“We’ve ignored all the meaningful terms you were searching for. Now here’s a bunch of pinterest and quora spam.”
“hey, is that a brand name? Here’s 9 sketchy looking shopping sites selling things that have that brand name on them”
I installed the extension that removes Pinterest from searches… it’s great.
Which one are you using? I use unpinterested but its not open source and I want to add a few more sites to auto-exclude.
Those two sites are absolute skid marks.
Once AI is handling search for us, many may never learn the concept of “search term”
You can already outsource a lot of this to Bing. If you need to know the right temperature for making french fries, you can google a bunch of “recipes” (AKA life story of the author + history + vacation photos + cooking instructions) read them through and… actually better make some coffee while you’re at it because this is going to take a while. Anyway, the other option is to ask: “Hey Bing, I’m making french fries, but I don’t know how hot the oven should be.”
Spoiler: 220 °C
The scary thing is, what happens when people start doing this for more important things, such as what to do if your child has swallowed something or how to parallel park your car.
200 or 220, depends on if you are using a convection oven. But that’s beside the point, I really hope AI finally kills SEO.
I’m making french fries, but I don’t know how hot the oven should be.
Contents:
- What French fries are
- Why you might want some
- The dangers of French fries
- Where to buy French fries
- Ways of preparing French fries
- Other names for French fries
And so on.
Quality content right there, if you don’t mind going down some rabbit holes.
French fries aren’t made in an oven though.
Correct. However, if you buy frozen ones, you do need to heat them up some way. I ran out of nuclear weapons again, my flamer was out of gasoline, so using the oven was my best option.
Oven cooked french fries are a thing, and have a surprisingly high popularity
Doesn’t the very nature of being fries, require them to be fried? Otherwise, they’re baked potato sticks.
Ours are pre-fried at the factory, then frozen and packaged. We typically then finish cooking them in the oven.
This is the way.
Yes.
Source: I’m a chef.
In my just under 40 years on this rock, the only time I’ve seen someone deepfrying french fries at home has been on American TV shows. It’s a lot more popular to cook them in the oven around here.
“AI” is already handling the search for you. The big search engines are probably the first mass scale adopters of machine learning.
And they have lost the war with SEO spam to a hilarious extent. What makes you think the same won’t happen with chat bot AIs? Bad actors (including PR agencies) will inevitably figure out where and how to spam comments in order to bias the AI models in favor of their agendas or products.
If the data they consume is filled with something like “fossil fuels don’t cause global warming because XYZ”, the chat bots will repeat it. They don’t have the capacity to reason.
There hasn’t been a reason to flood the internet with low effort spam because it’s easily detected by humans who read it. But the ML algorithms will be a lot easier to trick.
True but they will learn the concept ‘inefficency increases individual profits’. Google has been getting worse and so will AI search eventually.
I think communicating with AI will become an art form the same way googling was/is.
Until they’re sponsored
“I realize you seem frustrated from my responses. Nature’s Choice has a fantastic Stress Reducing gummy available at your local CVS”
Yeah, the gentle product hints at first will be driving people away quicker than a Monstered up Uber driver.
Tea. Earl Grey. Hot
In the Greatest Generation postcast they posit that you can actually get anything you want materialized at a certain temperature.
A Stradivarius violin. Luke warm.
Hm, and I guess in any variant state. Janeway always gets “Coffee. Black.”
Is is possible for something to be replicated that if one of its defining features is the person who built it?
If the violin was replicated, it was not built by Stradivari, and thus is by definition not a Stradivarius.
It’s the same idea I think, figuring out how to describe what you mean or phrase the question the right way to get the right kind of results.
Ask Jeeves was just ahead of its time
Half the time I look at a website or article it is just AI generated crap anyway. Oh you want a product review? Here are a half dozen articles that have summarised the Amazon reviews of an item, with no first hand experience.
Google “Best vacuum cleaner”
Top 6 hits: “We evaluated the 5 brands that paid us the most and found that they all suck up your dirt. We can’t really speak ill of any of them because this is an ad and we signed a contract. Please use our embedded links so we can have more money.”
Search engine protocol:
Ignore first few results (ads)
Ignore next few results (bullshit spam comparison farms)
Ignore really annoying site you think is ok but is a usability nightmare
Ignore subsection of reddit links
Find 0-1 useful links on first page
Regret
The sad thing is the Reddit Links probably contain the most useful answers that google will show you
I know. But I’ll use them as a last resort
Use them, costs bandwidth and CPU cycles.
Yes but it will be offset by traffic boosts for advertisers
Use an adblocker. Unless, you mean people go on the internet without using protection?
That won’t make a difference. Reddit knows how much traffic they get and they use that number to sell ads
They do. Either due to technical ineptitude (like approximately everyone’s parents) or, and that might be worse, with the conviction of doing “the right thing,” like a friend of mine.
Junk data that costs the advertisement without a return on investment
Trying to find the tiny “show more results” button sandwiched between the first page of shit results and the weird AI bubbles of shit results just to find semi-decent shit on pages 2-3 makes me wish i was dead every single time.
This is especially frustrating when trying to find parts for vehicles or machinery. Used to, one could search for something like “1988 Suzuki Samurai Oil Filter” and get the answer for all the common filter brands. But now all you get is links to an auto parts website, where you have to use their shitty search function and hope they have what you need.
I know your pain, I’ve skipped it entirely and always go for the part number. There are great resources for BMWs with sites like realoem.com, but what about other manufacturers?
I have been experiencing exactly this with a Suzuki in the last week. It gives me links to parts stores that don’t even have the part I’m looking for. Come on Google, get your shit together!
wait until the AI chatbots are optimized with SEO spam.
I want to search for recipes that are not blog posts
This is a pretty good aggregator
oh, cool, thank you!
Often you’ll find a ‘print recipe’ button somewhere near the top of the page. Click on that, it’ll take you to what you’re looking for without all of the crap nobody cares about.
100% what I do. Print to pdf and then never go to the site, because they’re so over loaded with ads and pictures that will load and cause the page to bounce around.
Firefox+AdNauseam
Watching the numbers on each page go up is entertainment enough. Best part is that it stops the ad popping in the background so your page rarely jumps
How’s that compare with Ublock.origin?
AdNauseam integrates with UBO, so you’d get both. Basically, it virtualizes clicks on ads so ad sellers get charged for the click but it’s all hidden in the background from you.
That said, I kinda have mixed feelings about it. Ad clicks will help support sites you like, so even if you’re blocking ads you’re still getting ‘served’ and ‘interacting’ with them. On the other hand, it tells sites 'hey all these ads you’re serving aren’t making your website shitty and unusable (but they generally are) so keep it up! And it tells ad agencies and the industry ‘oh yeah we sure love clicking ads keep slapping them in my face at every corner’. And if ad buyers are realizing their clicks are all ghost clicks, they’ll stop buying ad space. Which just means shittier lowest common denominator ads in more places.
It’s different from the technical end but it works by clicking the ads and filling them with junk to cost. It essentially removes the ad for you
Yeah, I despise that every fucking recipe is a blog post. I don’t care that little Becky loved this soup, I just want to know how much salt I should add.
I’ve had good luck with whisk.com.
We need a Google successor.
Something non-profit.
The horrible reality is that Bing has actually become a competitor to Google, simply by Google getting worse and worse. Microsoft used to be the main bad guy, but these days they practically seem benign compared to the others.
The ai generated top reply on Bing pisses me off 90% of the time. Word salad with citations.
The infrastructure to crawl, store, and serve search results to billions of users is phenomenally expensive. A government might fund it (which comes with its own concerns), but a non-profit will struggle to compete.
I would pay a subscription if it were truly non profit and had no ads.
Did you sign up for Neeva? Because unfortunately it’s shutting down.
When you factor out all the garbage content it’s suddebly affordable lol
Hmm… Interesting… That would be great… If only something like that exists now!
Yacy exists but it’s bad enough that it’s one of the few options I don’t self host.
This could be interesting. The infrastructure required to scrape the internet though is going to be so daunting. Google got to build it up slowly as the internet got bigger. Bing is backed by a huge corporation that already has data centers. A new non profit player is going to take a huge coordinated effort.
Tfw you searched something and the top10 answer is mostly copied homework without much variation, and then the best one is from reddit.
That’s why I use Kagi. It’s a paid search engine and the results are actually really good.
This whole thread reads like astroturfers
Nobody ever likes anything
If you really don’t believe me, check out search.dsemy.com - my Searx instance which I stopped using because of Kagi.
Edit: I realize now you didn’t reply to me, I came back to the after seeing people downvoting my (honest) comment in this thread and your comment kinda pissed me off so I just wrote a response quickly.
When we’re talking about the issues of search engines, and a whole bunch of people come in and “organically” promote a paid service, then my astroturfing detection rises up. This is how modern advertisement works and it fucking sucks.
I get what you’re saying, but it’s not very nice to accuse people of astroturfing when you can quickly look at their other posts/comments.
Literally every person in this subthread who said something positive about Kagi is very clearly just a normal user who has recently posted things completely unrelated to it, judging by their history.
Maybe I’m being naive about how sophisticated these campaigns have gotten, but it seems unlikely that a small company will invest the effort in making it seem this believable on such a niche platform.
Literally every person in this subthread who said something positive about Kagi is very clearly just a normal user who has recently posted things completely unrelated to it, judging by their history.
Yes, this is exactly how it works. This behavior is well documented.
Not saying 100% all these users are astroturfing accounts, but I’m just pointing out this looks like it
It’s tough, because people also like to recommend things they like. If a friend in real life told you about the new CastX® Iron Extreme™ cast iron skillet that they got and how they love its rich iron flavor, you would just think they just like their new pan.
I haven’t used kagi, but the service being paid is not the red flag you think it is, as long as the privacy policy and ToS make sense.
Do they already have their own index? Last time I used it (when it was still beta) it was quite okay, but it was basically yandex or whatever with a different front-end and site-pinning
Look at https://kagi.com/faq .
They basically query other search engines and APIs in a privatized manner and they use their own indexes as well. I used Google, Ecosia, StartPage, DDG, a self-hosted SearXNG instance and then Brave. I liked DDG and I kinda liked Brave Search, as well. But in comparison to Kagi, they’re all not that good in my opinion.
The image search of Kagi is especially what blows me away. It just shows relevant results for my queries and I’m satisfied.
I love kagi. I use it mainly for work, where it gives much better results. It even has a programmer lens so that it shows results that are relevant to programmers. But its image search didn’t work that well for me. Not sure if I’m just not formulating the queries right though.
Kagi is actually awesome.
I just started using it this month and I’m blown away by the results.
I just started my trial, so far it’s looking good!
That’s why I use brave search, it’s a free search engine and the results are actually really good
Even if it’s good, their long term goal will always be to appease their advertising customers, not you. Google has the ability more than anyone else to make the perfect search engine but they’re not spending their time and resources on that because that’s not what will increase their revenue. That model is just fundamentally broken.
I used it before and unfortunately, it sucks in comparison to Kagi.
Idk, I found it to be quite good but it may be just me knowing how to search stuff (even tho Google just gives shitty results and DDG is hit or miss)
I also know how to use keywords, etc. And maybe I went a bit overboard when I said Brave Search sucks. It doesn’t suck, but with Kagi, I don’t feel like a product any more and the search results make sense again, like with Google a couple years ago. Most free search engines just don’t work that good any more.
If you would’ve told me 2 years ago that I’ll be paying for a search engine in the future… Well, I would’ve thought that you’re crazy. But here I am now.
What are “SEO spam tactics”? I would google, but am afraid of that now.
Whenever you try to get an answer to something like “What movie was the Be Like Water line from” and you can NOT find anything other than a bunch of articles with tons of paragraphs wasting your time - that’s the SEO spam tactics. Those articles chose words that made themselves easier to be indexed by Google, but don’t actually want to answer that question.
And yes. I literally looked this up this week.
I still don’t fucking know if it came from Enter the Dragon or some other short series. I just gave up. Google has enshitified news articles on the internet and has to seriously consider retraining their algorithm to negatively impact shit like that.
“Be like water” is from a Bruce Lee interview https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cJMwBwFj5nQ not a movie.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=cJMwBwFj5nQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Basically all the crap on a recipe page before the actual recipe… Except there is no recipe.
Tactics to get more visible to the search engines. Optimizing the website to the search engines.
It’s something we all must do to make a nice, visited websites. It’s also something that spammers got so good that literally everything you search is basically ¾ ads at this point.
I think I just figured it out, Search Engine Optimization?
Yes. Google popularized it and now it has ruined Google search.
One where they optimise their article and site according to how google algorithm works, and then multiply by 10. Or they funnel your search term to their own search function.
If they haven’t gotten into this habit in the last 20 years anyways, I don’t think the SEO spam was that last straw. That ship has sailed.
People are born everyday. Grandma may have had 20 years to figure it out, but kids these days won’t have the opportunity to search the web and find information the way we did.
The internet is unsearchable at this point. I feel like 99% of websites are fronts.
How do we find information these days? I still default to my search engine, which is often google. I moonlight over to DDG often, but usually an operating system upgrade gets me back on Google for a while.
Ignorance is bliss, give me some pls
