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I take back everything I said in my previous post because of this
Further erasing the source of truth so it can be rewritten by the highest bidder.
The co-founders of google that are still on the board, did business with epstein.
I want to downvote this so bad but I know that's not the point of downvotes...
I too sometimes wish it would be possible to boo stuff that gets published in digital media. 🫨 Some stuff is just too triggering.
We need a post upvote/downvote for the quality of the post and media upvote/downvote to say how much we hate or love the content.
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you're gonna use AI whether you like it or not ..... oh wait, I left google search long ago
Not only will this suck but it will also be very dangerous. A large company whose goals are profit and manipulation that is essentially embedded in society should not be allowed to have this kind of control over this facet of the public square.
Welcome to the internet post-NetNeutrality
Is this a problem that net neutrality would have solved?
I'm pretty sure net neutrality was what prevented internet platforms/providers/protocols/etc. from artificially favoring some content over others, until it was repealed.
Net neutrality is more about the physical network, e.g. your ISP can't make google requests go fast and bing ones go slow, or not count google requests against your data cap (if you have one)
Oh, I see. Thanks for the clarification.
It should still be reinstated though.
Yesterday, as the goog search-results-page was taking 4-5 seconds to generate the AI-guff at top, it made all the site-links unclickable until AI summary was done. 🚽
(Disclaimer: Was on a random PC)
Louis Rossmann already talked about how if he generates his website content with ai, or post-processes it with ai, it scores #1 in results consistently, whereas THE SAME information written in a human way, scores down in the hundreds.
They already did it.
If AI really were that good, it would have naturally displaced human written answers by now.
I honestly thought it was already doing this. Whenever I accidentally use Google on my phone, it gives me the ai result that I have to exit out of, before I can see the results list.
Maybe it wasn’t that way for desktop?
Either way, I am trying to avoid Google and microslop as much as I can. I’m slowly removing them from my life, piece my piece.
Email is my next challenge. I really hoped self-hosting it would be easier by now.
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They really know how to please their customers (the advertisers).
Actually, the advertisers lose too, this is just a way to get people to search more than once so advertisers dollars don't go as far.
Doubt it, the AI will direct people directly to the advertisers.
There are multiple stages of enshittification:
- The company offers a useful service, often for free or at a reasonable price.
- Once it's gained enough users, the company cuts corners to save costs, and abuses the users to sell their information, attention, work, and / or time to business customers, like advertisers, and might start charging for the once free service, or increase costs. This significantly degrades the quality, usefulness, and usability of the service, but by this point the users probably have no alternative, or most other alternatives are doing the same.
- Once it's gained enough business customers and cornered the market, it starts cutting corners, degrading the service, and increasing costs for these customers, who, again, by this point have no viable alternative.
- Once the degradation and cost increase have reached the level beyond which even the captive users and customers would start leaving in significant numbers, the corporation extracts as much money as possible from its investors and stockholders, for instance “investing” in datacentres that won't ever be built while distracting them with shiny but useless “innovations” like AI.
- The CEO runs away with the money, possibly including a bailout, and the company dies, leaving the investors and stockholders with the debt, the users without a service, the customers without a product, and society poorer than before point 1.
Google is currently at stage 4, having abused both users and customers to the point that many are leaving, and burning money as fast as possible to enrich the top brass and try to look like a company worth investing in.
It won't be long before it implodes, but it'll still be too long.
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And if you try to use the AI search to actually find any actual websites or articles it will just hallucinate them. They kept telling us AI was the future of search, but we know they want it to be the future of information.
Its just that they can't afford to not be. You leaving for another site is heresy with how much money they need to make on selling ads and you.
And the middle man has decided they have overheard enough of the conversation going both ways to just "know" what you are about to ask and what the answer should be.
This is the new market for them. Not being a search algorithm but being a magical information hoarder that can predict everything about their user and their brand partners.
They want to be Madame Leota
Are there any plans to release an AI that's not dogshit?
The problem isn't that AI is dogshit. In fact there are many things that have been revolutionized because of AI. Our understanding of biology has catapulted forward decades because of new models.
The problem is marketing. Those few use cases, while truely amazing, are only useful for a few things. The marketing of AI is horrible, throwing it into every product whether it makes sense or not. Throwing more money at it when it doesn't make sense in the vain hopes that will eventually make it profitable. Then manipulating the market so that alternatives to your bad product aren't feasible.
These silicon valley narcissists need AI to be profitable more than AI can become profitable.
A big part of the problem is that everything is AI and AI is everything. Machine learning, LLMs, and "AI companies" are three very different concepts that get muddled together by newspeak.
Many machine learning applications are indeed truly innovative and a leap forward in how we deal with certain classes of problems, like in computer vision or computational biology as you mentioned. But the big trouble with LLMs imo is twofold: they are kryptonite for our monkey brains as language is something so uniquely human that it is a literal backdoor into our minds; and as a whole they are both affected and effected by the forced enshittification of capitalism, whether directly or indirectly, and the interests of "others", leading to some not great times.
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I love that Google has convinced themselves they can be a massive advertisement company without the mechanism that got us to look at the ads.
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Self-host SearXNG on your laptop/PC. Your only regret is that you'd wish you'd done this sooner. Both SearXNG and Docker have helpful setup pages that walk you through the process. https://docs.searxng.org/
I’ve been hosting searx(ng) for like a decade or more. Rarely does it not find what I’m looking for.
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Geez, a person would have to think for like 2, maybe even 5 seconds to forsee how this plays out. Instead of buying apples from the orchard, we'll be buying apples from the local apple thieves. Hey, why are there no more apples?
I noticed that dictionary definitions on Google are now AI-generated, whereas they used to be taken from the Oxford English Dictionary, written by humans. Needless to say I much preferred the human-written definitions.
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...rather than ~~making you~~ allowing you to decide what kind of search experience...
I wouldn't be so frustrated with AI popping up everywhere if we were given clear choices about whether or not we want to use it.
"We, Google, who produce an AI, are now prioritizing AI content in our search engine, in a totally unrelated decision to our AI production, so that we can totally not artificially inflate the imaginary value of AI so as to force more people to use our AI to create content, so it will show in our search engine we've gone to lengths to skew results in the favor of AI in to give you the best service imaginable (because its imaginary to think we provide the best of anything)"
I really wish we'd get another president into the office thats willing to take a massive hammer to these big companies and bust them up into shards again.. preferably this time making sure they cant T2000 themselves back together into the original whole, thats somehow worse.
surely this won't bite them in the ass.
Dammit. Now I have to spend more time at the library. Thankfully it ain't too far away.
Serious question: can anyone vouch for a search engine today that prioritises… searching? and does it well?
I used DuckDuckGo for a couple of years, but I’d found the result set frequently lacking compared to Google. I’m currently on Brave search (+ Brave Browser), and it’s good for text, but it does shove an LLM response at the top and is pretty bad for image results.
SearXNG is a local option and is fairly easy to get a container running for it.
It's not the cleanest, but it will let you search about anything that is searchable if you allow it. (It'll aggregate results from ~244 different search engines so beware. It's a "metasearch" engine.)
It can be a bit slow at times (especially if all the things are turned on), and is a bit like Google in its infancy. However, there aren't ads or promoted results. It's fairly raw, if you are into that kinda thing.
Getting the API working with Python can be a pain at times due to its bot control mechanisms and strict header checks. (I believe they default these features ON if someone accidentally makes their instance public or something like that.)
I'm pretty happy with Kagi which does search, including images (and a personal favorite, GIFs), well. It's meta-search so they capitalize on other indexes.
I too never had luck with DDG - I like their general privacy ethos, but their search sucks. They've gotten a little better as they've shifted away from being 100% Bing, but only baby steps so far.
Brave is much better search, but hate their crypto-bro company ethos. Image search is meh.
Self hosted meta-search options (SearXNG, Whoogle) are good but difficult to set up well.
Kagi, Brave, and DDG all let you disable AI responses in settings. If you're otherwise alright with Brave just turn AI results off (does require you to let them keep a cookie).
"Search" engines will always prioritize their revenue source. If you want a search engine that prioritizes search, you need to DIY or find someone whose revenue source is search, not data/ads.
To my knowledge the only engine getting their income from search is Kagi.
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Good thing i dont use google anymore
I wonder how long before they disable the Web Search option (udm=14). I still use that as my default search engine wherever possible, because I find it more reliable than Duck Duck Go for the things I tend to search for. Unfortunately, I can see Google killing it to funnel more people towards the slop trough.
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this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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