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Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

chuckwnelson.com

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Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#481

Post by nicbou »

carlosjobim wrote: post #453
nicbou wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t sell my services. My income comes from affiliate links on some pages (e.g. for choosing a first bank). A vast majority of the content is not monetised. I noticed a drop in traffic, despite having added a lot of valuable guides this year. The traffic per page is way down, and only for Google. You are correct that people don’t pay for this, even when they email me and I personally assist them. There’s just an e…

People pay thousands of dollars for immigration assistance, even if you're just filling out paperwork. If you want to make money from your webpage, you could simply offer to help them with these things for a fee. And leave the information up if you want, for the people who don't want to pay. Also, the more information you have up, the more comfortable people will be to hire you. E-mails from people who want free advi…

Affiliate income is tied to the size of my audience. Income from relocation assistance is tied to the number of hours in a day. So far I have made more money doing less work, and it helped far more people.

I’d much rather help a greater number of people for free than the well-off minority that can afford my time. I’d sooner run my business into the ground than change this.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#482

Post by KTibow »

onion2k wrote: post #312
binkHN wrote: post #7

> Enter 2024 with AI. The top 20% of search results are a wall of text from AI... I'll be the contrarian here and say I actually like Google's AI Overview? For the first time in a long time, I can search for an answer to a question and, instead of getting annoying ads and SEO-optimized uselessness, I actually get an answer. Google is finally useful again. That said, once Google screws with this and starts making sear…

Google's AI summary of search results hallucinates. You might like it, but you may also end up seeing, and believing in, something that just doesn't exist. For example, it says there's a sequel to a Disney film called Encanto, and there just isn't. https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3lee...

Most if not all of the times it "hallucinated" it was paraphrasing the web.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#484

Post by mystified5016 »

bradgessler wrote: post #441
sersi wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an aside, I tried to love ddg before using kagi but I'd always revert to google with !g and end up not finding anything because google has sucked for the past 5 years I've been using kagi and I've noticed that the only time I ever switch to google is for things that are truly local to where I am at the moment (restaurants, etc..). Kagi is really great. I've also been testing perplexity and I'm not that convinced y…

The thing I don’t like about Kagi is how you have to be logged in with an email to search. I wish they’d setup something like Mullvad where you get an account number, pay for said account, and that’s it.

What's the difference? It's still a permanent ID tied to your account and linked to your payment. Just generate a random email address if that matters.

Kagi and mullvad make the same claims to privacy and non-tracking of accounts. What's the difference between a random numeric and a random alphanumeric account identifier?

Edit: actually I just remembered that my android devices are linked to my Kagi account with a token. Kagi gives you an alphanumeric token you can use in your query URL to authenticate searches. That's how my homescreen search widgets are set up, no email required.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#485

Post by BeefWellington »

atombender wrote: post #466
BeefWellington wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly: - Bing: Goodreads is third result - DDG: Paywalled NZ Herald article appears to be the only result. Of course what you've really uncovered is that Google search is the only thing that respects robots.txt: https://www.goodreads.com/robots.txt

The robots.txt does not prevent Google from scraping the quote page, which is the one that matches for me: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11541816-few-hundred-years-... The robots.txt seems to exclude things which are genuinely useful to exclude, like RSS feeds.

While true, it seems like every individual quote page also includes:
Worth noting as well, their sitemaps all 404.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#486

Post by illiac786 »

potsandpans wrote: post #42

Just sharing an anecdote: I was searching for a quote that I'd heard in an audiobook the other day. I just had the general paraphrase, and didn't feel like scanning through the chapters to go find it. This was a somewhat obscure source. Google had just straight garbage for me. The quote was political in nature, and I felt like the results were fighting general tone-policing filters and were tuned for recent events. o…

Doesn’t Gemini perform just as well?

Google enshitified one product to require more money for the new one, while delivering zero added value overall.

I would say, well done.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#487

Post by hinkley »

sroussey wrote: post #474
hinkley wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People losing weight are probably eating more than 2000 per day to begin with. But if you go from 2800 down to 1500 you’re already likely to exceed 3 lbs of weight loss per week that is recommended without doctor supervision. If you need to lose more than 150 lbs in a year because you’re well past morbid obesity then you need staff, not just a food plan.

If you’re eating out at Chilies, you could easily be eating 3000 calories per meal.

I recall when Krispy Kreme came out with a donut shake that was 1800 calories for the large size. It’s crazy out there.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#488

Post by gremlinsinc »

jeroenhd wrote: post #168
fratlas wrote: post #2

People want to spend less time on a task. Whichever tool succeeds at this will win.

Sadly, this is true. Getting the wrong answers quickly is valued more than having to work for the right answers. I fear the day that the poor kids who grew up believing everything LLMs hard out will reach a position of power.

you get wrong answers from either source. When ai builds in fact checking that's accurate to validate it's answers then it's game over and that wouldn't be too hard to implement and future versions will have a lot less hallucinations and faulty facts.

We're in the early stages here.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#489

Post by squiggleblaz »

alfor wrote: post #388

Google became an asset of the government. By selecting what you see they control what you think, what you buy who you vote for, similar to legacy media. Open AI has started on day one with that goal.

This conspiracy theory is broken, because governments around the world have been struggling more than previously to get reelected. It might be that Google has been used to "select what you see so they control what you think, what you buy who you vote for, similar to legacy media", but they're not doing so under the control of government.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#490

Post by onion2k »

KTibow wrote: post #482
onion2k wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's AI summary of search results hallucinates. You might like it, but you may also end up seeing, and believing in, something that just doesn't exist. For example, it says there's a sequel to a Disney film called Encanto, and there just isn't. https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3lee...

Most if not all of the times it "hallucinated" it was paraphrasing the web.

And in doing that it's endorsing some random website that makes things up and elevating that garbage to be something users trust 'because it's on Google.'

Users will need to learn that Google is only as trustworthy as the crappy websites it uses for data that drives its AI. I'll leave it up to you to work out how that might impact Google's brand.

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