Why internet searches are serving up 'AI slop'

[usonian]

RNZ
24 August 2024
emphasis mine

Danyl McLauchlan, author and IT systems consultant at Victoria University of Wellington's School of Biological Sciences, said science fiction has foretold what happens when such content is left to spread unchecked.

"Neal Stephenson… describes nations in the future as having been 'Facebooked', which is… that kind of phenomenon of being completely swamped by meaningless gibberish," he told RNZ's Saturday Morning.

Stephenson coined the phrase 'metaverse' in 1992's Snow Crash, which directly inspired the name of Facebook's parent company, Meta - which has poured billions of dollars into creating the kind of virtual reality Stephenson wrote about in his dystopic novel. Facebook has in the past been accused of creating algorithmic 'echo chambers', in which people are served up engaging content which might differ completely from what others are seeing.

"There is no coherent media or what he calls 'consensual reality'," McLauchlan said. "No one agrees on what basically is happening in the country because everyone is getting different algorithmically sort of news feeds. "And so the nation collapses, because you do need that kind of consensual reality to even argue meaningfully about what's going on and what should happen."

Hmmmm, know anyone whose goal is national collapse?

Description of fake books on Amazon and how Google summaries are trashing news sites' revenue at the link.

Here:
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/526067/why-internet-searches-are-serving-up-ai-slop

[Skittles]

1. "facebooked", as in meaningless drivel

excellent

[BadgerKid]

2. IOW, serve up misinformation much like advertisement,

Personalizing it to increase/decrease the likelihood of the desired/undesired outcome.

[usonian]

3. The prize is your attention. Life spent on their site instead of IRL.

Note that there are two separate realities out there, and no discourse between them.

[dickthegrouch]

4. But only one is actually real

[canetoad]

5. I'll never forget a couple of grinning, giggling boys

Declare, over a quarter of a century ago, "Don't be evil".

That was the early vision of Larry Page and Sergy Brin, the founders of Google. It's a shame they couldn't follow their own advice. It was unlike all the other search engines of the time - clean, crisp interface. Plenty of results. Then it went bad - as so many things on the internet does.

Duck-Duck-Go is a good serarch engine. You can turn off AI, advertising and many of the things that make Google 2025 distasteful. Coupled with Brave browser, the web experience is improved by added privacy and less tracking. This combination may not last forever, but there's usually some idealistic tech company who will take up the slack when these go the way of Google.

It's entirely possible to cut the Google cord and vote with your fingers and your wallet.

[usonian]

6. DDG is mostly, if not entirely Bing. Compare results.

Nice not to be tracked though. They serve up "results" aka ads, based only on the search term and geolocation.

If you use a vpn or a proxy, it's more fun.

And I sometimes have to tune my search term mode diligently than an LLM ( which I don't use) as in

query -book -book -amazon -amazon -amazon -amazon -amazon -amazon

Gets a little annoying (SEO)

SEO, DUCK DUCK GO, M O N E Y.

[canetoad]

7. Not true

Maybe you haven't tweaked your settings sufficiently.

[usonian]

8. I lose a lot of settings when I clear history, cookies and cache.

Point taken. I don't compare often. Still, what's popular is often the opposite of what I am looking for. Sometimes on the 5th screen, and DDG paginates. Again, without cookies or a profile, settings get lost.

I still use it >99% of the time.

Autopager extension seems to work only on Firefox, and not on sites I use a lot. Not into userscripts but I might have to.

[eppur_se_muova]

9. I"ve disabled AI in Google searches with this extension: Google search engine with udm14 preset

Unfortunately, Google seems to be returning increasingly worthless search results.

I tried DuckDuckGo, and it hardly returned any results at all.

Searching for people by name tends to get 'outsourced' to various commercial search services, with all kinds of 'soft' results on the name searched.

Apparently the enshitification of search engines is well under way. Goodbye to a Golden Age.

[usonian]

10. The are others, but I can't remember their names.

I should revisit them.

I am trying to avoid Apple Intelligence. The new iphone SE won't do it, but the mac and ipad will have to stay stuck with ios 17 and Ventura to avoid it.

Apple Intelligence now requires 7GB of free storage per device
https://9to5mac.com/2025/01/03/apple-intelligence-now-requires-almost-double-iphone-storage/


I never asked for it, and don't want someone else making decisions for me.

Might be linux time again. Less RedHat, which seems high on AI.