Mastodawn

James Gleick Jun 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

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The Thankless Water Heater

@JamesGleick If you do a search on DuckDuckGo or Bing you’ll get roughly the results Google used to return. I don’t think Google is being tricked into promoting shit content from content farms. Google is being paid to promote shit content from content farms, and it’s very profitable for them.

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Andrew (ku7)Jun 11, 2023

@ThanklessWaterHeater @JamesGleick I think you will find that's very product specific.

Anything technical or research google is still superior, but I am using ChatGPT first a lot now as it gets me closer to the target before going for the search engine.

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The Thankless Water Heater Jun 11, 2023

@ku7 @JamesGleick Yes, research is not a commercial venture, so it’s largely unaffected. But anywhere there’s stuff to be sold, Google, like Amazon, is using its monopoly position to squeeze money out of sellers in exchange for boosting those sellers’ listings, no matter what it does to the usefulness of the results the user sees. I find for my purposes DuckDuckGo is far superior now, in that it’s just like Google was six or seven years ago.