#google fail

[gremlin-mom]

Ah yes my favourite Honkai Star Rail character: Cheetah

[theabstruseone]

If you want to know why this is happening, there's a joke:

"Did you know that no country in Africa starts with the letter K?"

"What about Kenya?"

"Kenya lick deeznuts"

And this is why using algorithms to answer questions doesn't work no matter how much you call them "AI"

[sweaterkittensahoy]

My parents left for a cruise today. It was supposed to leave from Miami and travel through the Western Caribbean, but due to Tropical Storm Leo, the cruise has been moved to the Eastern Caribbean.

Can someone who understands hurricanes and geography help me out and explain how safe this actually is? My googling just brings up "how to pick a Caribbean Cruise" even when I'm just trying to see how far apart these two parts of the Caribbean are to gain any sort of knowledge, and while I don't think a cruise company would intentionally lie to customers to get the cruise going anyway, I also...don't believe it. If you get me.

So, if anyone has useful info on if it's actually safe to be in the Eastern Caribbean while a hurricane bears down on the West Caribbean, I'd appreciate it.

[someonewhogotanaccount]

You sure that’s Latin, Google?

I actually just wanted a info page about the word “ut” for my Latin exam but okay…

[joudama]

Amazing. 🤣

[fortheloveoflatinum]

Fun Fact:

Apparently, if you Google "stars that have died," you get a list of celebrities.

I am literally looking for celestial bodies that were there and then weren't.

[masterpikachu6]

Well. Dead Frontier is such a popular game franchise. Also, God of War looks weird, but fair enough.

[iveneverdoneanythingwrong]

There is so much wrong with this picture.

[obeliskthetormentorsfeetpics]

a collection

please add on to this if you find ones i havent

[voxaeternam]

Damn you google docs

I finished the overall plot structure of my novella! I'm happy I'm taking writing more seriously now, I would love it if it sees the light of day in the future and maybe some people will enjoy it? but since I don't have win office to work with I relied on google docs for prompts and other book ideas I have. Now with all this AI nonsense I had to scrape my google drive. It's not like omg I have the greatest book of all time there but it's mine you know? my ideas, my heart and dreams poured in my silly little book ideas.

So now I hope to find an alternative both to google docs and office, I tried open office years ago but the tools are so SO limited :(

[bigfatbreak]

Does Chloe tone down her direct bullying/harassment of Marinette after that day to just the dead mom jokes out of guilt, or is it more that Marinette now being homeschooled means Chloe just lost access? Also, does Lila try the whole lying/sabotaging thing on Marinette and just fail or does Marinette just not care?

Lila has no reason to sabotage Marinette because Marinette isn't threatening her little empire she wants to build. In fact, she really wants Marinette on her side BECAUSE she's not apart of the school, so she doesn't need to keep up an elaborate web of lies! She can just try to befriend a talented girl who makes AMAZING food and try to get freebies~

meanwhile, with Chloe, things got really complicated after the pool incident...

Tom was not in the mood to put up with this crap.

[ew-selfish-art]

Dp x dc AU - If the Internation Space Station orbits the Earth 16 times a day, then so does the Watchtower.

Danny’s on track to move out of his parent’s house and move to Gotham for college (He swears that Sam bribed the board to let him in- and she wasn’t even going to that university!) but the dorms don’t open for another three days and he cannot wait to escape. Seeing his parents try to perfect yet another weapon to use against him while he changed out the ecto filters on the portal was too much. He’s completely over the idea of staying when he already has everything packed and ready to go.

The solution? Take all his boxes into his haunt in the Ghost Zone, leave them there and then spend some time in camping in space. He’s already explored the Infinite Realms enough to be bored of it for a minute (not to mention he wants to avoid getting more ‘favors’ to do from Clockwork) and hell, he just wants to see some stars.

He grabs his tent, a sleeping bag and all the food and things he could need and brings it into the atmosphere with him. Keeping it all tethered to him, Danny stays in a fixed position above Gotham (Cause that’s where he’s going next, duh) and treats himself to some quality Me-time.

Only problem is that several times a day he has to make himself intangible while he lets satellites and things pass through. Easy enough and honestly pretty interesting to observe as a wannabe engineering student.

He doesn’t know when exactly it happened the first time- but it turns out the Heroes of Earth all congregated in a satelite office building? It was bigger than the ISS! What the heck!?

Going intangible but not invisible, the JL spot Danny and are incredibly confused how an ‘Alien’ teen just happens to appear in their meeting rooms disappearing at the rate (slowly but surely) of the Watchtower moving through space. Was that camping gear? How was he roasting a marshmallow? Did propane camping stoves even work in space??

16 times a day they get the opportunity to ask Danny a few questions. He mostly ignores them or gives them joke answers. Eventually Martian Manhunter phases through the Watchtower to join him.

They talk about how hard transition periods in life can be and having strained relationships with family. J’ohn returns to the watchtower on its next cycle and reports that the kid is just fine, being an adult is just a hard thing to do.

[todayikilledmybestfriend]

I'm going to vent about #Google because I'm so tired of them.

When I started my own site in 2011 it was on Blogger. At some point we reviewed a comic that was co-written by an international Japanese music artist and Stan Lee. The Japanese artist whose name I don't remember tweeted the review and our traffic shot up, like a thousand fold.

Suddenly I was denied ad revenue by Google, which I thought was weird and didn't look into because at the time ads weren't my focus.

Years later the site #ComicBastards was doing well and we wanted to move into the video space so enter #YouTube and really the only reason to use YouTube is the ads. This is where I find out that I'm permanently blocked from ad revenue on Google.

I look into it and appeal it over and over and finally find out that they suspected I paid for traffic around the time that a international Japanese musician tweeted a review for the site... And I can't appeal.

It sours me on YouTube and Google. A lot.

Now to today's part of the story where I continue to be retaliated again by #Google. I buy the #PixelPro7 on the #PixelPass because you get a phone and everything #Google has to offer in one subscription. I'm enjoying it, the camera is the only reason to get the phone really, but I'm trying apps on the pass until I can't.

My phone tells me I don't have a pixel pass anymore and I'm like, what? Turns out the account I started with Google's partnership flagged Google as fraud because what they don't tell you is that the pixel pass is a separate charge. They supposedly email me, but if they did it went to spam. The bank didn't call me or tell me anything. Google who I bought the phone through didn't call me and only supposedly sent the two emails.

So I call, because I want the pass it's why I subscribed. I'm told they can't reinstate and I escalate the call and I'm told again, no they can't reinstate it. Which is weird right? I called the minute I found out about the issue and yet I can't have it reinstated? My money is not worry?

But really I feel like Google is still retaliating against me. Supposedly a supervisor is going to call me, but I've been told that two other times now and still haven't been called. Most likely I will sell the phone, take a loss on it and never use Google again. That's their aim with their customer service department who would lose nothing from reinstating my pass, but they won't. Google is terrible, YouTube is terrible. I can't wait until someone else disrupts their business model and we get a new platform that isn't terrible. @Google (probably not your real account) but any thoughts on why you retaliate against your customers and user base? # badcustomerservice

[wormpool]

Kyle MacLachlan's appearance as himself on How To with John Wilson (2020)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Too big to care

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.

Today, Google has a 90% search market-share. They got it the hard way: they cheated. Google spends tens of billions of dollars on payola in order to ensure that they are the default search engine behind every search box you encounter on every device, every service and every website:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

Not coincidentally, Google's search is getting progressively, monotonically worse. It is a cesspool of botshit, spam, scams, and nonsense. Important resources that I never bothered to bookmark because I could find them with a quick Google search no longer show up in the first ten screens of results:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Even after all that payola, Google is still absurdly profitable. They have so much money, they were able to do a $80 billion stock buyback. Just a few months later, Google fired 12,000 skilled technical workers. Essentially, Google is saying that they don't need to spend money on quality, because we're all locked into using Google search. It's cheaper to buy the default search box everywhere in the world than it is to make a product that is so good that even if we tried another search engine, we'd still prefer Google.

This is enshittification. Google is shifting value away from end users (searchers) and business customers (advertisers, publishers and merchants) to itself:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#apor-locksmith

And here's the thing: there are search engines out there that are so good that if you just try them, you'll get that same feeling you got the first time you tried Google.

When I was in Tucson last month on my book-tour for my new novel The Bezzle, I crashed with my pals Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden. I've know them since I was a teenager (Patrick is my editor).

We were sitting in his living room on our laptops – just like old times! – and Patrick asked me if I'd tried Kagi, a new search-engine.

Teresa chimed in, extolling the advanced search features, the "lenses" that surfaced specific kinds of resources on the web.

I hadn't even heard of Kagi, but the Nielsen Haydens are among the most effective researchers I know – both in their professional editorial lives and in their many obsessive hobbies. If it was good enough for them…

I tried it. It was magic.

No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again.

That was before I started playing with Kagi's lenses and other bells and whistles, which elevated the search experience from "magic" to sorcerous.

The catch is that Kagi costs money – after 100 queries, they want you to cough up $10/month ($14 for a couple or $20 for a family with up to six accounts, and some kid-specific features):

https://kagi.com/settings?p=billing_plan&plan=family

I immediately bought a family plan. I've been using it for a month. I've basically stopped using Google search altogether.

Kagi just let me get a lot more done, and I assumed that they were some kind of wildly capitalized startup that was running their own crawl and and their own data-centers. But this morning, I read Jason Koebler's 404 Media report on his own experiences using it:

https://www.404media.co/friendship-ended-with-google-now-kagi-is-my-best-friend/

Koebler's piece contained a key detail that I'd somehow missed:

When you search on Kagi, the service makes a series of “anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Yandex, Mojeek, and Brave,” as well as a handful of other specialized search engines, Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, etc. Kagi then combines this with its own web index and news index (for news searches) to build the results pages that you see. So, essentially, you are getting some mix of Google search results combined with results from other indexes.

In other words: Kagi is a heavily customized, anonymized front-end to Google.

The implications of this are stunning. It means that Google's enshittified search-results are a choice. Those ad-strewn, sub-Altavista, spam-drowned search pages are a feature, not a bug. Google prefers those results to Kagi, because Google makes more money out of shit than they would out of delivering a good product:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/2/24117976/best-printer-2024-home-use-office-use-labels-school-homework

No wonder Google spends a whole-ass Twitter every year to make sure you never try a rival search engine. Bottom line: they ran the numbers and figured out their most profitable course of action is to enshittify their flagship product and bribe their "competitors" like Apple and Samsung so that you never try another search engine and have another one of those magic moments that sent all those Jeeves-askin' Yahooers to Google a quarter-century ago.

One of my favorite TV comedy bits is Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator; Tomlin would do these pitches for the Bell System and end every ad with "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company":

https://snltranscripts.jt.org/76/76aphonecompany.phtml

Speaking of TV comedy: this week saw FTC chair Lina Khan appear on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It was amazing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM

The coverage of Khan's appearance has focused on Stewart's revelation that when he was doing a show on Apple TV, the company prohibited him from interviewing her (presumably because of her hostility to tech monopolies):

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/apple-got-caught-censoring-its-own

But for me, the big moment came when Khan described tech monopolists as "too big to care."

What a phrase!

Since the subprime crisis, we're all familiar with businesses being "too big to fail" and "too big to jail." But "too big to care?" Oof, that got me right in the feels.

Because that's what it feels like to use enshittified Google. That's what it feels like to discover that Kagi – the good search engine – is mostly Google with the weights adjusted to serve users, not shareholders.

Google used to care. They cared because they were worried about competitors and regulators. They cared because their workers made them care:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/4/18295933/google-cancels-ai-ethics-board

Google doesn't care anymore. They don't have to. They're the search company.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

[xzacloudx]

Uuugh, heh, tell me about it...

Trying to Google for song lyrics, being shown a direct rip from some random website that's very wrong at least 65% of the time (clearly done by ear, with maybe 2 listens max)...

...which people "helpfully" copy/paste in the comments on music videos on YouTube, or even use to make their own "lyirc video, susbcribe for moer", thus propagating falsehoods & misrepresenting the piece's intent.

All due to, & encouraging the continuation of, mankind's growing propensity to just blindly accept the first answer they get, trusting the disintegrating public façades of our corporate overlords...

...and feeling proud of all the praise they get as a relayer of those increasingly nonsensical noises of malfunction...

...rather than ANY of them doing a couple minutes of work to find the actual sources & verify for themselves. 😑

at this point googling just about any cartoon character (particularly ones from preschool shows) now gets you auto-generated questions with nonsense answers, usually scraped from a random fanon wiki run by children because google just assumes that anything on fandom dot com is trustworthy