When I see talk of how bad search is and the need for human curated indexes I remember web directories and dmoz. I contributed as many links as I could to that thing.
Got a question about #privacy. I know #Mastodon has robust privacy settings. I was wondering about the underlying protection of the system from massive data scrapers. Are there underlying protections built into Mastodon to prevent theft of data or the upload of data onto a third party website? On another vein, is there any way to limit your account reach in outside #search engines like #Google? Does Mastodon have limited interaction with outside search? Thanks!
Google has dominated the search market for more than two decades, accounting for as much as 90% of all global searches. But OpenAI could be about to take on Google at its own game, with the launch of a new search engine based on ChatGPT tech.
Rumors began when a domain name and security certificate for search.chatgpt.com was found, with an AI influencer later hinting an announcement was coming on 9 May. Here’s more from Tom's Guide.
Not sure if it's just me, but there is something quite wrong with #duckduckgo this morning!
Results don't seem to be showing up for even the most basic queries.
Trying to set up Kagi.com as default search engine in Vivaldi. Pasted in the session link from Kagi in the search settings of Vivaldi but whenever I type in Vivaldi’s search field or search (Ctrl + T and term) I’m just redirected to Kagi.com, no search results show up? #kagi#search#vivaldi
I know that I am not the first to bring this up, but #DuckDuckGo is getting more useless by the day. I really try hard to not support fascist billionaires where I can, but the % of times I get useless responses from DDG and have to use Google is now close to 80%.
Feature suggestion for #DuckDuckGo or other #search engines: let me downvote results.
There is just so fucking much utter garbage, and the people pushing it have (apparently) effective SEO. Let me click a button saying "never allow this domain in my search results ever again."
#AI#GenerativeAI#Search#SearchEngines: "There seem to be clear indications of a novelty factor at work. And while novelty in and of itself is not a bad thing, if it isn’t followed with a consistent behavior change, we can’t really call it a trend.
Take the above Bing.com numbers for instance. If we credit the inclusion of AI search tools on the platform as the cause of the unique user bump, it would seemingly serve to solidify the predicted 25% drop. Yet when we consulted our panel data further, we found that only between 4% and 9% of users used Bing Chat (their AI agent) in any given month during 2023. What’s more, of those that did use it, only two to four searches were conducted over the ensuing month.
#FactChecking#News#Media#SERP#Google#Search#Journalism#ContentModeration: "Our investigation found that fact-checks enjoy greater visibility in Google Web Search compared to the articles they seek to correct, both in terms of frequency of appearance and their placement within the SERP rankings. Specifically, our study shows fact-checks rank higher than problematic content across five topical keywords groups, Covid-19, climate change, the war in Ukraine, U.S. liberals and U.S. elections, except in contested stories related to the war in Ukraine, where articles about U.S. bio-labs share equal prominence with their corresponding fact-checks. The findings imply Google moderation effects, as fact-checking content is more prominent given (nearly) equal levels of optimisation. It also implies that fact-checks are generally more prominent for audiences searching for problematic content, though both often appear in the same SERP. Navigational queries (e.g., searching for the name of a source and that content) reduce moderation effects." https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3614419.3644017
Im as anti-"AI" as the next person, but I think its important to keep in mind the larger strategic picture of "AI" w.r.t. #search when it comes to #DuckDuckGo - both have the problem of inaccurate information, mining the commons, etc. But Google's use of LLMs in search is specifically a bid to cut the rest of the internet out of information retrieval and treat it merely as a source of training data - replacing traditional search with #LLM search. That includes a whole ecosystem of surveillance and enclosure of information systems including assistants, chrome, android, google drive/docs/et al, and other vectors.
DuckDuckGo simply doesnt have the same market position to do that, and their system is set up as just an allegedly privacy preserving proxy. So while I think more new search engines are good and healthy, and LLM search is bad and doesnt work, I think we should keep the bigger picture in mind to avoid being reactionary, and I dont think the mere presence of LLM search is a good reason to stop using it.
#AI#GenerativeAI#SEO#Reddit#Google#Search#SearchEngines: "For years, people who have found Google search frustrating have been adding “Reddit” to the end of their search queries. This practice is so common that Google even acknowledged the phenomenon in a post announcing that it will be scraping Reddit posts to train its AI. And so, naturally, there are now services that will poison Reddit threads with AI-generated posts designed to promote products.
A service called ReplyGuy advertises itself as “the AI that plugs your product on Reddit” and which automatically “mentions your product in conversations naturally.” Examples on the site show two different Redditors being controlled by AI posting plugs for a text-to-voice product called “AnySpeech” and a bot writing a long comment about a debt consolidation program called Debt Freedom Now." https://www.404media.co/ai-is-poisoning-reddit-to-promote-products-and-game-google-with-parasite-seo/
📙Weekend Reading Material for #Search Research Enthusiasts! 😃
The #JASIST Special Issue on „Re-orienting search engine research in information science” is out!
Lots of reading material about #InternetSearch – including an article that many OWS.EU consortium members co-wrote!
Sovcit has some indecipherable thoughts. (lemmy.world)