Another problem is they ruined their own search with AI.
Kicked themselves right in the nuts.
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2024
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They ruined it without AI before AI was commonplace. They ruined it with higher profit margins. 🥹
Avid Amoeba is right that Google ruined their own search before LLMs entered the public consciousness (this does not mean LLMs didn't exist before this, but that they were not widely available for the general public to use or became part of the zeitgeist).
If you don't agree please listen to the Better Offline podcast episode "The Man That Destroyed Google Search". The episode goes through the rollbacks/changes Google made to their search Algorithm well before AI was commonplace.
Better Offline: CZM Rewind: The Man That Destroyed Google Search: https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/czm-rewind-the-man-that-destroyed-google-search
Yeah. Also I'm guessing their AI additions to search made their profit margins worse since they take a lot more computation to produce. Although they probably cache a lot of them for common searches.
Probably made the margins better because investors apparently still love hearing the word "AI" attached to shit
Even though that surely results in them being able to access more money and makes shareholders richer, that's not a factor in profit margins. Profit margins are just about revenue vs cost. In this case - how much the make from each search vs how much it costs to produce that search.
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They ruined it by setting themselves as untouchable and wanting bigger profit margins than “richer than God” money.
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Their search was shit before AI. Unless you like pinterest and quora spam.
Their search algorithm was great.
It's fucking awful with our without AI in 2024.
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My younger sister searches tiktok for information and by that I mean she doesn't even use the search feature. The topics just show up in her feed. She thinks she's choosing/finding but is actually getting fed topics.
Its sad because everytime she tells me something she learned on tiktok I do like 2mins of research and find its not true or misleading. People lie about the most mundane things on that platform and I don't know why.
That's why I think those platforms should be banned, especially for children.
We're creating a whole new generation of misinformed people.
I'd argue a different approach: Teach critical thinking and scepticism to children. Banning things makes it a race to keep up with whatever new thing comes up; it's not a sustainable solution so much as a constant fixing of new holes without tackling why these things are so destructive.
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I really think we need a monitored internet for under 13s. The internet is just to fucked up at the moment. I never thought I would be someone advocating for this because i grew up on the wild west internet watching people getting beheaded and stuff. But all that is nothing compared to being bombarded with friendly, trustworthy (seeming) people that constantly spread lies and misinformation that shapes your world view.
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Ya my little bro is the same. He'll announce some thing he's learned and it collapses under the barest scrutiny... I only hope that the rest of us are able to teach him to apply that scrutiny himself. It's pretty scary how kids just accept shit, if you take that into adulthood... Well, I think we see the results all around us in the world.
They say stuff that isn't true because it gets them engagement from people who come to correct them. We figured out how to generate profit from misinformation.
Oh my… searching TikTok for information is so misleading and so encouraged by the platform…
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Younger generations are using other platforms to gather information.
What's not being talked about here is that young people don't seem to give a damn if the information they research is accurate or not, it's whether or not it's peddled by their preferred streamer. Those "other platforms" are apparently Tiktok and Netflix, not exactly places known for speaking truth to power.
I've spent twenty years trying to believe that the children will be the saviors of the future, but I think maybe the conservatives actually succeeded in murdering education in it's crib. I am now nearly fully on team "You know, maybe these kids actually are a bunch of dumb fucks who won't save us after all."
It’s not so much that they don’t give a damn, but that they can’t tell. I taught some basic English courses with a research component (most students in their first college semester), and I’d drag them to the library each semester for a boring day on how to generate topics, how to discern scholarly sources, then use databases like EBSCO or JSTOR to find articles to support arguments in the essays they’d be writing for the next couple years. Inevitably, I’d get back papers with so-and-so’s blog cited, PraegerU, Wikipedia, or Google’s own search results. Here’s where a lot of the problem lies: discerning sources, and knowing how to use syntax in searches, which is itself becoming irrelevant on Google etc. but NOT academic databases. So why take the time to give the “and” and “or” and “after: 1980” and “type: peer-reviewed” when you can just write a natural-language question into a search engine and get an answer right away that seems legit in the snippet? I’d argue the tech is the problem because it encourages a certain type of inquiry and quick answers that are plausible, but more often than not, lacking in any credibility.
Is it the tech? Or is it media literacy?
I've messed around with AI on a lark, but would never dream of using it on anything important. I feel like it's pretty common knowledge that AI will just make shit up if it wants to, so even when I'm just playing around with it I take everything it says with a heavy grain of salt.
I think ease of use is definitely a component of it, but in reading your message I can't help but wonder if the problem instead lies in critical engagement. Can they read something and actively discern whether the source is to be trusted? Or are they simply reading what is put in front of them then turning around to you and saying "well, this is what the magic box says. I don't know what to tell you.".
I think my kid is gonna be just fine. He rarely believes anything i tell em without follow up evidence....He's 5.
But Ive always focused on critical thinking skills from as early as possible.
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This isn't a young person problem and it isn't new, it's just getting worse. See Fox news on Trump 8 years ago or more through now
This is the big problem. Kids are trusting search results from a Chinese propaganda platform, and they don't give a shit.
Its the older folks who muddled the walls between editorial and factual reporting, and now thats come home to roost. There are no facts anymore, and very little real journalism anymore. Theres no truth, justice, democracy, or human dignity either. Its not tiktok or youtube who led us where we are, its the double-be-damned boomers and centrists.
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I was Googling just fine until Google ruined it with "SEO" and AI so that completely irrelevant results dominate the first 2 or 3 pages.
It's this last two years where it has gotten really bad in my opinion. Before you could at least navigate the ads ridden site. Now base Google search is tremendously worse.
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Can't read this article thanks to shitty paywall. Yet it has 28 trackers even tho it just need pure HTML
Edit: thank you for archive link OP!
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And how do non-old people navigate the web? I mean I get it, you don't need to google the Wikipedia article about the French Revolution... You can ask AI. But how do you find business hours for the repair shop downtown? Which website sells the concert tickets? News from yesterday? The forum that tells you if 32GB of RAM fit into your laptop?
Hours and menus normally come from Maps. News often comes from social media, unfortunately. But Google rarely helps me there either. Concert tickets is probably an app or venue website (but I don't really go to many concerts because fuck Ticketmaster).
Not that I don't Google stuff, but it's way less useful than it used to be.
I'm over fifty (though fuck does it feel unreal to say that).
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News from yesterday? You mean your social media feed of choice?
Forum that tells you if 32GB of RAM fit into your laptop?
Who has a laptop anymore?
RAM?
32GB? My phone has 128GB!
RAM?
32GB? My phone has 128GB!
Are you confusing RAM with storage?
I'm pretty sure it's tongue in cheek of the average person who doesn't know much about tech.
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What? I Google stuff all the time. Just not on Google (DuckDuckGo or Qwant)
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Have you seen a Gen Z-er trying to research something on the internet?
It's almost like the tools they were taught to use were crippled out from under them in the name of serving more ads.
Well as the builders of the current distopian present we were told all the time that we needed to create user interfaces and services where people would not need to know anything about tech and there was always a "design for the dumb user" since forever.
This is what we get by pushing that narrative I guess.
It's kinda wild to me. I used to think that as a millennial the next generation would be more technically savvy than mine for similar reasons to why my generation was more technically savvy than the last. That doesn't quite seem to have panned out and I'm not sure if I'm just not seeing things right or if technical literacy is really that much on the decline.
I was totally unaware of how bad it is until I actually read some current teachers describe horrrors of how the incoming students were so unprepared about technical literacy. It's freaking scary.
We really designed the society as it is and we're going to suffer the consequences for a long time.
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Ok, but answer me this! Without those ads, would you even know that George Washington crossed the delaware with delicious chunky cambells soup!
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Honestly it usually starts with chatgpt or ai. I've been watching my younger coworkers.
It's not a bad thing per-say but sometimes it's wildly wrong and they don't question where it comes from. Which bites them when we do reviews/code.
"sometimes it's wildly wrong and they don't question where it comes from"
A stark difference from google results surely
Article is behind a paywall, what does it say "young people" do instead of "googling"?
This shift is due largely to users’ bypassing Google to start their search for goods on Amazon. It’s handing Amazon billions in advertiser dollars. Meanwhile, TikTok has less than 4% of U.S. digital ad revenue, but significant potential to expand its share of the pie. A recent TikTok pitch to advertisers reported on by The Wall Street Journal said that 23% of its users searched for something within 30 seconds of opening the app, and its global search volume was three billion a day. The second threat is the rise of “answer engines” like Perplexity which, well, do what they say on the tin. OpenAI has added internet search to ChatGPT, Meta Platforms is exploring building its own search engine, and even AI chatbots that can’t search the internet are proving increasingly capable at addressing many questions. They’re also becoming ever more widespread, as Microsoft and Appleintegrate them directly into the operating systems of all the devices they make or support.
Non paywalled version: https://archive.today/?run=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Ftech%2Fgoogling-is-for-old-people-thats-a-problem-for-google-5188a6ed
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I would like two search engines displaying results side by side whenever I do a search. There's so much empty space on a wide screen display anyway.
Maybe I should check if there's an addon for this...
Not sure if it's what you're looking for, but a searx instance can return commingled results from multiple engines
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