oshyMay 11, 2025
You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose
Show threadWillow Brook đź’śMay 11, 2025

@ocean I need to understand what people are searching for and why the first page doesn't help them.
Cuz the only time I can't find something is because I don't really expect to find anything. Either cuz it's a very niche question or earlier when I tried to get a pdf/ebook of Harold and the Purple Crayon (still copyrighted I think, no straightforward download).

Like I believe people are having a hard time. I just can't tell from my experience.

Show threadLisPiMay 11, 2025
@Paradox @ocean Even just looking for straightforward cooking instructions leads to LLM vomit being the first few results on Google.

(It's somewhat better if one searches for recipes in other languages than English.)

Not exactly what I'd consider niche.
Show threadWillow Brook đź’śMay 11, 2025
@lispi314
Llm is always the first thing tried. You can ignore it.
Show threadLisPiMay 11, 2025
@Paradox It seriously covers multiple pages at this point on the worst search-engines.

Any topic that /isn't/ particularly niche suffers from it more.
Show threadBenjamin BraatzMay 11, 2025
@lispi314 You are not only talking about the snippet from *Google's* LLM at the top of the search results, but also about the other results? Haven't had *that* many obviously LLM-generated, but perhaps my interests are just niche enough. @Paradox
Show threadLisPiMay 11, 2025
@HeptaSean @Paradox Not the snippet, no. Pages on other domains linked by the search engine results.

There's a certain... meandering meaninglessness to the text with a bunch of huge empty spaces on those sites (thanks adblockers) that's typical.

Oh sure, the meaningless nonsense also used to get written-up by humans before but I don't consider spam to be worth more when written by humans instead of autogenerated.
Show threadBenjamin Braatz

@lispi314 I usually search programming, Linux, politics, and science stuff and then strongly prefer sites I know – Wikipedia, StackOverflow, universities, well-known publications, …. That works quite well even without adblocker and is not overrun by LLM-generated garbage up to now.

But I just tested searching "Steak Medium Rare" and you might be right with the language thing. Google's AI summary isn't even that bad as far as I can tell. The first few German articles I get are ad-infested, but the content is at least quite informative. There, of course, is the Wikipedia article on “Doneness”.

But the first English article is just *awful*. Even more ad-infested than the German ones. And it just promises that it *will* tell me how to cook a steak, but *never* actually starts. @Paradox

May 11, 2025 at 9:54pmWeb