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Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

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Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#271

Like many of you, I serve as IT support for family. Some of those family are beginning to slip cognitively, so I'd like to say: Fk google for doing this. You are confusing my relatives who cannot tell the difference between your ad-spam and actual links, and it is not an exaggeration to say that you are now taking advantage of old people. I'm trying to install adblockers (uBlock) and move them over to chatgpt when po…

> move them over to ChatGPT OpenAI has even more VC money to pay back than Google ever did. Practically all the large tech companies so far have turned to ads and monetizing users rather than charging enough to remain more neutral. I suspect one day, when you ask ChatGPT "Can you give me a link to mid journey", you'll instead probabilistically get a link to whichever competitor paid OpenAI for the best placement.

1. The reason why ChatGPT is free despite being honestly very advanced, is that they want the general public to have an association of ChatGPT being "the default AI", just like Google is the default search engine and YouTube is the default video platform. Once they have this position they can throw as much garbage at the users as they want and nobody will care. This is why it doesn't really matter how much it costs now to capture the market, if the potential benefits are huge.

2. Once the market is captured and solidified, ads and enshittification ensue. If you're willing to put on your tin foil hat for a second, I'd tell you that as a matter of fact the technologies to integrate different services with ChatGPT are being developed right now, and once they're ready it's just a small step to make sure that ChatGPT prioritizes answers mentioning those integrated partners, which can easily be justified to users as legit quality-of-life improvements.

Maybe the answer is indeed to just buy a book and go touch some literal grass, and let the civilization drown in the sewer of disinformation it produces.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#272
I made the mistake of agreeing to undertaking that I would not use the trademarked brandname of one of my competitors' keyuwords in our Google ads bidding. Talking with a lawyer after the fact, I learnt that we can freely use the keywords but agreeing to the undertaking is a more serious and legally binding corporate promise. Now they are bidding on my brand names but we can't bid on them. So, I do agree Google search sucks, heh.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#273
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Kagi for non-US folks? I've tried switching to DDG a while back but the experience for me, living outside the US, was not great. Sure, programming related searches were pretty good, but everything else was not. Does Kagi have a better localized experience?

Seems fine here in Australia, though I tend to use global results.

Works fine in AU settings too.

It's not as good as google at knowing where you are (gee I wonder why) but if I search Bahn Mi the results as good as google. Results for something niche like "Keycaps" are showing lots of local results too (or as local as you can get living outside a capital city in Australia).

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#275

Like many of you, I serve as IT support for family. Some of those family are beginning to slip cognitively, so I'd like to say: Fk google for doing this. You are confusing my relatives who cannot tell the difference between your ad-spam and actual links, and it is not an exaggeration to say that you are now taking advantage of old people. I'm trying to install adblockers (uBlock) and move them over to chatgpt when po…

Creat your own family yahoo — a website you maintain that has links to the websites they commonly use like mail and bank. Set as home page and new tab page.

It’s a slight security risk since it shows where you have accounts.

If you are savvy, build your own search that just passes it to an LLM and returns as page.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> move them over to ChatGPT OpenAI has even more VC money to pay back than Google ever did. Practically all the large tech companies so far have turned to ads and monetizing users rather than charging enough to remain more neutral. I suspect one day, when you ask ChatGPT "Can you give me a link to mid journey", you'll instead probabilistically get a link to whichever competitor paid OpenAI for the best placement.

Wait long enough and it seems like almost any company tries anything to increase its bottom line, but the main difference between ChatGPT and Google is at least ChatGPT attempts to give a paid option. Again, I don't think that'll stop them from ever getting to that point... but it'll go farther than "here's search, we pay for it via adtech". Kagi is a similar boat - the product is what you pay for, not what they can…

> at least ChatGPT attempts to give a paid option. Again, I don't think that'll stop them...

Netflix also attempted to give a paid option, but now we have an "ad-supported" plan. I think that same logic of maximizing profit means that even if there are some people paying for ChatGPT, the amount of free money that is sitting on the table means that we will see "ad-supported" ChatGPT pretty soon once the low-hanging fruit for quality enhancement start to dry up, which is kind of already happening.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#277

I made the mistake of agreeing to undertaking that I would not use the trademarked brandname of one of my competitors' keyuwords in our Google ads bidding. Talking with a lawyer after the fact, I learnt that we can freely use the keywords but agreeing to the undertaking is a more serious and legally binding corporate promise. Now they are bidding on my brand names but we can't bid on them. So, I do agree Google searc…

Why did you agree to this without it being mutual?

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#278

Like many of you, I serve as IT support for family. Some of those family are beginning to slip cognitively, so I'd like to say: Fk google for doing this. You are confusing my relatives who cannot tell the difference between your ad-spam and actual links, and it is not an exaggeration to say that you are now taking advantage of old people. I'm trying to install adblockers (uBlock) and move them over to chatgpt when po…

Buy them a Kagi membership and switch them to that.

A lot of people want to complain but don't want to pay (not saying that is OP, just generally)

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#279
When I tried, I got the expected midjourney site first up. I'm logged in to Chrome in case that matters.

For comparison DDG gave me the site as third link, which only just made the bottom of the screen.

DDG often gives me useless Ebay links which remind me of the early days of search.

Perhaps these single data points are useless?

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#280
post #186

With udm14 and ublock origin on Firefox my first link is the official midjourney.com, then the subreddit, then the official discord, then wikipedia, then the offical Facebook page. That is just about perfect and covers what most people would want. No ads. No LLM BS. While the experience google is pushing is terrible, the underlying tech still works in cases like this.

Regular google + unlock origin gives me the same results
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