this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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No Stupid Questions

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Why do the article sites even exist anymore? Check out this link.

This is clearly a slop article. DDG results are chock full of this exact cookie cutter slop. Clearly if all I'm gonna find in search engines anymore is slop, I might as well just go straight to the source, right? How is this business model viable anymore?

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[–] pnwpixel@programming.dev 22 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Indie/smallweb is promising and is growing.

https://indieweb.org/

There are indieweb dedicated spaces to search for these sites. Such as https://theindex.fyi/

It's a return to a very non-corporate web experience.

[–] otp@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

I think you forgot to finish the question in the post title

[–] cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The search results only have slop articles because it's increasingly difficult to find anything else. I heard that recent estimates are indicating about 50% of the content of the internet is already AI generated, and it's only going to get worse, and it's going to keep getting worse very rapidly. "Search" in the way we understand it is obsolete. I don't know what the future of content discovery for real humans is going to look like, but I'm confident it's not going to look anything like search. That's broken and it's never coming back.

[–] OwOarchist@pawb.social 8 points 2 days ago

I don’t know what the future of content discovery for real humans is going to look like, but I’m confident it’s not going to look anything like search. That’s broken and it’s never coming back.

We should go back to web rings and curated lists of useful links.

Us internet dinosaurs remember those days. It kind of sucked, but it would defeat the slop if you only link to human-made websites and those websites only link to human-made websites, etc.

[–] reddig33@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

On DDG, You can send feedback about each result. I dunno if it actually does any good.

  • tap the three dot button next to the result
  • tap “share feedback about this site”
[–] AstralPath@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 days ago

Ooooh thanks for this!

[–] OwOarchist@pawb.social 6 points 2 days ago

Might as well just go straight to the source ... if you can find the source ... if the source isn't just more slop.

[–] Ep1cFac3pa1m@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Have you tried noai.DuckDuckGo.com? I’m curious if it gives different results.

[–] OwOarchist@pawb.social 13 points 2 days ago

Pretty sure that just disables DDG's AI. It doesn't do anything to filter out AI articles.

[–] Krusty@quokk.au 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That's funny. I do the opposite. I use the AI to do the searching and finding results of suitable quality is part of the prompt....

^This

Unless your AI is grok or meta obviously