- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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I noticed DDG now has AI. Damn it
Everything now has AI in it. And if it doesn’t, it soon will. Get used to it.
It has a chatbot you can interact with separately. It doesn’t uses AI in its search engine as far as I know.
It may summarise Wikipedia articles in your search results, though you can turn that off.
We’ve leant nothing from the Terminator movies…this AI bollocks is everywhere…🤦🏻♂️
Hey Arnie(AI) became the good guy in some of the movies!
Aaaaaaand I’m entirely out. No thanks.
If u want ai powered search results I would recommend this tool instead: https://github.com/muntedcrocodile/Sydney
But nobody should want AI powered anything.
There has never been a better time for someone to swoop in and remake web search. Hell, there are probably dozens of software engineers from Google that have direct experience with search AND were laid off.
I’m surprised that no one is trying to compete with Google at the weakest point it’s been since going public.
I think the problem is that search does not make money. Ads make money, and subscriptions make money. Convincing people to switch from Google ads to New Google ads would involve dumping tons of money into becoming popular enough to attract advertisers. Convincing people to pay for search, like Kagi is doing, is probably even harder.
And it can go fuck it self all the way down. I can only think of one good thing to do with Google and that is to de-googlelize yourself.
It’s going to find 1 billion more results that all are equally as irrelevant as the 8 billion results that was initially pulled up per search.
But can it find a product that you will want to buy. That’s the real question.
I was wondering who could defeat google, looks like Google is up to the task
Nah. It’s not going to be “AI.” It’s going to be YouTube results, followed by Reddit results, followed by “Sponsored” results, followed by AI-written Bot results, then a couple pages of Amazon results and finally, on page 10 or so, a ten-year-old result that’s probably no longer relevant.
Headline fix: Google kills the one good thing it has going for it with AI
Search sucks for some time now. I’d say the best thing google offers today is Gmail - but there are plenty of arguments against that too.
No, gmail’s Inbox is the best mail client out there!
…wait
Google Maps, their traffic data has no rivals, unlike gmail which has plenty of good competition. It’s the one thing I couldn’t easily replace yet.
I prefer OSM since I can use the maps offline. Google maps is useless out in the middle of nowhere without any cell service.
I tried OSM and it completely failed. Downloaded the offline region, loaded it up at home fine. Went to the location and the offline map wouldn’t load. Had a connection and tried to load an online map, nothing. Ended up right back using Google maps. I support the concept of OSM, it just doesn’t work.
Strange, it’s been very very reliable for many years, for me. Did you use OsmAnd?
No, I used solely on my phone. It worked fine at home and looked promising. When I went out 2 days later it wouldn’t load anything, was on cell only with excellent 5g data. Tried for about an hour and it just wouldn’t load a map.
Uh, but…OsmAnd is a phone app. So you’re saying you used the website on your phone’s browser, then? I’m not sure if that has an offline function, though I never used it myself. Does it say it has that function? Otherwise I think you will have to install an app, first.
Maybe you downloaded the offline map files, but had nothing to open them with. Apps use their own versions of the map files, by the way, those files you download from the website are for other use-cases.
But what app did you use to access OSM and download the maps for offline use… was it a web browser? OsmAnd? Vespucci?
Far from any desire to give kudos to Google: Maps does allow offline maps.I had greater London available on my iphone recently, and that worked.
But what if you’re not in london
This is a great question.
The obvious answer is to then go to London.
But if you are unable to do so AND have no mobile network, you can download the maps via avian carrier.Sorry, only London available
If you want to experience offline maps, you gotta go to London
Not to discourage usage of OSM at all, but you can absolutely download offline maps on mobile with Google Maps, they’ve just hidden it a bit. If you tap your account icon in the upper right, a menu pops up that includes offline maps, and it’ll let you select boundaries to download.
Its only car routes though, useless for footpaths and public transport
It’s not only car routes
It has all the path data
Source: I just tested it
Which makes it good for hiking, and I’ve found it’s better for bike routes too. However, I can’t easily search for places to go, there’s no recommendations, and generally you need to know the address of the place you’re going to (not just a restaurant/bar etc.).
I switched away from google maps to Apple Maps a few years ago and I honestly can’t tell any difference. If google maps traffic data is better, it’s not in any noticeable kind of way for regular day to day usage.
Honestly Apple Maps is better in my area by a decent margin. It’s up to date sooner and that matters in a rapidly growing city. Google still beats it in search but even then AM finds things it doesn’t at times. i just wish they’d move on from shitty Yelp. I vastly prefer AMs navigation over GM as well.
True. I wanted to replace it with OSM or similar, but my main use of Maps after navigation is exploring places, reading reviews, and browsing pictures. They have a database that is tough to replace.
their traffic data has no rivals
do you mean the waze traffic data, or does google actually have some of its own?
Waze is owned by Google.
And just like their ridiculous chat apps, they have no beneficial feature integration or consolidation between the two.
Google Maps has the ability to report speed traps and hazards, but none of that data comes from Waze or vice-versa.
or does google actually have some of its own
every phone running Google’s version of Android with location enabled.
ProtonMail is like the best if you can get if you’re a small user that regularly cleans their inbox and keeps things that matter.
I never use more than a handful of MBs, so I find 15GB of storage that GMail offers me a bit much. It’s been this way for me for years so ProtonMail does it.
I like most of their basic tool apps for being so basic. Notes, clock, calendar, Gmail, etc. I will lament the day they fuck all these up.
Google search is still a very shitty product right now. In a blind test I would never conclude they are the market leader. It used to work a few years ago though.
Indeed. They started pushing things that make them profit before the things that you’re searching for. They love the revenue stream but are realizing now that it’s also killing their main product: googling.
But if they’re moving to AI it will probably be the same, trying to guide you into selling something instead of giving what you want. Microsoft too is trying to paper over their os with ads so you know what direction they’re going.
It’s so exhausting. Google “how to do thing” and it’s just dozens of links to webshops that sell barely related products to your search.
They don’t really have a choice. Classic website search will be useless in the near future because of the rapid rise of LLM-generated pages. Already for some searches 1 out of 3 results is generated crap.
Their only hope it’s that somehow they’ll be able to weed out LLM pages with LLM. Which is something that scientists say it’s impossible because LLMs cannot learn from LLM results so they won’t be able to reliably tell which content is good.
The fact they’re even trying this shows they’re desperate, so they will try.
If they can’t direct me to the right web site because they can’t tell what’s LLM junk, then how will they summarize an answer for me based on those same web sites they know about? It doesn’t seem like LLM summaries are a way to avoid that issue at all.
Do you have a source for those scientists you’re referring to?
I know that LLMs can be trained on data output by other LLMs, but you’re basically diluting your results unless you do a lot of work to clean up the data.
I wouldn’t say it’s “impossible” to determine if content was generated by an LLM, but I agree that it will not be reliable.
Well, it’s not exactly impossible because of that, it’s just unlikely they’ll use a discriminator for the task because great part of generated content is effectively indistinguishable from human-written content - either because the model was prompted to avoid “LLM speak”, or because the text was heavily edited. Thus they’d risk a high false positive rate.
So far I’m mostly unaffected by this. That’s probably because I usually internet mostly for niche hobbies and occasionally practical things and shopping. Like apartment hunting, since the industry is too spread out for anybody to get in bed with Google enough to get a big boost up the AI idiocy. Except maybe apartments.com, but that’s where I’ve always ended up anyway even back before Google’s enshitification.
Just fix google back to how it was and create an entirely new search engine with AI and call it Sairch.
Is it Scottish?
Sadly, old Google doesn’t work either thanks to the efforts of SEO and the AI generated garbage.
The problem with search is that the motives of those being searched aren’t to provide you with the most helpful answer. The motives are to get you to visit their website then stay/click/buy as much as possible. They’ll tailor their content to match whatever algorithm the engine is using.
That’s why Google’s new plan is to collect all of the information ahead of time and skip the “visit other websites” step. Then you can stay/click/buy on their website as much as possible.
Seriously though. Just skip all this nonsense, you selfish piece of shit, and open your wallet so the hungry corpos can feast on its contents - they have poor, innocent, starving shareholders to feed… you monster.
Google already lost me around 2016. All other search engines lost me to AI. Google is too late
I’m just gonna plug “Kagi” here.
Kagi is a paid search engine. Yeah, sucks that we have to pay for good or decent search results, but… as the economic models of the internet change, we need to change with them. I’ve personally lost faith in freemium ad-supported websites in general.
I don’t need ads on Lemmy thanks
It’s no surprise that “free” search funded through advertising led to this. The economic incentives were always going to lead us to the pay-to-win enshittification that we see today.
Paid search might look better initially, but a for-profit model will eventually lead to the same results. It might manifest differently, maybe through backroom deals they never talk about, but you’d better believe there will always be more profit to be made through such deals than through subscription fees.
Newspapers were always partially advertisement driven.
But I think everyone would agree with me that Newspapers were better when a substantial base of their $$$ came from their subscriber base.
Nothing is absolute in the world of money. There’s always additional sources of money elsewhere. From this perspective, I think we can argue that purely advertisement-driven media is what is most dangerous. Search is an important part of modern digital media, so thinking of the economic realities of funding, and how those economic incentives shape the website and future business is important.
Maybe it fails, but Kagi is trying something new. And that’s good enough as an experiment for me. I dunno, maybe I’ll revisit the idea in 5 years or so, that’s really not much money in the great scheme of things.
At very least, Kagi now has a “Fediverse search”, and now that “search-lemmy” seems to have died, I need something like Kagi to more easily search Lemmy.world and other Fediverse locations. (Google ain’t so good at this yet).
Kagi started as an AI company. and they do a bunch of weird things otherwise, which made me stop giving them money.
Nothing fundamentally wrong with AI search. I’ve found Kagi’s AI to be unobtrusive and helpful. That article is a bit of a nothingburger.
I don’t want any AI search.
Then don’t use it. The regular search is still good
Is this really new? Haven’t they been using soft computing methods since, basically forever?
Yo dog, we stuffed AI in your AI so you can use AI while you use “AI”
Great. now the search engine will tell me “I am not designed to provide that information” when I don’t use the specific, constantly changing magic words it wants.
This also reminds me that I’m still annoyed my phone options are more or less limited Android and iPhone.
