This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Any hope this takes SEO out with it, or are we just going to get to a point of PR companies flooding AIs with data to benefit their clients?
The original Google algorithm was powered by establishing 'reputation' by the number of links to that page. Would be cool to see an algorithm that started with that analysis, but also weighed pages by their Erdős distance to your Fediverse account(think 6° of Kevin Bacon) - basically much higher scores for links from you, higher score for links by your friends, moderate boost for friends of friends, etc.
I’ve googled several things recently, the AI shit really sucks! It’s fine if you’re looking for something basic, like translations of words and what not. But if it’s something more specific it’ll easily bullshit you and claim it’s correct.
Yeah not using Google but duck.ai gave me some claim about a product I was looking up that had some categories. I asked how many of category x and it said 11 but the product only had 11 in total. Oh yeah oops I have actually no idea how many of category x there is out of 11. Cool, people who trust it would have just wasted money.
I've switched to startpage and have no complaints. Not that Google has deployed much of its latest crap in Europe, but it's been shit for quite some time anyway.
One final nail in the open web coffin, just hammer it in there real good. RIP.
Will 'AI' give rise to Internet 2.0?
As intended.
First they're going to collapse the ad model by eliminating most clicks.
Then they're going to put all of the information they've been scraping from the now-bankrupt websites behind paywalls.
Why would they do that, when they can charge advertisers to bias the LLM? How much do you think Adidas would pay to have their products advantages mixed into any response about sports gear, undetectable?
Joke's on them, I've already been working on that for decades. *pats ublock* This baby can bankrupt so many websites and I always hoped it could collapse the ad model completely.
In all seriousness, it's becoming increasingly clear that we're eventually going to have to build a new, free internet out of the wreckage of this one once the corporations are done with it. Technically it's already there, nascent but ever so slowly growing and taking root, hiding in plain sight. Like the so-called dark web of tor, it already exists in parallel to the existing structures of the internet. Call it the deep web, the indie web, nostalgia web, unsearchable web, I've heard countless terms and most of them aren't terribly accurate, but the web doesn't need ads and google search to exist, it never did. It just needs humans, which despite the best efforts of big tech many of us still are, communicating directly with one another and documenting our billions of lifetimes of diverse collective experiences and knowledge.
We are the wealth of information in the internet. Corporations don't own it. We are it.
I see your ublock and raise you Pihole.
The internet has always had ads, some of the most obnoxious were those mid to late 90s banner ads with sound. I’ll never forget loading a random page and my speakers screaming: Helllllloooooooooo.
I genuinely forgot about the ads with sound.
I don't miss them.
Porque no los dos?
Very much yes.
I have this great visual image of the corporate web, marked by neon signs and billboards and holographic ads, populated entirely by bots talking to each other while the humans sneak away, giggling and shushing each other.
As intended.
Yes. The secret to telling what a search engine wants you to do is whatever is on top of the search results.
You and I might scour the results to find the exact best results, but most people simply look at the very first thing they're presented with and call it a day.
When I saw all of the search engines putting AI answers first, I knew they were intentionally trying to stop people from clicking through.
Search results are shit now.
Our only hope is this opens the door to some competitor, who'll provide actually useful search results. I know that would be very expensive to start.
Kagi. Kagi is the answer. Been using it for 3-months and it's absolutely worth the $5 a month.
I'm at about half a year, and I thought for sure I'd be mixing in Google from time to time, but nope.
Same here. Never looked back. My search finally just works.
Google pushed out competitors using partnerships only they could afford, then intentionally made search worse so people would see more ads.
Enshittify search to the point of it being nearly useless. Then introduce a little bot to find it for you. Predictable.
Some websites now are really shit. Won't load unless you allow JavaScript from 15 different domains, cookie consent, terrible privacy etc.
If I want to know things like what 10 kmpl in mpg, I often use DDG snippets.
