Google is no longer asking — feed the AI or you’re not in search results
Kids today might not realize that, for about twenty years there, you could go to Google Search and find things you were looking for! Google now features a hilariously unreliable AI summary as the f…
cross-posted from: https://awful.systems/post/2178630
Google results are actually already pretty terrible. They just have tremendous inertia.
We all keep saying this but can anybody point me to which one is better?
I invariably end up having to go back to them because the other search engines all have their own problems.
The issue is the internet is polluted with SEO and all the useful things that used to be spread out are now condensed onto places like Reddit, or places that aren't even being indexed.
Part 5 is where I don't see this actually going.
Look at twitter. Now look at mastodon. Tell me which one is more shitty. Now tell me which one has something like 85% of the market, and which one most people haven't heard of.
Just because something it better, doesn't mean people use it. You can fit all of Lemmy in the world in one of the larger NBA size arenas. You can't even fit twitters total user base into some smaller CITIES.
I'm pretty pessimistic about this:
Unfortunately, the vast majority of people do not give a single fuck and they will use whatever is preinstalled on their device
Let's DuckDuckGOOOOOOO!
For now.
DDG gets search results from Bing, owned by Microsoft. And I wouldn't be surprised if the later did the same as Google did.
That's technically true, but it's as misleading as saying they get their search results from Yandex. Their results are aggregated from several search engines, not just Bing. They also have their own web crawler, DuckDuckBot, which absolutely respects RobotRules.
Edit: I'm told my information is out of date. No more Yandex because of Uncle Sam. Yahoo is just Bing now, so that index doesn't count anymore. The bulk of the rest of their sources are largely inconsequential specialized search engines. Their sources page states that they "largely source from Bing".
DuckDuckGo is just Bing. Which is uh.. going from Google to Microsoft. Maybe not much better either
We're at a point where not only should the Internet be classified as a utility, so should Search.
Yeah, it's not just e.g. water that is the utility, pipes and pumping stations are part of it. Otherwise you have water...uh...somewhere, go get it yourself.
Oh look, more anticompetitive shenanigans.
Break Google up. Bring the full force of antitrust down on them.
Anything else is an unmitigated disaster waiting to happen.
Can someone explain why the fuck Google is pushing this so hard? Generative AI is not a general intelligence, and useless for concrete facts. Google has already demonstrated how shitty it is for information, and the people with the knowledge to work on the project have to know this.
So why the fuck are they all full steam ahead on something that will always be useless for them?
Because the engineers aren't in charge anymore
AI is hype.
They've recently signed a deal with Reddit for AI parsable data. Reddit reciprocated by allowing Google to be the only indexable search engine.
Google now thinks it can do the same to literally everyone else.
Googling is pretty damn mainstream.
Don't give Google your data, then don't be included in googles search results. It's like a flip of their previous trade with reddit, except it's not a trade. It's extortion.
Reddit never gave Google traffic. They gave them content and data.
And Google thinks it can withdraw traffic from other sites unless they get data in return.
Google is a monopoly.
Literally extortion
Their line goes up when they show they're investing in AI, and it goes down when it looks like they're falling behind or not investing enough in it.
TBH, a lot of times I find myself interacting with ChatGPT instead of searching. It's overhyped, but it's useful.
Magic beans.
Been on ddg for a few months now. Doesnt look like i need to go back either
Ddg are shit too, search a name and they will relate it you locally even if you turn off regional results.
Click a link and go back to results and they have changed.
Ddg is enshittifying.
Well it gets me here and to .ml so i cant complain
Lol... Peasants will accept it...
Sundar the creep knows it.
So how do I actually opt out? My website is just some personal hobby stuff on wordpress that only friends and family look at, I don’t need seo.
You should put these entries into your robots.txt file.
To block the Google search crawler use for all of your site:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
To block the Google AI crawler use:
User-agent: Google-Advanced
Disallow: /
I've been really happy with Kagi since switching.
Same! I swore I wouldn’t pay for a search engine, but I feel like it’s absolutely worth it, considering the current state of things.
It's definitely better...but. Thanks to Google SEO the internet it's bringing you results from is still filled with shit
Same. It's amazing. I really like the feature where you can prioritise or deprioritise search results from certain websites.
100%. Best option ever
Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't Kagi still uses google/bing results?
I might be wrong, but they meta-search across multiple providers, including their own. The real benefit is that YOU can choose which search subjects to prioritize when trying to find something specific.
For normal search stuff, this feels like "old Google" (no ai spam). For detailed searching, its better than any other engine I've used.
We do really need to figure how to make some kind of decentralized search engine.
Some discussion on that here: https://lemmy.world/comment/11859761
I hope it happens one day, but that's an almost insurmountable task given the scale.
Take the entirety of the fediverse, and it's entire history, and you're probably talking a days worth of search engine indexing compute & storage.
The scale is large and the fediverse is incredibly small. Keeping my fingers crossed, but definitely not holding my breath.
In the meantime, I'll use Kagi.
If I say no and revoke my consent, and they do it anyway ...
Can you afford enough lawyers to prove it?
Justice is the original pay to win game. Seems its out of our budget though.
That's actually a good news. Maybe we're able to revert the internet to the times before the Eternal September happened
This will never happen. We might get some of the issues more regulated, and people may move away from others, but you can't put the Furies back into the box. Things will change, but we will never have the early internet again.
I read that as "you can't put the Furries back in the box" and it still worked
We can, closed communities with some effort to enter the group. I pretty much ditched most main stream social media and use what it used to be mailing lists and discord servers. It's not about technology. Internet and access used to be simply exclusive and we have to create exclusive channels to communicate about f.e. arts, history, technology or even occult where there is no "free riders" with no knowledge. That's what I mean and this may happen imo. Quality over quantity
I've switched from DuckDuckGo to Ghostery Private search. I've been happier with the results than DDG.
I'm using SEARXNG. It's a search engine aggrigate and you can mix and match where you want your results to come from. It's like using Google from a decade ago.
I remember discovering MetaCrawler in the 90s (before Google was even founded) and it quickly became the go-to search engine because its aggregate results were superior to any of the other options at the time. I don’t think its source mix was tunable, but that sounds like appropriate progress for 30 years.
I'm using SEARXNG.
Sounds like the Elon alternative for searching
Nice thanks for this
Please understand that this is the next 'SEO' shit.
It was going to be this from the very start.
Google is genuinely bad now. I switched to Ecosia which is just Bing with a simpler front end and they use their profits to plant trees. I don't think Ecosia is particularly special though. Duck Duck Go, Bing whatever, they're all better than Google.
Whenever I set up a new computer then search for something, I'm always surprised at first seeing the awful layout and quality of the search results before I realize that I haven't changed the default search from Google. It's awful now. Seriously, how are people using it?
My new favorite way to search is perplexity.ai. It's an AI search tool that summarizes the loads of crap out there so you don't need to read through the junk that people write. It provides sources, unlike using ChatGPT, which is incredibly valuable. All AIs make shit up, so having links to double check it is a must. Unlike Bing Chat, or whatever Microsoft calls it this week, you can ask follow up questions to home in on what you want.
Google: "Making AI helpful for everyone..." (..mostly us!)
Bing to finally overtake Google? Inconceivable!
This makes me mad…
As I understand it, this is only about using search results for summaries. If it's just that and links to the source, I think it's OK. What would be absolutely unacceptable is to use the web in general as training data for text and image generation (=write me a story about topic XY).
If it's just that and links to the source, I think it's OK.
No one will click on the source, which means the only visitor to your site is Googlebot.
What would be absolutely unacceptable is to use the web in general as training data for text and image generation.
This has already happened and continues to happen.
No one will click on the source, which means the only visitor to your site is Googlebot.
That was the argument with the text snippets from news sources. Publishers successfully lobbied for laws to be passed in many countries that required search engine operators to pay fees. It backfired when Google removed the snippets from news sources that demanded fees from Google. Their visitors dropped by a massive amount, 90% or so, because those results were less attractive to Google users to click on than the nicer results with a snippet and a thumbnail. So "No one will click on the source" has already been disproven 10 or so years ago when the snippet issue was current. All those publishers have entered a free of charge licensing agreement with Google and the laws are still in place. So Google is fine, upstart search engines are not because those cannot pressure the publishers into free deals.
This has already happened and continues to happen.
With Gemini?
that latter will be the case rather sooner than later I'm afraid. It's just a matter of time with Google.
that latter will be the case rather sooner than later I’m afraid. It’s just a matter of time with Google.
If that will actually be the case and passes legal challenges, basically all copyright can be abolished which would definitively have some upsides but also downsides. All those video game ROM decompilation projects would be suddenly in the clear, as those are new source code computer-generated from copyrighted binary code, so not really different from a AI generated image based on a copyrighted image used as training data. We could also ask Gemini write a full-length retelling of Harry Potter and just search, replace all trademarked names, and sell that shit. Evil companies could train an AI on GNU/Linux source codes and tell it to write an operating system. Clearly derived work from GPL code but without any copyright to speak of, all that generated code could be legally closed. I don't like that.
I'm not sure of the advantages of showing up in Google search results. It seems like something that I wouldn't want to happen anyway.
