I decided to lookup some history of my local area, and i was reading a whole page until i noticed some things didnt add up. It was stating some obscure things such as it (the local place) has it’s own currency and whatnot.
I decided to check the sources they used, and i noticed it was some stupid wiki page made by Grok.
Sure i can’t fact chek all of it, small point’s were correct but for crying out loud. Please.
Try asking your local librarians about local history.
1: You’ll absolutely make their day by asking.
2: They’ll be able to direct you to real, verifiable sources.
And if you’ve got the ambition, you can use that new information to fix some of the crap on the Wikipedia page, helping others who might not be as perceptive of AI slop as you are.
They said wiki page, not Wikipedia. Not the same thing.
Thats what i wanted to do! I wanted to write some more inside history and information about the place.
DuckDuckGo is pretty much useless now. The overwhelming majority of links it throws at me for any search are just the most obvious AI slop. This is a dark time for the internet.
startpage.com actually has good results still and no ai. used to be ixquick
DuckDuckGo is pretty much useless now.
And every other search engine just skips the middleman and shoves the AI slop directly onto the search results page.
Dead internet time, baby!
I don’t think people, including the ones responding to you, have the causality right. It’s not that searching is broken (although it is) but the actual human internet is dead. You can switch from Google to Bing to DDG to No AI DDG to Ecosia to Kaji, but they’re all just pointing to different orders of the same low quality junk websites. I don’t think we can optimally search our way out of the sea of slop and referral links that makes up the vast majority of the internet now.
RIP human internet (1980ish - 2020ish). We had a good run.
Except that there are publicly available court documents from a case against Google showing that in the 2010s they started intentionally reducing the quality of search results (or at bare minimum refusing to roll out fully built and tested improvements to it) in order to artificially boost impressions and click through of the paid ads on their search results. See “The Man Who Killed Google Search” by Ed Zitron on his Where’s your Ed At blog.
So it’s a combination. Things started going downhill with the popular search engines far earlier in attempts to boost ads and with the hyperproliferation of sketchy SEO tactics, then the whole house of cards got fucking bulldozed by AI.
But I’d also argue that the human internet is hanging on fine, it’s just a massive pain in the ass to find good sources and maintain your own personal list of "go to"s.
I downloaded Wikipedia in 2020 just to have something
Wait thats smart, have every wiki page archived pre LLM
This is probably a case of blind men touching an elephant, but Kagi to me genuinely feels like Google did 15 years ago.
The actually-useful static content of the internet is still there buried under the deluge of slop.
Kagi is the one big alternative I haven’t tried because of the paywall, but maybe I’ll finally bite the bullet.
It’s such a weird coincidence that the two largest companies involved in search engines, Google and Microsoft, are fully invested in AI. It almost feels like they have made their search engines useless so that people are pushed to use AI chatbots instead. Really makes you think.
That they’re trying to curb traffic by reducing pagination or giving bad results? I also haven’t seen as many ads, which is weird and sus af.
I use this URL as my default search engine too.
It’s great that it disables the AI overview / summary, but I don’t think it has any impact on the search results
Happy to be proven wrong
Nowadays you can’t just read a random website without bumping into slop. Reading stuff online has always been risky, but nowadays you have to be extra critical.
Bad sources have always existed, so these are not radically new skills. The amount of unreliable text out there has completely exploded though, which means most of the material available to you is not worth reading.
Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience.
Whatever they are doing over there, it’s not working.
I also noticed that majority of results from DDG are some random website with no relation to my query whatsoever, having bot written article picked up by some SEO trickery. e.g garbage site about cooking (doubt) having tech related article written by bot. These sites seem to have articles for everything.
Another complain is how they detect simple unit conversion (or calculator) query. DDG have converter UI and still shove garbage converter sites up my face, I don’t even know how these sites managed to have some specific “convert x unit a to y unit b” indexed. Annoying AF.
SEO is a broken game and index/crawler should change the way they do things. As it is, I see no point putting in effort to cater to good crawler anymore. Might as well block them all and go back to early 00’s style neighbor links, slap tar pit and anubis on it for good measure.
I would love some suggestion for alternative privacy respecting search engine that have some “sense” of what they are actually indexing.
I also noticed that majority of results from DDG are some random website with no relation to my query whatsoever
…that’s an exaggeration. I use ddg daily and it works fine most of the time for me. And when it doesn’t I cannot remember ever once thinking “no relation whatsoever to my query”…
Right. I need to calm down.
Recent long research on machining messed me up good.
That sounds like Elon musk’s shitty project to rewrite Wikipedia using grok.
It’s basically just the facts from Wikipedia plus right wing talking points and AI hallucinations.
It even has a shitty name to it
Ughhh…
Adding that domain to my DNS block list right now.
And Gemini references it
Dude I just had the same experience yesterday. Wanted to know a bit about the folklore of my place and I guess it was kind of right when cross referencing but it just fucking sucks.
Definitely add a comment saying it’s an unacceptable source, if there’s a comment feature. It might even be the case that they had real sources and then an Elon fanatic gutted it out to grokify the page.
Information about my own local area’s history is like… gappy, or when not gappy, very inaccessible? They have a dedicated city history archive in the city library but don’t upload any of it to a digital location. We’re left with fan historical sites, which are relying on very non-juicy sources to paint the picture of our local neighbourhoods.
So though I know this is pre-LLM documentation, it is a really crappy qnd fake sounding narrative full of people’s speculation with very little sourcing.
It’s stuff like that which actually got me to care about and understand the historical method, more so than learning about it in high school.
Oh and when I say neighbourhoods I mean places that were villages before being assumed into the greater city, not just suburbs laid down in the last 230 years or so.
point’s
Woop’s
This is how you know its a human.
That’s frustrating.
Wikipedia has been abused for literal decades. People will just make up sources to cite and hope nobody notices. That’s why the first thing they teach you (or taught, not been in school for a while), is to never use wikipedia as a source. Local libraries, local newspapers and, funny enough, pubs (always some old guy who knows everything and will have books n shit). Check those places out.
“A wiki page” is not necessarily Wikipedia.
Fair enough
