@thomasfuchs@matthewskelton This might be the missing, long-overdue push back to local, repair-and-reuse economy. If something doesn't work you don't turn to google anymore, to find a tutorial that encourages you to buy 7 expensive tools designed specifically for this, but you contact your local electronics tinkerer and ask them to fix it. It keeps people from buying expensive things they don't need, fuels local economies and strengthens communities.
@thomasfuchs Content marketing is pollution. Generative AI is toxic waste. Come back Yahoo curated directory. All is forgiven. #CapitalismIsCannibalism
@thomasfuchs I don't know if you noticed but that started happening about 10 years ago. LLMs might have accelerated it, but the traditional approach to search has been gamed and exploited without the need for them for a long time.
@thomasfuchs
All of the useful stuff is still there, it didn't get deleted - it's the search engine that's failing you. Kagi is much less susceptible to this problem.
@thomasfuchs Google predates the ‘enshittification of the Internet’. I’m sure around ‘08 they stopped worrying about the index and embraced adverts. As for accuracy, I remember trying to search internally about google. Googling “google”. Just didn’t get anywhere.
@thomasfuchs I have started looking at Kagi Search. It's a paid search engine, no ads, no tracking, no data mining, emphasis on search result quality. They downrank garbage sites like SEO, LLMs, sites with heavy ads/affiliate links, and they allow you to adjust which domains you prefer in results as well as filter domains you don't want to see. It seems very end-user oriented as opposed to mainstream search engines which are advertiser-oriented.
@thomasfuchs I think we've reached the point, where search results need manual moderation and the option to flag websites for obvious bad faith SEO tactics and the option to just block websites from you search results entirely and have it affect their rank in the results.
Agreed. I wanna learn about a thing or find a very specific piece of information, but all I get are these nothing-burger articles split into arbitrarily titled sections, where you only know it's useless already having read the same paragraph re-worded 3 times.
@thomasfuchs Our ice-maker was having trouble a few weeks back, and the solve was to clean the little water filter bit at the bottom, which had some schmutz in it. Worked like a charm.
It’s becoming harder and harder to find good image references for things as more of the internet is filled up with shoddy AI generated “art” and stock photos.
@thomasfuchs I'm happy to use a self-hosted SearXNG instance.
Earlier on I would usually search on my meta-engine, and in that ~15-20% of the cases I couldn't find what I was looking for and I would fall back to Google.
Nowadays, when I don't find what I'm looking for on SearXNG, I may still fall back to Google - just to realize that I get even worse results, sponsored content and other SEO garbage.
My best suggestion is to use SearXNG or any other meta-engine. My instance pulls results from Google, DDG, Brave, Qwant, Bing, Startpage etc. If one of these engines decides to go down the enshittification road, I can just disable it from my settings and keep using the others.
@RLIBlog yeah, this isn’t a new problem, it’s been gradually getting worse for years. the only thing that’s changed is LLMs are now a convenient scapegoat. billion dollar businesses were built around bs-generation long before LLMs were capable of it. just try looking up a recipe for apple pie in 2019 @thomasfuchs
@thomasfuchs It was startling to see how bad Google results were when Reddit mods shut their subreddits. The whole internet is becoming more or less unusable.
I suspect the future is going to be a bunch of invite only enclaves.
I don't use Google very often. I searched 'my ice maker doesn’t produce ice correctly' and I found articles from CNet, iFixit, The Appliance Care Company, and three live-recorded YouTube videos within the top ten results
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