweets that used to aggregate links.

I don't think going back to web 1.0 will help discoverability, and it probably won't be as profitable or even monetiseable to maintain a useful web 1.0 page compared to an entertaining but ephemeral YouTube channel. Going back to Web 1.0 means more long-term after-hours labour of love site maintenance, and less social media posting as a career.

Anyway, Google has gotten noticeably worse since GPT-3 and ChatGPT were made available to the general public, and many people blame content farms with language models and image synthesis for this. I am not sure. If Google had started to show users meaningless AI generated content from large content farms, that means Google has finally lost the SEO war, and Google is worse at AI/language models than fly-by-night operations whose whole business model is skimming clicks off Google.

I just don't think that's true. I think the reality is worse.

Real web sites run by real people are getting overrun by AI-generated junk, and human editors can't stop it. Real people whose job it is to generate content are increasingly turning in AI junk at their jobs.

Furthermore, even people who are setting up a web site for a local business or an online presence for their personal brand/CV are using auto-generated text.

I have seen at least two different TV commercials by web hosting and web design companies that promoted this. Are you starting your own business? Do you run a small business? A business needs a web site. With our AI-powered tools, you don't have to worry about the content of your web site. We generate it for you.

There are companies out there today, selling something that's probably a re-labelled ChatGPT or LLaMA plus Stable Diffusion to somebody who is just setting up a bicycle repair shop. All the pictures and written copy on the web presence for that repair shop will be automatically generated.

We would be living in a much better world if there was a small number of large content farms and bot operators poisoning our search results. Instead, we are living in a world where many real people are individually doing their part.

[the-blinkie-guy]

neon green blinkies (mostly compiled for my riddler-themed spacehey :P)

[copperbadge]

Sam, what search engine do you use? Recently I have decided to stop using Google, due to privacy concerns and the honestly terrible forced answers to regular search terms… for 99% of my searches, I want a catalog of results that allows me to become informed.

Any suggestions on search engines for doing proper long tail keyword searching these days?

Honestly, when I use one at all, I still use Google. I've given up on expecting privacy or the idea that it's effective to try and ensure it on a personal level -- it needs legislation at this point. People say it's gotten measurably shittier but I haven't really noticed a drop in quality, which is not to Google's credit since it's never actually been great. It is, however, convenient and generally gives me what I want. Perhaps part of it is I grew up without it so when search engines started to be a thing I was like, already prepared with critical thinking skills to weed out the trash. Just because I haven't noticed a drop in quality because I've always ignored the increasingly numerous sponsored/garbage results doesn't mean it hasn't happened.

I don't actually use search engines at all that often -- in my work, I'm using databases or specific sites, and in my personal life I usually know a specific site I'd consult first (ie, Serious Eats for recipes, Wiktionary for language research, Jstor or NIH for scholarship, etc). So I mostly use Google these days as an index -- finding a specific page on a site other than Google that I'm already aware of.

I believe a lot of people recommend duckduckgo, mainly because the privacy function is so much stronger, but I can't speak to its robustness in terms of giving you what you're looking for.

Readership, feel free to chime in with whatever you're using and why! Remember to comment or reblog, as I don't post asks sent in response to other asks.