It is clear that the signal to noise ratio of the WWW is getting worse. It’s much harder to find good content when using a good old search engine. And if it’s good it is usually hosted on Reddit or Stackexchange.
So remember, even if it’s easy too Google something (well, it isn’t nowadays), we want to create a fediverse of good content that helps people (I hope). So, it’s always better to write a real answer if you have the time and energy. Please help boost the SNR and reverse the AI fueled information degradation loop.
Imagine asking chatgpt and it tells you to “Google it”
This will be Gemini in 2025
Didn’t it already tell some teen to kill themself recently? It fits right in with the worst of the internet.
I assume that grok did that, just because that’s on brand
When I ask someone for clarification via their expertise, I usually reflexively indicate that I cannot trust google because of the incursion of AI slop, and even if it shows THEM accurate results, it is no guarantee that it will show ME those same results.
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I agree even though I will sarcastically answer things with how easy it was to find, but I still give the information. I ask questions about things I could google myself, but I am not looking for just and answer. oftentimes Im looking for a nuanced answer and hope to find someone with knowledge around the subject that can give me a human take. not that I need a human take to know whats human because im so human myself and all. its not alien at all to me and hey who said anything about aliens. heh. heh.
Never thought I would see anybody call having to scroll past some sponsored links and reddit results “hard”. Compared to what, farting? Honestly folks, after 2025 we’ll probably all have a different view of what’s easy and what’s hard.
It’s not hard. It’s that information from people has become more fact than a single persons opinion on a topic. Do you have any idea how many variables are involved in why my cucumbers are dying in my green house? How many links and articles I’ve read before just asking it to the community and finding the answer in literally the first person who replied?
Information, wisdom, knowledge are all empowered by a community, and trusting a search engine to populate those will eliminate the community aspect of information gathering. It’ll cause the watered down, lost in information practices that we have going on today.
Doing this, in 30 years no one will be able to grow cucumbers in their greenhouse becuase all the information you’ll have will be based off the same shitty technique and everyone’s attempt at that technique, and no one will talk about the nuanced variables.
The cucumbers is an example.
I too value the advice of people sharing their experience on reddit, but I also see way too many highly upvoted posts crediting Nikola Tesla with inventing everything but fire. Top google results are increasingly useless junk, but so are top social media results. Having grown up with physical encyclopedias I wouldn’t say information is “hard” to find.
Physical encyclopedias are just time capsules of knowledge, sometimes irrelevant. And pricy too. Having them and then saying information is easy to find is entitlement.
I see what you’re saying. Top up voted corporate social media posts and AI finding top results for search engines and query requests is exactly why people need to ask other people wtf is going on with anything. It’s confusing enough to try to parse through irrelevant information, maybe asking someone will narrow down what you need to know.
Encyclopedias are republished regularly and are free to use at the library, so really… time capsules and entitlement, srsly? Whatevs.
I reply “search it”
Duckduckgo it
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Only if they include the link.
I prefer the screenshot to a webpage because
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If it’s a shit site, I don’t want to give it clicks and revenue
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News sites have a history of manipulating the title over and more to maximize views
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Images are easy to scan within the Lemmy app. Versus kicking me to a browser that has to fetch data somewhere.
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If it’s for textual information, I’m personally a fan of covering all bases. Screenshot, link to site, and quoted relevant text.
Webpages can change, but screenshots can stop being hosted with no warning and any text in screenshot form can’t easily be copy and pasted. Quoted text is essentially the longterm accessible failsafe. Text in comments tends to last much longer than images or links.
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Great point honestly. I was only writing that comment from the perspective of answering troubleshooting centric questions. Not everyone who browses the internet has the same ability to see though, and while I imagine screen readers have some ability to process images (I’ve never used one so I don’t know specifically), I can only assume that actual text is much easier.
I know that text for me is much easier than screenshots, cause I’ve adjusted the font size and type in my browser to suit my preferences. Can’t do that for an image.
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I will occasionally post a screenshot of an excerpt of a web site, specifically for the purpose of showing it to whoever I’m responding to who is continuing to bleat rather than visit the link I provided and use their eyes, or is attempting to argue with me about the presence of content that is, in fact, right there as plain as the nose on your face. Extra bonus points if whatever they need to click on to get what they want is right there in the header or sidebar menu, without even having to scroll or anything.
I maintain that this method of saying, “look, dumbass” is perfectly valid.
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The amount of times I’ve googled a problem, and the first result is a forum post of someone just being told to google it then locking the thread is way too high.
I have started getting pissed at people who snap at someone “Don’t necro this post” (Or any of the numerous other things they say), on information that is well outdated that could fucking seriously use an updated answer.
End rant…I’d prefer not, though…I want to keep this rant going.
These ones plus “this is a duplicate of <link to question that is only kinda related and doesn’t address the specific problem being asked in the newer question>”.
Fuck busy body moderators. The people you “have power” over can see how stupid and incompetent you are and being able to shut down forum conversations about it doesn’t hide it, it just means people know not to bother saying it where you’re looking.
Github sucks.
Don’t tell me what to do.
Found the guy who grew up listening to rage against the machine, who now uses machines to rage against the humans who want him to rage against the machine…but fuck you I won’t do what ya tell me! Fuck you I won’t do what ya tell me! Fuck you I won’t do what ya tell me! Fuck you I won’t do what ya tell me! (UGH!) guitar solo
Who?
No, not The Who.
Then who?
Search engines are mega sucky these days, but Wikipedia has never been better. I find myself going straight to wiki any time I need a quick fact or basic info.
Wikipedia is an internet gem
I give them a few quid every month. Might be the only regular donation I’ve got going at the moment (was being the sole earner for 3 until recently so yeah, rebuilding slowly)
Hear hear! We’re all witnessing what can happen with something nice, if you nurture it and keep improving, slowly, instead of the new pattern of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish or insisting on extracting maximum value. Modern Wikipedia is often rich in content and fun to use. I love it :)
I can’t imagine just how much more lost we would be if we had an internet without Wikipedia…
What would we be using, some form of online Encarta? Ugh.
I’ve noticed that a lot of people are just really bad in using the right searching terms, and then quickly shifting through all the info to find the right information. Googling well truly is a skill. Though be it a strange one.
Same! Had a discussion recently with a guy searching about gun law in Austria for 3D printed weapons. He showed me his Search Query. Didn’t even include the word “Law”. People just really forgot how to properly query search engines.
I was going to bring up card catalogues and microfiche, but it is more difficult now, especially with all the AI written articles popping up a la carte as top results.
I guess it would be like the physical library having a fee^1 to enter, the librarian men and women in lingerie and banana hammocks, and all the publications unsorted: Fiction and Non-Fiction together with celebrity magazines, The National Enquirer, and nazi publications… and lots of torn out pages.
^1 Fee replaces ads. I’d rather not picture a world where the advertising in the show Maniac exists. (Can’t afford the bus? The ad-reader shows up and speaks ads at you until you have “earned” the $1.25, or whatever.)
It’s not even much of a skill anymore now that there’s so much focus on natural language question and answer. You can straight up Google “how do I X?” And get a relevant answer for just about anything.
Edit: I’m not even talking about generative AI here, googling simple questions without using AI worked well before the AI craze.
That’s not exactly true. The AI answers are often wrong or incomplete. You still need skill, it’s just that the required skill has shifted to accepting this is true, recognizing when the AI answer is not complete and correct, (which can be more difficult due to the answers often being seemingly correct, yet slightly wrong or incomplete), and then doing what you’d do in any other search that nets poor results: adjust and search more or dig further down the given results stack.
I’ve never had issues with looking anything up. By downranking Reddit and using a search engine with a good indexer that downranks bullshit and generated websites, which mine is really good at, I haven’t noticed much change from how it was before.
But I agree with the second part. That’s something that never occured to me, and it makes sense. I was usually trying to answer questions I knew, and never had the urge to reply “just google it”, so it doesn’t change much for me, but it’s a really good point I never realized.
Do you mind elaborating on your search setup? I’d like to be able to avoid a ton of bullshit especially while working.
I just use Kagi, which seems to be pretty good at filtering bullshit by default, and have mabually downranked reddit and twitter, ot any other site I found and don’t like. But it’s been a long time since I used other search, so I can’t compare it much since I’m used to it. Never really had any problems with not finding what I need.
I’ll be sure to check it out, thanks!
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My absolute favorite videos for car repairs were some shade tree mechanics who just recorded what they were doing and talking through the steps. No fancy lighting setups, no separate camera person. Just explaining and sharing knowledge for something that I couldn’t figure out by reading words because the written word was just ‘lightly hammer’ and they showed the angles and explained where the parts were frequently getting caught.
You are a hero.
Repair steps are one of the few tasks that I feel videos are better than words (and sometimes pictures). It definitely helps to see the motions they’re taking and a single capture of the location from walking up to the car (or other repairable object) all the way to looking at the part that needs fixing.
In the before times we had libraries of books that’d teach a person anything they wanted to learn. If a person had a question and the book didn’t answer there was someone there who didn’t know the answer but damn well knew how to find it. We never had to sort through piles of garbage content produced to waste our time for profit.
Even the early Internet was this way. Its slow degradation became a nose dive with broad adoption of Facebook and AI. I had to starting writing a line of code to search. And, that doesn’t even work anymore.
I used to be pretty good at googling stuff, but the last 1 or 2 years it just won’t work anymore. For instance, I had to charge a battery yesterday, and the power led started blinking when I put the battery in. I didn’t know if this meant either charging or faulty battery, so I googled it. Got pages of ads for this particular charger, but no answer. So google is just a big marketplace these days, and nothing more.
Just so you know, a dremel battery is charging when the power led blinks.
Did it not have a manual?
Just yesterday I was looking for similar info on a thermostat. Given only the brand name and knowledge that it was a thermostat, I found the product line, tech specs, and manuals. (I didn’t find the answer I needed, but that’s because it was “the button can be programmed to do different things by the control system”).
Usually both of those options are on the same page. If you have one, you have both, or at least a lead on their support site.
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SearxNG To quote old Ben, “This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight. Not as clumsy or random as a blaster; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.”
I’m using Kagi, but as of right now I’m not sure if I can recommend it. The last year with it was amazing, but for the past few days I’ve been getting blocked searches from my VPN out of nowhere. That would be a dealbreaker for me, but I hope it was just a mistake and they will fix it. It’s the first time it has happened in the year or so I’ve been using it.
Apparently, they are also adding a bunch of AI features, but I only noticed it when I was looking up the feature page, and I haven’t noticed any of it in my feed before that - so I guess they don’t push it on users and it’s optional somewhere out of the way, so don’t let that discourage you. (Though, it would’ve discouraged me, if I saw that before I started using it. But as of now it doesn’t affect you unless you look for it, I guess)
Other than that, the search is awesome. But since I’m using it exclusively for like a year, I can’t really compare it with other engines, it’s possible that I’m just used to it.
What I mean by that is that it doesn’t shove the AI summaries into your face, and they are only generated if you actually click on a different tab.
Even if you want to be snarky, at least do something like:
I [googled it](searchresult.com) for you.I understand the temptation for snark, but if you’re going to snark, I suggest that “here is how I googled it for you” is a better response, wherein you explain the terms you chose and how you selected the most pertinent result.
Definitely more work, but even if the OP is infuriating, there are people who will find the answer in the future, and who would benefit from the explanation of something that might be obvious to us but not them.
I’m not kidding, one time I saw that and the first result was back to that thread where the only answer was to Google it.
Thank you for saying that.
While I don’t think we can beat AI driven content degradation by outposting them, I still agree posting ‘just Google it’ does any good either.
Post an answer or link a topic which covered the same question in detail. But directing people to Google isn’t something I’d advocate. Maybe tell them to Ecosiate it if you really have to.
Also it’s just rude and creates an uninviting admosphere around here Imo.
But the AI issue can’t be solved by users alone. It’s moderation and maybe regulation which is needed here.
