(In the case that someone in Lemmy still use Google)
Here the funny part, google knew this shit would happen. How you ask? Well, see google has had this problem for a long time.
When google first came out, there was all sorts of techniques you could use to boost your PageRank. Google had to tweak and tweak and tweak to fix it so that nazi sites would not come up when you looked up Jewish holocaust memorial museums for example.
Seems they’ve learned nothing. And yet they’re still one of the biggest tech companies in the world.
Scary. Let’s add AI to the mix now.
At least they haven’t used ChaosGPT for this.
Lord and master, hear my call! I have need of Thee! from the spirits that I called Sir, deliver me!
Goethe - The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
I remember when Google was the cool new kid on the block. How far they’ve fallen. But that’s what unrestrained, unregulated capitalism gets you. It’s all a race to the bottom.
Can we please stop pretending “regulation” is all that effective. It’s been tried, and has resulted in corrupt bureaucracy or given way to neoliberalism (and corporate bureaucracy).
What we need is a radically different system where the power truly is in the hands of the people, and not just nominally like in representative democracy (and which is completely lacking anyways in most workplaces). And what this requires is the construction of fundamentally different modes of production and human interrelation that will not resemble what we’ve got now, neither economically nor politically nor socially. Regulating capitalism won’t get us there.
There’s an issue at play here that I think we’re not confronting enough. America has been on a steady march of deregulating in the name of corporate greed. Some of the most functional countries in the world are also the ones with the strongest regulatory bodies (granted they’re also largely petrochemical profiteers, I do have criticisms even of countries that I think are doing better than the US) because there’s a presumption built into the system that if left unchecked, the forces of greed will violate the liberties of the populace. Its not a coincidence that the only countries that faced major Y2K bug issues were the UK and the US. Germany, Nordic countries, and Benelux countries all ALSO faced this bug, but in those countries the consequences for fucking up banking data was fines. In the US and UK, the consequences were someone might sue in civil court. Much less scary for banking institutions so they continuously acted like the problem was someone else’s problem until the last minute.
My point is this: regulations work. We have case studies in other countries that they work. We don’t implement them not because they don’t work but because they require long view systems change and the political system we live in doesn’t encourage thinking long term. Political funding efforts encourage thinking of policy in 2-6 year terms instead of the actual 30 year time frames it requires to plan them. Its much easier to pull a quick grift with political power weakening the overall system than it is to FIX the system. It incentivizes corruption. THAT is the issue that needs addressing and one we should really be trying to assess what the Benelux countries are doing so well
Capitalism with its unrelenting drive to maximum profits at all costs will always eventually erode regulations, or capture the regulatory bodies. We had more regulations, more unions, and higher taxes before. They were put in place in response to the excesses of capitalism in the early 1900s, and capitalists eventually found ways to undo a lot of them. We need different systems with different incentives, or keep repeating this cycle.
The deregulation march you’re talking about is neoliberalism, and it hasn’t just affected USA. And in a sense neoliberalism is capitalism’s response to regulation.
It’s not that regulation doesn’t work per se, it’s that the (political) hierarchy through which it functions is susceptible to being taken advantage of, and inevitably it will be (*has been) taken advantage of by the capitalist class to protect their economic hierarchy.
For democracy to truly represent the people it’d need to be federated from the ground up through free association. Large scale organisation and cooperation would be ephemeral, existing when/if the need arises and dissolving as soon as projects are concluded (or cancelled). But within the rigidity of the current system(s), where power is consolidated at the ‘top’ through processes we’re lead to believe are necessary for ‘order’ (when their real purpose is of course control), horizontal forms of social organisation seem impossible (I like how Anark calls this - “hierarchical realism”).
Regulation would certainly help, considering the USA has basically given up on it. They don’t even try.
What to use for search engine. Even ddg is not giving reliable results.
If you believe Google is the most reliable, you can still use it in a private way via :
- Startpage
Startpage is a private search engine known for serving Google and Bing search results. One of Startpage’s unique features is the Anonymous View, which puts forth efforts to standardize user activity to make it more difficult to be uniquely identified. The feature can be useful for hiding some network and browser properties.
- SearxNG https://searxng.org/
SearXNG is an open-source, self-hostable, metasearch engine, aggregating the results of other search engines while not storing any information itself.
There’s plenty of public instances too https://searx.space/
Get Google search results, but without any ads, JavaScript, AMP links, cookies, or IP address tracking. Easily deployable in one click as a Docker app, and customizable with a single config file.
Couple of public instances too. Basically SearxNG with ONLY google as a source. https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search#public-instances
Thank you
Any alternative to Google Alerts?
Long time looking for such service which monitors web for keywords.
I’ve been happy with Kagi. It’s for-pay but it’s quality to me.
It’s just a bit too expensive imo.
For something I use constantly every day $10 is nothing
but for something you never use $10 is quite a lot.
That’s fair. Like the sibling comment says, it’s worth it for me. But not everyone has the ability to pay.
Same here, happy Kagi subscriber 👍
DDG queries can’t really be written the same way you’d write one in Google if you’re after effective results. It’ll take some time to get used to it, tbh I was using DDG alongside Google until I fully switched.
Do you mean grammar-wise, or special operators?
Grammar, I’ve noticed I get much better results if I word things more directly instead of like a question
They probably mean grammar, since most Google operators do work. If there’s a specific difference in search syntax (other than bangs) though, I’d love to know what I’ve been missing.
I use mainly Andisearch, also has AI but relay on reliable sources (and one of the most privat search out there), Startpage and Whoogle use the old Google search engine, Mojeek also is fine, Groot search has a own search index, Etools a Suiss made Metasearch engine and some more. In the Vivaldi Forum you’ll find the, maybe, most complete list of search engines you can try.
Kagi. It’s better here.
Google: “Hey, do not be evil.”
Google years later: "Can I has all the profits and personal data?”
Google after that: " I am the Lizard Queen!"
Scammers were already paying Bing and Google to have their sites above real ones.
And now they’re paying to have google and bing have their AI to show scam websites above real ones.
The same assholes riding a new horse and as usual everyone wants to blame the horse.
I…. Don’t really get why they think this is better. Google search was good…. Other companies can copy AI technology anyway. AI is really just predicting words and wasn’t designed for search, but their old algorithm was.
Whyyyyyy
Google hasn’t understood the internet for a long time. They created an excellent search algorithm by treating the internet as a single information system that warranted analysis and indexing for convenient traversal.
These days that’s not… Something they’re interested in anymore. The goal is to collect user data for targeting advertising and resale. Their core product is still the search bar, sure, but that’s just a hook to reel you in. They’ll attach whatever buzzword to it it takes to keep it in the zeitgeist. “Ai” is hot right now so that’s the buzzword.
I don’t get the impression technical competency is something Google values anymore…
There’s been some former Google employees with stories about being told by the ad team to scrap mostly completed projects that increased search functionality because in testing it negatively impacted impressions on the “sponsored” search results.
That really says all you need to know.
Beyond that, Google is notorious for having terrible metrics for promotions. It highly incentivises creating new projects and disincentivises maintaining or improving existing systems.
One of my favorite articles about that last part is “I am not a maker”
Google hasn’t been dogfooding in a long time have they? I wonder what products Googlers use.
Hell’s attorneys are seriously lacking. I’ve been waiting for them to sue Google for DMCA violations 🤣.