Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.

  • @Tenthrow
    link
    English
    23111 months ago

    Google has never sucked more than it does now. I miss the old internet before megacorps turned it into a huge shopping mall that barks propaganda at you while you shop.

    • drphungky
      link
      English
      12411 months ago

      Legitimately the mega corps are the least problem with Google search these days. Once you get past the ads and sponsored content at the top, you get tons of blogspam that is written solely to maximize SEO and get page views. This was bad before generative AI, but now people can generate whole websites on “the best impact hammer” or “how to buy solar panels” without even paying a shitty copywriter. Google is literally unusable for anything like that. I have to go watch 10 YouTube videos to get an idea, and even some of THOSE are text to speech product spec regurgitators, again just content farming for affiliate links.

      The internet is just fucking awful these days. Thats why people look for Reddit links. Reddit was its own community for a very long time generating content and curating good content generated elsewhere. It was a filter for all the bullshit filler, but Google looks at everything without nearly as good separation of quality from affiliate spam as Reddit has.

      • @Eidolon
        link
        English
        4211 months ago

        undefined> I have to go watch 10 YouTube videos to get an idea, and even some of THOSE are text to speech product spec regurgitators, again just content farming for affiliate links.

        Not to mention the removal of dislikes on Youtube, which makes it even HARDER to find quality tutorial type videos

        • @grue
          link
          English
          14
          edit-2
          11 months ago

          First we ditched Twitter for Mastodon, now we’re ditching Reddit for Lemmy, and sooner or later we’ll be ditching Youtube for Peertube.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            6
            edit-2
            11 months ago

            I really doubt this. I hate to be that guy, but 90% of things I want to follow are on Twitter still. Very few on mastodon. I’m sure it’s a people circle thing.

            It’s way too easy to use Twitter and complain… it’s way to easy to use reddit … (if you use their app) and complain.

            I don’t think there is going to be any sort of mass migration that leaves any of these overnight. All of this stuff needs to be better for end users, not just for people who like the technicals and general idea of the fediverse.

            Let me know when companies are on Lemmy and Mastadon. Some companies do support via Twitter. Heck I’ve gotten better deals from Comcast via their subreddit. Then again there is a general fear of companies being on the fediverse… so would I get that experience here ever? Idk… but it’s a minus for me.

            Edit for tldr: I feel like there is a pseido-toxic echo chamber in the fediverse as a whole that will likely harm it in the long run. I don’t see it as being a replacement for other things for regular users at the current trajectory. Hope it changes though.

            • 🦥󠀠󠀠󠀠󠀠󠀠󠀠
              link
              English
              511 months ago

              I’d prefer if all those companies just stay on Twitter and leave Lemmy/Mastadon alone. Their influence is what got the internet into the mess that it’s currently in.

            • @ultranaut
              link
              English
              111 months ago

              It seems like we’re heading towards all of this becoming “better for end users”, it’s just going to take multiple years to reach a point where the fediverse is there for a random non-technical person. Assuming it does get there, there’s a lot that can go wrong of course. It does feel plausible to me, if the userbase stays large enough to keep regularly generating fresh content and devs keep improving things. Certainly the incompetent leadership at companies like Reddit and Twitter will continue to do ridiculous things that drive users away in the years to come.

            • @graphite
              link
              English
              011 months ago

              Pretty much this. I agree with you 100%.

              As much as I’d like to see Reddit die out and places like Lemmy become more mainstream, I doubt that’s going to happen anytime soon.

        • Hopps
          link
          English
          1011 months ago

          Ever since dislikes were removed I use a plugin that shows the ratio of likes to views to determine if a video is worth watching.

          Most of the time if the likes to views is >= 2% then it’s an okay vid.

          • @setsneedtofeed
            link
            English
            4
            edit-2
            11 months ago

            My understanding is plugin is alright (I have it too), but it’s increasingly inaccurate, especially for videos uploaded after it was created. I believe it took data from YouTube before the dislikes were removed and uses that as a snapshot, then adds the thumbs up/down of users of the plugin and uses that to extrapolate trends from the very limited data it has coming in.

            The real solution would be YouTube showing the scores again, but I guess their stupid corporate videos getting BTFO was too much for them.

            • Hopps
              link
              English
              4
              edit-2
              11 months ago

              The plugin you are mentioning is based on dislikes and yes it is very inaccurate. The one I mentioned works off of the ratio between the likes vs the view count so the accuracy is always there, it’s a different way of going about it.

              I agree that YouTube just needs to bring the dislike count back, it’s a pain trying to find these alternative ways to know if a video is good when the data is there. It’s so greedy of them, outright harming user experience for profit.

        • @aceshigh
          link
          English
          311 months ago

          there’s a browser plug in for that.

          • @Eidolon
            link
            English
            711 months ago

            Which isn’t entirely accurate if at all. It extrapolates the dislikes from its own database ie users who have it installed. Compared to the entire user base of Youtube this is an incredibly tiny sample size.

            • tool
              link
              fedilink
              English
              811 months ago

              Which isn’t entirely accurate if at all. It extrapolates the dislikes from its own database ie users who have it installed. Compared to the entire user base of Youtube this is an incredibly tiny sample size.

              You need a much, much smaller sample size than you think. Estimates for Youtube’s monthly unique visits range from ~2 billion to about ~2.7 billion. For a 5% margin of error at a 99.9% confidence level, you’d only need to sample 1083 people to get an accurate sample size.

              I’m positive that extension has more than 1000 users.

              • @goetzit
                link
                English
                311 months ago

                Don’t you also need to worry about your sample population being biased? You’d only be sampling people who sought out a dislike plugin, these people might be much more likely to dislike a video. Is there any way to account for that?

                • tool
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  111 months ago

                  You’d have to have a separate cohort of non-plugin users & another with a sampling of both, I think. Run some regressions on those data and I think you’d be able to tease out any bias that exists.

      • livus
        link
        fedilink
        2311 months ago

        Yeah this, it’s demented.

        I will google something specific that I know is on the internet and it comes back with ten ridiculously off-topic AI spam blogs and “no further results.”

      • Margot Robbie
        link
        English
        1211 months ago

        It’s more important than ever then to make sure that this place stays a place for people, and not bullshit.

      • sacredbirdman
        link
        fedilink
        611 months ago

        Well, what caused the chase for ad-money and affiliate link clicks? Google, Amazon & other mega corps. It’s just indirect enshittification :-|

      • Hopps
        link
        English
        311 months ago

        I have been using GPT4 as a Google replacement and it’s been working out fairly well.

    • Captain Jimmy T Kirk
      link
      fedilink
      English
      5211 months ago

      Google is completely useless for finding anything organically now.

      The last couple of times I’ve had to phone shop have been a nightmare of SEO-keyword articles and promoted junk.

      If it keeps up this way, we’re going to be completely dependent on AI to sift through the junk for us.

      • Sir_Kevin
        link
        English
        811 months ago

        Google sucks now at giving me information. It seems like now it just gives me products.

      • @EddieTee77
        link
        English
        211 months ago

        We will have AI write the junk and click bait articles and AI sift through the junk. What a future

  • @W6KME
    link
    English
    16211 months ago

    That’s not the least of what makes me unhappy about the Google search experience lately. The thing I don’t like is how much it sucks. Like, really really sucks. It was the paradigm of mind-boggling usefulness at one point. Now it’s an ad server with occasionally marginally relevant results.

    • @klyde
      link
      English
      8311 months ago

      I haven’t been able to find anything good on there in years. Everything is some company claiming to have a fix and it’s just stupid crap that isn’t helpful. ‘Here’s 10 tips to fix your issue that are worthless.’

      • @Arekusenpai
        link
        English
        3411 months ago

        I’m in the process of repairing my entry way guard rail. I did a Google search for marking banister placement with curved railing. Google’s attempt to be useful was to to search for “baluster” instead of “banister”. It’s a complete fucking joke.

        And forbid searching for vehicle tire size suggestions if you’ve ever done a single search bikes. Finding recommended tire size for 17x8 wheels is fuck all impossible. After the first 10 links I start getting links to Bicycle shops in the UK. While I’m located in the US.

        • @grue
          link
          English
          18
          edit-2
          11 months ago

          Also is it just me, or did search engines (not just Google) suddenly start disregarding quotation marks a year or so ago? I’ve been adding quotes to tell the stupid thing “no, I really did mean that weird word you think is a typo” and lately it just fucking auto-incorrects it anyway!

          • @c2h6
            link
            English
            511 months ago

            Yea I have this problem as well. Brackets, quotes, nothing forces the search engine to ONLY return that specific term.

        • @klyde
          link
          English
          1511 months ago

          It’s awful and it’s sad. I remember when I could find everything on there and now it’s just all garbage. I’d be pretty annoyed getting links outside the US when that’s where you live. Sure wish it was like it used to be.

        • livus
          link
          fedilink
          411 months ago

          Ah that’s interesting. I get US results all the time but I assumed it was because the US dominates and New Zealand is small and obscure. Yet now I see you literally live in the US and it still doesn’t help you!

      • @Infernal_pizza
        link
        English
        2511 months ago

        How to fix your tech problem:

        1. restart
        2. the same generic fix you already saw on the last 10 websites that didn’t work
        3. download our totally legit software that’s specially designed to fix this exact issue
        • @klyde
          link
          English
          311 months ago

          Yep, that’s exactly it. Every fkn search result.

    • @_finger_
      link
      English
      2411 months ago

      The biggest problem is that if you want to find info on a particular subject matter, be it something niche or not, there’s no dedicated place to find discussions on it unless you already know of specific forums where you can mine for info. That’s the real value that Reddit brought to the table.

    • SCmSTR
      link
      fedilink
      7
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      I’ve found that bad addons, spyware, and adware can immensely affect your Google results. Which is… Really alarming, but… Its true.

      This is not to say a lot of seo hasn’t absolutely ruined search. Because it has.

    • @derelict
      link
      English
      511 months ago

      If you know exactly what you want and the perfect key words you can usually get it to show up on the first page as long as you’re willing to scroll. Compared to its peak of “have a vague idea and we’ll find it” it’s really sad

      • @W6KME
        link
        English
        311 months ago

        Even Wikipedia results are 20 or more results down. I use Google search less every day.

  • @YoBuckStopsHere
    link
    English
    10511 months ago

    As someone who had millions of karma and 70+ front page posts on reddit, I deleted all my posts and comments so those Google results would lead to nothing. In fact reddit banned me for that and setting my subreddits to private. Now I’ll be reposting all that content to Lemmy. No money for you Reddit.

    • @Domriso
      link
      English
      2911 months ago

      Have you checked to make sure Reddit didn’t restore your comments? They’ve been doing that to a bunch of people.

        • @awderon
          link
          English
          1911 months ago

          You still can request a data export to see what they still have.

          As a plus point if your GPDR request was logged and they can’t fulfill it in 90 days they will be fined.

          • @HerrLewakaas
            link
            English
            511 months ago

            They won’t be fined if you don’t report it

  • @ward2k
    link
    English
    9511 months ago

    Honestly Google Search in general seems to get worse every year, for work any kind of niche issue involving errors returns no results on Google (literally no results), tried plugging the same search into Bing and the first 5 results were actual answers on solving the error

    It amazes me how a search engine once considered a massive joke is able to outperform Google

    • @Aetina
      link
      English
      2111 months ago

      I habitually enable “verbatim” mode. I find most problems with google search now are keywords in my search being removed because google thinks it knows what I’m searching better than a literal string describing specifically that. The problem isn’t that reddit is less accessible, it’s that google is trying to do some unwanted manipulation of your results to “optimize your search” but it end up making worser results. They need to stop with the “I know what you want better than you” mentality when showing results because that’s how the results get so bad. You can see that in youtube too with how they show you clickbait with every search. I also think AI is or will be making that mentality worse… AI is just statistics at its core, and I feel like that will have biases toward more commonly asked stuff and away from more specific and technical answers.

    • @setsneedtofeed
      link
      English
      21
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for years. I never realized how bad Google had gotten until I searched on a public computer where it was the default.

    • @ahbi_santini
      link
      English
      1411 months ago

      What is even more surprising is the Bing ChatGPT diagnosed the PC problem I was having when I never would have guessed the correct search terms for it.

      It even gives me citations. So, I can go to those websites and read the whole answers

    • @cashews_win
      link
      English
      8
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      What were you searching?

      • @ward2k
        link
        English
        1511 months ago

        An error log for some Scala code, tried the usual thing of Googling full error log, key words etc and nothing really returned any actual useful results (or none at all)

        Put the full log into Bing and the first few results were straight from stack overflow and a raised GitHub issue describing the errors cause

        • @pwnstar
          link
          English
          211 months ago

          Wow that’s pretty awesome, I’ll have to give bing a try

          • @gimmemahlulz
            link
            English
            111 months ago

            That’s a phrase you’d never have heard ~5 years ago lol.

    • @JoMiran
      link
      English
      511 months ago

      I’m a beta tester for Google’s Bard AI system. Google search results for tech troubleshooting are fairly garbage, but if you ask the same question to Bard it will give you a precise and concise answer, with examples. I also use ChatGPT and it’s easy to see that Google’s focus on its AI seems to be search results.

      PS: It’s also been sprinkled into Google Workspace. Emails, docs and spreadsheets now have very good predictive auto complete.

      • @ultranaut
        link
        English
        211 months ago

        Is this an unreleased Bard? I tried the publicly available version a few weeks ago and it was not particularly good at anything I tried, especially in comparison to chatGPT4.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    7811 months ago

    Of course they are. Adding “Reddit” at the end of questions and other stuff was the best way of avoiding shitty results (Fuck you Quora).

    • @meiti
      link
      English
      3011 months ago

      That was one of the last ways of getting some useful results out of Google.

      • Trevader24135
        link
        English
        911 months ago

        It depends what you were searching for. For help with Stable Diffusion or programming questions or other technical subjects, the reddit communities were actually one of the best places I could go to for answers

        • @ilickfrogs
          link
          English
          15
          edit-2
          11 months ago

          They still are on archive.org. you’ll get the info you need and reddit gets nothing. Win win

          • @ArcticCircleSystem
            link
            English
            511 months ago

            The issue with that is Google doesn’t index IA, and I don’t think it has any kind of keyword search. ~Nai

  • Captain Aggravated
    link
    fedilink
    English
    7511 months ago

    It’s going to be interesting watching the downfall of Google.

    Google’s got a bit of a problem: THE search engine, THE place people have gone to find information for two generations now…can’t find shit. And it’s about half its own fault.

    I’ll put right around half of the blame on “platformization.” Your Facebooks and your Twitters are, for the most part, deep web. Google doesn’t get to search Facebook; you have to sign into a Facebook account to see much of what’s there. Twitter is slightly more open…but not really.

    The other half of the problem is Google’s own making; the surface web is a twisted, pus-leaking cancerous abomination of its former self, riddled with absolute useless nonsense vomited up by computers for the express purpose of convincing Google to show it to searchers, with no intention of being useful in any way. So the surface web is effectively bullshit and online shopping.

    That leaves Reddit. A for-profit platform on the surface web. Even before this whole fiasco, folks were making grumbling noises that they’ve gotten in the habit of appending “reddit” to google search strings because a. that’s where all the actual answers are and b. Reddit’s own search feature has never actually worked. So some of Reddit goes private for a few days and suddenly Google doesn’t work so well.

    So what are we keeping them around for?

    • @mioko
      link
      English
      1311 months ago

      Are there any quality alternatives to Google? I use DuckDuckGo, but i don’t feel that the results are much better - if i remember correctly DDG uses Bing beneath the surface.

      • @refugeered
        link
        English
        911 months ago

        DDG has also become bad unfortunately. I used to add -site for quora and pinterest. But for some odd reason now a days it fails most of the time. Which has made the results very similar to Google. Plus they were always horrible at local search, atleast for most of the places where I lived.

        https://search.brave.com/goggles - Is an interesting way of searching. But I just started using it recently. So still not sure about it.

        https://kagi.com/ - Seems to be pretty decent, but it is paid.

        But I am still searching. None of them seem to match old google. But that might be because the internet has changed with most of the actually useful information walled up.

    • @NevermindNoMind
      link
      English
      411 months ago

      And all that is before you get to AI and LLMs. Personally, I haven’t used Google once since I got access to Bing Chat back in Feb/March. For east low stakes questions, I can use Bing or ChatGPT, for high stakes questions I’m going to a specialized information website, for buying things I’m looking for expert reviews like wirecutter (after looking for a mattress I’ve grown skeptical about the authenticity of even reddit as mattress reviews were clearly astroturfed). I’m having trouble of thinking of a use case for where I would need or want to use Google.

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
      link
      English
      111 months ago

      So what are we keeping them around for?

      There are no better alternatives.

  • sacredbirdman
    link
    fedilink
    7511 months ago

    I think Google is headed to breach the trust thermocline (warning: a twitter link). I think why these collapses seem sudden and so large in scale is because there’s so much inertia. Services / products that have become the standard can go well below the line that would be accepted otherwise and that’s why they don’t see big changes in user base while the enshittification process goes on… So, for them the point where a large portion of the user base is even willing to try alternatives is already way too far… and no small corrections is going to cut it. They try to find out what they did in the last months to cause this exodus but the reality is that they’ve been worse than competitors for years.

    • curiosityLynx
      link
      fedilink
      28
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      That tracks so much. The two big I social media paltforms I was involved in were Facebook and Reddit. My distrust in Facebook/Meta is so large, I’m willing to block any fediverse instance that federates with them. And Reddit’s only chance to get me back would be to become a trust-managed nonprofit within at most a year (but only if that’s how long it would take to implement if they started to go that way within the next few weeks).

    • @grue
      link
      English
      17
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      Apparently, that guy cross-posts to Mastodon.

  • @cpt_kierk
    link
    English
    7411 months ago

    It’s amazing how crappy the internet has gotten over the last decade or so. Yes, before that was the blogspam and link hijackers, but those were real problems that search engines were actively cracking down on via their Spam teams.

    In the meantime, the relevance teams took a break and started trusting their social signals too much - now we’ve built an internet which incentivizes popularity over accuracy and has done so for a long time. Used to be that I could find things on Google and, if I couldn’t, I knew the advanced search tools to tailor the search and get where I needed. Now, I just add “site:reddit.com” to the query. But if the niche communities die, that’s a lot of knowledge that just vanishes.

    • TWeaK
      link
      fedilink
      English
      2411 months ago

      Unfortunately many users have abandoned and deleted their accounts, rather than maintain control and authority over their posts.

      So when reddit restores their comments, in spite of the fact this contradicts reddit’s own terms and conditions as well as Californian and European law, users won’t realise this.

      • @impulse
        link
        English
        2211 months ago

        I used the power delete suite to leave a nice explanation of Lemmy and ways how to migrate as well as a last happy fuck u/Spez on my main account.

        My NSFW account has an even more elegant solution: Each and every post or link was edited to a highlight reel of the 2 girls 1 cup video, with no warning whatsoever.

        Both accounts have been abandoned in this state, good luck restoring the OG content.

        • TWeaK
          link
          fedilink
          English
          1311 months ago

          Keep checking, see what happens

          Although I suspect edits are less likely to be restored than edits+deletions, or even edits alone.

          Certainly, I’ve had a couple comments that I manually edited that have stayed, while a few others have popped back up.

          But so far, comments that I have edited and deleted from the source URL have stayed down. It’s only the edits from the profile (using PowerDeleteSuite) where some have come back. Granted, most were old, now I’m getting info the recent ones they’ve been lingering on.

          I still have a good 28,000 out of 76,000 lines to get through though from my original CSV file. I will make sure they’re all processed before 1 July, and if reddit restores any of them I’ll have logs to show their violation.

        • @Aetina
          link
          English
          411 months ago

          I downloaded shreddit, made a few changes because the main repo is broken and unstable, configured it to edit all of my comments to “fuck u/spez” before it deleted them, and then let it run. Who knows if they keep reddit history, but whatever data is retained will hopefully be replaced by my “appreciation“ for the admins.

    • Ziro
      link
      English
      1611 months ago

      I have to say, though, that this Fediverse stuff (I’m new) smacks of the “old Internet.” I love it. This is such a breath of fresh air.

      • Ember Ushi
        link
        fedilink
        English
        111 months ago

        I’m very new to it, but it feels like a very complicated and polished webring.

  • المنطقة عكف عفريت
    link
    English
    7111 months ago

    They need to do a better job surfacing ANY KIND OF user-generated content. Seems like this is failing due to Reddit being a fairly old site, thus being bumped up the search results. Lemmy, kbin, etc communities are on newly created domains, giving them minus points on Google’s retarded result ranking system. This system is now effectively hiding the internet from us by holding out good content that doesn’t satisfy it’s ranking algorithm. This system crumbles in the face of new changes because they are treating the internet like a town square rather than an organic community-driven living machine.

    • @electriccars
      link
      English
      2211 months ago

      I literally couldn’t find Lemmy.world on Google by searching Lemmy.world, it was wild to see that.

      • المنطقة عكف عفريت
        link
        English
        2611 months ago

        Try finding an OLD article about something that just hit the news. Impossible. And it amazes me that Quora and Pinterest (garbage questions in, garbage answers out) to be always at the top, shining.

        Also, search symbols like using double quotes for exact matches or a minus sign to remove a keyword from the match… They don’t fucking work anymore.

        • @rDrDr
          link
          English
          411 months ago

          You can add date restrictions in Google search. Very helpful.

      • @kadu
        link
        English
        811 months ago

        Google heavily prioritizes .com, .org and other similar “popular” top level domains.

        .world, . travel and similar ones are heavily penalized in Google’s ranking for search results.

      • @nucleative
        link
        English
        711 months ago

        I can see it on the localized version of Google where I’m at.

    • Sterben
      link
      English
      1011 months ago

      We just need to keep it up. Contribute to the communities we like, and we will rank up surely. :)

      • المنطقة عكف عفريت
        link
        English
        1011 months ago

        I agree that contributing is good overall, but with how this ranking system works, we might never make it to top Google search results even with good content. People are also spread over several decentralized forums rather than a single site (AKA Reddit, which is how Google likes things to be).

        Sound a tad bit radical but the solution for me is to give up on Google and its attention-sucking click farming. I use Brave Search but it isn’t significantly better. Maybe a solution for searching here is to have a search engine that goes through online forums/communities/subs.

        • Ɀeus
          link
          English
          911 months ago

          i imagine a fedisearch engine will come out that can search lemmy, kbin, mastodon, etc. efficiently; so instead of googling “how to x site:reddit.com”, we’ll just fedisearch “how to x”

          in fact, i’m pretty sure i already found one but it wasn’t very good, and i’ve forgotten it’s name

        • Sterben
          link
          English
          311 months ago

          I ditched Google years ago. Lemmy is still in very early stage of development, so things will change most likely.

  • @amonkeyfullofbarrels
    link
    English
    6711 months ago

    It’s pretty incredible how often I put “Reddit” in a Google search. It really is the quickest way to get a good answer to most questions, from how to fix an Excel error to which robot vacuum is most reliable.

    • @figaro
      link
      English
      4411 months ago

      I still remember the vacuum dude. There was a legendary post probably a decade ago made by the world’s most knowledgeable vacuum salesman. He laid out all the secrets of the industry, and went into detail I didn’t know I needed regarding how they all work.

      To this day I remember his advice: get a bagged vacuum if you want a clean carpet.

      • @Risk
        link
        English
        911 months ago

        Not a vacuum salesman but repair man. Still active on reddit, but that’s the last AMA he did.

        I doubt vacuums have changed that much in 4 years.

        • @figaro
          link
          English
          111 months ago

          Thank you!

      • doctortofu
        link
        fedilink
        711 months ago

        I do wonder sometimes if that advice still holds, or if vacuum tech made it obsolete…

    • @aceshigh
      link
      English
      111 months ago

      i wonder if chatgpt will eventually replace reddit.

        • Nioxic
          link
          English
          7
          edit-2
          11 months ago

          You have to have some idea as to what the answer might already be

          it doesnt provide sources etc. which is a bit annoying.

          the chatgpt “bot” in the edge browser is actually decent at providing sources, but its terrible at finding specific info. i tried finding information about what TIME a certain game would be available to play, and it just kept giving me its release date. (which i also gave it, in my query)

          but they’re still very new.

          google, and such, have had over 2 decades to refine their search etc. and to be honest i think the issue is its not giving you “generic” results. its trying to specify the results based on your previous searches etc. which means it can be difficult to find new info…

          as for chatgpt …

          i use chatgpt quite often to summarize a large blob of text, in a simple manner, or give me code snippets for generic stuff im too lazy to write. test-data as well. or just “facts” about some topic. simple stuff.

          chatgpt works by looking at your query, and then based on that, it tries to find the queries “key words” and fetches some result based on that. It only gives you one result. and as we’ve all tried when searching the internet, often times the list of results will show stuff that is clearly not what we’re looking for.

          • @figaro
            link
            English
            9
            edit-2
            11 months ago

            For simple coding it is a dream. Or like, shitty DNS errors that need to be sorted out because apparently you can’t have 2 SPF records lol. I copy and pasted all of the records over and said WHAT IS WRONG lol, and it figured it out for me.

            I get that some people don’t like it, but… its not going anywhere.

            • Hopps
              link
              English
              211 months ago

              I second that, it’s been very useful for coding/debugging for me too. And the cool part is that it’s only going to get better.

              • @figaro
                link
                English
                311 months ago

                Exactly - this is the worst it will ever be.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          6
          edit-2
          11 months ago

          I really can’t wait for the “AI” trend to die.

          I think you vastly underestimate the impact machine learning and large language models are going to have on our society. It’s like saying “I really can’t wait for the Smartphone trend to die” in 2007. Or “I really can’t wait for the Google trend to die” in 2000.

          All aspects of our lives are going to be infiltrated by machine learning and large language models. Personal organization, work, grocery shopping, entertainment… Everything!

          • @Kept7963
            link
            English
            711 months ago

            The hype around it is pretty insufferable though, in a way neither of the other examples you gave had.

            The closest example I can think of is NFTs.

            I don’t think it’ll go the way of NFTs, but it’s also going to disappoint people because it’s promising to be everything for everyone.

            As far as I’m concern it’s a very powerful search assistant and especially for bridging the gap between regular and power users - being able to use natural language is a game changer.

            I also found it great when getting set up with a new piece of SW, and rephrasing or summarising text on general topics. It’s not so good for parsing specialist information even when asked for specific items.

            I’m looking forward to seeing what other tools people build with it but thus far I’ve been thoroughly… whelmed.

            • Saganastic
              link
              fedilink
              411 months ago

              Speaking from personal experience, it was obvious NFTs would go nowhere and large language models would succeed. They’ve both been hyped by the public, but one of them has the utility to back up the hype and the other doesn’t.

              I use chat gpt all the time. I use it at work, i use it for looking up recipes, I use it to help with DIY projects around the house, and I use it to just get more information about a niche topic. The results are catered specifically to me and my question, and they’re better than a search engine. This tech is only going to get more common from here.

        • Saganastic
          link
          fedilink
          611 months ago

          Machine learning is here to stay. This is really just the beginning of mass market adoption for it, there’s still a lot of room for the tech to grow.

          I really don’t think your representation is fair. For Chat gpt at least, it will sometimes be wrong, it will sometimes make things up, but is an extremely useful tool for getting quick answers and meaningful insight into questions.

          • LunarLoony
            link
            fedilink
            311 months ago

            But if we know that it makes things up and gets things wrong, how can we trust any information it gives us? Fact-checking is one thing, but at that point, you might as well skip the LLM and just look the information up yourself.

            • Saganastic
              link
              fedilink
              3
              edit-2
              11 months ago

              At the end of the day you can’t 100% trust anything you see on the internet. You have to think critically about the answers it gives you and cross reference it against other sources. No different than when evaluating search results, which can also be wrong. But it’s a great starting point.

              It’s a lot easier to get a thorough and concise answer from chat gpt and double check it than it is to wade through a search engine.

        • @CosmoNova
          link
          English
          411 months ago

          And no matter how well GPT will or won’t work, we shouldn’t forget who we’re dealing with here. I wholehardly trust Microsoft to completely screw up and shit the bed once they got a (semi) monopoly on AI assistants. Google worked pretty well for a very long time until they got too cocky, same with Internet Explorer from Microsoft. History will repeat itself and GPT will become shit one way or antoher.

        • @MercuryUprising
          link
          English
          011 months ago

          Its more like “As an ai llm, 2+2=4. Now invest 500 billion in my creators company.”

      • @itsnotlupus
        link
        English
        1111 months ago

        in the same way that infinite monkeys will replace Shakespeare, maybe.

        (this is not meant to imply that reddit posts/comments are praiseworthy works of literature. although obviously, they are.)

  • @cmrn
    link
    English
    6711 months ago

    I still think it’s absolutely insane that Google just willingly runs ads to so many illegitimate and deliberately harmful sites too.

    If you search for any software and click one of the first few links (the ads), you’ll almost always end up on a scam site. What a useful search engine…

    • @kat
      link
      English
      2011 months ago

      I downloaded a virus in high school computer lab. I was looking to download Chrome, and Google pushed a scam Chrome link to the top. I still have no idea how or why it happened.

  • @dysorder
    link
    English
    6611 months ago

    Google should just buy Reddit so they can shut them down six months later.

    • @Dezzillion
      link
      English
      1511 months ago

      Months? You mean weeks.

      • @dox
        link
        English
        2111 months ago

        Are you saying they were going to… regReddit?

        • @Pulsar
          link
          English
          2311 months ago

          First they will rename it few times, Reddit+, RedditOut, RedditWave then merge it will Google Groups wait for a year and then pull the plug.

    • NutWrench
      link
      fedilink
      English
      211 months ago

      I actually think Google has a long term plan to buyout Reddit. Google Groups failed miserably several years ago, so Google would LOVE to own a mature social media platform.

      The former, despised owner gets to cash out. And Forbes and WSJ will write glowing articles about how Google “saved” Reddit. (Narrator: what’s left of Reddit will get unbelievably sh*tty. And then it will die, like Google Groups).

  • @Wolfram
    link
    English
    6611 months ago

    I didn’t realize how important Reddit was to get quality results from Google. Without Reddit almost the whole 1st page is just SEO optimized sites. It’s just ironic that alternate search engines are better than Google now.

    • @achensherd
      link
      English
      2811 months ago

      I used Bing to find a parts diagram for my car after repeatedly failing to do so with Google. I’m sure I could’ve eventually found it with Google using the correct combination of operators and such, but at that point why bother.

      • @ConTheLibrarian
        link
        English
        2211 months ago

        What’s even more annoying than google populating half the first page with ads is that the links don’t even work half the time these days.

    • @ConTheLibrarian
      link
      English
      1911 months ago

      If AI art is just ripping off IRL artists than it’s safe to assume chat GPT’s training was >50% reddit & Wikipedia content.

      • R0cket_M00se
        link
        English
        1911 months ago

        That would explain why it’s all written like wiki content edited by a redditor.

        • @ConTheLibrarian
          link
          English
          3011 months ago

          Fuuuuuuck… Imagine if chat GPT started amending its results with… “EDIT: wElL tHiS bLeW uP oVeRnIgHt… tHaNkS fOr ThE gOlD kInD ReDdiToR”

          That’d be so damn annoying haha

          • @perviouslyiner
            link
            English
            1411 months ago

            Like that story of a child saying “remember to like and subscribe” at bedtime because she thought that was the words for goodbye

            • @ConTheLibrarian
              link
              English
              811 months ago

              Wait is that some kid IRL? Or we talking about gpt speaking as a child?

              • @perviouslyiner
                link
                English
                411 months ago

                actual kid, supposedly.

                A bit like kids trying to swipe to scroll or zoom on a printed magazine article or book (to be fair, I’ve done that too!)

  • @Kethal
    link
    English
    5411 months ago

    Google Perspectives will highlight results from Quora? That’s the last thing I want.

    • @chris2112
      link
      English
      2311 months ago

      Dear God, i hope that’s not true. Quora answer quality is probably worse than Yahoo answers; at least those were just shit posts, 90% of Quora answers are ads by the creator of some project in my experience

      • @x4740N
        link
        English
        1211 months ago

        Yeah the quora answers are just advertising

        Even when someone was asking about something for free that they’d not have to pay for some fucking idiot would come in selling something

        • @ArcticCircleSystem
          link
          English
          5
          edit-2
          11 months ago

          It’s typically either that or some conspiracy theorist screeching about how the Uyghur genocide is a CIA psyop or that the (((psychopaths))) are trying to take over the world or something. Or some random who has little to no experience in a subject acting like they know everything about it. Or some abuser who should be on a watchlist who thinks that children axiomatically evil until the evil is beaten out of them. Those people are terrifying. ~Nai

    • @CosmoNova
      link
      English
      2111 months ago

      For real. Looks like speedrunning digging one owns grave is becoming hella popular in silicon valley as of late. Everyone wants to set a new record.

    • @Springtime
      link
      English
      1111 months ago

      And TikTok. They’ve listed that one, too.

      TikTok? Really Google?!

  • @TrickyCamel
    link
    English
    5311 months ago

    Whats bothering me the most about it is that Reddit is still a valuable source of information for so many things, can’t get around a boss fight in a certain older videogame? Yep, there are about 10 threads about it on reddit from years ago.

    The amount information on there is big enough that often times many of the top useful search results are in reddit, I hope Lemmy can fill the gap, at least partially but I’m aware that it could years and that’s only if the fediverse picks up well enough.

    • @Katana314
      link
      English
      4511 months ago

      Are you having trouble with Bigman in Metal Kojima Acid 5? Check our guide for more info! Subscribe to receive notifications on the best tips for Metal Kojima Acid 5!

      If you’re like every other player this Christmas season, you’ve been playing the hell out of Metal Kojima Acid 5. But, many players have found themselves stuck on this boss. Just before the big, well-executed reveal that Ludicrous Reptile is an adopted clone, Bigman comes after you for a climactic showdown. Read past this ad, thinly disguised as article content, to find out more about this killer boss!

      To defeat Bigman, keep hitting him with your strongest weapons until his HP reaches zero.

      Thanks for reading our guide on Metal Kojima Acid 5! For more tips, go literally anywhere else!

      • Margot Robbie
        link
        English
        911 months ago

        That’s way too straight forward for Kojima. You need at least 3 more hours of cutscenes.

      • @zeppo
        link
        English
        1
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        Back in the early Sega Genesis days, Sega used to send out hints for games if you wrote and asked them. My favorite was for the game Last Battle (a Fist of the North Star game in the JP market), the tips for several levels simply said “Punch and kick your enemy on your way towards victory”.

    • MattWatchesChalk
      link
      English
      711 months ago

      This is fair. GameFAQs is still this if I look something up for a pre-2010 game a lot of the time.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      411 months ago

      A few weeks ago, when things started to get heated, I had the reflex of copying all the helpful posts I made amd putting them on my own knowledge base in case something goes wrong with reddit. I can always put them somewhere since I’ve secured that info on my own server.