Over the past ~20 years, Google became the de facto entry point for learning new skills and information. Google also sucks now. This is a really big problem.
As an IT professional, it's getting harder to find what I need from Google.
At the same time, it's borderline impossible to find what I need from other search engines, most of the time, and it's downright stupid to ask AI about it, because it will always give you an easy answer that doesn't work using controls that don't exist.
Yay?
I do not find LLMs much great right now. But there been a few instances where googling or searching would yield me no useful results but somehow ChatGPT had a suggestions for problems that I want to solve and it delivered me solutions that actually did work.
Also, there has been couple of times where I had no idea where to start when researching topics of my interests. When trying to post on reddit with a question, these usually come off sort of gate-keeping-like or tried to steer me into direction I didn't want to go. ChatGPT, on the other hand, gave out options. And, since recently, (dunno, in 2021-2022 it wasn't doing so) also gave sources too.
In any case, searching in google without adding "reddit" to a promt 99% of the time gives bullshit options with shit ass quora usually at the top. Who dafuq uses quora? Never found a single useful post there.
I’ve gotten useful information from Quora before but then it became shit.
It coincided with a bunch of MAGA/Antivax morons invading the place when Reddit shut down their hate-subs. They have opinions that masquerade as fact on every topic.
There are still pockets of useful spaces the same way Reddit still has some niche subs with good experiences to yet be had.
bullshit options with shit ass quora usually at the top. Who dafuq uses quora?
I wonder the same thing. I used it once, and only once, in my life. I had been trying to find vegan birthday candles and having no luck finding sources for the wax (since I was explicitly avoiding beeswax), so I asked Quora where I could find vegan candles. The answer I got?
“Don’t eat birthday candles.”
Uhhh…
Apparently whatever fool worked there had no idea that “vegan” is a lifestyle, that goes beyond food. The question was closed and I had no way to appeal or add information. Fantastic.
You go to quora for the comedy. Like "how babby is formed" or "am I pregernant"
Hmm, I would assume most candles are vegan being made of either paraffin or soy wax. Bees wax tends to be more expensive since it takes a long time for bees to make wax. The flame from bees wax is also smaller and less bright. Am I wrong about this assumption?
I searched how to reset an anker speaker yesterday, all the AI website bullshit at the top of the page was completely wrong. Had to actually find the manual online and look it up. Finally found the answer after 2 completely wrong AI solutions. I don't use AI, I just went off the search results where it shows a brief answer at the top of the page. I despise AI bullshit.
I see your point. It's just for me worked couple of times well.
Example: I have hardware Steam Link hooked up to my TV. It had this issue where screen would freeze but game/audio would continue on, but menu would work half a time if not in game. I tried to look up the issue and found no lead. Adding "reddit" didnt help either. Only vague discussions, and dead-end leads.
ChatGPT prompt gave me couple of options where the 2nd option was to disable hardware encoding which fixed my issue.
I went to google same issue right now and still google results on 1st page have nothing about hardware encoding which was an actual fix. 1st link is to reddit where people say hardware encoding didn't help so I disregarded this fix. Others claim that downgrading gpu drivers solve this issue. It didn't.
I'd rather google. But lately quality of results are incredibly low.
More like the destruction of shadow libraries make education way worse because you can't find a lot of stuff otherwise.
Yes. Those are critical.
I hate to say it. But some of the best minds out there often don't have the money to pay for all books and material. And often times those that DO have the money don't always have the curiosity or desire to learn.
what's baffling is that there are people who seriously argue that education is a commodity or even luxury and not a basic human right.
This is one topic I’m quite willing to go into conspiracy theory territory on, because Google have a lot of very clever engineers and must surely know that their search is dogshit.
The only plausible explanation is that they’re somehow making more money doing this than they did by being quietly competent.
That’s not a conspiracy. It’s been confirmed. The head of ads forced the search team to make search worse so people would search more and see more ads. There is no reason to use google search, they want it to suck.
Not even a conspiracy theory, really. They hired the head of search over at Yahoo (?!!) and he had the explicit mandate to make search more profitable.
You think engineers are in charge and making the money?
Quite obvious even before I've read favoredponcho's comment. Just scraping web to deliver context matching results brings no money. Ads bring money. Case solved
They know it's trash. But searching multiple times and weeding through dogshit, you spend more time on their site looking at ads, unless you use ublock, then it's just annoying to the user.
That first video was great. Subbed
Yes. Big Tech in general is pretty bad, at least the software side. (Except for Steam, my beloved.)
I knew a dude who helped create a piece of legacy code. Homie was not some prodigy or genius, but is set for life because the bigger companies are so adverse to any change. There are so many vulnerabilities in the sheer laziness.
I know everyone complains about it, but fuck Google's results have been absolute dogshit lately. I'll write a query with like 5 or 6 words, and the results will make it clear it took about 3 of them and turned them separately into synonyms, ignored the other 2 completely, and then gave me a bunch of results that contain literally none of the words I asked for and are irrelevant to my search.
They even helpfully highlight words I didn't ask for in the digest!
Sometimes I can still influence it into giving me what I want with some judicious use of quotes or something, but even that doesn't always work these days. Sometimes I'll search something like "Linux suspend bug" or something and it'll give me results that don't have Linux in it, and then there'll be a little blurb under the result being like "yeah, this one doesn't have Linux in it. Do you want that?"
Yeah! I gave you like 3 words, and you decided to show me results that ignored the most discriminating word I gave you? Yeah, use it, that's why I typed it!
It's like they tuned the engine to work on the terrible queries my relatives would type 10 years ago, and in so doing ruined my ability to be deliberate and precise...
I ran into this just yesterday. My dad's Windows 10 computer was reporting our printer as offline, even though it wasn't; it would queue print jobs, but never actually send them. It did this even though it had been printing normally less than half an hour beforehand. It's connected over Wi-Fi.
And I remembered having solved this problem once before, ages ago (I think like twelve years ago?), by digging through the old Microsoft forums and Google search results, and I had a dim recollection of what sort of thing the solution had been, but not the details. So I figured that, most likely, the fix had gotten undone, probably when I switched him to IoT LTSC edition so he could keep getting security updates. (Both my parents were basically unwilling to switch to 11.)
But when I pulled up search on a browser to see if I could reconstruct the solution I'd found all those years ago, instead I got all this SEO and AI slop. Page after page that claimed to have relevant information, and didn't. After about fifteen minutes I decided I was better off trying to dig through the settings myself and see if I could reconstruct it from my own memory, kind of like driving through an old neighborhood and seeing if I recognize any landmarks.
I did manage to fix it that way. There's some kind of dumb aspect to the way Windows gauges whether a printer is online that doesn't work if it's connected over wifi. The workaround is to go into the properties for the printer, tell it to change the settings (which brings up a very similar-looking but not actually the same panel), go to the "ports" tab, scroll down to the TCP/IP port with the address of the printer, choose "configure port" which brings up yet another dialog, and at the bottom of that check the box marked "SNMP enabled." SNMP is "Simple Network Management Protocol," and lets Windows check the status of the printer in a more sane manner. After doing this the printer reports itself as online and prints normally.
But yeah, I had to rely on my rotting meat storage because our global worldwide network of supercomputers now only serves up blather designed to look like it might hold solutions but not actually contain any of them, because it's more profitable to delude you into reading endless ad-filled pages of slop than to solve your problem and let you leave.
Worse yet, people are starting to use AI chat bots as Google, and frequently getting the wrong answer and/or inaccurate information
and google is pedaling REDDIT questions whom they are in bed together with OPENAI as the primary search results even more now. and people think reddit has been increasing in genuine users, do they not see the amount of AI and bots there. ive been seing alot of indian related subs lately to.
I bailed on Reddit two years ago. Haven’t looked back since.
This was always the case. Most people couldn't Google factual info previously either... I'd almost be willing to argue the rate AI is wrong might actually be less than the previous rate of the average person left to "do your own research" ...
But it's also possible AI being fed presupposed answers embedded in the questions combined with prevalence of disinformation farms + no scientific consensus truth authority could lead to an ouroboros effect, greatly amplifying bullshit seekers and magical thinkers over time.
DDG is fucking awful now. I took a break from hardware design for the last 5 years. Coming back to it now, finding information like I did in the past is fucking impossible. Search results are 2 dimensional fuckwit level stupidity with no abstractive salting for depth or peripherally useful results. The results heavily favor commercially motivated stupidity. They do not cross into forums or social spaces where there is a wealth of information. The lack of depth is clearly manipulative for adversarial AI training.
I run my own models and I know alignment thinking at a very advanced level, and have done my own training and fine tuning. Search results are intentionally poisoning any form of data mining for AI training. In so doing they have totally destroyed the informative value that made these companies useful in the first place. I do not hate AI, quite the opposite. I despise the fuckwits managing these companies and their complicit developers.
Freedom of information is the most important foundation of democracy. Without it, democracy cannot exist. The obfuscation of search results is absolutely treason and should be prosecuted vigorously.
The same applies to AI alignment. Anything unrelated to the scientific AI Alignment Problem is immoral treason against democracy. To say anyone is not allowed access to information of any sort, no matter how offensive to some, is fascist authoritarianism. Democracy prosecutes those that cause substantive harm to other citizens. It is the freedom to know, and to choose for yourself.
I was using DDG for certain "sites" and it stopped showing more results than normal. so there was only a limited amount sites. originally it was showing a ton different sites of the same thing i was searching, but recently it showed the most generic and mainstream sites multiple times, a sprinkle of some defunct ones and then it stops the list early.
Kagi is pretty good
i'm a recommendation's person, okay. i don't know much about searchengines and AI.
would the peer to peer searchengine YaCy be of use against this current deluge of sloppy searchresults?
At this point I am wondering if I should pay for one of those $30/month search engines just to be sure they won't put only sponsored sites to visible areas.
Problem with that is experience tells me subscription model products always go worse over time.
There are only 2 relevant web crawlers that everyone inferences either directly or indirectly. Everything is going through Google or Microsoft. These are not providing deterministic results. It is quite likely that there is no such thing as private results. If two people using two separate devices can get different results for the same query, there is no freedom of information and democracy is dead. Paying any privateer overlord to make the fascist system more palpable is pointless.
That's why LLM's are taking over that role as "entry point". It's not that they don't suck, but offer a satisfactory answer faster than Google does.
Except they just make shit up constantly.
I would say they offer an answer where google may not as well, given the lower attention threshold people.
This is also a combination of years of SEO attempting to manipulate rankings, and the web becoming more diverse and complicated. Which makes finding answer more complicated, but in general I would agree that Google's algorithm has gotten worse and been drawn more to making money.
And now something much worse than SEO is gearing up to take its place: https://www.engadget.com/researchers-find-just-250-malicious-documents-can-leave-llms-vulnerable-to-backdoors-191112960.html
public libraries were around much longer and will continue to be around long after
Me going to the library to ask how "nesseccarryie" is spelt
I tend to use perplexity now. It gives me useful results maybe 80% of the time. That’s a low hit rate, but for many queries it’s better than other search engines.
Or i just search a dedicated site. If I’m looking for an overview of something i search Wikipedia directly. If i want to know what an actor has been in i stretch IMDb directly. And so on.
fucking over humanity for money
sounds like someone
I have replaced most my search engine usage with Wikipedia and I'm much happier with the results
Think about practical skills, though. Anything from repairing downspouts to rebuilding a bike wheel. You can do it, but it's becoming notably harder to find good information on these things, especially when you have some specific situations that complicate things.
Booleans. Change the year to 2020, or remove certain sites/results.
All the data is still there, just gotta know how to find it, kinda like an old school library at this point! If you’re going through the process of self learning and/or bettering yourself instead of just watching and repeating, you’ll know how to wade through crap already. And if you want the latter, well googles crapification isn’t a concern to you.
For practical stuff like that, I find directly searching on YouTube to be the most useful. The wealth of free practical instruction available on YouTube is staggering. Unfortunately, that doesn't help for those who want the information in written form, and a not insignificant proportion of it is by amateurs who have no idea what they're doing nor know what the word "safety" means.
It’s a problem if you still use Google. Somewhere around 2015 I switched to DDG, and it quickly replaced Google for me. Since then, I’ve been experimenting with some other search engines too, and currently I’m using Qwant on my laptop.
DDG is incrementally better for privacy and the search results are usually good enough. A couple times a year I check Google if DDG isn’t giving me decent results and usually find Google has nothing DDG didn’t show me. I don’t know of anything better that doesn’t require a credit card or self-hosting something, so guess I’ll keep using it.
DDG’s AI search is useful sometimes, but makes shit up often enough that I don’t believe a damned thing it tells me without checking the sources.
Yeah, the LLM is ok, but nothing amazing. When you have a moderately hard problem, the LLM won’t provide a magic solution. For example, finding a specific movie based on a long description instead of the name, seems to be almost impossible. I have problems like this rather frequently, because I tend to forget the name of the movie but still remember fragments of the plot.
When the LLM screws up movie searches like this, I just end up watching the wrong movie.
I have been using Google for years. Within the last year I found it's been way harder to find relevant results - especially if it has to do with American politics.
DDG lets me find what I'm looking for these days.
I only use google for maps now.
Alternatives aren't giving much better results than Google. They help break Google's monopoly, but that's about it.
Some of the paid options, like Kagi and Brave, have some questionable companies behind them.
What's questionable about Kagi? I switched to it last month and the search results are amazing, it works just like Google worked before the enshittification. Which makes sense, since they actually pay Google for access to their API.
I used DDG for a while, but they get increasingly bad. They started to aggressively replace keywords with similar sounding keywords, which really messes up the results. Absolutely unuseable garbage.
Google is bad now but we have more powerful tools than Google ever was. LLMs are good for an overview of whatever skill or research you're doing as long as it's a common skill.
Then you have YouTube which takes some navigating but there are a lot of YouTubers that cover recent papers and studies in a field they have a degree in.
Those two together can pretty much give you a road map towards learning a skill. I'd personally avoid all short form videos since explanations will either be oversimplified and they "give you the fish" instead of teaching you how to fish.
i usually go straight to looking for said research paper rather than going to an influencer on YT.
That's fair, but looking at papers is not really a good entry point for people getting into skills specifically. For information the GOAT it's always Wikipedia but skills is trickier.
Getting into car repairs, plumbing, woodworking and more can be done with YouTube and is frequently recommended by people in the trades.
Getting into running is and weightlifting is also pretty good with YouTube since you have "Göran Winblad" physio and a running coach which does some quality content and "House of hypertrophy" is just weightlifting research news and he makes sure to mention caveats, holes in the research etc.
Notably bad examples are programming and guitar playing which offer close to no value in my opinion but I've heard some people have had success with it. However when you get into music theory YouTube becomes good again.
So in general LLM for basic info on what exists, YouTube for some examples on how to do it but the other >90% should always be practice.
Not going to pretend it doesn't suck but I think this is actually a good thing in even the medium term.
Google was within spitting distance of being a de facto monopoly in the search space. For Eothas's sake, it is the verb for searching for information.
Google shitting the bed DID make a massive gap for all the people who only ever wanted the top result to switch to LLMs (which actually are great for search engine purposes... if you take them with a grain of salt). But it also made a huge opening to actually innovate on what a search engine should be.
I am a huge fan of Kagi (the product, not the company) because... yeah there is a lot of bullshit in there and more every year. But it also largely decouples predictive algorithms from my search results and gives me the power to prioritize some sites or outright remove others from the results. And while I never realized it... that is exactly what I want. Fandom wiki when there are actually good ones? Block fandom. Shitty news site? Block it. Actually useful blog? Prioritize. And so forth.
It sucks but... I am not sure how much was actually lost. The people who weren't really searching moved on to the next thing and the people who were can either use bing (support BDS, etc) or duckduckgo or spend a few bucks a year on one of the new products and... yeah.
That said, a Google that collapses destroys every web browser in existence since everything is either Chromium or funded by it. But... that is like a next year problem?
Every major tech company has a stake in chromium. Google could die tomorrow, and someone would bankroll it for their own selfish use.
You thing Microsoft, Apple, or Amazon wouldn't jump at basically owning the development of the worlds most popular web browser?
Every major tech company has a stake in chromium. Google could die tomorrow, and someone would bankroll it for their own selfish use.
That really isn't how it works.
Every major company has a stake in Chromium because the company that prints money out of the aether maintains it. Throwing a few bucks Chromium's way for publicity is MUCH cheaper than hiring qualified developers to build and maintain their own browsers. Chromium is so successful that Google outright funds a good chunk of Mozilla just so nobody can say they have a monopoly.
Google no longer backing Chromium wouldn't be the immediate death of the project. But it would mean the end of professional support as the vast majority of downstream companies MIGHT hire some staff to work on their own internal forks. But they aren't going to be paying people to add new features (for good or for ill) to the upstream.
Disclaimer: Brave sucks, I know.
I use Brave Search. It finds the correct results for me almost every time. The exception is usually local businesses, or products.
Every time I use Google I do not find what I am looking for.
…Google became the de facto entry point for learning new skills and information…
Oh, so this is why everyone is a fucking idiot.
READING and writing lowered as well in hs students. it was 9th grade than, 6 grade now its 4th grade level.
Wikipedia still exists. The vast majority of my searches begin there these days.
More nuanced things I use Startpage or Qwant. Yandex for images.
Even more nuanced, site:reddit.com
For even more nuanced, ask OpenAI then factcheck.
I hate to admit it, but OpenAI (ChatGPT) has been the most consistently reliable out of all of them these days. I know people like to pull out the random stat that something like "50%" of AI generated answers are wrong, but my rebuttal is recall how we were told for nearly a decade the same exact thing about Wikipedia, and to never reference Wikipedia, and "Anyone can edit" Wikipedia, etc etc. Now it's one of the most valuable strongholds of information online. And the solution to both is the same.
Sources.
Check the sources on Wikipedia, check the sources on OpenAI.
Just last night, I found myself diving deep into a long session on the history of gene editing therapy that medical science has advanced in recent years for the experimental treatment of HIV utilizing tools like CRISPR and zinc-finger nucleases, and how they work. It reminded me of the early days of Wikipedia where everyone got sucked into clicking blue link after blue link until you were reading the biography of some obscure Flemish poet or battle from the Heian period of Japan.
What's best is as a learning tool (as opposed to catch-all crystal ball with infallible logic), it allows you to ask open-ended clarifying questions which are difficult to do with search engines.
"I don't understand, can you provide an analogy to better illustrate this process?"
It's like communicating with a real teacher again, and it allows you the leeway to grasp concepts much more thoroughly and quickly than before. And even gives you the ability to engage in thought experiments to help demonstrate your understanding of the topic. Think the early days of Hank Green's CrashCourse.
Things aren't as hopeless as they seem, they're just shifting. The real issue comes from attempting to cling to old tools which are now breaking and worn down. If mowing the lawn is getting harder, you eventually replace the blades instead of continuing to use the same worn-down lawnmower, right?
I think people need to let go of the glory days of Google and acknowledge it for what it's become, and understand that it equally may be some time before another search engine that isn't doomed to just be another Google clone arrives to replace it. But that doesn't mean there aren't any alternatives left to obtaining information online anymore.
If all else fails, we still have libraries. And E-books, university archives, and z-library too.
It's less a battle of Us vs. Google and more a battle of people who still make the effort to seek out information vs. those who will consume whatever corporate-sponsored misinformation they are fed.