"hey, is that a brand name? Here's 9 sketchy looking shopping sites selling things that have that brand name on them"

I installed the extension that removes Pinterest from searches.... it's great.

Those two sites are absolute skid marks.

Google "Best vacuum cleaner"

Top 6 hits: "We evaluated the 5 brands that paid us the most and found that they all suck up your dirt. We can't really speak ill of any of them because this is an ad and we signed a contract. Please use our embedded links so we can have more money."

The sad thing is the Reddit Links probably contain the most useful answers that google will show you

Trying to find the tiny "show more results" button sandwiched between the first page of shit results and the weird AI bubbles of shit results just to find semi-decent shit on pages 2-3 makes me wish i was dead every single time.

"AI" is already handling the search for you. The big search engines are probably the first mass scale adopters of machine learning.

And they have lost the war with SEO spam to a hilarious extent. What makes you think the same won't happen with chat bot AIs? Bad actors (including PR agencies) will inevitably figure out where and how to spam comments in order to bias the AI models in favor of their agendas or products.

If the data they consume is filled with something like "fossil fuels don't cause global warming because XYZ", the chat bots will repeat it. They don't have the capacity to reason.

There hasn't been a reason to flood the internet with low effort spam because it's easily detected by humans who read it. But the ML algorithms will be a lot easier to trick.

You can already outsource a lot of this to Bing. If you need to know the right temperature for making french fries, you can google a bunch of “recipes” (AKA life story of the author + history + vacation photos + cooking instructions) read them through and… actually better make some coffee while you’re at it because this is going to take a while. Anyway, the other option is to ask: “Hey Bing, I’m making french fries, but I don’t know how hot the oven should be.”

Spoiler: 220 °C

The scary thing is, what happens when people start doing this for more important things, such as what to do if your child has swallowed something or how to parallel park your car.

True but they will learn the concept 'inefficency increases individual profits'. Google has been getting worse and so will AI search eventually.

I know your pain, I've skipped it entirely and always go for the part number. There are great resources for BMWs with sites like realoem.com, but what about other manufacturers?

Product information search is now totally useless. I used to be able to use a part number to find a manual, now it is just scammers Amazon and eBay.

YouTube videos were once good sources for DIY, now the useful shit is buried behind product placement bullshitters.

The horrible reality is that Bing has actually become a competitor to Google, simply by Google getting worse and worse. Microsoft used to be the main bad guy, but these days they practically seem benign compared to the others. Not open source like you're saying, of course.

The infrastructure to crawl, store, and serve search results to billions of users is phenomenally expensive. A government might fund it (which comes with its own concerns), but a non-profit will struggle to compete.

Or even if it was accurate.

The future seemed so much more promising when I was a teenager. Now I'm mid 30s and the present is very.... corporate and lame. Very lame. They've even programmed the younger generation to be sanitized and accepting of blandness. Imagine growing up with only one or two genuinely creative movies being released a year. Zoomers don't even have their own music genre, it's all just nostalgia. Sigh.

2 months ago that was fine.

Now I don't have an app for that, the website on my mobile doesn't open my search and instead tells me to download the official Reddit app, or the subs are nsfw or private.

Sigh, so much for easy answers at a type of the finger :(

Up until the API debacle, that was my solution too. Now even that doesn't work. It's so bizarrely hard to look something up on the internet now.

https://librex.devol.it/

It's pretty amazing to search for something and actually see things you searched for.

I ran a business, built my website and done SEO according to advice found on the internet practically just using keywords related to my business. My goal was not to be on page 2 or 3 when people look for similar businesses. The site ended up always as a first result. I did not tinker with it, never paid for adwords/adsense. I don't think I was being an asshole, just trying to make a living.

The problem seems to lie with Google. I remember days when I could search it for topics of interest and get results that were informative and didn't try to sell me shit. Google is now reminiscent more of a mall and search results are shop fronts in the mall.

idk - you can't really blame website owners for optimizing their SEO, it's google's fault for using such a game-able system IMO

I used to just use Google but add reddit to the end of the search, and it'd usually pick up several relevant posts/conversations that would have the answer I wanted somewhere in the comments. I'll still keep doing that for a while probably, but given how reddit has been going, and with people erasing their accounts, I doubt that will last long. I'm holding out hope for a good search functionality on lemmy, since reddits own search was pretty unusable.

This whole thread reads like astroturfers