Technology

Yes it sucks. And it’s not the only one. I’ve recently been seeing scam ‘official site’ of a real site. Then in another occasion it was looking for a product. I couldn’t remember if it was just .com or .net. The product was not even within the first two pages of results.

I also tried DuckDuckGo.

Meanwhile I tried Kagi, first result for both, each time. I was swapping to Linux and didn’t have my Kagi login handy at the time. Anyway

It’s a HUGE difference today in search. To find what you need through all this other extra shit. Good Search is more important now than ever imho.

oh I know this site! they also had an other rant earlier about google's fucked up site ranking, from before AI was forced into it

Or if you are set on using AI Overviews to research products, then be intentional about asking for negatives and always fact-check the output as it is likely to include hallucinations.

If it is necessary to fact check something every single time you use it, what benefit does it give?

Google has been literally unusable for search for years.

This ia crazy. It means Google and Reddit are shifting content from other web sites to Reddit, under corporate control. It seems like Google has firmly entered the unsustainable profit maximization step where they're now increasing the share of profit they take from their content sources by redirecting less and less traffic to them, while showing that content to Google users.

Don’t bother asking Google if a product is worth it; it will likely recommend buying whatever you show interest in—even if the product doesn’t exist.

This seems like a general problem with these LLMs. Sometimes when I'm programming I ask the AI what it thinks about how I propose to approach some design issue or problem. It pretty much always encourages me to do what I proposed to do, and tells me it's a good approach. So I'm using it less and less because it seems the LLMs are encouraged to agree with the user and sound positive all the time. I'm fairly sure my ideas aren't always good. In the end I'll be discovering the pitfalls for myself with or without time wasted asking the LLM.

The same thing seems to happen when people try to use an LLM as a therapist. The LLM is overly encouraging and agreeable, and it sends people down deep rabbit holes of delusion.

I am seeing more and more people trusting that "zero-click search" result without looking for any kind of source or discussion around their information. Honestly, it's scary.

I’m low key pretty certain one of their long-term plans for the “AI” overview integration is to slowly sub in straight up ad content

The part about Reddit communities being built now that contain only Ai questions, Ai answers, and links to products is what I figured Spez wanted when he ipo’d. And with Ai writing convincing text, it’s so easy!

• Google is shitty
• LLMs are shitty

Combine the 2:

Didn't take as long as I expected, but I expected it (which is why I didn't bother to read, even if it's not all the way there, it's coming).

Seriously, advertising (or propaganda to use the older name favoured by Goebbels) really needs to be seen as a much more serious enemy than most do. Propaganda for capitalists is super effective at sucking up peoples mental bandwidth, they've been selecting for it going on a century now and they're depressingly good at it, if you don't actively counter it, straight to the subconscious, along with all the background crap in it. /rant, but seriously...

oh no who would have thought it would come to this

seems usefull until you notice it's just copied from wikipedia

Working as designed.

This isn't much of a change. Before AI it was SEO slop. Search for product reviews and you get a bunch of pages "reviewing" products by copying the amazon description and images.

Was trying to find info about a certain domain the other day - damn near impossible just cause all the results I could find was the same type of AI slop.

garbage in, garbage out.

An advertising company are advertising at you? Whatever next?

Not surprising

We've come full circle