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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

#51

Post by Skunkleton »

onemoresoop wrote: post #18
schaefer wrote: post #11

Kagi search today is better than Google search ever was. And it’s clear that Google’s Ad model ultimately created a priority inversion. The advertisers became the customer. I am so glad Kagi came along with a business model that is actually working.

I was wondering how would Kagi scale/expand if all of a sudden google were to stop serving search altogether (not likely) or alter search such that users look for alternatives.

Kagi is an aggregator for other, some paid, search APIs. They have, at least in the past, served some percentage of their results from Bing's API among others for example. Kagi seems to me to be dependent on these APIs being available, if they were to go away, so would Kagi.

I am a happy subscriber of Kagi though, they provide a really excellent service.

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

#52

Post by amatecha »

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…

Yeah, there are times where DDG has like, literally three results. Yet, I know for an absolute fact, there are hundreds of pages on the web that contain the terms I specified. Web search is becoming utter garbage.

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

#53

Post by dijksterhuis »

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…

https://noai.duckduckgo.com is a thing fyi

i don’t agree with the google has better results thing. sometimes it does. most of the time it’s just that google has the site i want higher in the ordering than DDG. personally i’m fine scrolling down a little bit more. it’s rare i need to go to google for something that DDG doesn’t have at all in their results, but it does happen.

i do have to go to google for maps/directions/planning travel. a lot that’s annoying.

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

#54

Post by jamesfinlayson »

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.

Yeah I mostly still use Google out of habit but there have been a few times where Google has decided something isn't worth indexing (too niche, doesn't use SSL).

I miss when Google was like a grep for the entire visible Internet. Now it tries to second-guess my search and direct me to a bunch of sites which all have identical information that isn't what I'm looking for.

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

#55

Post by amatecha »

qudat wrote: post #25

Funny as I just cancelled my Kagi sub to get the Gemini ai pro sub. The deal was too good to pass up

The deal will be great for now, while they lure you in and get you to drop the competition -- then they will raise prices later.

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

#56

Post by _dark_matter_ »

paxys wrote: post #40
comrade1234 wrote: post #7

I spent the last three days (off and on) using Gemini to configure my edge router 4 with my iOS devices on a vpn and it's been awesome. In the past I'd do a google search and read a few sources of documentation, do another google search and read another set of documentation. Now, Gemini aggregates multiple pages together so all of the work of reading source docs from multiple locations is now n a single step. Oh, I s…

All the information Gemini surfaced was created with human effort and published on the internet with the expectation that humans would visit the website and the creator would get some reward - advertising dollars, bragging rights, popularity, subscribers or whatever else. If the only visitors to websites are now LLM training bots then what incentive is there to publish anything new? For how long can we continue to re…

I wonder the same thing. I only imagine that what comes next is worse: AI companies using vast resources to develop new training data, in house, locked down. They are already doing this with developers and code at Meta. Information will become locked away behind AI paywalls and chatbots.

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

#58

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

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…

That was true until a few months ago. Now, it almost never has relevant results, and I've given up on it.

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

#59

Post by carlosjobim »

Chinjut wrote: post #27
charcircuit wrote: post #8

It would be beneficial for the author to look at the revenue for Google Search. Revenue is still growing.

Indeed. Money over everything. It is absurd to complain about decreasing quality of a product that makes increasing money for increasingly rich people (thus, by definition, better).

If business owners are paying for ads, then it doesn't matter a iota to Google or Facebook if real people use their services. It would be even better for them if real people didn't use their services, since that would save some costs. Business owners are going to keep paying for the ads, as long as they get some number about how many (bot) impressions their ad generated.

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

#60

Post by ElProlactin »

bitwize wrote: post #35
ElProlactin wrote: post #19

There's too much going on in this article and while I think some of the points are valid, others go too far. A lot of the "cultural record" the author refers to is just digital junk. Random digital content that very few people care about, if we're being honest. Trying to hoard every bit of digital information ever produced is not the same thing as preserving "culture". Case in point: > Even the increasing use of ephe…

On the other hand, when modern archaeologists discover "Claudius has a small dick" graffiti on the side of some God-forsaken wall in Pompeii, they're fascinated. The presence of such graffiti adds color and texture to the civilization inhabited by Virgil and Ovid. What's just disposable background noise to us may provide context into how we lived and thought to our far-future descendants.

> The presence of such graffiti adds color and texture to the civilization inhabited by Virgil and Ovid.

It does, but do you think that people at that time thought anywhere near as much about preserving their scribbles as we do?

I'd venture a guess that we've created more "content" since the advent of the internet than in all of human history prior, and most of it is stored on things that aren't even designed to last a human lifetime without failure.

The idea that we're going to save every piece of digital junk for posterity just isn't realistic or healthy.

> What's just disposable background noise to us may provide context into how we lived and thought to our far-future descendants.

You're right, but you're also assuming that they're going to care that much, and that we're going to survive that long.

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