Esp. relevant amidst the reddit blackout, and how it’s affecting Google Search quality as well.
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The blackout really affected the quality of Google search results. I used to add “reddit” at the end of my query to make sure I get genuine answer from the community. Now without reddit, I have to dig deeper. The verge has a good article on this
I hope we’re also on the cusp of a new era of search… not sure how that would look like but I envision with SEO-optimized AI-generated articles (esp. all those top 10 articles which is so easy to generate with AI), Google is only going to continue going downhill spammed with fake content.
also reddit’s own search kind of sucks, so Google is basically a glorified reddit search engine for me half the time.
SEO has been killing Google for years.
you’re right, i was just oblivious to it until the blackout showed me how much i rely on reddit to get any useful search results…
I’ve been disappointed in Google for a long time. Using their shortcuts doesn’t work anymore so it’s all ads until it’s “We don’t seem to find… leave a question” Which. No. I actually get much better and faster results from Bing or Edge or whatever it’s called through Microsoft. DDG and Brave are no’s too.
Today people append Reddit to their search to find human replies to their question. If the Reddit community fragments into the fediverse what keyword would they type in then?
Hot take: The old way of searching is outdated.
Bing Chat is rough, but it’s the future. You ask it a question - it uses a modified ChatGPT to generate an answer and cites its sources.
About 60% of the time, it’s right. About 40% of the time it’s wrong. But either way, it cites its sources using links that it found during that search. You can click those sources and see responses from humans, who generally have the correct answer.
I rarely use Google now. Bing Chat is always my first stop for any kind of question or general knowledge query. Give it 5 years - 10 at most - and that’ll be the only way to use a search engine. The tech isn’t going anywhere, and it’s only getting better.
If I have to check a list of sources to make sure what ChatGPT spat out was accurate, why don’t I just skip the middleman and make that determination with my own brain? That’s what I don’t get. Is that a skill that’s being lost now or something?
I mean, I use it a lot for programming. I try the solution given and if it doesn’t work/breaks then I go double-check the sources to see what they actually said.
But generally it’s “good enough” the first time around, or it gives me an alternate way of thinking about the problem that I didn’t consider.
I use it for programming too, but programming is deterministic – if the code doesn’t work, you know what the AI gave you is incorrect. I had a question regarding which types of glasses to get for an astigmatism recently which maybe the AI could help me with, but I don’t necessarily trust it to give me the correct information when I then need to go and gamble my money on purchasing the correct product for my needs.
In a scenario like that, having recommendations from lots of different people is far more useful. They can tell you about those unique idiosyncrasies of reality that aren’t able to be found on the Wikipedia page or outdated news article the AI is referencing to build you its answer.
This is almost a worst case scenario to me. There was a time when I could search the internet and find long form articles written by experts in the field, or at least by knowledgeable people answering the question that I had and often giving me a deep dive. These days I can search the title of an article I know exists and it will still be buried beneath pages of SEO driven AI generated garbage. I get the feeling that many of these sites and writers shut down simply because there was no reason to generate content that would be buried.
