RIP to the sentence “Here, let me Google that for you,” the single most useful clapback of the 00s and 10s, killed by Google becoming absolutely useless for discovering any correct information whatsoever
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Clearly you need to work on your google-fu because adding “wiki” after a search term still gets me a result I’ll settle with for lack of an alternative most of the time
I mean, Google’s results were always a little suss and had to be verified rather than just accepted but that’s even more true now. Or maybe there’s just more to sort through?
Tons of ‘fake’ sites generated by AI now. Before there was plenty of misinfo or bad/useless sites and results out there, but now it’s mostly GPT generated trash
I guess I wasn't paying enough attention but it feels like it went from "fine/normal" to "borderline/useless" in the span of like a week. Everything suuuuuuucks.
The day I realized google was useless was when I tried to look up a Ben 10 episode I worked on to get a screenshot from it and the top result was a procedurally generated synopsis for a completely fake episode that never existed.
What ever system duck duck go uses gives me more accurate info, but at the very least, Google gives me a wiki. But that fake one is still there and I'm wondering what benefit Google gets for making stuff up like that? Is there a specific ad revenue source it gets for this?
No episode ever had that title, that director left the show years before we made that season, and that sysnopsis came from an early logline pitch that was thrown out early in production and rewritten into a completely different premise.
I've seen you tell that story before, but it still weirds me out that Google got ahold of that dead data to begin with. Where did it siphon from? Someone's careless Google Docs drive?
I work for Google Search. The Knowledge Graph displays bring in information from sources that are generally dependable, as IMDB can be. Clearly not, in this case. These displays generally have a feedback link. We do look at that. But I’ll pass this on to the team.
I could never understand why I can't sort by date on YouTube, or tell it not to play stuff I've already seen.
It's like "Oh, I'm on autoplay? Great! Let me serve up the same video you've already seen 5 times!"
or
"You like this guy, here is his video from 3 years ago, instead of the latest one..."
I like when you search YouTube for something specific, it gives you 3 relevant results, and then "you might also like" instead of the rest of the dozen results of the thing you ACTUALLY searched for
I had a pretty intense version of this happen to me a couple days ago
The first one being a thumbnail of before a chainsaw beheading, the second of a Digimon character taking her top off, the third being a render of Overwatch porn
All I watch on YouTube are Vtubers and electronic repairs!
Google failed twice as hard at this. When they rolled out their Chat-GPT competitor, they called it Bard? “Let me go over here instead and Bard that for you”?? It’s refreshing to see such a monolithic entity fall so hard over night. Gives hope.
And also the greatest source of my frustration I search for something, and the first result is from 10 years ago, with the accepted answer being "just Google it." I DID YOU MOTHERFUCKER AND LOOK WHERE IT GOT ME.
Holy shit yes. I'm trying to find outdoor speakers for an event and every single hit is an SEO-riddled content blog garbage pile for some totally unrelated product or service
it's super annoying when you're talking to someone who knows the definitive answer off the top of their head and they won't just give it to you. Especially when it would take less time to tell you than type out LMGTFY.
Time to return to our public libraries for reliable information - librarians are trained to assess validity of sources, consolidate data from multiple resources, and get the answer you need. For free.
We (librarians) are still here fighting the good fight. But you’re right - where you are will determine how strong your library is. Use and defend them!
Been using DuckDuckGo for years, I tried Google the other day out of curiosity and the results were so fucked. DDG takes queries from Google and provides actually relevant information. Not that easy to say "lemme DuckDuckGo that for you" though.
Stripping the phrase "lemme google that" from my personal vocabulary is going to be as awkward as trying to replace band-aid with bandage or chapstick with lip balm.
Same here, and that’s why Google is getting worse - it relies on the masses all using it for accuracy, and the masses are moving to alternatives that don’t constantly blast ads at them and track everything they do on the internet.
Looks like it works by giving them money when you click on an ad. I usually use adblockers and tend to not click on ads even when I see them. I'm not sure I'd be helping, but at least I wouldn't be feeding google any more.
In a recent episode of Star Trek Strange New Worlds, James T Kirk said "Guy at the Apple Store taught me how to use DuckDuckGo" which was one of the weirdest things I've ever heard in Trek.
It is really saying something that I now go back to Reddit for useful information on my esoteric hobbies (which is all of my hobbies, if I'm being honest). How did Google fuck this one up so soundly?
"Google it" is now more frequently the clarion call of the Boomer who has no fucking clue what they're talking about but thinks they saw it SOMEWHERE on the internet once.
In the early days we library folk knew it was faster to Google than to find a known item in our own online catalog. And all those nifty proximity tools.
Youth today don't appreciate the old Google. It's shit.
We as Elder Millennials/Xellennials/Gen X need to quickly teach those webring surfing and library/microfilm research skills we learned as youth to the Zoomers and Alpha kids so they can continue to use (accurate) knowledge for Chaotic Good
searching through microfilm.. man it hurts the eyes but I can recall so many times i did that at the public library and at our local community college. Came in so handy in college.
There's also all the interesting noises the microfilm reader makes. The scuffling of the film, the clunking of a turny part I guess. I seem to recall occasional random bangs related to the metal being heated up by the bulb. Unless I imagined that.
It always felt like you really earned your discovery in microfilm/fiche. You waded through the mess and found treasure. Doesn’t feel the same now, though that can be rewarding too
I’m working on a zine about how all that stuff worked right now 😆 I was like “I’ll take a break and see what’s on bluesky.” Oh good, it’s also webrings. Clearly I am on the right path, I must impart this knowledge I possess on the youths before it is lost.
Let’s see if this GIF works. I’ve shared it in the past on how search used to be. Yes, I work for Google Search. Yes, I’m aware some don’t feel we care about search. We do. We work hard at it. We’re continuing to make improvements. But whatever search engine you use, they’re miracles in perspective
Are you responding to Chris or me? I am confused bc I wasn't saying anything about the quality of Goggle Search in my response, but was talking about the old days haha.
It was to you, mainly to say as an aging GenXer myself, the whole microfilm stuff resonated with me. Glad Google Search sounds OK for you; for others, we'd like to make it better. But I'm definitely glad doing a lot of research has gotten easier.
Every time I see a card catalogue drawer in a movie/TV show I instantly remember how they smelled. Don't know why. But man is it vivid. Then I remember how annoying it was to use them. And am happy.😊
Yes, I know to avoid it and yes, I can find things because I know a bunch of search optimization tricks. But if the average person gets that kind of nonsense, then you end up with crazy outcomes, particularly when say someone is trying to research a news event.
Yeah, my department, which are illustrators/comic artists, are talking about generative art. It is a really great example of how AI+SEO is destroying google as a resource for everyone and how that might work with the art generators too. But who knows at the moment.
If I'm trying to, like, figure out how some specific piece of code works for my job (which is a lot I use it for), Google is usually fine. But as soon as I try to research a product or product area or get more general tech support or most anything else, it's just AI sites and SEO spam.
This. If I'm looking up a specific algorithm or a solution to a precisely worded problem I can usually find it. When I need to e.g. try to figure out how to fix my own electronics or get reviews for cat litter it's useless.
The dichotomy seems to me to be: in the first scenario, I know essentially what webpage I'm looking for, I just don't have the link. It gets a lot harder when I don't know the best wording of the prompt, or am trying to research something (esp if I'm likely to pull into from multiple sources)
Before the current stage of enshittification, Google was *spooky* good. I would routinely look for things using what I recognized were not well-crafted searches and get what I was looking for on the first hit. Effort: trustworthy results ratio is much worse and getting worse.
It would be very cool if Google kept the old algorithm in parallel with the modern one and you could flip between the two, but I bet they'd monetize it as google pro.
depends on what you search. most common requests these days are SEO-spammed and the first pages of results is just an endless list of GPT-powered parrots.
A friend of mine recommended a commercial search engine and I really liked it and I went to open the DM to find the recommendation and she had deleted her account T_T
I forget where I heard it, but the idea now is you put whatever query you had into google and just add "reddit" at the end because the reddit results are generally better but reddit's search function sucks majorly. Weird how the internet kinda broke.
So I work for Google Search. We do sometimes skip words primarily because often, if we matched exactly every word, we wouldn’t find stuff that’s as helpful. People misremember what’s on a page, content creators use language different than searchers. When it works, no one notices. When it doesn’t ..
Lol, that’s the nature of most engineering; a good day is when no one notices yr there. Quotes I’ve known about for years; the weird thing about All In is that those are both little words that’d make sense to skip. A lot of the spam I saw seemed targeted to exactly match for “aew all in” though.
Except when I’m searching for something specific, and include that specific word and get a page of useless results, every one of which ignored THE SPECIFIC SEARCH WORD.
Well i googled whether you can freeze Bearnaise sauce because i thought it would be like Hollandaise where it's hard to make too little. Top (ai flavour) results said you could but a page 2 chef forum said you can't and do a flavoured butter instead
An entirely incorrect cremation temperature (unfortunately relevant right now) and information about a dental product that, upon further research, was exclusively for horses, not people.
I'm sorry that you've lost someone, and seemingly had to hotwire a crematorium to send them off. Are horses teeth that different though? People can take ketamine after all
Thankfully we only needed the temperature to know if my mom's husband could be cremated with specific metal mementos (he can), and as for the teeth, I'm sure it *could* be used for people, but it's a product formulated specifically for horse gums, so it might be unwieldy to apply.
Ok cool, one time I snuck into the ruin of a Scottish castle at night time to get married (our friend and celebrant's powers only work in certain places) so to my mind illicit ceremonies are maybe more of a thing
There's a parable here. Google built the single most useful research tool in the history of humanity over the course of 2 decades and obliterated its utility within 24 months because of greed.
Elon destroyed Twitter's utility with *shocking* speed. The only reason he's going to get away with it is that his net worth is so high, I think he can absorb the bankruptcy.
So much of this is true.
For a while, I used Neeva exclusively as search. It failed as a business and so, back to Google.
I was truly, truly stunned at how mediocre it was at anything other than covering my screen with paid-for results. / more
... at Neeva, there was no adspamcrap AND about a year ago it started supplementing its search results with an LLM-generated full-text response that, then, was better (as I recall) than G is now trying to offer.
Same. I fully hate how it redirects to MSN scraped versions of news stories, for example, but that’s the price to pay for being a bit less completely evil and useless as Google is these days.
Googling the name for the Norwegian Tax Office (Skatteetaten) now presents you with an ad for a fake version that tries to steal your national logon credentials. GG!
Someone was recently talking about how this was the case for a number of airlines. They called the number a Google search gave them trying to rebook a flight
I typically use DDG, wifey prefers Bing for her uses.. never expected Google to lose their lead in search, imo if they ever kill Gmail that's the last major flag before they kill off Search and go full advertising and marketing/ spying on customer data and selling that
Also their assistant responses deteriorating dramatically over the last 24 months and their inability to stay relevant because they constantly kill every new service they launch within 18 months
I have that and Google as well as Ecosia. I’ve started using different search engines for different tasks. Maybe a little silly or fussy, but it’s interesting to compare results.
You could always just install uBlock origin to get rid of the ads.
And if you can't quit Google but the relentless SEO gets too much for you then another small fix is setting your region to another country like the UK or Holland (works much better for health/medical questions too).
i was that kid, except undiagnosed. people just thought i was a bit weird and my parents probably pushy about teaching me to read (they weren't at all, i taught myself, they just facilitated my reading obsession by taking me to the library when i needed more books)
There even was a site called something like let me google that for you and you could send people a link and when it opened would just show the whole process of the googling
Also I just bought a Google phone and it got stolen in the mail to the repair shop and they won't fill out a simple form so I can get compensation. Fuck Google.
You obviously haven't seen the latest version. It's absolutely more precise and correct because it uses wolfram alpha and other changes have been made.
I've gotten A/B test surveys from them for years and every question is like, "If we add this random trash to the top of the search results, how would you prefer it looks?"
Back when Google first became a thing, I could type my full name into Google and the first 6 pages of results were All links related to me and my posts. Now, unless I am a Belgian DJ kid, you got the wrong Dennis Cartier.
Back when they actually tried to coin that phrase, I didn't even understand what they were trying to say.
It might be because I'm Norwegian, but replacing a verb with the name of a company made no sense at all.
"To Dogpile" might have done the trick, though.
Why do you say google is worthless? I use it to locate all sorts of information just fine. The ads are easy to skip. I think the issue is that there are a ton of crappy websites with AI written articles, but they are easy to spot.
For example my dog had a skin lesion, which after googling I narrowed down to a couple of possibilities, one of which recommended seeing a vet. So I took dog to vet, she concurred. Fortunately it wasn’t the one we needed to worry about. (Pup is fine now).
Not everyone has the skills or time to do this. People who aren't comfortable with computers and/or elderly and/or non-native English speakers can have a hard time accepting basic services. I have to tell them to look for a .gov domain when they're looking for the DMV. #DigitalDivide
Never ever thought I’d say it but I use Bing now. Bing Chat has been pretty awesome. I also use ChatGPT v4 which reasons. I mostly use Google to find local places now. Totally sad.
Feels at times like some older exec got mad that their granddaughter looked something up they didn't know so quickly, so they started sabotaging the working infrastructure out of spite.
I think its on purpose, we unleashed progress at a rate the world has never seen with our new ability to communicate and they are scared, so they are destroying the internet to save themselves from us.
A fuckton of sites are AI spam. Google's own "here's the answer" highlighting completely misunderstands questions most of the time, what isn't AI is some top 10 list thrown together by someone with zero intention of articulating anything of value about the subjects.
bard and chatgpt are the future of search, they will work amazingly for a few years and then slowly start to suck and then those brain chips will seem super attractive...
It would have been for the best had AI just stayed with memes and shitposting. Though hopefully, those idiots in Hollywood will feel the most pain from AI failing
google wasn't always reliable in 1998 either, i'm old enough to remember when image search was literally nothing but porn. this is a solvable problem. where we'll be with this tech in 4-5 years is kinda scary because it's unprecedented territory.
It's remarkable how bad it's become. Even when searching for specific websites or actual named things the official link is buried beneath screeds of shitposter links, ads, and stupid AI prompts.
Also, good to see you on here! One more reason to never use Twitter again :)
Where's @caseynewton.bsky.social on this one? This is what LLMs are killing directly and quickly.
"How major brands (HBO, Twitter, Google) are directly killing most effective marketing."
Since Google and Meta removed news sources in Canada I have had to vpn to find national news other than my usual sources. It means only the misinformation persists.
Actually, I would say "I am not your Google monkey" all the time, then I got a weeklong ban on Facebook because someone said it was racist. Apparently the old saying about 1000 monkeys with 1000 typewriters would be deemed racist as well.
This really became vivid to me last week when I was stuck in rural WA with a dying phone looking for a nearby locksmith to get into my car. Trying to discern which results are legit is now its own fun little research project.
And I’m not at all sure it’s a problem AI can solve, as it’s an endless arms race of generative models (ever since Markov models to LLMs) versus detection/classification/discrimination models. They don’t want to allowlist sites. But they must.
But when even mostly-legit media also post GPT content…
The normal search has degraded substantially, imo. The quality, and validity, of the results it returns is rapidly going downhill. Of course, this is anecdotal. Someone might have actual stats somewhere though.
Cannot believe Google wrecked their primary product and infinite money machine cause some techbros created a copyright breaking predictive text machine.
I can believe it - look at their history of ruining or abandoning products. The Search experience had already been getting worse in recent years, but gAI definitely didnt help
Besides, almost the entire first page now is dedicated to paid advertising links. The number of ads grow each year. Pretty soon we'll have to wade through pages of promoted links to get to anything meaningful.
I'm THIS CLOSE to quitting my job and creating a front-end for Wikidata/Wikipedia that can answer questions--but *accurately* and *doesn't rely on AI* to generate truth statements.
I used Bing Maps almost exclusively for a while when I was doing real estate consulting because their aerial footage was head-and-shoulders for a while (Google did catch up, I think, but I was outside RE by then)
i was whining about bing there, but i appreciate your assurance
but is there a google "hard mode" i can activate that only returns results that strictly match my search terms, and doesn't try to personalize or localize the results ?
When you do a search, after, select from Tools the "Verbatim" option and that will match all the words you entered exactly. It's like putting quotes all around them.
Localization of results -- there's always going to be some,b because otherwise you'd get really bad results, not relevant to your country etc. And there always has to be some assumption of location. This explains more https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/179386
The most infuriating thing is that in the last couple years, Google just decides it knows better than you and does the whole "Showing results for instead"
That's verifiably incorrect. This search branches out to a "best guess" search even though "exactsearchresults" comes up with 8 results.
As a system administrator / programmer, it's maddening how often I Google a verbatim error code and this happens despite there being valid exact matches.
Unfortunately for me this is still very relevant and helpful to me for finding most resources, just use the right query and pay attention to your sources ...
Comments
oh no. aw crap. aw geez.
And it's better ... argh
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo
Even Alta Vista engineers knew that This Is The Way.
It's like "Oh, I'm on autoplay? Great! Let me serve up the same video you've already seen 5 times!"
or
"You like this guy, here is his video from 3 years ago, instead of the latest one..."
EI: "uploaded within the last 2 weeks"
I turned off my autoplay as soon as it came out lol it stays off. I do get the same Shorts though.
The first one being a thumbnail of before a chainsaw beheading, the second of a Digimon character taking her top off, the third being a render of Overwatch porn
All I watch on YouTube are Vtubers and electronic repairs!
https://xkcd.com/979/
...DuckDuckGo, that is.
😁
Now if I could just get my old, computer illiterate boss to use anything except yahoo...ughh
If I got a 25 cent raise every time I saved him from a virus/malware, I'd be in a whole new tax bracket.
- Google
Google: “Ok we can have just a little evil, as a treat. We’ve earned it.”
Google: “We seek to cover all the lands with a second darkness.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark
Youth today don't appreciate the old Google. It's shit.
Google becomes the byword for chaff and misdirection
“Aw man you got googled bad!”
Google eyes, seeing anything but the truth
Also, great scene 💯
The dream in my mind is a world where online search engines and analog research coexist and support each other!
Who would pay for it now?
For a while, I used Neeva exclusively as search. It failed as a business and so, back to Google.
I was truly, truly stunned at how mediocre it was at anything other than covering my screen with paid-for results. / more
Do people still use that?
https://www.searchenginemap.com/
And if you can't quit Google but the relentless SEO gets too much for you then another small fix is setting your region to another country like the UK or Holland (works much better for health/medical questions too).
“It’s better”
Also obsolete
Unfortunately now even googling (or duckduckgoing, which isn't much better) doesn't tend to help much
https://bsky.app/profile/cavaloriponga.bsky.social
It might be because I'm Norwegian, but replacing a verb with the name of a company made no sense at all.
"To Dogpile" might have done the trick, though.
https://www.searchenginemap.com/
I mean, I’m not hopeful… but… maybe?
*puts on tin foil hat*
I think its on purpose, we unleashed progress at a rate the world has never seen with our new ability to communicate and they are scared, so they are destroying the internet to save themselves from us.
*takes off tin foil hat*
But then again, Hanlon's Razor
there's no better search invented yet
Also, good to see you on here! One more reason to never use Twitter again :)
"How major brands (HBO, Twitter, Google) are directly killing most effective marketing."
Chat GPT isn't a source of truth, it's a conversational engine
libgen is a database of pirated books so you definitely shouldn't go there ever
But when even mostly-legit media also post GPT content…
Real "slam dick in car door" energy.
(It is, but it wasn't much more helpful sadly)
but is there a google "hard mode" i can activate that only returns results that strictly match my search terms, and doesn't try to personalize or localize the results ?
On personalization, it likely rarely happens for you. You can tell as explained here: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/12410098
As a system administrator / programmer, it's maddening how often I Google a verbatim error code and this happens despite there being valid exact matches.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfHuZ5qrYX4
Lacks the snark of the original, don't it?