Sigh. AI has basically added a rocket booster to the enshittification train.
Hopefully this doesn't impact DDG.
this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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I mentioned this in another thread, but I do worry that google is eventually going infect the APIs that metasearch engines like DDG, Kagi, searchxng, etc depend on.
In my experience, a lot of the sysadmins who run high traffic sites will treat all bots as scrapers that have to be blocked or slowed to a crawl. Then they make special allowances for googlebot, bing/msnbot, and a few others. That means there is a massive uphill climb (beyond the technical one) to making a new search engine from scratch. With Google and MS both betting the farm on LLMs I fear we're going to lose access to two of the most valuable web reverse indexes out there.
I fear that as well. I use Searx-NG at home, so am expecting that to start dying a death of a thousand cuts soon.
Was thinking about standing up (or contributing to) either YaCY or Stract, but you made a good point about the bot allowances for the Googlebot et al crawler UAs. Wonder how frowned upon it would be to spoof the crawler UA in a self-hosted one?
I've just started using Searxng.. you expect it to die soon? Is it because you expect other search engines to follow suit until there are no search engines anymore, only hallucination machines?
s it because you expect other search engines to follow suit until there are no search engines anymore, only hallucination machines?
Basically, yeah.
I hope there's enough of a market for non-ai content that it doesn't come to that. I think we already reached the pushback stage with image generation.
When I was running a site, I had special rules in my firewall to look for things that said they were googlebot but which didn't come from one of googles published public IPs.
......yeah.
I had that thought after I replied when I realized that most of the reputable search crawlers will publish the IPs/ranges they use in addition to the UA. The disreputable ones (cough Bytedance cough Xiaomi cough) will just spoof Chrome on Windows 10 and flood you with requests from AWS datacenters in Shanghai or Singapore.
That said, I may still continue looking into working with one of the actual self-hosted search engines (vs meta search) and see how well that works.
Yeah. This is going to suck worse before it gets any better. The good news is that all the useful content (outside of sales gardens) is going to be here in the Fediverse.
The other good news is that the state of Cybersecurity investment is abysmal, and the walled garden content is going to get breached/leaked/pirated a lot, for a long time to come.
Hopefully it doesn't impact them too much. So tired of this AI train man.
Same. I don't mind it as an option if that's what some people want, but stop "enhancing" the default experience with it and shoving it down my throat. No lo quiero.
Oh, it will impact a lot more than one private search engine. Watch The AI Dilemma presentation given by Asa Razkin and Tristan Harris last year if you want an idea of what could be coming.
Is coming, and more. Very good video, with good points. Slightly outdated already, with AutGPT being a thing. What's coming, is going to be orders of magnitude more than what they predicted in that video.
Slightly outdated already, with AutGPT being a thing.
That's the really disturbing thing and what makes this challenge so different to all others humanity has faced to date. I think Asa even referenced in the presentation that some of his slides were going out of date on a daily basis, that's how fast the technology was moving.
Yup.
They also correctly identify the function of LLMs as a glue between siloed AIs. We have barely seen the beginning of that, but as the AI race continues, it seems likely that some LLM models will be created that will have less human language, and more "interop language". Where nowadays LLMs can be somewhat probed for words and relationships, we'll have zero chance to probe an LLM using tokens that are part of some made up (by the AIs) interop language. Black boxes inside black boxes.
A naive approach will be to "democratize AI", and that will surely be better than centralized AIs responding to every query... but won't solve the deepening of inscrutability.
One point made me chuckle: when they showed the graphs for cualitative jumps above certain network size. Recently someone commented about the "diminishing returns" and "asymptotic growth" of making a LLM larger and larger... but also so it was in these models: diminishing returns all the way up to a point... followed by a sudden exponential jump until the next asymptote. The truth is we don't know where the asymptotes and exponential jumps lie, we don't even have a remote hypothesis about it.
Google destroys their own search engine by encouraging terrible SEO nonsense and then offers the solution in the form of these AI overviews, cutting results out of the picture entirely.
You search something on the Web nowadays half the results are written by AI anyway.
I don't really care about the "human element" or whatever, but AI is such a hype train right now. It's still early days for the tech, it still hallucinates a lot, and I fundamentally can't trust it—even if I trusted the people making it, which I don't.
Google was already going downhill but when they fired Matt Cutts and replaced him with an advertising person was the point where it was obvious they weren't interested in search anymore.
You will never be able to consistently find the truth when AI optimizes for overfitting to get any result as long as something is show with ads next to it.
AI has no way of understanding truth. It's autocomplete trained on just anything it can find truth or not.
AI can also understand extra weights for hand picked sources of truth. Whether you then agree with the choices of whoever is doing the hand picking, is a separate matter.
Would be a shame if different "truths" made more or less money and someone optimized for one of those.
Yeah, they call it A-Z testing, because A/B wasn't enough, and AIs can fill A to Z cases with ease.
Google said, "yo, we heard you liked search, so we gave you AI with a slither of search and we will ram it down your throat until you feel like you can't live without it, because walled gardens are the best and we can't figure out a way to trap you in ours" 🥴
Large language models are going to replace search. Naturally concise recommendations are easier for humans to interact with than a swath of web pages. The problem that you get here is this is going to disincentive the creation of new web content outside of the walled gardens we already have. The walls are just going to get higher.
Google will be sued again by the big publications and will pay out. But little independent publications will die as people get used to not leaving the search engine.
The appeal to google and friends is that it's even less obvious when you're being advertised to when a LLM tells you something than on their existing SERPs.
💯
Oh good, now when I search I'll have to wade through the effluent of AI-produced pablum to find an actual human journalism product.
Bold of you to assume you'll find an actual human journalism product
I wish more people would care about monopolies fucking up the infrastructure of our internet.
Government needs to give a shit instead of taking their money and doing nothing.
Google has been unusable in English for at least 2 years now. Searching in Estonian makes Google behave like it did when it was still good. I wonder how long that's going to last.
BRB, gonna learn Estonian.
See on väärt oskus, meid on lausa tosinaid!
how seo game this? the sooner you start...
And layoffs all the way down.
I wish they undid a lot of their stupid redesigns instead of doubling down on it.
Yes please. Shoot yourself in the foot. It seems like it's the only way people will even consider switching.
I'm getting Pixel 8a ads and I usually trade-in my older a if I start having problems or the new one has a feature. 8a finally has wireless charging (7 mightve, was too soon) but it has this bullshit now. Damnit.
I’d like to check in as part of the problem; I pay for google ads and I show up at the top of certain search screens. I’m in a small local market, and google is primed to make about $350,000 off about $3mm of work this year if things keep up the way they are. We have no choice but to play the game to reach our consumers. Sorry guys.
Nope nope nope