That's why I think those platforms should be banned, especially for children.

We're creating a whole new generation of misinformed people.

They say stuff that isn't true because it gets them engagement from people who come to correct them. We figured out how to generate profit from misinformation.

Ya my little bro is the same. He'll announce some thing he's learned and it collapses under the barest scrutiny... I only hope that the rest of us are able to teach him to apply that scrutiny himself. It's pretty scary how kids just accept shit, if you take that into adulthood... Well, I think we see the results all around us in the world.

Oh my… searching TikTok for information is so misleading and so encouraged by the platform…

It's because the truth is boring, sad, and unnoteworthy. That doesn't make for good you know what viral videos.

https://jakeukalane.github.io/archiving.html

They ruined it without AI before AI was commonplace. They ruined it with higher profit margins. 🥹

Their search was shit before AI. Unless you like pinterest and quora spam.

It's fucking awful with our without AI in 2024.

Their search algorithm was great.

I've almost forgotten how shitty Google has become. Been using kagi search for a year now.

It's so nice to get clean unbiased search results.

Old people are the only ones with any money.

It's this last two years where it has gotten really bad in my opinion. Before you could at least navigate the ads ridden site. Now base Google search is tremendously worse.

Don't get me wrong, fuck google, but how much can we blame google for SEO? That's just people gaming the system, and they'd be doing it no matter how google presented their results.

Maybe there is a whole cooperation aspect that I'm not aware of.

It’s not so much that they don’t give a damn, but that they can’t tell. I taught some basic English courses with a research component (most students in their first college semester), and I’d drag them to the library each semester for a boring day on how to generate topics, how to discern scholarly sources, then use databases like EBSCO or JSTOR to find articles to support arguments in the essays they’d be writing for the next couple years. Inevitably, I’d get back papers with so-and-so’s blog cited, PraegerU, Wikipedia, or Google’s own search results. Here’s where a lot of the problem lies: discerning sources, and knowing how to use syntax in searches, which is itself becoming irrelevant on Google etc. but NOT academic databases. So why take the time to give the “and” and “or” and “after: 1980” and “type: peer-reviewed” when you can just write a natural-language question into a search engine and get an answer right away that seems legit in the snippet? I’d argue the tech is the problem because it encourages a certain type of inquiry and quick answers that are plausible, but more often than not, lacking in any credibility.

This is the big problem. Kids are trusting search results from a Chinese propaganda platform, and they don't give a shit.

Hours and menus normally come from Maps. News often comes from social media, unfortunately. But Google rarely helps me there either. Concert tickets is probably an app or venue website (but I don't really go to many concerts because fuck Ticketmaster).

Not that I don't Google stuff, but it's way less useful than it used to be.

I'm over fifty (though fuck does it feel unreal to say that).

I hate to say it, but DDG results are shit. The only half-decent competition I've found is yandex, and I don't really trust it.