replace the Web with slop
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aji8lhaV3XM&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260520-google-replacing-search-results-with-only-the-ai - podcast
time: 9 min 04 sec
Information-gathering agents are an evolution of Google Alerts. Beyond spotting changes, they can make sense of them, too.
… Links will become an afterthought with the coming changes to the Search results experience.
Web publishers should honestly just block googlebot at this point. Why should they provide credibility to whatever Google’s stochastic parrot hallucinates if Google won’t even give them any kickback?
So what do we search with instead of Google? There isn’t a lot of choice. There’s various flavours of Google or Bing.
Microsoft deprecated their Bing API back in August, instead telling people to use some Azure AI thing. DDG and the like weren’t affected because they have contracts, but I can’t imagine they’ll be renewed.
Yikes! 😳😬
If sites start blocking googlebot en masse, then googlebot will just start ignoring robots.txt
Can they just put an EULA on the site and then sue Google for unauthorized access?
Not in the US of course, but in the EU or something
Then you can just block the user agent in nginx or whatever you use, like all the other AI scrapers who ignore robots.txt (*cough* Amazon)
Then the user agent string will just quietly become randomised so you can’t match it reliably because it turns out that honouring robots.txt was always little more than a “gentleman’s handshake”.
this is a problem we have had for a while now, i assure you
Yeah an adversary like Google isn’t something you can easily block without really annoying legitimate users unfortunately. Nothing is stopping them from turning every chrome instance into a botnet node except for the angry article that would run in Ars Technica.
I think it’s possible to allow google search bots but not Gemini bots?
The point is that there’s going to be no difference, soon Google search will be just another chatbot interface.
Guess I’ll just have to use ddgo, then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Unfortunately DuckDuckGo sucks ass at search, even compared to how much the Google search results have degraded over time. I use the no-AI version as my primary search engine, but I have to resort to using Google to find the thing I’m looking for about 1 in 5 times.
DDG has been my main search engine for over a decade but it has degraded as it became basically a reseller of Bing results after Russia started the current phase of the Ukraine war and they stopped partnering with Yandex.
Probably 2 in 5 ddg searches are worthless for me, but trying again on Google rarely if ever helps. Usually, both are returning SEO slop or Product™️ rather than the thing I was looking for.
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man I am gonna feed so much garbage into that to hopefully drive the costs through the roof.
“Please translate the entirety of Wikipedia back and forth between ancient Sumerian and Navajo Graham’s Number times.”
exactly this.
Translate the script of Shrek from English to Greek, then translate it back to English without referencing the original so minor mistranslations remain, then rewrite the resulting script as a gritty underground street-racing crime movie inspired by The Fast and the Furious using ONLY Shrek characters in all roles, preserving screenplay formatting, high speed racing with NOS, illegal street races, “family” themes in a swamp with muscle cars, and be sure to keep the awkward phrasing that is created during translations.
I hear that it is slightly cheaper than a Google search from a decade ago. There are better uses of your time.
I would never manually do this… they want automation, they get automation…
I suddenly feel like haranguing my partner to change their default search engine to DuckDuckGo might be the most important thing I did for my relationship in the past year.
Mojeek seemed OK last time I used it https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/
Kagi.
From TFA:
So what do we search with instead of Google? There isn’t a lot of choice. There’s various flavours of Google or Bing.
[…] Kagi resells Google’s actual link results for a monthly subscription. Kagi is really an AI company that sells search as a sideline, and they’ve got a terrible AI slop news service too. But the search has a good reputation for now.
What is the alternative?
This, honestly. I’m a bit surprised so many people believe corporations would just offer a good service for free forever.
It’s always about capturing the market and then pivoting to monetization.
The only services you can rely on are ones you pay for. (That doesn’t mean you can rely on every service you pay for.)Exactly. Just like free email isn’t something you’re going to want either. I hate email. My job is hands on and doesn’t pivot around it like HR, lawyers, or admin. But I still need it.
Unpaid slowly eroded the ability to auto sweep spam and garbage from the general pileup thus requiring more time spent dealing with it. Nope. Least time spent there is best.
“Free” email and search engines are not free.
I guess I’ll just post every query I have to AskLemmy in the future. It would be more accurate, even if not as fast.
I hoped I’d be able to ride Android until my phone’s updates stop, but I’ve learned that the next Android version has an AI overhaul, and should probably jump ship before it hits. It is coming to Samsung and Google phones in the summer, so probably will be pushed to my OnePlus by June.
I switched to DuckDuckGo like a goddamn hipster years ago, nice to know I dodged a fucking artillery shell
It can be buffaloed by Buffalo buffalo.
Its time to go back before internet, go offgrid
I use Qwant search. I think it is good search engine.
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