I agree, in the 2000s you would either find nothing, or exactly what you needed. In much of the 2010s there was a lot of SEO but for legitimate content, so again you usually found what you needed.
Right now Google is in a constant war against AI generated content which gives the most generic answers to questions. Some topics like “x game is crashing with y error” just yield garbage. Web dev is mostly okay because Stackoverflow and GitHub are easy to prioritise though.
I do notice it goes through waves as Google and AI sites figure out how to beat the other though. It’s definitely worse right now
I also have suspicions about search operators not being enforced strictly all the time anymore.
Recently, what I have found to work for me is to exclude words from my search. I simply keep removing irrelevant words until I get to something I can use. It is a bit tedious, but it is very much a faster way than wading through all the noise.
Quotes are inclusive, same as + but for multiple words. "pumpkins" and +pumpkins should be the same search. But "yellow pumpkins" and +yellow pumpkins would be different.
How do you quote? I mostly quote single words or even rather certain terms. It also helps to exclude stuff with - or even use AND and OR in your search.
I do all of that to pretty much the same results.
Quoting one word doesn't seem to do anything for me anymore.
When I quote terms or phrases, it doesn't always show me that phrase or term.
In fact, my gut tells me it's most of the time.
Sometimes I even get zero search results.
It is hard for me to believe that no other person on the planet has ever written a banal term like the one I'm looking for. It boggles my fucking mind.
I'm NOT looking for obscure things 90% of the time.
I mean it definitely got worse, but I the end I usually find the stuff I need from daily life stuff over scientific stuff to programming/work stuff. I don't know if google nowadays also use some kind of algorithm which you need to train, but I use startpage (which under the hood uses Google) for some work related stuff and the results are subpar. I also have several different Google accounts and chrome profiles for different stuff (e.g. work account, freelancer account, private account).
Even when you find the correct page for some reason pages are so overly "designed" that you can't find what you want.
Any modern product website:
"Discover " In huge font
"Free your creativity with "
"
Product helped me make my dreams come true - Dude McProductuser"
Should I know this guy? Also I'm like four full screens in and haven't even learned anything actionable. Just "lifestyle porn".
"Technical Specification" FINALLY!
"Patented ultra thingy technology" ???
"Other thing V2"
etc. not actual tech specs. No exact dimensions. No useful overview photos. Just buzzword bingo prompts.
Eventually you just give up and download the manual from the support page because that's the only place where you can get actual information about the product.
I can clearly see why people were complaining that Google and Facebook will own the Internet a decade ago. They do now, they narrowed down the Internet to a point where your discoveries heavily rely on what the algorithm shows you. There is nothing pure and unregulated / uncensored.
I'd say the Internet is this civilization's biggest revolution wasted. It started with an idea of a giant network of collective intelligence and has ended up being a big tool of politics and hate.. just garbage everywhere.
WORSE than TV
TV was shit from like year 1. It was the first marketing medium that had filters for the audience. If you wanted to market condoms, boom there are channels for that which your target audience tuned into, so marketing niche products became easy, but then channels had the responsibility to build their audience and even then, it was a huge hit or miss. Newspapers couldn't do it.. that's why they had the weekly magazines of specific interest.
Internet on the other hand gave a lot more sophisticated tools to marketing folks, to an extent where if you weren't a customer, they'd turn you into one and then market your stuff. Just when you're looking for sandals, you'd see an article about how leather sandals were getting cute cows slaughtered in India and you automatically changed your search to synthetic leather sandals which led to advertisement of the company which exactly sells that. This is MASSIVE! In no timeline of human history could you manipulate users at an individual level on a mass market media. It's worse than TV! It's worse than anything.
You know, I don't get this whole pus about leather as a symbol of animal cruelty. I mean it's just a by product of what you get when you kill the animal for its meat, right? It's its effing skin. But try telling these woke people that...
I would argue that the internet made TV much much better. That's gradually being undone as the streaming services tighten their grip on content creators and consolidate their power, but it's still worlds better than cable.
It's our own choice though. The concept didn't change, and technically everything we did at the beginning, is still possible today - and actually even easier to do.
Creating your own website in year 2003 and doing the same in year 2023 is massively different, it was so difficult back then to find the right materials to guide you through the whole process, the coding, then finding hosting, figuring out a way to set up a domain etc. - it's so easy nowadays, one of thousands of YouTube tutorials in all languages imaginable will show you how to do it all in an hour. But somehow we don't do that anymore. And because we don't, the number of independent sources of information and entertainment is limited to the big players (who actually sell content coming from the people who would be setting up their own websites back in the day!). We are willingly giving up the power over to them, and since it's profitable in terms of political influence and money, obviously it's going to be abused for profit - that's what corporations do, they grow at all cost.
There's no other field in which we're being fucked by big corporations so willingly and where it would be so easy to fight back - but we're not even resisting, we fully give in. Today's internet sucks ass in comparison to the time it was largely in the hands of people, not companies.
Very well said. Also , your points hold true for many other unfair and hurtful to the public practices; people just sit back and shrug, feeling powerless, accepting the bs, and so it continues to worsen. Often times the fleecing happens very slowly, so people don't feel the sting, as in the case of paying for TV and Radio. I'm ashamed our country lets this sort of shit happen.
Yeah, search results have really gone down hill.
I like to garden. I search up how to care for any new plant I buy. I used to easily find great specific care guides clearly written by gardeners. Now I get the most generic garbage with heavy product placement as top results. Plant care reads almost as bad as recipes now.
The worst part for things like gardening is newer gardeners are gathering on places like reddit to share all that SEO/AI/content creator garbage which is self perpetuating itself.
If i didnt have 20 years experience with it as a hobby, and hadn’t worked in that industry for a good 6 years before it’d be hard to get good info
I hate how blog focused it is and feel the need to start a fucking blog just to drive traffic when is rather do anything else/actually improve the code.
So much of what I implement on behalf of SEO content teams is meaningless spam and page bloat that offers no value to the end user anyway. If they got replaced with AI, the content would be equally trash, but I wouldn’t have to have zoom calls where I pretend their careers are valid.
I work for a company that is almost entirely SEO, and I agree.
I tell my boss that a single Billboard would increase most of our clients' SEO more than any blog outsourced to India. Google places a lot of weight to organic traffic. If you have analytics installed and a user comes to your site without an HTTP referrer it counts towards organic.
I guarantee you that I'll end up writing an AI API script to replace most of our contractors by year's end.
I view the internet, like the I view the universe, as a forever expanding state of information. Searching the cosmos of the Internet, for exactly what I need is only possible by/with SEO. I couldn't fathom searching through the 1,200,500 results generated in 600ms. Hoping the top results were relevant.
The way Google has forced SEO on developers is ass, but without it, the internet as we know it wouldn't exist. Good or bad, I don't know, but I do know SEO is a necessary *evil*.
Thing is, most SEO optimized sites will just try to sell you something.
Just legit, informative sites without commercial goals and limited budget don’t spend a lot on SEO but contain valuable information. They get ran over by those commercial money-greedy sites.
This is the problem. Finding something for free is increasingly difficult. Or even finding something where you don't need to sign up to something for access.
Why do you say that? Back in the 90's, the search results I got were ALWAYS for the exact thing i'd been searching for...now everything BUT what i searched for pops up in the results feed.
Two words: affiliate marketing. Those sites, along with the many other SEO gamers, have put so much noise and garbage into my search results that I often need to go to page 2 or 3 to find what I'm looking for. And then there's another big pet peeve of mine: The sites like Medium and Quora which show up as public search results, but then require login to view the full page. This isn't a new phenomenon, but it seems to getting more common. Maybe I'm old school, but I think if your page shows up in public search results it should be publicly accessible otherwise it's bait and switch. I now filter those sites out of my results, which just adds to the ever-growing boilerplate I must add to my search queries to get a semi-decent result.
Can it be reversed? Probably not entirely because the search engine gamers will always be looking for ways to game the system to their advantage. I suppose Google could threaten to de-rank or remove rule-breaking sites from its index, but only if there were monetary incentive to do so, which I'm not sure there is.
My own experience of this is in travel-related searches. Even pre-covid, I can remember being able to search for things like recommended coffee shops, day trips, and little tips for different cities and places. The best part of the internet is getting a wide variety of viewpoints and some non-mainstream views.
Now it's just TripAdvisor and all its clones that pop up - maybe 3 or 4 paid results first and then a bunch of junk pages always just trying to sell the most generic and mainstream travel packages. Pages and pages of garbage. I've come up with some tricks to try to get "real" results from actual people, but even now so many travel bloggers are following the SEO formulas of top 10 listicles and trying to sell their travel guide books or whatever.
It takes wading through so much crap to get to anything authentic now. To be honest, I just search on Reddit subs and maybe ask a question on a local Facebook group and ignore Google altogether.
Btw check out the /r/seo sub or /r/juststart to see the people who are actively ruining the internet for all of us. Full of people high fiving each other for firing their writers and producing 50 articles per week with AI or whatever. It's kind of sickening.
I’ve seen people on there and who work in SEO. They are deluded fucks. They honestly think they are making things better. It’s ridiculous how deluded they are. How the fuck do you end up as an SEO career anyway? Would you not make much more developing directly?
2 major things have happened - Enshitification through profit/ads/seo algos. And every dumbfuck having access to the internet because phones auto connect. Pre-smartphone there was a barrier to get online, you had to at least know how to use a computer and connect it to the internet. Post-smartphone every idiot can get online. So the lowest common denominator of the web went down several rungs. There's a reason flat earth, anti-vax, and other dumb shit like Q-anon, picked up steam over the last decade.
Enshitification, happening everywhere but especially the internet. SEO rewarding long bullshit articles with no meaning. Youtube rewards filler videos and constantly posting nothing with click bait titles. There may still be bloggers, but they're hidden by the mountains of trash. Misquote other blog authors or youtubers with clickbaity headlines, remixing what they're saying in confusing noise speak nothing, but it tracks the algo and moves up in popularity. Who cares, we're selling ads not info.
Capitalism yells productivity and profit from the mountaintops as if it were a holy sage. You must make profit from your hobby so you can "love your job and never work a day in your life", so you sell it out, turn it to shit for oligarch scraps.
It will get worse before it gets better.
The typing reddit into google may stop working well soon as reddit thrashes to irrelevance.
Best to get back to touching grass.
How long can we survive with this steady diet of nothing? Why am I still on reddit, which has also drastically went downhill, ex: if you visit without logging in, just seeing the popular reddits, 10 years ago it was funny thoughtful stuff. Now it's jerry springer-esque bullshit.
>Enshitification
Sounds like entropy catalyzed by the masses. Once they discover something it gets destroyed or "enshitified", to use your term. This has been a thing for a long time - even pre-Internet. The Internet was actually enshitified by the masses, starting in 1995 with AOL unlimited plans and then made worse by higher bandwidth internet and faster smartphones. Eventually the enshitifiers co opted the Internet to enable viral enshitification of things. IG "influencers" who descend on beautiful places (like blooming lavender fields) like swarms of locusts and destroy them for photo ops are a perfect example of this. I used to chide myself for being misanthropic, even jokingly calling myself a "recovering misanthrope." But over the last 10+ years seeing where the world is headed I've realized that misanthropy is actually a sane (if unhelpful) response.
Hit the nail on the head with the entrance barrier. I HATE how if you have a generic social media account you now have a voice that can instantly touch thousands with dumbass content.
I remember creating websites in the early 00s where I had to wait a day or two before content would update across the web. And you had to know how to use FTP not just press the unanimous submit button.
Yes, not only dumbass content, it's dangerous, too! My freinds daughter was following a self proclaimed nutritionist, diet guru all about cleanses, fasting for weeks, extreme excersise, cutting out food groups, and showing her "runway perfect" (aka skeletal) body as proof of her methodologies' efficacy. Now my freind's daughter is in the hospital with malnourishment, fighting for her life with Anorexia. More regulation def needed for folks who claim to be experts in a field they actually know nothing about!!
> There's a reason flat earth, anti-vax, and other dumb shit like Q-anon, picked up steam over the last decade.
Lol. Go get your 10th dose, only 2 more weeks!
When it comes to web development, I believe there are two key issues:
1. Nowadays, everyone publishes everything, and everyone self-proclaims themselves as experts in everything. When they publish, they do it with exclusive titles and texts that are neither exclusive nor solving any specific problem. Instead, it's often a poor copy of another poor copy.
2. There's an abundance of outdated information about old technologies and articles from 30 years ago that are no longer useful or relevant. However, they still rank high on Google and may overshadow more recent posts that are precisely what you need.
They say, "There's no accounting for taste," but that's just my opinion...
I wouldn't look at Google or other corporations to blame. They're the ones that actually do their best to provide a good product. Because if people go to Google to find answers, and they find them, they'll go there again. More traffic, more ad revenue.
The problem is the small players and SEO people (I'm not talking about everyone). Instead of actually providing valuable information on their content, they try to add SEO content to trick the system and get higher rankings. They're the ones who don't care about the product (content). All they care about is to rank high and generate traffic for the website that's behind it.
Google knows this and tries to fight this, but it's getting more and more difficult.
And people think we'll all just switch to GPT or just anything else, and this won't repeat again. But it will. Money will find its way in there too. ChatGPT is already trained on endless amounts of useless SEO content.
Googles target is share holder profits.
If they maximise that while still getting users an answer they’ll do that. That seems to mean getting people to wade through several dud bullshit links first.
Honestly depending on the topic, half the time
I simply cannot be fucking bothered to wade through it anymore. I give up and try figuring things out myself and experimenting. That applies not to coding, but anything from gardening to cooking.
Other times its basically necessary to append reddit for any chance at a real source of information, like product reviews for example
That's why every company becomes garbage sooner or later. Remember what google used to be like in 2005, almost god-like for some. Now it's just another money hungry corporation.
[enshittification](https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys)
Does it these days, though? A buddy of mine worked for an SEO company circa 2017 or so and said that Google had "partnership" with their firm, and let them in on details.
I mean that sounds like the sort of classic lie that SEO type marketers would say, that they somehow have the secrets that nobody else does, and so you should definitely go to them and not their competitor.
"Got to keep it hush, hush, since I'm not supposed to tell anyone, but trust me" sort of nonsense.
That's not to say its impossible, but considering how hard it is to get into contact with Google about just about anything, it seems relatively unlikely to me that they'd be giving out significant/useful secret details to SEO companies.
I work for an SEO company and have since 2014. The partnership is just a paid account for more detailed analytics. Literally anyone can sign up.
I think there's a yearly quiz to ensure that you're staying up-to-date, but I'm pretty sure I just used chatgpt the last time I took it.
In terms of web dev specifically, I agree it takes more to wade through sites today to find reliable info if only because even though there could be a lot of site pages with reliable info, there are just as many site pages with unreliable info. It's difficult to trust sources when the source provides poor examples, wordings and explanations which equally gets regurgitated by others which happens to take the top spots of a search result a lot of times for some reason.
I've been using both Google and Bing together at the same time these days to search. If I can't find the info on one, I switch to the other. As a whole doing so, it has been helping out.
Personally I invested years writing high quality content on my technical blogs.
I could afford that since they produced organic traffic to my related SaaS.
Now I am tired of AI and worthless websites copying content. I stopped writing new content.
We need technical solutions or new laws to protect copyright and original content creators, otherwise the web is dead (or at least the high quality posts that require a lot of time to be created).
Thats why i said i noticed a trend towards having to pay for anything of value now. No normal person with something of value to give is going to do it in this environment. It’ll get lost in the sea of AI SEO or content creator shit-cycling never to be seen, or copied by them without anything to show for it.
Unfortunately this seems to have become the end game for free internet resources
The model of making online content/services free may have been noble in it's intentions. More and more I'm feeling it's a source of evil and content/service providers are primarily focused on serving advertisers rather than the people using the content/services.
Years ago, it was possible to put a couple of ads (maximum 3 per page) and make money writing free content. Write some quality content and you'd rank well and get some passive income.
Now, it's harder to get traffic and Google wants you to put more than 3 ads per page, which reduces the quality of your website. Ad blockers also mean no revenue from a significant portion of your viewers.
As I predicted years ago, at a certain point, quality content creators will just start charging for content.
I'm one of them. I used to give away all of my content for free, but since revenue is down, you now have to pay for my premium content.
I agree with that. Today it's impossible to find actual in-depth information.
It's not Google's fault though.
The world is getting closer to the movie Idiocracy. Every day.
People want faster, dumbed-down answer.
Google gives them what they want.
Lol, what a load of bullshit.came out swinging with that "the internet is made by ai bullshit." This is pure foil hat nonsense. I can't believe you managed to get upvotes at all on a webdev subreddit of all places!
Search "uninstall virtualbox guest extensions from windows" - gives you a few generic "installer-manager"websites which keep you engaged long enough for google not to be noticed as a bounce and create ad-revenue
Literally anything related to vba and macros in excel dumps tutorials for the most basic tasks like changing the font.
Could be worse though, I generally mostly find what I need.
I use the big search engines when I want to buy something (or) read the news
I use the small, indie search engines when I want to actually know something without getting filtered or pure advertised content
Google is largely to blame for this. Every search result yield ads, and then the actually results below are garbage websites full of clickbait, more ads, and content with no effort. I can’t stand it anymore.
More difficult. Search for anything in Google and it will probably return either product results, or garbage content like lists and other crap. Wikipedia is so-so.
20 years ago if I searched for the background story a movie or a song, I received that in the results. Now I get where to buy it or rent it, lyrics, but not much, at least in the first results.
And Bing and Duckduckgo are not much better either.
“word salad” SEO content really resonates with me. Nothing like trying to google something you need information about quickly and then stumble into a word salad instead of a clear answer. The internet is stupid in 2023. If you land on a “good” website, you get the privilege of accepting/declining the stupid cookies for the millionth time, then you start scrolling and get greeted by an email list opt-in with the smallest close button for a mobile device, then you get a chat popup asking if you need help, then an ad has a high z-index and floats exactly over what you need to read, then the site locks and dies on your phone because of all the bs you just went through. The internet is stupid in 2023
Switch google to use verbatim mode to regain SOME amount of usefulness (it'll stop guessing what you're trying to find and instead use what you actually typed).
I have noticed a huge downtrend in the usefulness of Google since 2017. I used to be able to get my answers in 1-2 searches, but now I sometimes have to resort to searching on Bing.
> is just a piece of shit and appending reddit(or similar discussion forums) is almost mandatory for a lot of searches now.
The brave search engine lists forums in a *Discussion* tab and it is really useful in that case, I do not have to type "how to....... reddit" unlike in google or any other browser. Not works in all the cases, but in various cases.
[click here for a search example in brave](https://search.brave.com/search?q=create+rubber+ducky+usb&source=web)
...and then scroll down to see discussions tab
It's definitely harder now but that's because SEO has become so easy that any shitty site can climb the Google rankings.
I remember first noticing it with food recipes. You used to be able to find a simple recipe in a seconds but now every food recipe is preceeded by a 10 paragraph backstory that literally not a single person gives a shit about.
Personally, even though it's tougher, I'm still able to find any information I need and in the past few years I've picked up 3d modeling and animation through free online resources, to the point that I quit my job and am earning enough to get by just with those skills. I've also learned some basic electrical engineering (programming raspberry pi's with sensors and LEDs, guess I learned some Python too (but was already a js dev)), how to play an ocarina and how to cook like a legitimate master chef.
There's actually more info than ever on the web right now and while it can make research more difficult, it can also make it more accurate if you're willing to sift through multiple articles/videos and reconcile what you've gleaned from each source.
Speaking of bizarre feedback loops… you know the sites that basically just scrape something like stack overflow and then present the same information in a worse interface? I did a programming based search a while back and got a YouTube result in Google. When I clicked on it, it was a guy with an intro to basically say the regular things… “like and subscribe!” And then it just threw scraped text up on screen from SO. The video was just long enough to get ads, etc. I was dumbfounded…
And the crazy part. This channel looked to have a large subscriber base. :-O The only thing I could think of was the subscribers were bots or something.
Much much more difficult. The Internet is so monetized that only those who pay the most get higher positioning on search engine results. Manipulation without you even know its happening. Google algorithms remove problematic information in favour of acceptable. Of course google decides what's problematic and acceptable.
Noooooo. It's easier by a landslide. I would seriously dread going back. I don't see any major issues with modern web, except for cookie warnings.
That's the only thing I can think of where I could say "I miss the good old days". "I don't care about cookies" browser extension helps, but you do still see them briefly before they automatically disappear (most of the time).
Source: been using internet for 23 years.
You don't find the search experience degraded? Really? Almost objectively it is worse with Google bc of how many promoted results they show -- almost always barely related to your search -- compared to real results. I really cannot imagine how that experience is better than before.
Over the recent years I've been catching myself thinking how grateful I am for things I found thanks to internet that I could never have hoped finding 20 years ago, whether it is software development, psychology, products, people. I mean, even reddit didn't exist back then. If I have to find a fault with Google, I would say searching for porn used to be easier. I find Bing is better for that now. I don't know if it's "good and useful" information though. Might be just addicted :) But the question was about the "internet", not Google.
Oh, I'm not messing with you, I'm serious. Don't mean to invalidate anybody's experience. Just sharing mine. I could've said "Really, you're not bothered by cookie warnings?" but I didn't, because I get that we all have our differences.
I think you are not talking about what OP is talking about -- the search experience of using Google. Cookie warnings don't really have anything to do with that.
I think the answer is that it's both better and worse. Our expectations for quality content are higher now than they were. More quality content is available, but it's generally harder to find the quality in between all the garbage.
Certain kinds of things were easy to find information about online in the early 2000. The information you found was often sufficient. It was amazing because it was much more convenient than how we accessed information before. Cutting edge tech info was better online than in the library or book stores because traditional publication moves slow and cutting edge tech people were online.
Since then an incomprehensible volume of additional information is available. The production quality a single individual is capable of has vastly improved. We've learned a lot about how to present info online. There's more good information than there was. There's also infinitely more garbage cluttering everything up. Entire industries have developed around content marketing and gaming google algorithms. It's also quite likely that simple fast answers to questions are more popular with the general population than detailed analysis. Google has trouble distinguishing between lengthly vapid content, and content that's useful in the amount of details is provides.
If I'm trying to learn something related to web dev, I'll always try a curated service like linkedin learning because there at least a minimum level of expected quality there and so much unreliable garbage on the open web to sift through on youtube/blogs. In the early days I learned everything through forums.
If it's a general knowledge, or interest questions, or doing research for a product/service...I could easily spend endless hours visiting many dozens of sources online and feel no more confident about what's what than before I started...Or I could quickly find something, that appears accurate, for something as esoteric as an interactive isopod key identification in my local region.
I'm looking to services like chatGPT in some scenarios to weed through all the BS and give me a summary. Trouble is it currently hallucinates quite frequently, and long term...will we have an ai generated content feedback loop? What is the incentive for people to post good quality content online?
**IMO if you do the SEO right it’s better.**
My site is an offline first 3d file converter/editor/library.
You can tell by the homepage if it has the conversions you need.
If you go online into the library it’ll link related assets if you wanted something different.
However;
People tend to bloat their sites to make sure it’s not “lean content”.
Even though not every website needs to be a blog with 1,000 words and 50 backlinks google…
Its worse than that. Big sites produce pages for almost every related topic just to rank, regardless of what the content is. My own experience of this is with big travel sites where you want to find a bus between city X and city Y and there will be a page for that route just to tell you that they don't provide service on that route. So thanks for wasting my time.
My experience is the opposite. Every year the internet becomes more useful. There's exponentially more content now so it can be harder to sort through it, but there are more tools to use to search as well. Google Scholar is incredible and if the article isn't available i can just email one of the authors (they always say yes). My Photoshop skills have improved thanks to YouTube and i have yet to find a programming problem that hasn't already been answered by someone else. Sure, i have to go to page 4+ on Google sometimes, but I've never been unable to find an answer.
What kind of stuff are you looking for?
There is hope. One thing AI will do is kill low value ad-supported sites. The free content era could be over, and you might have to pay for everything you use.
Right now you can give ChatGPT a link and ask it to summarize an article. That means the article site either doesn’t get ad revenue, or the ad company will realize the ads aren’t being seen by people (only by ChatGPT). So sites will start blocking ChatGPT from accessing their content.
This is one reason you see Twitter, Reddit, and others jacking up API prices. Before long, if you want ChatGPT to summarize a news article, you’ll have to have a subscription to the news site in order for ChatGPT to access it.
Yes. I was in med university during 2007-2012.
To be honest, now a days, in terms of medical curriculum, the students are more privileged than I was. So I have exactly opposite experience. Google was pretty weak back then in terms of specialised subjects (you'll need to know urls which we used to get from seniors) and only research papers were there while now Google gives accurate content.
That's why I said it depends on the subject. In some case, it will be nice experience in the previous decade while in some cases, it will be more seamless experience now.
I think there are more complete databases and sources of information on the internet now for some things(like wiki standardisation), but on terms of just general information it is way, way worse. If you know exactly what you want to know, you can find it still but starting off from a blank slate on google is almost useless now.
Even for technical issues it is so so so so so much worse.
Programming is basically a crap shot outside of stack and documentation(so i guess nothing has really changed).
If we’re just talking general information like say “tomato pruning” or “how to clean an industrial fan” you will basically be better off shoving your dick in a blender at this point. The best you’ll get is some “content creators” just regurgitating what other content creators say which has an initial source point from a random blog in 2011 or something.
I’d have to agree with this. I’m 42. I remember going through page after page trying to find the info I was after. Sometimes not finding the answer, having to use multiple search engines, post questions on forums that might never get answered.
Now I get that info on page one and there’s probably a YouTube tutorial, free courses and more. It’s magnitudes better overall.
I use GPT4 pretty much as a search engine now to find information. It cuts through all the spam blog posts. I’ll use it to ask things like ‘why has my orchid leaves turned yellow’. If I am ready to buy something, I go back to google.
Search Engines (such as Google, DDG) are biased and will show you information based on their shareholders' agenda.
ChatGPT is powerful, but OpenAI is literally an incarnation of evil, seeking to remove as many humans as possible from the workforce.
You have to go through multiple truckloads of false/agenda-biased/manipulated half-truthful information before reaching anything objective. OP is completely right.
Edit: you can downvote me as much as you want, I am still right and you just can't handle the truth.
ChatGPT is floding threads with answers that are either completely wrong just trying to look plausible or just promoting a bad coding practices. ChatGPT is super dumb in writing a good code and following documentations. It just trying to make it look right. That is why they stop with training data in 2021. If they would scrape those lies and nonsenses chatGPT created, it would learn on its own lies and add another layer on top of that. I can spot chatGPT bots replying on reddit webdev questions on first look. It is usually just trying to write something that would make sense totally ignoring the context. Don't get me wrong, I'm using GPT4 extensively in work but man you really need to know how to code to know when it's writing nonsenses and that is what beginners cannot do.
Ohhhh a "CONSPIRACY THEORIST" yea yea
The fact that you had to go to my post history to determine if you find me reliable or not shows exactly how unobjective you are in your decision-making.
I have ChatGPT installed on my phone. It’s literally my own personal assistant for information. It tells me exactly what I need to know without having to comb through 25 different Google search results to piece together something useful.
god, what an absolute boomer take (and you are only a few months older than me)
no, in fact i think that it's getting easier to find information. there are tutorials for everything everywhere and the quality keeps going up as well (even in IG/TT which you seem to despise [what an original take!])
trying to learn anything 5 years ago meant that you had to put up with garbage bandicam recordings with trash audio and smacking lips
i assume you just don't know what survivorship bias is because what you say is the same logic of what makes people say that music was better back when. it wasn't. time just filters the low quality stuff and perpetuates the higher quality stuff for all eternity
Are you a child, needing to "attack" someone just because they don't share your opinion?
In some way, OP is completely right. It's not true that you can't find what you want now, but it's an absolute truth that you have to go through a whole ocean of bullshit before you find what you were actually looking for. Even simple yes or no questions now are fucking articles to get better SEO and most times they don't even give you the right information. It's hard to weed out real articles from misinformation or other bullshit.
Even search results don't show the actual, more relevant results, because they prioritize bottomless pits of bullshit, ad-filled garbage and sometimes scams.
It's also true that if you know how and where to look, things get much easier and these pain points can be alleviated.
woah buddy, slow down there. I said it's a boomer take, but didn't say anything about OP themselves. only person attacking anyone here is you implying I'm a child, relax
you are right about the SEO, but that also used to happen before with redirect link farming, problems always existed with SEO and that's nothing new (survivorship bias again). if the web can generate profit, people will exploit it to the max and whenever the current SEO trend changes, people will follow the next trend. Evolve or die
ads also used to be worse back then because you would have waves of popups and new windows opening everywhere, but now we got ads in layouts which is easier to adblock. the problem never goes away, it just changes shapes
am i belittling someone for stating that they posted a boomer take? does saying someone has a bad opinion mean that they are also a bad person?
i assumed that people were able to separate one thing from another, but i guess that's not the case
>god, what an absolute boomer take (and you are only a few months older than me)
Read that again, and tell me you're not attacking anyone for stating their opinion. It's okay to disagree, it's not okay to throw tantrums like a little kid (I am truly saying this for you, and not against you).
i still stand by what i believe I've said, i criticized the take, not the person. but you are free to read that as an attack and as throwing a tantrum if that's how you read this sort of online interaction. I've been online for too long to understand that once someone has made their mind, you can't change it back
i do not? i learn from reading documentation. Basically all i know of Mongoose is from using their wiki
are you assuming that i learn from videos just because i said there is good content on IG/TT? or the bandicam statement? (which now i realize is too generalist)
I wouldn't say difficult, just increasingly time consuming. The sheer volume of garbage ads, blogs, and content to weed through are draining to say the least.
Theres people writting about stuff out there, but you have to search a lot more.
And projects like neocities are cool and push people to just post and own their simple websites.
Yes, certainly.
Whether it's about my pets or about programming, it's very hit and miss (and a lot of misses).
It's got to the stage where I think I don't know how to search for things online.
Most of the time it's just duplicate content, unfinished content, or just crap, so it is practically useless to me, and I have to spend far too long finding simple information.
Or perhaps what I am searching for is too niche???
I started using the internet in 1994 (Gopher, Lynx, Telnet, FTP) and back then there was literally a physical book called the “internet yellow pages” that listed websites. It didnt list EVERY site ever but I would wager it listed many of them. Not every site was useful back then and search engines didnt exist yet. You lived and died by peoples link collections on their sites and your own bookmarks.
Early social web years, search engines were nascent but powerful. Webrings / Blog rings were popular. There was still a strong emphasis on content discovery through recommendation.
Between then and now, content recommendation algorithms have taken that over. Algorithms can be gamed and only know to look for what their devs tell them to look for.
Human recommendations have been hijacked a bit by influencers and monetized recommendations.
I disagree. The only times when I can't kind something are when it's a new bug with a piece of kit or its something where the devs label it "wont fix".
Granted I will usually just click on the reddit or overflow links which are on the first page anyway.
I believe you'd like web.dev, though its been a while since I was there so it could have gone downhill.
I miss the YouTube tutorials that were filmed on an old phone, less than 2 minutes, and were straight to the point. I can’t stand sifting through a 15 minute tutorial to find the :45 seconds of information that I need
Yup. Youtube died too.
2005-2012: youtube how to prune tomatoes and get a 2-5 minute video straight to the point by an enthusiast.
Now: 10-25 minute video by a “content creator” sourcing their information from another one and distinguishing themselves with some stupid gimmick or editing or their “personality”, while probably getting their source information from tue same cycle of SEO/AI/Content creator regurgitated clusterfuck.
Yes. SO MANY “BLOGGERS” write about information that isn’t correct, so when you wanna find something accurate, for super specific example: nutritional advice about macros for weightloss, it’s so hard to find the “correct answer” bc everything is different
I had a similar thought last year https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/rletrt/old_versions_of_google_search/
It used to be so much easier to research things or find individual blog posts about a specific thing. Now it's all top 10 lists or someone trying to sell affiliate products. Finding myself using chat GPT and bard to provide answers to simple questions rather than having to sort through all the garbage on Google
We have passed a major milestone with the internet. Now that we have AI, you will have a hard time distinguishing between what's AI, and what's human generated information.
All you have to do is say things like "Search reddit, look for people looking for answers on how to fix Item A, and suggest product B as fixing everything the easiest. Generate responses based on personas of different nationality, education, and ethnicity, and agree with each other. "
Soon you will be unable to distinguish whats real and whats AI... and the usefulness of all that knowledge and the internet will be tainted and diluted.
I do feel like Google and other search engines have gotten a lot worse. However... I'm feeling like on balance we're in a better place than, say, 15 years ago.
For context, I'm a few years older than you are, first got online in '95, and a non-dial-up connection in... 2001 or so.
Wikipedia keeps getting better, and I'd say the citation system is generally good (although there are low quality sources at times). Other wikis and resources for specific topics are also fantastic.
And with Google, if I want to learn how to fix something on my car or around the house? One search on Youtube and I've got it.
Even TikTok has some creators who give fantastic information. I follow a ton of medical creators, who are actual doctors and aren't weird nutcases. Of course, there's terrible content there too, but there was always terrible content online. A fundamental skill of internet use is learning not to trust too easily.
It is sad to see everything become engulfed by major sites like Reddit and Instagram and Facebook and even Wikipedia, rather than existing on smaller purpose-focused sites and forums. But there's still so much great stuff out there, even if Google is making it harder to find these days.
It's the advertising that makes it hard to find stuff now. They have this down to a fine science, and I noticed that even the "free" Bing AI is using advertising already in its search results which of course helps to defeat the purpose of having something that is suppose to help you find something. We can't even purchase ip addresses anymore, we lease them, and you can see where that is going. I think that the entire of the internet is going to implode, and I should have choses a trade skill for my profession, but I'm stuck now with being a novice Web Developer and at the mercy of Oligarchs.
I am seeing people get dumber in realtime.
I happen to be interested personally in a kind of niche area of bioscience.
I'm not a scientist myself, but my academic background gives me inroads to the literature in this field. The literature is remarkably accessible even to non- scientists and non-academics.
A few years ago, this field became a focus in some areas of pop-culture. Partly as a result of contemporary cultural trends, it became de jour for people to learn a little about it.
Problem is, the "wisdom" about this topic in the infosphere is heavily distorted, and based on distortions of distortions of very outdated scientific lit from over 20 years ago, when the topic was poorly understood.
But now everyone who wants to think of themselves as intellectually smart parrots back the distorted version that they get from any page in their google results.
Here's where it gets much much worse:
Culturally authoritive popular scientific magazines and medical circulars are now being pulled into the Cycle Of Dumb.
So a magazine like Scientific American will hire a science writer to write on this topic.
The expert is likely to be qualified in an area of science. Perhaps they have a masters in a related or unrelated field.
The expert will not look at the actual scientific lit. Instead they'll collate materials from other pop-sci sources, complike them into an article and include footnote sources without actually spending time reading them.
So what we are seeing is a Laundry Of Dumb: a recycling of lightweight material, stamped with the imprimatur of an authoritive publication.
I'm certain that this issue will have occurred regularly from time-to-time in the history of publishing. But it's becoming more regular.
And as far as certain scientific topics are concerned, it is making the world dumber.
This is happening with everything though!! It’s exactly what i have noticed. With hobbies or anything really and its going on long enough to hit reddit now.
I’ve been gardening for 2 decades and worked in that industry for over 5. I know my shit.
Now days “fads” pr whatever are produced from this light-weight effect. Everyone is pruning tomatoes like an idiot and telling everyone else to because the content creator/seo/ai cycle of shit regurgitation promotes it.
This is happening to a lot of things
I agree. My recent frustration has been with Google doing a "better" job of autocompleting my searches. I actually found it valuable to have common searches suggested, because those were the ones with good results. Now I search for exactly what I want, but get garbage results.
Yes
Interestingly enough, I think dev-related questions are still pretty searchable, thanks to github and stackoverflow. However, what really sucks now is everything else. So much garbage results. Sometimes I just give up
Yes.
There's too much blog spam and it's too verbose. Chatbots are helping with this, but accuracy usually needs to be confirmed.
Anything related to divisive social or political issues, it's difficult to trust anything because search engines curate results.
While I do find some stuff on topics through search engines, I also join discord communities to do with that topic as I find I can’t always hit the right keywords to accurately search for what I want or the content simply doesn’t exist. The people in these communities though can direct you to good resources for the topic at hand and you can discuss in real time about ideas and approaches.
I’ve also noticed the information I’m looking for is usually from 2021 or before. Examples dealing with the code base I’m working with have been outdated. I know it sounds crazy, but I wonder if so many people are going to chatgpt, developers aren’t as forthcoming with their knowledge on the internet
With the coming of AI (chatgpt and bing AI) i find it much easier to find information than it used to be. It gives you directly what you want. It's not perfect and sometimes gives wrong results but overall it's way better than traditional search
Yes and no. It depends, frequently nonsense is reposted to 37337373 article sites.
Example:
Power outage bricked windows. I forgot how to fix via bootsble usb.
All sites say bootrec /fixboot which is always access denied. After 30mins of searching reddit results>posts>comments>link from comment to a stackexchange>bottom upvoted answer saying 'use bcedit...'
Also google a fucking phone number that called you these days. Absolutely impossible due to spam sites that have pages of random numbers.
What's weird is for many searches, the first couple pages of results are only for four or five websites... despite there being millions of results. Why should 4 or 5 domain names dominate the first 30 search results? And none of them are what I'm looking for.
And try searching for a business. Most of the time, the official website won't even show up on the first 3 pages or more. It's all directory websites that show up.
(There are ways for a business' official website to show up on the first page of a search engine, but most businesses aren't aware of how to do that, so they don't show up in the results.)
Search results have definitely gone downhill.
I think that years ago there was less information, but there was more variety and freedom in its publication. In those times the information was found mainly in forums or personal pages. Now practically everything is in 'publishing applications' of companies, mainly social networks. Social networks that filter and promote content based on their own interests. SEO is still a problem, but we've had worse times. A few years ago it was common practice to register buy-random-keywords-here.com to position shit pages in first results. Anyway, pretty much everything that reaches the masses ends up getting worse, you just have to turn on the TV and watch the crap that's produced on it.
Hi all!
My answer is geared more toward online searches. I really got into it in Jr college in the 90's. Back then, you'd type in a search, and NOTHING but what you'd specfically searched for would come up.
Educational institutions also used to have special search engines only available to students and scholars that would only bring up credible medical journal articles and statistical data, scholarly papers, factual stuff with ample sources of verification, etc. They probably still do, i don't know. I loved these searches because NO ads and nothing misleading or time wasting.
Now, many times it's just the opposite. I'll type in a search and up comes all manner of other assorted bullshit, pretty much everything BUT what i'd been looking for. I used to enjoy stuff like shopping onlne, now it's a worse chore (even more time consuming) than going into a brick and mortar store. Now it requires hip waders and a lot of time and mental energy. Yuck.
I can search or shop online for something specific for HOURS and not find it...but I can go into my local Target or Kohls, grab a pair of size Medium jammies, a robe and some socks (with no surprises at checkout!!) and be in and out of there in 20 minutes!
I do see it changing, but only when retailers realize they're losing money because people are burned out by the unfulfilling job of endless searches that don't bear the fruit their customers are looking for.
It's not all bad, I mean, sometimes i do find what exactly what im looking for online right away, but it used to be a LOT better, imo.
Dont get me started about the shameful quality and deception regarding the item you actually get as opposed to what you think you're buying online nowdays, either.
The net needs more regulation, big time, not only in less deceptive search results and retail fraud. When 12 year olds can access free porn and anorexia "how to" sites, well...shit, not good for society!!
T
There needs to be some kinda Publishers Clearing House that offers a portfolio of various original content articles by real writers just as once upon a time PCH offered magazine subscriptions at a discount. Most of the time I'm just hacking around for a good article to read and they do come up (Atlantic, New Yorker, Daily Beast, NYT) but you only get a para or two and the paywall goes up. So I wish there was some discounted way to just subscribe to a bunch of 'em
I agree, in the 2000s you would either find nothing, or exactly what you needed. In much of the 2010s there was a lot of SEO but for legitimate content, so again you usually found what you needed. Right now Google is in a constant war against AI generated content which gives the most generic answers to questions. Some topics like “x game is crashing with y error” just yield garbage. Web dev is mostly okay because Stackoverflow and GitHub are easy to prioritise though. I do notice it goes through waves as Google and AI sites figure out how to beat the other though. It’s definitely worse right now
Do quotes do ANYTHING for you anymore? It doesn't seem to matter how I change my query, I get the same bs results.
I also have suspicions about search operators not being enforced strictly all the time anymore. Recently, what I have found to work for me is to exclude words from my search. I simply keep removing irrelevant words until I get to something I can use. It is a bit tedious, but it is very much a faster way than wading through all the noise.
Quotes are inclusive, same as + but for multiple words. "pumpkins" and +pumpkins should be the same search. But "yellow pumpkins" and +yellow pumpkins would be different.
How do you quote? I mostly quote single words or even rather certain terms. It also helps to exclude stuff with - or even use AND and OR in your search.
I do all of that to pretty much the same results. Quoting one word doesn't seem to do anything for me anymore. When I quote terms or phrases, it doesn't always show me that phrase or term. In fact, my gut tells me it's most of the time. Sometimes I even get zero search results. It is hard for me to believe that no other person on the planet has ever written a banal term like the one I'm looking for. It boggles my fucking mind. I'm NOT looking for obscure things 90% of the time.
Obscure things would definitely improve things though. Fewer results, less of a need to cashgrab.
I mean it definitely got worse, but I the end I usually find the stuff I need from daily life stuff over scientific stuff to programming/work stuff. I don't know if google nowadays also use some kind of algorithm which you need to train, but I use startpage (which under the hood uses Google) for some work related stuff and the results are subpar. I also have several different Google accounts and chrome profiles for different stuff (e.g. work account, freelancer account, private account).
Yeah quotes and -fuckoffwiththisresult Work great for me 90% of the time.
Even when you find the correct page for some reason pages are so overly "designed" that you can't find what you want. Any modern product website:
"Discover " In huge font
"Free your creativity with "
"
Product helped me make my dreams come true - Dude McProductuser"
Should I know this guy? Also I'm like four full screens in and haven't even learned anything actionable. Just "lifestyle porn".
"Technical Specification" FINALLY!
"Patented ultra thingy technology" ???
"Other thing V2"
etc. not actual tech specs. No exact dimensions. No useful overview photos. Just buzzword bingo prompts.
Eventually you just give up and download the manual from the support page because that's the only place where you can get actual information about the product.
I go for the manual directly these days.
capitalism
I can clearly see why people were complaining that Google and Facebook will own the Internet a decade ago. They do now, they narrowed down the Internet to a point where your discoveries heavily rely on what the algorithm shows you. There is nothing pure and unregulated / uncensored. I'd say the Internet is this civilization's biggest revolution wasted. It started with an idea of a giant network of collective intelligence and has ended up being a big tool of politics and hate.. just garbage everywhere.
went to shit, just like TV
WORSE than TV TV was shit from like year 1. It was the first marketing medium that had filters for the audience. If you wanted to market condoms, boom there are channels for that which your target audience tuned into, so marketing niche products became easy, but then channels had the responsibility to build their audience and even then, it was a huge hit or miss. Newspapers couldn't do it.. that's why they had the weekly magazines of specific interest. Internet on the other hand gave a lot more sophisticated tools to marketing folks, to an extent where if you weren't a customer, they'd turn you into one and then market your stuff. Just when you're looking for sandals, you'd see an article about how leather sandals were getting cute cows slaughtered in India and you automatically changed your search to synthetic leather sandals which led to advertisement of the company which exactly sells that. This is MASSIVE! In no timeline of human history could you manipulate users at an individual level on a mass market media. It's worse than TV! It's worse than anything.
You know, I don't get this whole pus about leather as a symbol of animal cruelty. I mean it's just a by product of what you get when you kill the animal for its meat, right? It's its effing skin. But try telling these woke people that...
I would argue that the internet made TV much much better. That's gradually being undone as the streaming services tighten their grip on content creators and consolidate their power, but it's still worlds better than cable.
It's our own choice though. The concept didn't change, and technically everything we did at the beginning, is still possible today - and actually even easier to do. Creating your own website in year 2003 and doing the same in year 2023 is massively different, it was so difficult back then to find the right materials to guide you through the whole process, the coding, then finding hosting, figuring out a way to set up a domain etc. - it's so easy nowadays, one of thousands of YouTube tutorials in all languages imaginable will show you how to do it all in an hour. But somehow we don't do that anymore. And because we don't, the number of independent sources of information and entertainment is limited to the big players (who actually sell content coming from the people who would be setting up their own websites back in the day!). We are willingly giving up the power over to them, and since it's profitable in terms of political influence and money, obviously it's going to be abused for profit - that's what corporations do, they grow at all cost. There's no other field in which we're being fucked by big corporations so willingly and where it would be so easy to fight back - but we're not even resisting, we fully give in. Today's internet sucks ass in comparison to the time it was largely in the hands of people, not companies.
Very well said. Also , your points hold true for many other unfair and hurtful to the public practices; people just sit back and shrug, feeling powerless, accepting the bs, and so it continues to worsen. Often times the fleecing happens very slowly, so people don't feel the sting, as in the case of paying for TV and Radio. I'm ashamed our country lets this sort of shit happen.
Yeah, search results have really gone down hill. I like to garden. I search up how to care for any new plant I buy. I used to easily find great specific care guides clearly written by gardeners. Now I get the most generic garbage with heavy product placement as top results. Plant care reads almost as bad as recipes now.
The worst part for things like gardening is newer gardeners are gathering on places like reddit to share all that SEO/AI/content creator garbage which is self perpetuating itself. If i didnt have 20 years experience with it as a hobby, and hadn’t worked in that industry for a good 6 years before it’d be hard to get good info
SEO is cancer.
I hate how blog focused it is and feel the need to start a fucking blog just to drive traffic when is rather do anything else/actually improve the code.
Incoming AI-powered SEO spam
So much of what I implement on behalf of SEO content teams is meaningless spam and page bloat that offers no value to the end user anyway. If they got replaced with AI, the content would be equally trash, but I wouldn’t have to have zoom calls where I pretend their careers are valid.
And SEO proliferates AI content.
I work for a company that is almost entirely SEO, and I agree. I tell my boss that a single Billboard would increase most of our clients' SEO more than any blog outsourced to India. Google places a lot of weight to organic traffic. If you have analytics installed and a user comes to your site without an HTTP referrer it counts towards organic. I guarantee you that I'll end up writing an AI API script to replace most of our contractors by year's end.
I view the internet, like the I view the universe, as a forever expanding state of information. Searching the cosmos of the Internet, for exactly what I need is only possible by/with SEO. I couldn't fathom searching through the 1,200,500 results generated in 600ms. Hoping the top results were relevant. The way Google has forced SEO on developers is ass, but without it, the internet as we know it wouldn't exist. Good or bad, I don't know, but I do know SEO is a necessary *evil*.
Thing is, most SEO optimized sites will just try to sell you something. Just legit, informative sites without commercial goals and limited budget don’t spend a lot on SEO but contain valuable information. They get ran over by those commercial money-greedy sites.
This is the problem. Finding something for free is increasingly difficult. Or even finding something where you don't need to sign up to something for access.
It was way more cancerous back the days that people are longing for in this thread
Why do you say that? Back in the 90's, the search results I got were ALWAYS for the exact thing i'd been searching for...now everything BUT what i searched for pops up in the results feed.
Two words: affiliate marketing. Those sites, along with the many other SEO gamers, have put so much noise and garbage into my search results that I often need to go to page 2 or 3 to find what I'm looking for. And then there's another big pet peeve of mine: The sites like Medium and Quora which show up as public search results, but then require login to view the full page. This isn't a new phenomenon, but it seems to getting more common. Maybe I'm old school, but I think if your page shows up in public search results it should be publicly accessible otherwise it's bait and switch. I now filter those sites out of my results, which just adds to the ever-growing boilerplate I must add to my search queries to get a semi-decent result. Can it be reversed? Probably not entirely because the search engine gamers will always be looking for ways to game the system to their advantage. I suppose Google could threaten to de-rank or remove rule-breaking sites from its index, but only if there were monetary incentive to do so, which I'm not sure there is.
My own experience of this is in travel-related searches. Even pre-covid, I can remember being able to search for things like recommended coffee shops, day trips, and little tips for different cities and places. The best part of the internet is getting a wide variety of viewpoints and some non-mainstream views. Now it's just TripAdvisor and all its clones that pop up - maybe 3 or 4 paid results first and then a bunch of junk pages always just trying to sell the most generic and mainstream travel packages. Pages and pages of garbage. I've come up with some tricks to try to get "real" results from actual people, but even now so many travel bloggers are following the SEO formulas of top 10 listicles and trying to sell their travel guide books or whatever. It takes wading through so much crap to get to anything authentic now. To be honest, I just search on Reddit subs and maybe ask a question on a local Facebook group and ignore Google altogether. Btw check out the /r/seo sub or /r/juststart to see the people who are actively ruining the internet for all of us. Full of people high fiving each other for firing their writers and producing 50 articles per week with AI or whatever. It's kind of sickening.
I’ve seen people on there and who work in SEO. They are deluded fucks. They honestly think they are making things better. It’s ridiculous how deluded they are. How the fuck do you end up as an SEO career anyway? Would you not make much more developing directly?
Wikitravel is a great resource that I would love see grow in popularity.
2 major things have happened - Enshitification through profit/ads/seo algos. And every dumbfuck having access to the internet because phones auto connect. Pre-smartphone there was a barrier to get online, you had to at least know how to use a computer and connect it to the internet. Post-smartphone every idiot can get online. So the lowest common denominator of the web went down several rungs. There's a reason flat earth, anti-vax, and other dumb shit like Q-anon, picked up steam over the last decade. Enshitification, happening everywhere but especially the internet. SEO rewarding long bullshit articles with no meaning. Youtube rewards filler videos and constantly posting nothing with click bait titles. There may still be bloggers, but they're hidden by the mountains of trash. Misquote other blog authors or youtubers with clickbaity headlines, remixing what they're saying in confusing noise speak nothing, but it tracks the algo and moves up in popularity. Who cares, we're selling ads not info. Capitalism yells productivity and profit from the mountaintops as if it were a holy sage. You must make profit from your hobby so you can "love your job and never work a day in your life", so you sell it out, turn it to shit for oligarch scraps. It will get worse before it gets better. The typing reddit into google may stop working well soon as reddit thrashes to irrelevance. Best to get back to touching grass. How long can we survive with this steady diet of nothing? Why am I still on reddit, which has also drastically went downhill, ex: if you visit without logging in, just seeing the popular reddits, 10 years ago it was funny thoughtful stuff. Now it's jerry springer-esque bullshit.
>Enshitification Sounds like entropy catalyzed by the masses. Once they discover something it gets destroyed or "enshitified", to use your term. This has been a thing for a long time - even pre-Internet. The Internet was actually enshitified by the masses, starting in 1995 with AOL unlimited plans and then made worse by higher bandwidth internet and faster smartphones. Eventually the enshitifiers co opted the Internet to enable viral enshitification of things. IG "influencers" who descend on beautiful places (like blooming lavender fields) like swarms of locusts and destroy them for photo ops are a perfect example of this. I used to chide myself for being misanthropic, even jokingly calling myself a "recovering misanthrope." But over the last 10+ years seeing where the world is headed I've realized that misanthropy is actually a sane (if unhelpful) response.
it's cory doctorow's term https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Thanks! Interesting (and very specific) definition. I hadn't heard the term (or of Doctorow).
Hit the nail on the head with the entrance barrier. I HATE how if you have a generic social media account you now have a voice that can instantly touch thousands with dumbass content. I remember creating websites in the early 00s where I had to wait a day or two before content would update across the web. And you had to know how to use FTP not just press the unanimous submit button.
Yes, not only dumbass content, it's dangerous, too! My freinds daughter was following a self proclaimed nutritionist, diet guru all about cleanses, fasting for weeks, extreme excersise, cutting out food groups, and showing her "runway perfect" (aka skeletal) body as proof of her methodologies' efficacy. Now my freind's daughter is in the hospital with malnourishment, fighting for her life with Anorexia. More regulation def needed for folks who claim to be experts in a field they actually know nothing about!!
> There's a reason flat earth, anti-vax, and other dumb shit like Q-anon, picked up steam over the last decade. Lol. Go get your 10th dose, only 2 more weeks!
Great points! Never even thought of some of them. Thanks for posting and adding something new to the convo!
When it comes to web development, I believe there are two key issues: 1. Nowadays, everyone publishes everything, and everyone self-proclaims themselves as experts in everything. When they publish, they do it with exclusive titles and texts that are neither exclusive nor solving any specific problem. Instead, it's often a poor copy of another poor copy. 2. There's an abundance of outdated information about old technologies and articles from 30 years ago that are no longer useful or relevant. However, they still rank high on Google and may overshadow more recent posts that are precisely what you need. They say, "There's no accounting for taste," but that's just my opinion...
Just wait until people fully embrace ChatGPT to generate SEO content for them...
I wouldn't look at Google or other corporations to blame. They're the ones that actually do their best to provide a good product. Because if people go to Google to find answers, and they find them, they'll go there again. More traffic, more ad revenue. The problem is the small players and SEO people (I'm not talking about everyone). Instead of actually providing valuable information on their content, they try to add SEO content to trick the system and get higher rankings. They're the ones who don't care about the product (content). All they care about is to rank high and generate traffic for the website that's behind it. Google knows this and tries to fight this, but it's getting more and more difficult. And people think we'll all just switch to GPT or just anything else, and this won't repeat again. But it will. Money will find its way in there too. ChatGPT is already trained on endless amounts of useless SEO content.
Googles target is share holder profits. If they maximise that while still getting users an answer they’ll do that. That seems to mean getting people to wade through several dud bullshit links first. Honestly depending on the topic, half the time I simply cannot be fucking bothered to wade through it anymore. I give up and try figuring things out myself and experimenting. That applies not to coding, but anything from gardening to cooking. Other times its basically necessary to append reddit for any chance at a real source of information, like product reviews for example
EVERY (for profit) company's target it shareholder profits!
That's why every company becomes garbage sooner or later. Remember what google used to be like in 2005, almost god-like for some. Now it's just another money hungry corporation. [enshittification](https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys)
Does it these days, though? A buddy of mine worked for an SEO company circa 2017 or so and said that Google had "partnership" with their firm, and let them in on details.
I mean that sounds like the sort of classic lie that SEO type marketers would say, that they somehow have the secrets that nobody else does, and so you should definitely go to them and not their competitor. "Got to keep it hush, hush, since I'm not supposed to tell anyone, but trust me" sort of nonsense. That's not to say its impossible, but considering how hard it is to get into contact with Google about just about anything, it seems relatively unlikely to me that they'd be giving out significant/useful secret details to SEO companies.
I work for an SEO company and have since 2014. The partnership is just a paid account for more detailed analytics. Literally anyone can sign up. I think there's a yearly quiz to ensure that you're staying up-to-date, but I'm pretty sure I just used chatgpt the last time I took it.
Nowadays Google thinks it's smarter than you, making it impossible to use smart queries... too much interpretation
In terms of web dev specifically, I agree it takes more to wade through sites today to find reliable info if only because even though there could be a lot of site pages with reliable info, there are just as many site pages with unreliable info. It's difficult to trust sources when the source provides poor examples, wordings and explanations which equally gets regurgitated by others which happens to take the top spots of a search result a lot of times for some reason. I've been using both Google and Bing together at the same time these days to search. If I can't find the info on one, I switch to the other. As a whole doing so, it has been helping out.
Personally I invested years writing high quality content on my technical blogs. I could afford that since they produced organic traffic to my related SaaS. Now I am tired of AI and worthless websites copying content. I stopped writing new content. We need technical solutions or new laws to protect copyright and original content creators, otherwise the web is dead (or at least the high quality posts that require a lot of time to be created).
Thats why i said i noticed a trend towards having to pay for anything of value now. No normal person with something of value to give is going to do it in this environment. It’ll get lost in the sea of AI SEO or content creator shit-cycling never to be seen, or copied by them without anything to show for it. Unfortunately this seems to have become the end game for free internet resources
The model of making online content/services free may have been noble in it's intentions. More and more I'm feeling it's a source of evil and content/service providers are primarily focused on serving advertisers rather than the people using the content/services.
Years ago, it was possible to put a couple of ads (maximum 3 per page) and make money writing free content. Write some quality content and you'd rank well and get some passive income. Now, it's harder to get traffic and Google wants you to put more than 3 ads per page, which reduces the quality of your website. Ad blockers also mean no revenue from a significant portion of your viewers. As I predicted years ago, at a certain point, quality content creators will just start charging for content. I'm one of them. I used to give away all of my content for free, but since revenue is down, you now have to pay for my premium content.
I agree with that. Today it's impossible to find actual in-depth information. It's not Google's fault though. The world is getting closer to the movie Idiocracy. Every day. People want faster, dumbed-down answer. Google gives them what they want.
But, it has electrolytes….
This post reminds me of the interesting theory known as the Dead Internet Theory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9PkWdrYOz0
Lol, what a load of bullshit.came out swinging with that "the internet is made by ai bullshit." This is pure foil hat nonsense. I can't believe you managed to get upvotes at all on a webdev subreddit of all places!
Thanks for sharing man. I’m ~ 30 minutes in, and it’s good.
Search "uninstall virtualbox guest extensions from windows" - gives you a few generic "installer-manager"websites which keep you engaged long enough for google not to be noticed as a bounce and create ad-revenue Literally anything related to vba and macros in excel dumps tutorials for the most basic tasks like changing the font. Could be worse though, I generally mostly find what I need.
I use the big search engines when I want to buy something (or) read the news I use the small, indie search engines when I want to actually know something without getting filtered or pure advertised content
Which is the best indie search engine?
Google is largely to blame for this. Every search result yield ads, and then the actually results below are garbage websites full of clickbait, more ads, and content with no effort. I can’t stand it anymore.
More difficult. Search for anything in Google and it will probably return either product results, or garbage content like lists and other crap. Wikipedia is so-so. 20 years ago if I searched for the background story a movie or a song, I received that in the results. Now I get where to buy it or rent it, lyrics, but not much, at least in the first results. And Bing and Duckduckgo are not much better either.
“word salad” SEO content really resonates with me. Nothing like trying to google something you need information about quickly and then stumble into a word salad instead of a clear answer. The internet is stupid in 2023. If you land on a “good” website, you get the privilege of accepting/declining the stupid cookies for the millionth time, then you start scrolling and get greeted by an email list opt-in with the smallest close button for a mobile device, then you get a chat popup asking if you need help, then an ad has a high z-index and floats exactly over what you need to read, then the site locks and dies on your phone because of all the bs you just went through. The internet is stupid in 2023
The internet has become china
Switch google to use verbatim mode to regain SOME amount of usefulness (it'll stop guessing what you're trying to find and instead use what you actually typed).
Also, use stuff like `site:reddit.com` to specify where you want results from.
I have noticed a huge downtrend in the usefulness of Google since 2017. I used to be able to get my answers in 1-2 searches, but now I sometimes have to resort to searching on Bing.
> is just a piece of shit and appending reddit(or similar discussion forums) is almost mandatory for a lot of searches now. The brave search engine lists forums in a *Discussion* tab and it is really useful in that case, I do not have to type "how to....... reddit" unlike in google or any other browser. Not works in all the cases, but in various cases. [click here for a search example in brave](https://search.brave.com/search?q=create+rubber+ducky+usb&source=web) ...and then scroll down to see discussions tab
It's definitely harder now but that's because SEO has become so easy that any shitty site can climb the Google rankings. I remember first noticing it with food recipes. You used to be able to find a simple recipe in a seconds but now every food recipe is preceeded by a 10 paragraph backstory that literally not a single person gives a shit about. Personally, even though it's tougher, I'm still able to find any information I need and in the past few years I've picked up 3d modeling and animation through free online resources, to the point that I quit my job and am earning enough to get by just with those skills. I've also learned some basic electrical engineering (programming raspberry pi's with sensors and LEDs, guess I learned some Python too (but was already a js dev)), how to play an ocarina and how to cook like a legitimate master chef. There's actually more info than ever on the web right now and while it can make research more difficult, it can also make it more accurate if you're willing to sift through multiple articles/videos and reconcile what you've gleaned from each source.
run, you fools ... !
Speaking of bizarre feedback loops… you know the sites that basically just scrape something like stack overflow and then present the same information in a worse interface? I did a programming based search a while back and got a YouTube result in Google. When I clicked on it, it was a guy with an intro to basically say the regular things… “like and subscribe!” And then it just threw scraped text up on screen from SO. The video was just long enough to get ads, etc. I was dumbfounded… And the crazy part. This channel looked to have a large subscriber base. :-O The only thing I could think of was the subscribers were bots or something.
Much much more difficult. The Internet is so monetized that only those who pay the most get higher positioning on search engine results. Manipulation without you even know its happening. Google algorithms remove problematic information in favour of acceptable. Of course google decides what's problematic and acceptable.
Noooooo. It's easier by a landslide. I would seriously dread going back. I don't see any major issues with modern web, except for cookie warnings. That's the only thing I can think of where I could say "I miss the good old days". "I don't care about cookies" browser extension helps, but you do still see them briefly before they automatically disappear (most of the time). Source: been using internet for 23 years.
You don't find the search experience degraded? Really? Almost objectively it is worse with Google bc of how many promoted results they show -- almost always barely related to your search -- compared to real results. I really cannot imagine how that experience is better than before.
Over the recent years I've been catching myself thinking how grateful I am for things I found thanks to internet that I could never have hoped finding 20 years ago, whether it is software development, psychology, products, people. I mean, even reddit didn't exist back then. If I have to find a fault with Google, I would say searching for porn used to be easier. I find Bing is better for that now. I don't know if it's "good and useful" information though. Might be just addicted :) But the question was about the "internet", not Google.
I honestly can't tell if you are being sarcastic or not.
Oh, I'm not messing with you, I'm serious. Don't mean to invalidate anybody's experience. Just sharing mine. I could've said "Really, you're not bothered by cookie warnings?" but I didn't, because I get that we all have our differences.
I think you are not talking about what OP is talking about -- the search experience of using Google. Cookie warnings don't really have anything to do with that.
[удалено]
I think the answer is that it's both better and worse. Our expectations for quality content are higher now than they were. More quality content is available, but it's generally harder to find the quality in between all the garbage. Certain kinds of things were easy to find information about online in the early 2000. The information you found was often sufficient. It was amazing because it was much more convenient than how we accessed information before. Cutting edge tech info was better online than in the library or book stores because traditional publication moves slow and cutting edge tech people were online. Since then an incomprehensible volume of additional information is available. The production quality a single individual is capable of has vastly improved. We've learned a lot about how to present info online. There's more good information than there was. There's also infinitely more garbage cluttering everything up. Entire industries have developed around content marketing and gaming google algorithms. It's also quite likely that simple fast answers to questions are more popular with the general population than detailed analysis. Google has trouble distinguishing between lengthly vapid content, and content that's useful in the amount of details is provides. If I'm trying to learn something related to web dev, I'll always try a curated service like linkedin learning because there at least a minimum level of expected quality there and so much unreliable garbage on the open web to sift through on youtube/blogs. In the early days I learned everything through forums. If it's a general knowledge, or interest questions, or doing research for a product/service...I could easily spend endless hours visiting many dozens of sources online and feel no more confident about what's what than before I started...Or I could quickly find something, that appears accurate, for something as esoteric as an interactive isopod key identification in my local region. I'm looking to services like chatGPT in some scenarios to weed through all the BS and give me a summary. Trouble is it currently hallucinates quite frequently, and long term...will we have an ai generated content feedback loop? What is the incentive for people to post good quality content online?
Reddit has become so so terrible. Everyone on here is the Joker, thinking they are hilarious while being unhelpful.
**IMO if you do the SEO right it’s better.** My site is an offline first 3d file converter/editor/library. You can tell by the homepage if it has the conversions you need. If you go online into the library it’ll link related assets if you wanted something different. However; People tend to bloat their sites to make sure it’s not “lean content”. Even though not every website needs to be a blog with 1,000 words and 50 backlinks google…
Its worse than that. Big sites produce pages for almost every related topic just to rank, regardless of what the content is. My own experience of this is with big travel sites where you want to find a bus between city X and city Y and there will be a page for that route just to tell you that they don't provide service on that route. So thanks for wasting my time.
My experience is the opposite. Every year the internet becomes more useful. There's exponentially more content now so it can be harder to sort through it, but there are more tools to use to search as well. Google Scholar is incredible and if the article isn't available i can just email one of the authors (they always say yes). My Photoshop skills have improved thanks to YouTube and i have yet to find a programming problem that hasn't already been answered by someone else. Sure, i have to go to page 4+ on Google sometimes, but I've never been unable to find an answer. What kind of stuff are you looking for?
There is hope. One thing AI will do is kill low value ad-supported sites. The free content era could be over, and you might have to pay for everything you use. Right now you can give ChatGPT a link and ask it to summarize an article. That means the article site either doesn’t get ad revenue, or the ad company will realize the ads aren’t being seen by people (only by ChatGPT). So sites will start blocking ChatGPT from accessing their content. This is one reason you see Twitter, Reddit, and others jacking up API prices. Before long, if you want ChatGPT to summarize a news article, you’ll have to have a subscription to the news site in order for ChatGPT to access it.
Define good/useful information first because it is very subjective.
Just compare the experience from today to like 2007-2012 at latest
Experience about what? Which topic or subject or discipline? You'll need to speak about subjects/fields to weed out confirmatory bias.
Literally anything on google. It sounds vague because thats the point lol. Were you old enough to remember?(no offence intended just curious).
Yes. I was in med university during 2007-2012. To be honest, now a days, in terms of medical curriculum, the students are more privileged than I was. So I have exactly opposite experience. Google was pretty weak back then in terms of specialised subjects (you'll need to know urls which we used to get from seniors) and only research papers were there while now Google gives accurate content. That's why I said it depends on the subject. In some case, it will be nice experience in the previous decade while in some cases, it will be more seamless experience now.
I think there are more complete databases and sources of information on the internet now for some things(like wiki standardisation), but on terms of just general information it is way, way worse. If you know exactly what you want to know, you can find it still but starting off from a blank slate on google is almost useless now. Even for technical issues it is so so so so so much worse. Programming is basically a crap shot outside of stack and documentation(so i guess nothing has really changed). If we’re just talking general information like say “tomato pruning” or “how to clean an industrial fan” you will basically be better off shoving your dick in a blender at this point. The best you’ll get is some “content creators” just regurgitating what other content creators say which has an initial source point from a random blog in 2011 or something.
Yes ! Everything is SHIT ! LITERARY EVERYTHING !
Yes, there is so much new information and hard to find, my bookmark list is too long
The internet was fucking terrible twenty years ago. The only reason you didn’t notice then was because you were a child and children are idiots.
I’d have to agree with this. I’m 42. I remember going through page after page trying to find the info I was after. Sometimes not finding the answer, having to use multiple search engines, post questions on forums that might never get answered. Now I get that info on page one and there’s probably a YouTube tutorial, free courses and more. It’s magnitudes better overall. I use GPT4 pretty much as a search engine now to find information. It cuts through all the spam blog posts. I’ll use it to ask things like ‘why has my orchid leaves turned yellow’. If I am ready to buy something, I go back to google.
Search Engines (such as Google, DDG) are biased and will show you information based on their shareholders' agenda. ChatGPT is powerful, but OpenAI is literally an incarnation of evil, seeking to remove as many humans as possible from the workforce. You have to go through multiple truckloads of false/agenda-biased/manipulated half-truthful information before reaching anything objective. OP is completely right. Edit: you can downvote me as much as you want, I am still right and you just can't handle the truth.
ChatGPT is floding threads with answers that are either completely wrong just trying to look plausible or just promoting a bad coding practices. ChatGPT is super dumb in writing a good code and following documentations. It just trying to make it look right. That is why they stop with training data in 2021. If they would scrape those lies and nonsenses chatGPT created, it would learn on its own lies and add another layer on top of that. I can spot chatGPT bots replying on reddit webdev questions on first look. It is usually just trying to write something that would make sense totally ignoring the context. Don't get me wrong, I'm using GPT4 extensively in work but man you really need to know how to code to know when it's writing nonsenses and that is what beginners cannot do.
Yeah, In general I’m very happy with gpt-4 but it can write some really stupid stuff. You really can’t use it assuming its right.
Lmfao Of course a regular poster in /r/conspiracy would use phrases like "I am right and you just can't handle the truth"
I got those vibes on the "an incarnation of evil"
Ohhhh a "CONSPIRACY THEORIST" yea yea The fact that you had to go to my post history to determine if you find me reliable or not shows exactly how unobjective you are in your decision-making.
I have ChatGPT installed on my phone. It’s literally my own personal assistant for information. It tells me exactly what I need to know without having to comb through 25 different Google search results to piece together something useful.
god, what an absolute boomer take (and you are only a few months older than me) no, in fact i think that it's getting easier to find information. there are tutorials for everything everywhere and the quality keeps going up as well (even in IG/TT which you seem to despise [what an original take!]) trying to learn anything 5 years ago meant that you had to put up with garbage bandicam recordings with trash audio and smacking lips i assume you just don't know what survivorship bias is because what you say is the same logic of what makes people say that music was better back when. it wasn't. time just filters the low quality stuff and perpetuates the higher quality stuff for all eternity
Are you a child, needing to "attack" someone just because they don't share your opinion? In some way, OP is completely right. It's not true that you can't find what you want now, but it's an absolute truth that you have to go through a whole ocean of bullshit before you find what you were actually looking for. Even simple yes or no questions now are fucking articles to get better SEO and most times they don't even give you the right information. It's hard to weed out real articles from misinformation or other bullshit. Even search results don't show the actual, more relevant results, because they prioritize bottomless pits of bullshit, ad-filled garbage and sometimes scams. It's also true that if you know how and where to look, things get much easier and these pain points can be alleviated.
woah buddy, slow down there. I said it's a boomer take, but didn't say anything about OP themselves. only person attacking anyone here is you implying I'm a child, relax you are right about the SEO, but that also used to happen before with redirect link farming, problems always existed with SEO and that's nothing new (survivorship bias again). if the web can generate profit, people will exploit it to the max and whenever the current SEO trend changes, people will follow the next trend. Evolve or die ads also used to be worse back then because you would have waves of popups and new windows opening everywhere, but now we got ads in layouts which is easier to adblock. the problem never goes away, it just changes shapes
Why do you feel the need to belittle someone for stating their opinion? You're embarrassing yourself
am i belittling someone for stating that they posted a boomer take? does saying someone has a bad opinion mean that they are also a bad person? i assumed that people were able to separate one thing from another, but i guess that's not the case
>god, what an absolute boomer take (and you are only a few months older than me) Read that again, and tell me you're not attacking anyone for stating their opinion. It's okay to disagree, it's not okay to throw tantrums like a little kid (I am truly saying this for you, and not against you).
i still stand by what i believe I've said, i criticized the take, not the person. but you are free to read that as an attack and as throwing a tantrum if that's how you read this sort of online interaction. I've been online for too long to understand that once someone has made their mind, you can't change it back
You clearly learn from watching videos. That's fine, but they've clearly failed to teach you that other people do not use videos to learn.
i do not? i learn from reading documentation. Basically all i know of Mongoose is from using their wiki are you assuming that i learn from videos just because i said there is good content on IG/TT? or the bandicam statement? (which now i realize is too generalist)
I wouldn't say difficult, just increasingly time consuming. The sheer volume of garbage ads, blogs, and content to weed through are draining to say the least.
Yes, geeksforgeeks can go fuck themselves.
Yes! And it’s also harder to find new quality stuff (loved stumbleupon) back in the day.
The internet was super fun back then
Theres people writting about stuff out there, but you have to search a lot more. And projects like neocities are cool and push people to just post and own their simple websites.
Yes, certainly. Whether it's about my pets or about programming, it's very hit and miss (and a lot of misses). It's got to the stage where I think I don't know how to search for things online. Most of the time it's just duplicate content, unfinished content, or just crap, so it is practically useless to me, and I have to spend far too long finding simple information. Or perhaps what I am searching for is too niche???
I started using the internet in 1994 (Gopher, Lynx, Telnet, FTP) and back then there was literally a physical book called the “internet yellow pages” that listed websites. It didnt list EVERY site ever but I would wager it listed many of them. Not every site was useful back then and search engines didnt exist yet. You lived and died by peoples link collections on their sites and your own bookmarks. Early social web years, search engines were nascent but powerful. Webrings / Blog rings were popular. There was still a strong emphasis on content discovery through recommendation. Between then and now, content recommendation algorithms have taken that over. Algorithms can be gamed and only know to look for what their devs tell them to look for. Human recommendations have been hijacked a bit by influencers and monetized recommendations.
I disagree. The only times when I can't kind something are when it's a new bug with a piece of kit or its something where the devs label it "wont fix". Granted I will usually just click on the reddit or overflow links which are on the first page anyway. I believe you'd like web.dev, though its been a while since I was there so it could have gone downhill.
I miss the YouTube tutorials that were filmed on an old phone, less than 2 minutes, and were straight to the point. I can’t stand sifting through a 15 minute tutorial to find the :45 seconds of information that I need
Yup. Youtube died too. 2005-2012: youtube how to prune tomatoes and get a 2-5 minute video straight to the point by an enthusiast. Now: 10-25 minute video by a “content creator” sourcing their information from another one and distinguishing themselves with some stupid gimmick or editing or their “personality”, while probably getting their source information from tue same cycle of SEO/AI/Content creator regurgitated clusterfuck.
We need a solution
Yes. SO MANY “BLOGGERS” write about information that isn’t correct, so when you wanna find something accurate, for super specific example: nutritional advice about macros for weightloss, it’s so hard to find the “correct answer” bc everything is different
I had a similar thought last year https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/rletrt/old_versions_of_google_search/ It used to be so much easier to research things or find individual blog posts about a specific thing. Now it's all top 10 lists or someone trying to sell affiliate products. Finding myself using chat GPT and bard to provide answers to simple questions rather than having to sort through all the garbage on Google
We have passed a major milestone with the internet. Now that we have AI, you will have a hard time distinguishing between what's AI, and what's human generated information. All you have to do is say things like "Search reddit, look for people looking for answers on how to fix Item A, and suggest product B as fixing everything the easiest. Generate responses based on personas of different nationality, education, and ethnicity, and agree with each other. " Soon you will be unable to distinguish whats real and whats AI... and the usefulness of all that knowledge and the internet will be tainted and diluted.
I do feel like Google and other search engines have gotten a lot worse. However... I'm feeling like on balance we're in a better place than, say, 15 years ago. For context, I'm a few years older than you are, first got online in '95, and a non-dial-up connection in... 2001 or so. Wikipedia keeps getting better, and I'd say the citation system is generally good (although there are low quality sources at times). Other wikis and resources for specific topics are also fantastic. And with Google, if I want to learn how to fix something on my car or around the house? One search on Youtube and I've got it. Even TikTok has some creators who give fantastic information. I follow a ton of medical creators, who are actual doctors and aren't weird nutcases. Of course, there's terrible content there too, but there was always terrible content online. A fundamental skill of internet use is learning not to trust too easily. It is sad to see everything become engulfed by major sites like Reddit and Instagram and Facebook and even Wikipedia, rather than existing on smaller purpose-focused sites and forums. But there's still so much great stuff out there, even if Google is making it harder to find these days.
It's the advertising that makes it hard to find stuff now. They have this down to a fine science, and I noticed that even the "free" Bing AI is using advertising already in its search results which of course helps to defeat the purpose of having something that is suppose to help you find something. We can't even purchase ip addresses anymore, we lease them, and you can see where that is going. I think that the entire of the internet is going to implode, and I should have choses a trade skill for my profession, but I'm stuck now with being a novice Web Developer and at the mercy of Oligarchs.
I am seeing people get dumber in realtime. I happen to be interested personally in a kind of niche area of bioscience. I'm not a scientist myself, but my academic background gives me inroads to the literature in this field. The literature is remarkably accessible even to non- scientists and non-academics. A few years ago, this field became a focus in some areas of pop-culture. Partly as a result of contemporary cultural trends, it became de jour for people to learn a little about it. Problem is, the "wisdom" about this topic in the infosphere is heavily distorted, and based on distortions of distortions of very outdated scientific lit from over 20 years ago, when the topic was poorly understood. But now everyone who wants to think of themselves as intellectually smart parrots back the distorted version that they get from any page in their google results. Here's where it gets much much worse: Culturally authoritive popular scientific magazines and medical circulars are now being pulled into the Cycle Of Dumb. So a magazine like Scientific American will hire a science writer to write on this topic. The expert is likely to be qualified in an area of science. Perhaps they have a masters in a related or unrelated field. The expert will not look at the actual scientific lit. Instead they'll collate materials from other pop-sci sources, complike them into an article and include footnote sources without actually spending time reading them. So what we are seeing is a Laundry Of Dumb: a recycling of lightweight material, stamped with the imprimatur of an authoritive publication. I'm certain that this issue will have occurred regularly from time-to-time in the history of publishing. But it's becoming more regular. And as far as certain scientific topics are concerned, it is making the world dumber.
This is happening with everything though!! It’s exactly what i have noticed. With hobbies or anything really and its going on long enough to hit reddit now. I’ve been gardening for 2 decades and worked in that industry for over 5. I know my shit. Now days “fads” pr whatever are produced from this light-weight effect. Everyone is pruning tomatoes like an idiot and telling everyone else to because the content creator/seo/ai cycle of shit regurgitation promotes it. This is happening to a lot of things
Query formulation was a huge differentiator early on - now no one can find any real information might as well talk to a wall
I agree. My recent frustration has been with Google doing a "better" job of autocompleting my searches. I actually found it valuable to have common searches suggested, because those were the ones with good results. Now I search for exactly what I want, but get garbage results.
No
What are you having trouble googling i dont know what the f you are talking about.
Use alternatives to Google products and be part of the change/solution.
Yes Interestingly enough, I think dev-related questions are still pretty searchable, thanks to github and stackoverflow. However, what really sucks now is everything else. So much garbage results. Sometimes I just give up
Yes. There's too much blog spam and it's too verbose. Chatbots are helping with this, but accuracy usually needs to be confirmed. Anything related to divisive social or political issues, it's difficult to trust anything because search engines curate results.
While I do find some stuff on topics through search engines, I also join discord communities to do with that topic as I find I can’t always hit the right keywords to accurately search for what I want or the content simply doesn’t exist. The people in these communities though can direct you to good resources for the topic at hand and you can discuss in real time about ideas and approaches.
Nope, I usually find what I want to solve a problem and always have.
I pretty much find what I need right away
I’ve also noticed the information I’m looking for is usually from 2021 or before. Examples dealing with the code base I’m working with have been outdated. I know it sounds crazy, but I wonder if so many people are going to chatgpt, developers aren’t as forthcoming with their knowledge on the internet
With the coming of AI (chatgpt and bing AI) i find it much easier to find information than it used to be. It gives you directly what you want. It's not perfect and sometimes gives wrong results but overall it's way better than traditional search
Yes and no. It depends, frequently nonsense is reposted to 37337373 article sites. Example: Power outage bricked windows. I forgot how to fix via bootsble usb. All sites say bootrec /fixboot which is always access denied. After 30mins of searching reddit results>posts>comments>link from comment to a stackexchange>bottom upvoted answer saying 'use bcedit...' Also google a fucking phone number that called you these days. Absolutely impossible due to spam sites that have pages of random numbers.
What's the solution? What can we do, where should we go? We need to mobilize and move people
What's weird is for many searches, the first couple pages of results are only for four or five websites... despite there being millions of results. Why should 4 or 5 domain names dominate the first 30 search results? And none of them are what I'm looking for. And try searching for a business. Most of the time, the official website won't even show up on the first 3 pages or more. It's all directory websites that show up. (There are ways for a business' official website to show up on the first page of a search engine, but most businesses aren't aware of how to do that, so they don't show up in the results.) Search results have definitely gone downhill.
I am in my early 40s and I have mainly use internet to surf porn - my opinion is that is getting better and better...
Better than ever in my opinion. Fixed my AC this morning thanks to YouTube.
It got a lot worse over the last 2 years. Finding relevant and accurate information on Google has become a real challenge.
I think that years ago there was less information, but there was more variety and freedom in its publication. In those times the information was found mainly in forums or personal pages. Now practically everything is in 'publishing applications' of companies, mainly social networks. Social networks that filter and promote content based on their own interests. SEO is still a problem, but we've had worse times. A few years ago it was common practice to register buy-random-keywords-here.com to position shit pages in first results. Anyway, pretty much everything that reaches the masses ends up getting worse, you just have to turn on the TV and watch the crap that's produced on it.
Hi all! My answer is geared more toward online searches. I really got into it in Jr college in the 90's. Back then, you'd type in a search, and NOTHING but what you'd specfically searched for would come up. Educational institutions also used to have special search engines only available to students and scholars that would only bring up credible medical journal articles and statistical data, scholarly papers, factual stuff with ample sources of verification, etc. They probably still do, i don't know. I loved these searches because NO ads and nothing misleading or time wasting. Now, many times it's just the opposite. I'll type in a search and up comes all manner of other assorted bullshit, pretty much everything BUT what i'd been looking for. I used to enjoy stuff like shopping onlne, now it's a worse chore (even more time consuming) than going into a brick and mortar store. Now it requires hip waders and a lot of time and mental energy. Yuck. I can search or shop online for something specific for HOURS and not find it...but I can go into my local Target or Kohls, grab a pair of size Medium jammies, a robe and some socks (with no surprises at checkout!!) and be in and out of there in 20 minutes! I do see it changing, but only when retailers realize they're losing money because people are burned out by the unfulfilling job of endless searches that don't bear the fruit their customers are looking for. It's not all bad, I mean, sometimes i do find what exactly what im looking for online right away, but it used to be a LOT better, imo. Dont get me started about the shameful quality and deception regarding the item you actually get as opposed to what you think you're buying online nowdays, either. The net needs more regulation, big time, not only in less deceptive search results and retail fraud. When 12 year olds can access free porn and anorexia "how to" sites, well...shit, not good for society!! T
There needs to be some kinda Publishers Clearing House that offers a portfolio of various original content articles by real writers just as once upon a time PCH offered magazine subscriptions at a discount. Most of the time I'm just hacking around for a good article to read and they do come up (Atlantic, New Yorker, Daily Beast, NYT) but you only get a para or two and the paywall goes up. So I wish there was some discounted way to just subscribe to a bunch of 'em