“We’ve ignored all the meaningful terms you were searching for. Now here’s a bunch of pinterest and quora spam.”
“hey, is that a brand name? Here’s 9 sketchy looking shopping sites selling things that have that brand name on them”
I installed the extension that removes Pinterest from searches… it’s great.
Which one are you using? I use unpinterested but its not open source and I want to add a few more sites to auto-exclude.
Those two sites are absolute skid marks.
Half the time I look at a website or article it is just AI generated crap anyway. Oh you want a product review? Here are a half dozen articles that have summarised the Amazon reviews of an item, with no first hand experience.
Google “Best vacuum cleaner”
Top 6 hits: “We evaluated the 5 brands that paid us the most and found that they all suck up your dirt. We can’t really speak ill of any of them because this is an ad and we signed a contract. Please use our embedded links so we can have more money.”
And the website is called something like Best-Vacuum-Cleaners-Blog.com
What’s worse is most of what comes up isn’t even a hands on review, it’s literally someone doing what I just did, which is type “vacuum cleaner” into Amazon and see what came up. Then they give it reviews based on the bullshit in the description.
I want a review from someone who sees these everyday and has a deep hatred of every vacuum in existence. He’s the one who knows that such and such used to be good until they replaced this part with plastic because they have a new CEO, and now it’s no better than a dirt devil.
At least with vacuums however, there’s a few guys out there with carpet swathes, children, and dogs at home that get to take vacuums from work and do youtube tests with them. Unfortunately they usually don’t try to game the algorithm so they’re pretty deep in there.
Search engine protocol:
Ignore first few results (ads)
Ignore next few results (bullshit spam comparison farms)
Ignore really annoying site you think is ok but is a usability nightmare
Ignore subsection of reddit links
Find 0-1 useful links on first page
Regret
The sad thing is the Reddit Links probably contain the most useful answers that google will show you
I know. But I’ll use them as a last resort
Use them, costs bandwidth and CPU cycles.
Yes but it will be offset by traffic boosts for advertisers
Use an adblocker. Unless, you mean people go on the internet without using protection?
Junk data that costs the advertisement without a return on investment
That’s not how it works. Reddit is able to even get interest because of traffic counts. Same for IPO values
If you’re blocking their ads and not logged in, you are costing them.
Trying to find the tiny “show more results” button sandwiched between the first page of shit results and the weird AI bubbles of shit results just to find semi-decent shit on pages 2-3 makes me wish i was dead every single time.
Once AI is handling search for us, many may never learn the concept of “search term”
“AI” is already handling the search for you. The big search engines are probably the first mass scale adopters of machine learning.
And they have lost the war with SEO spam to a hilarious extent. What makes you think the same won’t happen with chat bot AIs? Bad actors (including PR agencies) will inevitably figure out where and how to spam comments in order to bias the AI models in favor of their agendas or products.
If the data they consume is filled with something like “fossil fuels don’t cause global warming because XYZ”, the chat bots will repeat it. They don’t have the capacity to reason.
There hasn’t been a reason to flood the internet with low effort spam because it’s easily detected by humans who read it. But the ML algorithms will be a lot easier to trick.
Injecting stuff into the data consumed by LLMs is the new type of SEO.
You can already outsource a lot of this to Bing. If you need to know the right temperature for making french fries, you can google a bunch of “recipes” (AKA life story of the author + history + vacation photos + cooking instructions) read them through and… actually better make some coffee while you’re at it because this is going to take a while. Anyway, the other option is to ask: “Hey Bing, I’m making french fries, but I don’t know how hot the oven should be.”
Spoiler: 220 °C
The scary thing is, what happens when people start doing this for more important things, such as what to do if your child has swallowed something or how to parallel park your car.
200 or 220, depends on if you are using a convection oven. But that’s beside the point, I really hope AI finally kills SEO.
I’m making french fries, but I don’t know how hot the oven should be.
Contents:
- What French fries are
- Why you might want some
- The dangers of French fries
- Where to buy French fries
- Ways of preparing French fries
- Other names for French fries
And so on.
Quality content right there, if you don’t mind going down some rabbit holes.
French fries aren’t made in an oven though.
Oven cooked french fries are a thing, and have a surprisingly high popularity
Doesn’t the very nature of being fries, require them to be fried? Otherwise, they’re baked potato sticks.
I think communicating with AI will become an art form the same way googling was/is.
Until they’re sponsored
“I realize you seem frustrated from my responses. Nature’s Choice has a fantastic Stress Reducing gummy available at your local CVS”
Yeah, the gentle product hints at first will be driving people away quicker than a Monstered up Uber driver.
Tea. Earl Grey. Hot
In the Greatest Generation postcast they posit that you can actually get anything you want materialized at a certain temperature.
A Stradivarius violin. Luke warm.
Hm, and I guess in any variant state. Janeway always gets “Coffee. Black.”
True but they will learn the concpet ‘inefficency increases individual profits’. Google has been getting worse and so will AI search eventually.
It’s the same idea I think, figuring out how to describe what you mean or phrase the question the right way to get the right kind of results.
Ask Jeeves was just ahead of its time
This is especially frustrating when trying to find parts for vehicles or machinery. Used to, one could search for something like “1988 Suzuki Samurai Oil Filter” and get the answer for all the common filter brands. But now all you get is links to an auto parts website, where you have to use their shitty search function and hope they have what you need.
I know your pain, I’ve skipped it entirely and always go for the part number. There are great resources for BMWs with sites like realoem.com, but what about other manufacturers?
wait until the AI chatbots are optimized with SEO spam.
I want to search for recipes that are not blog posts
This is a pretty good aggregator
oh, cool, thank you!
This is amazing. Thanks for that. Usually when I’m looking up a recipe I don’t want to scroll for miles about the history of the recipe, so this solves that nicely.
Often you’ll find a ‘print recipe’ button somewhere near the top of the page. Click on that, it’ll take you to what you’re looking for without all of the crap nobody cares about.
100% what I do. Print to pdf and then never go to the site, because they’re so over loaded with ads and pictures that will load and cause the page to bounce around.
Firefox+AdNauseam
Watching the numbers on each page go up is entertainment enough. Best part is that it stops the ad popping in the background so your page rarely jumps
How’s that compare with Ublock.origin?
AdNauseam integrates with UBO, so you’d get both. Basically, it virtualizes clicks on ads so ad sellers get charged for the click but it’s all hidden in the background from you.
That said, I kinda have mixed feelings about it. Ad clicks will help support sites you like, so even if you’re blocking ads you’re still getting ‘served’ and ‘interacting’ with them. On the other hand, it tells sites 'hey all these ads you’re serving aren’t making your website shitty and unusable (but they generally are) so keep it up! And it tells ad agencies and the industry ‘oh yeah we sure love clicking ads keep slapping them in my face at every corner’. And if ad buyers are realizing their clicks are all ghost clicks, they’ll stop buying ad space. Which just means shittier lowest common denominator ads in more places.
Yeah, I despise that every fucking recipe is a blog post. I don’t care that little Becky loved this soup, I just want to know how much salt I should add.
I’ve had good luck with whisk.com.
bbcgoodfood.com is another good one I check often
We need a Google successor.
Something non-profit.
The horrible reality is that Bing has actually become a competitor to Google, simply by Google getting worse and worse. Microsoft used to be the main bad guy, but these days they practically seem benign compared to the others. Not open source like you’re saying, of course.
The ai generated top reply on Bing pisses me off 90% of the time. Word salad with citations.
The infrastructure to crawl, store, and serve search results to billions of users is phenomenally expensive. A government might fund it (which comes with its own concerns), but a non-profit will struggle to compete.
I would pay a subscription if it were truly non profit and had no ads.
Did you sign up for Neeva? Because unfortunately it’s shutting down.
Federated search is possible but has not gotten a lot of attention yet.
If you’re talking about YaCY, apparently that’s pretty much useless right now from what I’ve heard. ~Cherri
There’s actually a lot of theory and early when out there on the topic of federated search. While existing search aggregators like Searx and YaCY certainly qualify as federated, search infrastructure built from the ground up with decentralization in mind would look very different.
Wikipedia probably has the resources to do it, wikisearch. Somebody talk them into it. But yeah, modern search engines, pretty amazing the ones from two decades ago actually worked better.
This could be interesting. The infrastructure required to scrape the internet though is going to be so daunting. Google got to build it up slowly as the internet got bigger. Bing is backed by a huge corporation that already has data centers. A new non profit player is going to take a huge coordinated effort.
I know P2P had become a dead buzzword, but what if people dedicated a portion of their computers to assisting an open search engine.
I would wait 30s for accurate results. It could also piggyback on a search aggregator.
Hmm… Interesting… That would be great… If only something like that exists now!
Yacy exists but it’s bad enough that it’s one of the few options I don’t self host.
Tfw you searched something and the top10 answer is mostly copied homework without much variation, and then the best one is from reddit.
The internet is unsearchable at this point. I feel like 99% of websites are fronts.
Product information search is now totally useless. I used to be able to use a part number to find a manual, now it is just scammers Amazon and eBay.
YouTube videos were once good sources for DIY, now the useful shit is buried behind product placement bullshitters.
Or websites showing the first page of a manual and requiring payment if you want to see the rest.
What’s been pissing me off for years now is googling a specific company and getting a wall of advertisements for their competitors first. So. Dirty.
I swear sometimes it feels like a superpower to have grown up in the 90s and learned the ground rules for multiple OSes, search tools, and file systems - the descendants of which are nearly all still in use today.
I defer of course to any oldheads who can still bang out a long .bat file or compile and configure Linux; I just mean it’s a very useful quirk of the era that skills learned on windows 3.1 or OSX are still broadly applicable, even in fields where ‘using the computer’ is a minor task of one’s workday.
I agree so much. It feels like I “understand” how a computer talks and interacts as opposed to most people I work with just learn processes by heart and have no clue what to do once their process breaks.
What are “SEO spam tactics”? I would google, but am afraid of that now.
Whenever you try to get an answer to something like “What movie was the Be Like Water line from” and you can NOT find anything other than a bunch of articles with tons of paragraphs wasting your time - that’s the SEO spam tactics. Those articles chose words that made themselves easier to be indexed by Google, but don’t actually want to answer that question.
And yes. I literally looked this up this week.
I still don’t fucking know if it came from Enter the Dragon or some other short series. I just gave up. Google has enshitified news articles on the internet and has to seriously consider retraining their algorithm to negatively impact shit like that.
“Be like water” is from a Bruce Lee interview https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cJMwBwFj5nQ not a movie.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=cJMwBwFj5nQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Basically all the crap on a recipe page before the actual recipe… Except there is no recipe.
I think I just figured it out, Search Engine Optimization?
Yes. Google popularized it and now it has ruined Google search.
Tactics to get more visible to the search engines. Optimizing the website to the search engines.
It’s something we all must do to make a nice, visited websites. It’s also something that spammers got so good that literally everything you search is basically ¾ ads at this point.
my lil trick is I’d just add “Reddit” after most searches to find others in a similar situation or maybe a solution
2 months ago that was fine.
Now I don’t have an app for that, the website on my mobile doesn’t open my search and instead tells me to download the official Reddit app, or the subs are nsfw or private.
Sigh, so much for easy answers at a type of the finger :(
Not that I’m recommending anyone give reddit any more traffic or leverage, but I’ve been using Stealth app at the recommendation of someone else on here. It’s downloadable through f-droid and specifically is meant to keep you anonymous and avoid any trackers and other trash normally found when opening reddit links. You can’t even log into an account. I use it on the rare moments I’m looking for stuff on there, it makes me feel a bit better about it.
Solid advice m8, I downloaded that 1. Funny thing that the 1st thing I saw on the app once I entered was a message saying “in a few weeks Stealth will end due to end of free API”. Sigh, these last months all these huge internet companies are making such a mess.
Up until the API debacle, that was my solution too. Now even that doesn’t work. It’s so bizarrely hard to look something up on the internet now.
I use chat GPT 4 for a lot of things instead of Google now.
Same here, for the reason that I don’t have to scroll through crap pages that only exist to show ads.
It’s pretty amazing to search for something and actually see things you searched for.
Does this work any better than DuckDuckGo. People praise DDG, but imo it’s results are pretty shit and I could never end to sticking with it. It can’t even get basic quoted text syntax correct.
Yeah ddg is as bad as google imo. This works like the net used to be.
Oh fuck man, that’s a great find! Thank you for sharing that. It’s actually providing really substantiative results which I haven’t seen from Google for at least 5 years.
I have definitely bookmarked that website, even though I use duck duck go I will probably use that as an alternate now.
Another good search engine that’s less useful for searches but for providing information is of course Wolfram alpha
Maybe that does work again after the thing with subreddits going nsfw has been somewhat resolved but not sure. It was my thing too. I heard good things about bing of all places. In general search just got worse over the last 5-6 years.
People talk about Bing and duck duck go like they’re good replacements, and I’ve given them honest good faith tries.
I always switch my search engine back to Google after simply not getting the results I’m looking for
you can use Google or Bing from duckduckgo using !bangs. g! (for google) or b! (for bing) then whatever you are searching for. I use g! all the time for non privacy related things. and since duckduckgo doesn’t use trackers and all that the results can be terrible so sometimes I just resort to using g!
Using DuckDuckGo to search through Google seems pretty damn pointless if you ask me. If the search engine is shit and I am just roundabout using Google then why even bother?
I know you said the thing about trackers, but a lot of us don’t really care about that. If the end result is just using Google anyway then I’d rather just start with Google and not use another site to use Google.
oh yeah. if you don’t care, there really is not a point to use duckduckgo.
I used Bing chat to plan my itinerary for my next vacation. These LLMs are the new best way to search, although the recent stories of their results becoming worse doesn’t bode well
There’s actually a lot of theory and early work out there on the topic of federated search. While existing search aggregators like Searx and YaCY certainly qualify as federated, search infrastructure built from the ground up with decentralization in mind would look very different. All that to say this isn’t necessarily the end of the line.
I used to work for Google. Now I pay for Kagi.
