James GleickJun 10, 2023

An astonishing fact about the present moment in technology:

Google—which began by doing one thing, and did it better than anyone else, and used that one thing to become a giant company, richer and more powerful than almost any other entity on earth—has lost its ability to do that one thing.

#Google https://hachyderm.io/@confluency/110491848831123193

Adrianna Pińska (@[email protected])

Content farms have basically eaten the first two to three pages of a typical Google search. This morning I was trying to find information about the relative safety of different space heater designs, and 95% of the results were long, rambly bullshit posts written by Jim Smith the Extremely Real Engineer Man for AllAboutSpaceHeaters.com and filled with Amazon affiliate links. Wow, AI is going great. I can't wait to see how this amazing technology will help humanity next.

Hachyderm.io
Show threadMax Wainwright
@JamesGleick duckduckgoers unite
Jun 10, 2023 at 8:34pmWeb
Show threadMKSinSAJun 11, 2023

Amen, @maxwainwright I've made the switch and am pleased with the results.

@JamesGleick

Show threadMax WainwrightJun 12, 2023
today I noticed that - (NOT) doesn't work. I guess they broke it on purpose? Got lots of results with this $string in the title even though I had -$string in the query :-(
Show threadCautionWIP 🎃+🇨🇦+🏳️‍🌈= Jun 12, 2023

@maxwainwright @JamesGleick DuckDuckGo is pushing AI as well, though at least they’re using Wikipedia as their content source.

I’m still using it as my default, but the intermittent outages are concerning and irritating.

This is what I get when I do search for it via my safari browser. 🤣🤷🏽