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As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

thewalrus.ca

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Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#171

Post by gostsamo »

gspr wrote: post #161
sgt wrote: post #153

Funny, I was just thinking this morning that Google searches are absolutely horrible these days. It's like it has amnesia, a lot of recent history seems to be just gone. Especially on non US specific sites too.

They're so horrible that I've started defaulting to their AI summaries. And I hate those summaries. It's just that the regular results are so terrible now, and seemingly getting worse at a noticeable pace. I used to not worry. I was sure that a competitor would come along and fix search. But the longer that's not happening, the more nervous I'm getting that we'll actually lose search. If a few more years pass in the…

Kagi is not russian. The founder is from Serbia and the company is american.

PS: I hope not many people are the type to see a slavic name and conclude Russia.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#172

Post by germandiago »

zkmon wrote: post #168

It happens when the deterministic precision was given away in return for the probabilistic guesses. It was one extreme until now (deterministic code), and we are swinging to the other extreme (probabilistic slop), but what the world wants could be somewhere in between. Some information does not need too much precision, while others do need precision.

That is a nice project -- classifying it based on reliability: human-made, sources, etc. + score.

Maybe a job for an AI to do? :D

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#173

Post by sph »

sgt wrote: post #153

Funny, I was just thinking this morning that Google searches are absolutely horrible these days. It's like it has amnesia, a lot of recent history seems to be just gone. Especially on non US specific sites too.

The Internet has been shrinking massively. My earliest experiences with the Internet were discovering the world of hobby OS dev around the turn of the millennium, when I chanced upon someone’s personal website talking about their OS, with source code and screenshots and dedicated forum. My mind was blown. I spent two years finding hundreds of small websites dedicated to the topic, hung out on IRC communities with other teenage OS nerds like me, and of course participated in the nascent osdev.org forum. To note that all of those websites were readily found through Google, and interlinked with their own topic webrings.

Today everything has disappeared or has been conglomerated into siloes, sanitised, focusing on engagement. You have YouTube videos about it (which is more cheap entertainment than actual education), you get some posts here once in a while, there’s Reddit where all intelligent discussion goes to die. IRC is a wasteland of idle bouncers. Then the LLMs arrived to kill what is left.

Who says the Internet is a vibrant place today mistakes flashiness with depth. It’s all empty calories, just makes you hungry for more, never satisfies.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#174

Post by gspr »

onli wrote: post #166
gspr wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're so horrible that I've started defaulting to their AI summaries. And I hate those summaries. It's just that the regular results are so terrible now, and seemingly getting worse at a noticeable pace. I used to not worry. I was sure that a competitor would come along and fix search. But the longer that's not happening, the more nervous I'm getting that we'll actually lose search. If a few more years pass in the…

Brave search works really well, I haven't switched to Google search for months.

Thank you for your suggestion. I think I've discounted Brave automatically because my brain is numb to the dime-a-dozen chromium browsers out there. I'll definitely give the search a try!

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#175

Post by ehnto »

8organicbits wrote: post #39
novafunc wrote: post #5

I occasionally use Google Search when DuckDuckGo fails to give me relevant. Almost always, Google has better results. Though I can find its AI answers annoying aggressive. I'll look up like two search terms and the AI will bullshit multiple paragraphs out of despite having zero context of what I am looking for. DuckDuckGo seems to have detection of whether it should give an AI answer. And it allows you to have more g…

Interesting, I've seen much better results on DDG. Most recently was the search: `site:feeds.bbci.co.uk inurl:rss.xml` which works on DDG but gives zero results on Google. As far as I can tell, Google just decided not to index these.

I find DDG is struggling to, or chosen not to, filter or derank obvious AI generated content farm sites. Of which there are an insane amount of already.

We thought blogspam was bad, at least it was easy to ignore. It's hard to find authoritative sources for a number of topics, worryingly health advice is one of them.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#176

Post by germandiago »

gspr wrote: post #161
sgt wrote: post #153

Funny, I was just thinking this morning that Google searches are absolutely horrible these days. It's like it has amnesia, a lot of recent history seems to be just gone. Especially on non US specific sites too.

They're so horrible that I've started defaulting to their AI summaries. And I hate those summaries. It's just that the regular results are so terrible now, and seemingly getting worse at a noticeable pace. I used to not worry. I was sure that a competitor would come along and fix search. But the longer that's not happening, the more nervous I'm getting that we'll actually lose search. If a few more years pass in the…

Probably what is happening here is that in the race for AI, which, whether we like it or not, means power and control, Google crafted things in a way that it does not do "self-competition" by their old search engine. Idk, just throwing ideas aloud here.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#177

Post by gspr »

gostsamo wrote: post #171
gspr wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're so horrible that I've started defaulting to their AI summaries. And I hate those summaries. It's just that the regular results are so terrible now, and seemingly getting worse at a noticeable pace. I used to not worry. I was sure that a competitor would come along and fix search. But the longer that's not happening, the more nervous I'm getting that we'll actually lose search. If a few more years pass in the…

Kagi is not russian. The founder is from Serbia and the company is american. PS: I hope not many people are the type to see a slavic name and conclude Russia.

Kagi pays Yandex for data. Yandex is definitely Russian.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#179

Post by ehnto »

andai wrote: post #160
luciana1u wrote: post #133

we're building the world's largest library and then locking the doors, letting the bots photocopy everything before the lights go out.

So there's a new Internet Archive, it's just split across 3,000 AI labs.

I wonder if the AI labs will throw out their own copies of the Internet Archive after it's been sued out of existence.

Probably not.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#180

Post by cookiengineer »

I'm working on using the OpenZIM format to archive the web and to make the wikis seedable (and locally hostable for LLMs) so that the ongoing cat and mouse game anubis defense can stop.

My hope is that with the torrent protocol we can make the archived knowledge discoverable and seedable, because currently there's only the web archive and the kiwix download servers for archived contents. Both of them still are centralized servers that bear the cost of hosting those files.

- [1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/gozim

- [2] https://github.com/cookiengineer/zimdex

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