and your Mom!
Google just, talks to me now? I’m not searching technical stuff I have an old habit of just plugging random subjects or ideas into a search bar and seeing what the internet thinks not for any reason other than I find it interesting, I’ve been doing this since the Ask Jeeves days it’s just a thing I do at this point. But now Google wants to talk to me about those ideas or topics instead of showing me what the internet at large is saying/thinking about them. It’s definitely no longer a tool for finding new or unique ways of seeing or thinking about things.
Gemini, is this true?
Search has been bad for a long time. We are back to the alta Vista days. Aggressive SEO ruined the internet.
Today I searched for a CD ISO filename on Google. Just the first part of the ISO name. I knew it was an ISO for Win 7, just not which one. I wanted to find a site that had the ISOs in an archival listing so I knew which version it was.
Google gave me zero results except AI telling me what I already knew. It’s a filename.
Zero.
Google is garbage. Google search is dead.
When I was watching Naruto Shippuden on Netflix, I eventually caught up to the episodes NF had but obviously it wasn’t the end of the series. I quickly found alternative places to stream the rest, and from there would occasionally find new animes to watch. Sites would last for a while and then get taken down, then the usual response on my end would be to just do another search and pick up where I left off.
The last time a site went down for me, I wasn’t able to find another one quickly. I’m sure they still exist, but my assumption is that the big search engines are using LLMs to filter results based on what their owners deem acceptable, at least when they can say it wasn’t legal anyways.
I’ve also been surprised at some of the “zero results” searches. Can’t think of any examples offhand, just that some were surprising.
Though I use DDG instead of Google, so YMMV and it might just be Microsoft doing this.
I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon: ChatGPT’s search function is substantially better than Google’s AI search. And Google’s AI search is, frankly, so broken that it can barely be considered functional in some situations.
I think part of the problem is that Google is asking its AI to serve two fundamentally conflicting purposes. It doesn’t just want an LLM that does LLM things. It wants an LLM that also functions as a marketing engine. And that makes sense from Google’s perspective because Google is, at its core, an advertising company that happens to operate some enormously successful technology platforms. Advertising is how Google makes the overwhelming majority of its money, so naturally it wants its AI to become part of that ecosystem.
The problem is that optimizing an AI for advertising inevitably compromises its usefulness as an information system. The AI’s job should be to determine what information is most relevant to the user’s question and present it as accurately and efficiently as possible. An advertising platform has an entirely different objective: determine what can be sold, who will pay for access to the user, and how to maximize engagement and revenue. Those objectives can overlap, but they are not the same objective.
And this gets even more interesting when you consider what increasingly capable AI systems are supposed to become. The fundamental value of an LLM, AGI, or whatever comes after AGI is that it can act as an intermediary between a human being and an enormous body of information, reasoning about what the human actually needs rather than simply presenting whatever happens to be profitable to show them.
You can certainly put advertisements around an AI. You can even have an AI identify products or services that are relevant to a user. But the moment the AI itself becomes financially incentivized to favor one answer, product, company, or piece of information over another, you have fundamentally compromised the thing that makes the AI useful in the first place.
A calculator doesn’t work better because the person who made it gets paid when you enter a particular number. A search engine shouldn’t give you a different answer because someone paid it to prefer that answer. And an intelligent system certainly shouldn’t be quietly optimizing its reasoning around whoever is willing to pay for access to your attention.
The irony is that the more capable AI becomes, the less compatible that model should be with traditional advertising. Advertising depends on controlling what people see. Intelligence depends on being able to determine what is actually relevant. Those are fundamentally different incentives.
As usual, the limiting factor may not be the technology itself. It may simply be our inability to resist turning every useful invention into another machine for extracting money from one another.
My bran?!?
That’s what helps me poop!
Why does the author assume I’m dumber than them. I basically never use AI. It’s stupid and pulls shit from the Internet and just assumes it’s correct. I, on the other hand, have media literacy and can figure out which info is useful and likely accurate myself. It’s like asking a chronic liar a question. It’s a waste of time when we have DDG and a few brain cells.
I haven’t used Google as a primary search engine in a decade or more. Nothing I do depends on Gemini (I don’t even use Apple Intelligence that’s a Gemini white label).
Personally, I think what Gemini is destroying is a market-based financial model that many came to associate with the Internet, information access and lifestyle.
Most of the websites I visit pre-date Google and some have gone as far as blocking all bots via robots.txt. They survive not via predatory ad networks but by donations and volunteers.
It’s why I like Lemmy; it follows the same model.
Just a quick correction. Robots.txt doesn’t block anything, it simply politely asks the search engine to not look here or use what is contained within. A lot of the search engines ignore this and catalogue the contents of the website anyway. And pretty much all of the AI database downloaders ignore it with impunity.
I am back to early web 2.0 in many cases , forums and such. Simply because they needlessly fucked something that worked perfectly before 2015 or so.
I think it’s cute you think the AI sites are paying attention to robots.txt. 🤣
I don’t; I think googlebot is paying attention to it, and AI sites get a LOT of their initial visibility and site ranking from the Google index.
Case in point: the sites I spend time on that set robots.txt to deny all bots before the LLM wave started still aren’t getting hammered with AI bot requests, while the ones that didn’t are.
I can see it on my own websites as well; I’ve got one that’s in Google’s index, and it gets a constant low volume traffic from AI bots. The ones that aren’t listed? They just get traffic from exploit scanners.
I don’t think today’s bots take any notice of robots.txt. It’s a relic from a more civilized time.
I run a few personal sites with some being available to the wider internet, and I have found that they generally do respect it. All the bots which advertise themselves as OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google do obey. However, I do occasionally see a stealth bot appear which uses a normal browser’s user agent and those just do whatever they want.
They don’t—but they DO use search index data to figure out where to crawl.
Nah, Gemini is really bad.
There’s a push to use AI where I work and we have our own Gemini, openAI, and Grok models and they literally check to make people are at least “trying” to use it…
Gemini will spin “thinking” for maybe 30 seconds, then something like “checking google results” and then just spitting out the same “ai overview” you’d get from searching the same thing.
All Gemini can do is Google something and summarize the first few results, but at that point a human could just pick a trustworthy site themselves instead of going with what has the best search optimization all mashed up.
With that one (and likely a lot of others) the big search engines becoming shit from AI slop and search optimization is going to also make AI even shittier, then the top links the next AI will be shittier.
We’ll get AI rewrites of AI rewrites, repeating itself exponentially faster as more money is sunk into it and hallucinations just keep repeating.
Like, this is the natural results of monopolies. Corporations get so large they can’t help but ruin the parts that work by integrating parts no one wants to try and make them profitable.
Because one corporation can’t function and be as large as Google. It’s just too much to keep organized while constantly growing profits. It’s like how the square cube law limits the size of buildings and animals.
The larger an animal gets, the weaker it gets pound for pound, until it would reach a point where it isn’t even strong enough to breathe…
That’s where these giant tech companies are headed.
So, I disabled everything AI the I can think of, use DDG as a search engine, ad block wherever, blah blah blah, my search results SUCK. Is there a better way to fix it?
And I use Linux at home…no blows crap
Kagi is pretty decent but the sad truth is that something like duck.ai works better as a search engine than normal search engines
robots.txt has been summarily ignored for nearly 20 years, my friend. Sorry to bear the news.
Only Google’s AI?
The amount of times I’ve gone to a top ranked website by duckduckgo and read the first paragraph only to go “oh this is just more slop” is ridiculous. I have to append reddit to every search to get anything useful and even then it could be bots.
Jokes on them i use Brave /s
I don’t even know her
