My younger sister searches tiktok for information and by that I mean she doesn’t even use the search feature. The topics just show up in her feed. She thinks she’s choosing/finding but is actually getting fed topics.
Its sad because everytime she tells me something she learned on tiktok I do like 2mins of research and find its not true or misleading. People lie about the most mundane things on that platform and I don’t know why.
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I don’t even know why people use Google anymore besides maps and restaurant data. The rest is all SEO corporate junk.
I search directly on medical and research / studies sites now. The rest I use AI.
And how do non-old people navigate the web? I mean I get it, you don’t need to google the Wikipedia article about the French Revolution… You can ask AI. But how do you find business hours for the repair shop downtown? Which website sells the concert tickets? News from yesterday? The forum that tells you if 32GB of RAM fit into your laptop?
Hours and menus normally come from Maps. News often comes from social media, unfortunately. But Google rarely helps me there either. Concert tickets is probably an app or venue website (but I don’t really go to many concerts because fuck Ticketmaster).
Not that I don’t Google stuff, but it’s way less useful than it used to be.
I’m over fifty (though fuck does it feel unreal to say that).
(but I don’t really go to many concerts because fuck Ticketmaster)
You can often (though not always) buy tickets directly from the venue in person or over the phone. You avoid Ticketmaster fees this way, though they may end up emailing you the ticket in Ticketmaster anyway.
News from yesterday? You mean your social media feed of choice?
Forum that tells you if 32GB of RAM fit into your laptop?
Who has a laptop anymore?
RAM?
32GB? My phone has 128GB!
RAM?
32GB? My phone has 128GB!
Are you confusing RAM with storage?
I’m pretty sure it’s tongue in cheek of the average person who doesn’t know much about tech.
That’s kinda what I thought, but the way it’s presented made my question if they were serious or not.
I was Googling just fine until Google ruined it with “SEO” and AI so that completely irrelevant results dominate the first 2 or 3 pages.
It’s this last two years where it has gotten really bad in my opinion. Before you could at least navigate the ads ridden we site. Now base Google search is tremendously worse.
Article is behind a paywall, what does it say “young people” do instead of “googling”?
This shift is due largely to users’ bypassing Google to start their search for goods on Amazon. It’s handing Amazon billions in advertiser dollars. Meanwhile, TikTok has less than 4% of U.S. digital ad revenue, but significant potential to expand its share of the pie. A recent TikTok pitch to advertisers reported on by The Wall Street Journal said that 23% of its users searched for something within 30 seconds of opening the app, and its global search volume was three billion a day. The second threat is the rise of “answer engines” like Perplexity which, well, do what they say on the tin. OpenAI has added internet search to ChatGPT, Meta Platforms is exploring building its own search engine, and even AI chatbots that can’t search the internet are proving increasingly capable at addressing many questions. They’re also becoming ever more widespread, as Microsoft and Appleintegrate them directly into the operating systems of all the devices they make or support.
Non paywalled version: https://archive.today/?run=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Ftech%2Fgoogling-is-for-old-people-thats-a-problem-for-google-5188a6ed
I can’t see through the paywall either, but if it’s like any of the hundreds of other articles that have been written on this topic, the answer is probably TikTok
What? I Google stuff all the time. Just not on Google (DuckDuckGo or Qwant)
Another problem is they ruined their own search with AI.
Kicked themselves right in the nuts.
Their search was shit before AI. Unless you like pinterest and quora spam.
They ruined it without AI before AI was commonplace. They ruined it with higher profit margins. 🥹
Avid Amoeba is right that Google ruined their own search before LLMs entered the public consciousness (this does not mean LLMs didn’t exist before this, but that they were not widely available for the general public to use or became part of the zeitgeist).
If you don’t agree please listen to the Better Offline podcast episode “The Man That Destroyed Google Search”. The episode goes through the rollbacks/changes Google made to their search Algorithm well before AI was commonplace.
Better Offline: CZM Rewind: The Man That Destroyed Google Search: https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/czm-rewind-the-man-that-destroyed-google-search
Yeah. Also I’m guessing their AI additions to search made their profit margins worse since they take a lot more computation to produce. Although they probably cache a lot of them for common searches.
The US National Weather Service releases updated 84-hour forecasts every 6 hours. Even with supercomputers at their disposal, due to the computational complexity of simulating physics, that is their best possible effort.
Google, meanwhile, is “developing a machine learning model that it says can accurately predict weather in seconds – not hours – and outperforms 90% of the targets used by the world’s best weather prediction systems.” Using a single desktop computer, they can generate a highly accurate 10-day forecast in under a minute.
More information:
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/12/ai-weather-forecasting-climate-crisis/
Given this information, and given the enshittification of Google search, would you still make the same guess about their profit margins?
Yes. Search generally pulls data from databases. It doesn’t compute weather forecasts. The addition of AI results is net addition computation. In the worst case scenario where the generation of the AI results happens on-the-fly, that’s a lot more computation. I’m sure they pre-compute a lot of them so they’re not in the worst case scenario. However in the best case scenario they still have to do this new additional heavy (check LLM compute usage) computation once per result. So the profit margin for search is very likely lower than it used to be when isolating for this variable. If they’re somehow increasing their revenue from these results, that’s another variable that might offset it. I’ve no idea. What I’m certain about is the cost is higher after AI results were introduced because more energy is used.
Probably made the margins better because investors apparently still love hearing the word “AI” attached to shit
Even though that surely results in them being able to access more money and makes shareholders richer, that’s not a factor in profit margins. Profit margins are just about revenue vs cost. In this case - how much the make from each search vs how much it costs to produce that search.
I hope AI is the new metaverse. I’ll have a good chuckle when it all implodes.
That depends strongly on which “public” we are talking about - some extremely intelligent people I have talked to don’t even know what Reddit is. Old Google searches got bad, but if you scrolled down far enough, or added “reddit” to the search terms, they used to be salvageable. So it’s less of a hard cutoff and more of a long process that brought us to where we are today.
Public in this term has nothing to do with intelligence, but rather people outside of companies working on AI/LLMs or doing AI research. It’s why I mentioned it entering the zeitgeist.
I never mentioned a hard cutoff but said they ruined it before LLMs were in use by the general public. Essentially I’m referring to the starting of the degradation of Google’s search which they made conscious decisions that deliberately put profit above all.
My apologies that me being hyperbolic did not add clarity and instead caused confusion:-). Ultimately I agree, but was adding the point that users who were either savvy or dedicated enough could still get a lot of use out of Google until more recently, whereupon it is now just a huge mess that makes it more worthwhile to abandon completely (in favor of e.g. DuckDuckGo) - even though it was the demise of Reddit rather than the addition of LLMs that caused the sharp decline (+ other things too, e.g. there was a strike of mods at StackOverflow), i.e. Reddit (& others) was propping up Google results for the longest time, which does not excuse Google for allowing such instability, but helps explain the timeline wherein Google results were both “usable” (even if less so than the past) and also “degraded” at the same time.
It’s all good, we both clarified our* thoughts on the matter and to be fair using “ruined” instead of “ruining” or “started to ruin” indicates a completed process or final state instead of a continuous one.
I agree that previously one could construct a search to sort the noise out, but as you stated this has become unfeasible without a sharp increase of queries needed to refine results which has shifted the thought from questioning if Google search is bad to now generally accepted belief - to the point where people are trying to quantify and provide evidence to back up the claim.
This article links to a research paper on the topic: https://www.fastcompany.com/91012311/is-google-getting-worse-this-is-what-leading-computer-scientists-say
*Fixed typo of ‘out’ to ‘our’
If I can go on a tangent: it is conversations like this that continually convince me that I need never go back to Reddit. Not EVERY SINGLE conversation needs to be full of snark and vitriol. Being able to discuss things rationally, calmly, and with kindness is possible, if only people will create the space within which they are allowed to happen:-).
And how that relates is: using DuckDuckGo convinced me similarly to abandon Google:-). Caveats include using Google Images, Google Maps, etc. e.g. to look up the hours of a shop (the SEO optimization there works for rather than against me, although tbf quite often I have to bat away unrelated results vying for my increased attention due merely to having paid for that exact privilege), but overall the results of DDG are just extremely much more worth my time than Google’s.
As an example, if you search for the keyword “Lemmy”, DDG pulls up Lemmy.World as the #2 hit (which notably has ~80% of all active users on Lemmy, so is overwhelmingly deserving of being listed so highly), after the #1 hit being the singer, whereas on Google the first instance mentioned is Lemmy.ml (that has 2,206 active monthly users, compared to Lemmy.World’s 17,122 that is roughly an order of magnitude higher, and also housing the most-used communities e.g. !technology@lemmy.world has 16.9k active monthly users compared to !asklemmy@lemmy.ml’s top community with 8.44K), and that not until the #4 hit.
i.e., not only are Google results commodified, but as you said they are “ruined” as well - to the point of representing actual & active disinformation (for the sake of $$$) rather than merely misinformation (aka oopsies). We can scroll past one, two, even ten ads, but how do we find our info when the sorting refuses to distinguish between SEO-advanced results and “real” ones? I dunno, perhaps the above one is a poor example (edit: b/c in the past, Lemmy.ml really was the top Lemmy instance, for so very long), but I think you know what I mean regardless:-).
They ruined it by setting themselves as untouchable and wanting bigger profit margins than “richer than God” money.
Their search algorithm was great.
They’re even shoving AI into Youtube by placing a summary in plain text below some videos now. Don’t know if it’s opt-in or just randomly placed for testing but so far I’m not impressed because it skips over important things. I’m honestly puzzled as to why the hell they’re doing this.
I do like how AI works for referencing articles. You can tap on any sentence in the summary and it will display all links that contain that source information. It’s actually pretty useful.
I find that in many cases, if you actually click the link to find the sourced information, it’s not there. I’ve experienced this with nearly every LLM front-end platform.
Younger generations are using other platforms to gather information.
What’s not being talked about here is that young people don’t seem to give a damn if the information they research is accurate or not, it’s whether or not it’s peddled by their preferred streamer. Those “other platforms” are apparently Tiktok and Netflix, not exactly places known for speaking truth to power.
I’ve spent twenty years trying to believe that the children will be the saviors of the future, but I think maybe the conservatives actually succeeded in murdering education in it’s crib. I am now nearly fully on team “You know, maybe these kids actually are a bunch of dumb fucks who won’t save us after all.”
It’s not so much that they don’t give a damn, but that they can’t tell. I taught some basic English courses with a research component (most students in their first college semester), and I’d drag them to the library each semester for a boring day on how to generate topics, how to discern scholarly sources, then use databases like EBSCO or JSTOR to find articles to support arguments in the essays they’d be writing for the next couple years. Inevitably, I’d get back papers with so-and-so’s blog cited, PraegerU, Wikipedia, or Google’s own search results. Here’s where a lot of the problem lies: discerning sources, and knowing how to use syntax in searches, which is itself becoming irrelevant on Google etc. but NOT academic databases. So why take the time to give the “and” and “or” and “after: 1980” and “type: peer-reviewed” when you can just write a natural-language question into a search engine and get an answer right away that seems legit in the snippet? I’d argue the tech is the problem because it encourages a certain type of inquiry and quick answers that are plausible, but more often than not, lacking in any credibility.
Is it the tech? Or is it media literacy?
I’ve messed around with AI on a lark, but would never dream of using it on anything important. I feel like it’s pretty common knowledge that AI will just make shit up if it wants to, so even when I’m just playing around with it I take everything it says with a heavy grain of salt.
I think ease of use is definitely a component of it, but in reading your message I can’t help but wonder if the problem instead lies in critical engagement. Can they read something and actively discern whether the source is to be trusted? Or are they simply reading what is put in front of them then turning around to you and saying “well, this is what the magic box says. I don’t know what to tell you.”.
I think my kid is gonna be just fine. He rarely believes anything i tell em without follow up evidence…He’s 5.
But Ive always focused on critical thinking skills from as early as possible.
Youre gonna have to write fully cited and sourced academic papers to convince him to clean his room.
You must understand that you are part of an infinitesimal minority.
It makes me sad as I observe the wider population 😭
This is the big problem. Kids are trusting search results from a Chinese propaganda platform, and they don’t give a shit.
Its the older folks who muddled the walls between editorial and factual reporting, and now thats come home to roost. There are no facts anymore, and very little real journalism anymore. Theres no truth, justice, democracy, or human dignity either. Its not tiktok or youtube who led us where we are, its the double-be-damned boomers and centrists.
This implies TikTok would have some incentive to propagandize their users that Google wouldn’t also have. Google does corporate American propaganda, which many Americans have been acclimated to and thus don’t perceive as propaganda.
You could argue a state has a right to propagandize its own citizens to counter foreign adversarial influence. I’m not saying it does but a state should have its populations best interests in mind compared to a foreign adversary.
at least it’s not American propaganda
People of all ages have great people and awful people in them. Always has been so and always will be.
This isn’t a young person problem and it isn’t new, it’s just getting worse. See Fox news on Trump 8 years ago or more through now
Kids are as smart as we used to be. And we didn’t save the then-future, now-present. Same deal with boomers.
Names will change, corporations will change, investors will stay the same. For us things won’t get meaningfully better or worse than they are.
I can see your point when talking about broader topics that people tend to absorb over time (politics, social dilemmas, economical condition) but this is more about users intentionally searching narrower topics. What’s wrong with my code, how do I fix my car, what computer should I buy, what’s the best way to get rid of termites - those kinds of things.
I unashamedly call myself an expert about exactly one car. I learned everything from it’s most popular forum from 2010-2015. I admin a Facebook group for it. When I started just on the dedicated forum, we’d get basic questions all the time about super common issues but a few links to good threads and recommendations about using Google with site:thisforum added helped avoid “repeat customers” in the future. That’s gone. The forum is forgotten because original owners have sold and new owners don’t know about it. No one wants to make an account on a site for just one topic these days when Facebook and reddit are so easy to use. Shitty answer sites following in the footsteps of Yahoo Answers (such as quora, fixya, and justanswer) have dominated normal Google searches. Google often suggests appending “reddit” to searches which is an improvement over those sites, but still atrocious for unpopular niche topics such as my forgotten car, in comparison to the forum. Having an existing account on reddit or Facebook promotes joining a relevant group/sub, not even knowing how to vet them for accuracy, and just blind-firing questions into the void. Google can sparse reddit, but the internal reddit search is rough. Facebook is locked down and the search is even worse. As I’ve joined other groups for cars I know less about, I can’t beleive the abysmal quality of answers I’ve gotten myself. People act as if I personally sent them a letter requesting information and I get answers that are overly generic, downright useless as they say they don’t know, or tell me to try something I said in my main post I already tried. This is the state of the world. None of these platforms value solutions, they value interaction for the sake of user volume. Wanna know why FB Marketplace is continually awful to sift through? Because every minute spent groaning about irrelevant listings and ignoring search parameters is another minute not given to Craigslist, kajiji, or any other classifieds. They don’t need you to win, they need the competition to lose.
I don’t want to hear anyone’s bullshit about ditching reddit and meta. We’re a microscopic niche of the internet, here on the fediverse. Our little bubble is not swaying half the fucking planet off meta. Do not act smug and say just go back to the original forums when they’re dead/devoid/deactivated because a handful of corporations socially engineered the ideal content streaming platforms.
Blaming kids for being dumb is a cop out. You have niche knowledge from your era about vetting content and avoiding scams/misinformation. You’re saying new kids are dumb in those regards. I bet you think older people are dumb in those regards too. Please realize both of those groups have their own niches and think you’re dumb, too, in some other topic. You are the peak of a decade, not a century. I don’t know your age, you don’t know mine, but consider this quote:
“Our youth now love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders, and they love to chatter instead of exercise. Children are now tyrants not servants of their household. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”
Sound accurate? Look up who said it.
There’s a big difference between “all kids are terrible today” and “some people have very successfully dismantled the education system, and it’s impacting our youth to a point where we can’t trust their levels of education can protect them against capitalism run amok.”
To be clearer: failure to educate is squarely on adults not on children.
where we can’t trust their levels of education can protect them against capitalism run amok
I’ve been dealing with more zoomer-and-younger kids and uh, it’s less that we can’t trust that their education level will protect them from the evils of capitalism, but more that we can’t even trust that their levels of education are sufficient for them to be able to both read and write, nevermind more complicated things like determining the accuracy of factual data and be able to make a reasonable decision based on you know, critical thinking and analysis.
It’s shockingly dire in a lot of places, and it’s unlikely to improve, at least in the US, since nobody values education and nobody wants to fund education, and we just elected a pile of geriatric rich white people that think we don’t need to do anything but add more Jesus.
And yeah, as adults we’ve absolutely failed the two most recent generations, and are going to epically, epically fuck up the next one too.
That’s not what I see in your parent comment. “young people don’t seem to give a damn” and “I’m nearly fully on team ‘young people are dumb fucks and won’t save us after all’”
Have you seen a Gen Z-er trying to research something on the internet?
Honestly it usually starts with chatgpt or ai. I’ve been watching my younger coworkers.
It’s not a bad thing per-say but sometimes it’s wildly wrong and they don’t question where it comes from. Which bites them when we do reviews/code.
“sometimes it’s wildly wrong and they don’t question where it comes from”
A stark difference from google results surely
per-say
I think you mean per se.
https://www.dictionary.com/e/per-say-or-per-se/
It’s almost like the tools they were taught to use were crippled out from under them in the name of serving more ads.
Ok, but answer me this! Without those ads, would you even know that George Washington crossed the delaware with delicious chunky cambells soup!
What?
Those chunky soups with 130 calories and 22% of your needs in protein, ideal for a hard day of work?
Ahh well, I didn’t know that!
Well as the builders of the current distopian present we were told all the time that we needed to create user interfaces and services where people would not need to know anything about tech and there was always a “design for the dumb user” since forever.
This is what we get by pushing that narrative I guess.
It’s kinda wild to me. I used to think that as a millennial the next generation would be more technically savvy than mine for similar reasons to why my generation was more technically savvy than the last. That doesn’t quite seem to have panned out and I’m not sure if I’m just not seeing things right or if technical literacy is really that much on the decline.
I was totally unaware of how bad it is until I actually read some current teachers describe horrrors of how the incoming students were so unprepared about technical literacy. It’s freaking scary.
We really designed the society as it is and we’re going to suffer the consequences for a long time.
To me it just means job security. But I get you, some of those people will become your boss…and it generally sucks.
I’ll confess I’ve had the same thought… but I feel like the problem is deeper than that. If people don’t have basic awareness of the devices they rely on then they in danger of becoming victims of those who do. I’d point to your average boomer on Facebook to illustrate that point.
I would like two search engines displaying results side by side whenever I do a search. There’s so much empty space on a wide screen display anyway.
Maybe I should check if there’s an addon for this…
Not sure if it’s what you’re looking for, but a searx instance can return commingled results from multiple engines
Thanks - I’ll have to look into this!
I guess you’re too young to remember the good old days of dogpile searching on four engines within one page.
Remember ask Jeeves?
I’d have Ask Jeeves, Hotbot, and Yahoo opened when I was trawling the Internet for porn while my parents were out for 30m when I was 14 years old. There were always substantially different results, though somehow they always ended up the same: with me infecting my parents’ computer with some shit. Let’s say I did a lot of learning from my mistakes.
Remember the porn networks that tried to get you to download their software to connect, and then it ended up being a dialer to a 900 number?
That is funny, and sounds like it’d be pretty expensive. I actually didn’t encounter this fortunately, because I was already costing my parents a fortune because I just couldn’t stay under 300 texts a month.
Hah! It would seem so!
This is an excellent idea. Did you happen to find any?
Not really no!
There was a “Multi Web Search” by Oleksandr for Firefox but it was last updated five years ago. It also intermingles the results whereas I would’ve liked to see them side by side (to compare how different search engines rank the sites)
The SearX feature the other guy mentioned might be the best bet!
Stopped using google some time ago.
I still use Google search without an issue, just de-bullshitted by the whoogle frontend.
why jump through hoops to keep using Google instead of just using another search engine
I have gotten more reliable results from Google than other search engines even if it involves a middle man service that removes the bullshit
Mental inertia. It’s the same kind of thinking that keeps some people using Windows. They’ve convinced themselves that the option with the familiar name will take less effort to learn than the one with the new name, when in fact the mental effort required to make the familiar-named thing work properly is greater.
switching OS and switching search engines are in completely different universes but I do agree with the point
Okay, it’s more like the people who all refused to leave Xitter until recently. It took something very like the original Twitter (Bluesky) for them to finally get the mental gumption to make the switch. Prior to that, mental inertia kept them in place.
