Kids today might not realize that, for about twenty years there, you could go to Google Search and find things you were looking for! Google now features a hilariously unreliable AI summary as the f…
That's technically true, but it's as misleading as saying they get their search results from Yandex. Their results are aggregated from several search engines, not just Bing. They also have their own web crawler, DuckDuckBot, which absolutely respects RobotRules.
Edit: I'm told my information is out of date. No more Yandex because of Uncle Sam. Yahoo is just Bing now, so that index doesn't count anymore. The bulk of the rest of their sources are largely inconsequential specialized search engines. Their sources page states that they "largely source from Bing".
Yeah, it's not just e.g. water that is the utility, pipes and pumping stations are part of it. Otherwise you have water...uh...somewhere, go get it yourself.
Can someone explain why the fuck Google is pushing this so hard? Generative AI is not a general intelligence, and useless for concrete facts. Google has already demonstrated how shitty it is for information, and the people with the knowledge to work on the project have to know this.
So why the fuck are they all full steam ahead on something that will always be useless for them?
AI is hype.
They've recently signed a deal with Reddit for AI parsable data. Reddit reciprocated by allowing Google to be the only indexable search engine.
Google now thinks it can do the same to literally everyone else.
Googling is pretty damn mainstream.
Don't give Google your data, then don't be included in googles search results. It's like a flip of their previous trade with reddit, except it's not a trade. It's extortion.
Reddit never gave Google traffic. They gave them content and data.
And Google thinks it can withdraw traffic from other sites unless they get data in return.
Google is a monopoly.
Literally extortion
I might be wrong, but they meta-search across multiple providers, including their own. The real benefit is that YOU can choose which search subjects to prioritize when trying to find something specific.
For normal search stuff, this feels like "old Google" (no ai spam). For detailed searching, its better than any other engine I've used.
This will never happen. We might get some of the issues more regulated, and people may move away from others, but you can't put the Furies back into the box. Things will change, but we will never have the early internet again.
We can, closed communities with some effort to enter the group. I pretty much ditched most main stream social media and use what it used to be mailing lists and discord servers. It's not about technology. Internet and access used to be simply exclusive and we have to create exclusive channels to communicate about f.e. arts, history, technology or even occult where there is no "free riders" with no knowledge. That's what I mean and this may happen imo. Quality over quantity
I'm using SEARXNG. It's a search engine aggrigate and you can mix and match where you want your results to come from. It's like using Google from a decade ago.
I remember discovering MetaCrawler in the 90s (before Google was even founded) and it quickly became the go-to search engine because its aggregate results were superior to any of the other options at the time. I don’t think its source mix was tunable, but that sounds like appropriate progress for 30 years.
Interesting. That seems a fairly heavy duty search and possibly more than most users would want to go about installing. But it's something to keep in mind if needed.
Google is genuinely bad now. I switched to Ecosia which is just Bing with a simpler front end and they use their profits to plant trees. I don't think Ecosia is particularly special though. Duck Duck Go, Bing whatever, they're all better than Google.
Whenever I set up a new computer then search for something, I'm always surprised at first seeing the awful layout and quality of the search results before I realize that I haven't changed the default search from Google. It's awful now. Seriously, how are people using it?
My new favorite way to search is perplexity.ai. It's an AI search tool that summarizes the loads of crap out there so you don't need to read through the junk that people write. It provides sources, unlike using ChatGPT, which is incredibly valuable. All AIs make shit up, so having links to double check it is a must. Unlike Bing Chat, or whatever Microsoft calls it this week, you can ask follow up questions to home in on what you want.
As I understand it, this is only about using search results for summaries. If it's just that and links to the source, I think it's OK. What would be absolutely unacceptable is to use the web in general as training data for text and image generation (=write me a story about topic XY).
No one will click on the source, which means the only visitor to your site is Googlebot.
That was the argument with the text snippets from news sources. Publishers successfully lobbied for laws to be passed in many countries that required search engine operators to pay fees. It backfired when Google removed the snippets from news sources that demanded fees from Google. Their visitors dropped by a massive amount, 90% or so, because those results were less attractive to Google users to click on than the nicer results with a snippet and a thumbnail. So "No one will click on the source" has already been disproven 10 or so years ago when the snippet issue was current. All those publishers have entered a free of charge licensing agreement with Google and the laws are still in place. So Google is fine, upstart search engines are not because those cannot pressure the publishers into free deals.
This has already happened and continues to happen.
that latter will be the case rather sooner than later I’m afraid. It’s just a matter of time with Google.
If that will actually be the case and passes legal challenges, basically all copyright can be abolished which would definitively have some upsides but also downsides. All those video game ROM decompilation projects would be suddenly in the clear, as those are new source code computer-generated from copyrighted binary code, so not really different from a AI generated image based on a copyrighted image used as training data. We could also ask Gemini write a full-length retelling of Harry Potter and just search, replace all trademarked names, and sell that shit. Evil companies could train an AI on GNU/Linux source codes and tell it to write an operating system. Clearly derived work from GPL code but without any copyright to speak of, all that generated code could be legally closed. I don't like that.