OnThePier
tanteFirst it was: "Search is bad now, I'll just use Reddit to find answers.". Now Reddit is trying to kill itself while the search engines inject falsehood generators into their pipelines for weird reasons. Finding information is gonna get a lot harder.
Axel Morgner@tante Can’t help thinking of a big opportunity for journalism. My willingness to pay for fact checked information is growing.
Lupino@LupinoArts @tante I was thinking of crowdfunded journalism like Krautreporter or De/The Correspondent, but yes, the ties between corporations and the publishing industry are strong.
number137@tante now all information is available in Discord *not*
Karsten@number137
Discord is just another data toilet where collaborative effort is going down the drain.
Edit: ...where collaborative effort is forcibly flushed down the drain.
@tante
Discord is just another data toilet where collaborative effort is going down the drain.
Edit: ...where collaborative effort is forcibly flushed down the drain.
@tante
alex13_h@tante exactly my feeling: and to add to that, the web in general is broken. To find a recipe, a recommendation/test of a product, tutorials etc you go on websites that are full of auto playing videos, cookie banners, Ads that look like articles, weird article recommendations and super long intros that they can place more ads
@alex13_h I stopped using Google for any "top 10" after using Reddit, most websites are just random generic opinions
\u1f0a1@tante "But, if you follow the chain of dominoes that falls down what they're really trying to do is shut off our access to information itself.
If they can't do it by law they know there's other ways to do it." — Jello Biafra / Ice-T
Karl Voit 
@tante You're just using the wrong search engines. 🤷
C.Cameron 👻
Asimech@publicvoit @cameron @tante Startpage uses Google and Duckduckgo Bing for search results.
If Google and Bing inject output from falsehood generators to their results then unless there's a reliable way for Startpage and Duckduckgo to filter the generated nonsense they too will be repeating it.
If Google and Bing inject output from falsehood generators to their results then unless there's a reliable way for Startpage and Duckduckgo to filter the generated nonsense they too will be repeating it.
@Asimech @publicvoit @tante
Agreed. I do wonder how that will play out. I have felt like my search results are less relevant than a few years ago. Duck Duck Go or Ecosia have been my main search for ages. Seems like it's harder to search for very specific potentially obscure things, just get more general and less relevant results. Hard to be sure if that's real or just in my mind though.
Agreed. I do wonder how that will play out. I have felt like my search results are less relevant than a few years ago. Duck Duck Go or Ecosia have been my main search for ages. Seems like it's harder to search for very specific potentially obscure things, just get more general and less relevant results. Hard to be sure if that's real or just in my mind though.
@cameron It has felt like that to me on DuckDuckGo as well and like you I can't tell if I'm just imagining that DDG is giving more general responses.
But I did notice last year that using a plus sign or quotes to insist on a specific word or spelling didn't seem to do anything and definitely didn't affect results they way they used to a few years ago.
But I did notice last year that using a plus sign or quotes to insist on a specific word or spelling didn't seem to do anything and definitely didn't affect results they way they used to a few years ago.
@Asimech
I have noticed that too!
I have noticed that too!
Sarah Guinevere@tante The new state of the internet after recent developments has made me crave encyclopedias on a spiritual level, to such a degree that I've already made plans to visit my local library this week and just work with an encyclopedia beside me.
Obvs they are not sources of objective truth either, but goodness me at least what they present is not an insult to the senses and intelligence.
Obvs they are not sources of objective truth either, but goodness me at least what they present is not an insult to the senses and intelligence.
Brian Perry@tante It’s starting to look like the first phase of the Internet was about making information available in unprecedented ways, but the next phase is about holding information hostage. “Pay me or your precious online community gets it!”
@tante It also occurs to me that when knowledge is cheap and easily available, an attempt can be made to sell ignorance…
@tante We have made information so cheap and easy to share and obtain, people will seek to hide information from us so they can once again charge money for it. Cross-reference this urge with rising interest rates, and the digital information bonfires are at the ready.
Paolo AmorosoI'm relying more and more on directly visiting specific trusted sites and sources, following great human curators, and asking around to actual humans.
Chris Domico
Anca
Melroy van den Berg@tante We just need a better alternative. Marginalia Search? https://search.marginalia.nu/
Marginalia Search
search.marginalia.nu is a small independent do-it-yourself search engine for surprising but content-rich websites that never ask you to accept cookies or subscribe to newsletters. The goal is to bring you the sort of grass fed, free range HTML your grandma used to write.
Harksaw@tante The other day I was trying to search for a transparent image of an arrow. Should be the easiest thimg ever, right? Well there are plenty of such images but every hit on the first two pages requires you to register on their website before you can download the transparent image.
What have they done to our internet?
@tante Everyone is too afraid of being proven wrong to point out the fundamental drawbacks of LLMs: they do not and cannot understand what they are talking about. And so they will never be able to determine whether anything is true or false. And for any AI to have any level of modeling and understanding concepts will require an entirely different form from LLMs.
Sean@tante but finding junk to buy will be easier than ever, as well as surprisingly similar to whatever you have recently been talking about needing.
lawnerdbarak
wakejagr@tante this feels like another step in the road to the world of Reamde
kainisenni@tante
I have mostly given up on search engines and usually search Wikipedia or Wiktionary directly now.
For things not there I usually just give up...
I have mostly given up on search engines and usually search Wikipedia or Wiktionary directly now.
For things not there I usually just give up...
@richh has moved@kainisenni @tante Indeed. But worth noting that en.wikipedia is very US-centric. Seen an article about an intl sports event in Belgium tagged for deletion “not notable, no results in google news”. I go to google.BE and check Belgian news. Boom, results. There’s a portion of idle editors whose criteria for inclusion is “reported in US media”. Meanwhile US topics are ad-nauseum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marksmanship_badges_(United_States))
phi1997@tante
Wikipedia isn't going anywhere
Wikipedia isn't going anywhere
Kevvles@tante I feel fairly confident that there will be an emergence of information broker type jobs surrounding this - basically just individuals that specialize in a particular field and are able to gather data from that field efficiently while sifting the factual from the non-factual, then delivering it to clients.
I know similar jobs already exist for raw data, but what I mean is that I think that analytic industry as a whole is about to enter a new phase of growth
Bruce Elrick@tante I, for one, am glad our corporate information colonial capitalist overlords are immolating themselves.
⚙ARC@tante Right now you trust humans more than Ai, but this is only because of how young Ai is...
Avocado Toast@tante like I said here, I think Google is in massive trouble and not in the way they think they are: https://mstdn.social/@avocado_toast/110557838786579208
Avocado Toast (@[email protected])
@[email protected] this is definitely the time to short Google I think. They're leaning into AI at the same time that generated content is threatening to make their search engine entirely useless, and if Reddit goes to the howling dogs, that'll end appending "Reddit" to your search query to get it to turn up something remotely relevant. Seems like someone is going to need to invent an actual search engine again.
Rafael “Akai” Masoni@tante What’s wrong with DuckDuckGo?
Christoffer S.@tante it will be very easy to find information. It will, however, get a lot harder finding trustworthy, accurate information.
Kolt Penny@tante Back to the books.
@tante To all the people wondering about DuckDuckGo:
It relies on Bing for most of its search results. Unless DuckDuckGo can reliably filter out the BS Injector's nonsense its results are going to go down with Bing.
And Startpage apparently relies on Google, so it's the same thing there.
Matt Crawford@tante oh but I think finding information is going to get far far easier. It's finding correct or verified information is going to get significantly harder, and there's a lot of money in this system.
elmuerte@tante I think you could make a killing by re-creating Google from early 2000. Just searching the internet with a few clearly marked ads.
Ankit
CapritiaJH@tante Duckduckgo give you problems? I've been finding it quite solid -- way, way better than google these days.
Aeder@tante I remember when Google used to be the best reverse image search engine. Now, Yandex gives me better results, which really shows how bad Google products have become.
Kevin RussellDonate to wikipedia today, and lets contemplate a Wikipedia of breaking ongoing news.
C.Suthorn 
gkashtan@tante I have been using Duck Duck Go as my search engine for the last year. Reminds me of the old google.
Robert A. Hill@tante @tchambers If anyone hasn’t tried Kagi I can recommend it. Very interesting business model with a distinct lack of the users being the product. I am trialing it now and seriously considering paying for it and switching it to my default search engine
steve mookie kong@tante Or the masses will be misinformed at an even quicker pace.
costrike@tante Meanwhile, we'll be buried in misinformation and disinformation. Wheeeeeee
Paul L@tante A cool thing or?
It's time people wake up that information literacy requires some tech understanding!
It's time people wake up that information literacy requires some tech understanding!
un admirador de Uruguay ⁂@tante let alone finding the truchas 
Alex Markley@tante that weirdo who bought the last remaining print encyclopedia is starting to look more and more like a genius.
Dispatches from Floor 13