Anyone else experience this?
You run into a niche or weird issue. So you google “how to x”, “y not working on z” or “Error code: 123”; The 1st, 2nd, 3rd page are infected, probably 90% AI slop. Don’t have any luck even with the one blog post that was probably written by a human.
Now I have to go to YouTube. Look for a tutorial, 1st, 2nd, 3rd video all AI. AI voice, AI avatar, bot comments like “😍😍😍”.
Finally I reach a real video from a year or two ago that actually solved my issue. Took 4 hours when normally I could find it in 1 hour tops.
I use duck duck search for their assist which scrapes from pages that were written by humans. Sounds like google has gone down some AI inception hellhole.
That’s what AI slop blacklists are for:
https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist
If you’re still using vanilla Chrome for some reason, it works with an extension called ublacklist too.
Very nice, I didn’t even think of that.
It ruined google search overall
or they trying to present opinions as facts like from blogs, or reviews.
And then some bs article is like this :
Step 1. Make sure you connected to internet
Step 2. Make sure your drivers are updated
Step 3. Restart your pc
Step 4. Delete cache
Step 5. Download some obscure tool
(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ
Those articles sole purpose is to get you to install the obscure tool. The unhelpfulness of the first couple steps is a feature, not a bug.
Yep, that’s good ol’ human-generated SEO spam. Look up every problem someone might have, offer extremely generic advice, present paid tool as a solution.
Part of this is Google’s and YT’s platform decaying, not just AI. Before AI, Google was infected with ads and listicles. Before any of that you had a million forum replies amounting to “Just google it!” (I am, wise guy, that’s how I ran into your post in the first place.) If not that, then it was “RTFM” (Maybe if you had a technical writer write a better manual and not have the devs write it who don’t realize there are people that don’t have the intimate knowledge of this obscure software package that they do and thus don’t bother mentioning stuff that’s ‘obvious’ to them and literally no one else.)
And don’t get me started on the landfill that is Stack Overflow.
Yea, I can’t find anything on the internet anymore.
It’s depressing because i still remember the times when I just found what i was looking for
They are burning the books.
Just set the search date to before 2019, AI at that point was a plaything so there’s next-to-no AI slop results
I do this for general knowledge, but it doesn’t work for new issues.
Ah yeah, sadly that’s true
You might want to have a look at Kagi. It’s a search engine that doesn’t have ads and actually crowd sources stats about sites being riddled with AI slop. The search is crazy-fast and the results regularly better than I’ve had with Google and DuckDuckGo.
The catch: you pay for it. It’s not much, but in my experience it’s worth it.
Fuck AI as the community:
Try this AI search tool, it’s paid for though so it sucks less
Is Kagi Assistant very distinct from the search?
I’ve heard generally good things about Kagi. But all of their plans include AI and that’s something of a red flag
So I was dubious about this as well, but it turns out, it’s actually rather well thought-out.
Each plan comes with AI support, but you don’t have to use it and it’s not enabled by default. So like, you search for “pizza toppings”, and you get a bunch of pages talking about pizza and their toppings:
There’s no unsolicited “AI” box at the top telling you to put rocks on there or anything insane like that. The availability of AI is there though, if you’re into that sort of thing. Click the “Quick answer” button and you get something like this:
.There’s likely a way to directly invoke AI via their bang syntax (similar to DDG’s), but I don’t know what that is, 'cause I don’t use it.
Either way, you can sign up and they give you 100 searches for free. You can trial it yourself if you like.
Well cool beans, thanks for the detailed reply!
the AI is behind a menu and you don’t have to use it. sometimes it may generate a response card if you ask a question in the search box, but not always.
the way the airplane works is that it will conduct multiple searches based on your prompt and then give an answer and citations, so you can click on them to go to where, even within an article, it got an answer. it isn’t always right, but it’s way better than relying on the training of an llm.
but again, you don’t have to use it and it’s out of the way. you don’t even have to see it.
I really like the service. it feels like the way search used to be, with exception that no one follows the old operators well anymore, eg +(this term) -(that term) NOT, etc
I second this, I love Kagi. I even got free Kagi socks but with $7.50 shipping >:(
The Google search AI has been giving me like the obvious solutions. Like the three things I tried tne minutes ago before I googled it. I already checked the menu and couldn’t find the setting or I wouldn’t be trying to get help online. And then the next seven search results are videos that don’t quite match my search. And the finally somewhere I find some promising leads on some message board that would have been the top result 6 years ago.
I find it especially annoying when companies have a “Contact us” button on their website and it just refers you to an AI assistant…
Google/Bing (includes DuckDuckGo) will sometimes not show me the correct results but will instead have the correct results as sources in the ai search assistant
Which is obviously intentional to pressure people to rely on the ai because their regular searches mysteriously fail to deliver the obviously correct results
We’re just going to be forced into it and im pretty sure the battle is already lost and this is the evolution of the search engine, full stop ):
Or just use https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ instead, then they also won’t spy on you as much too
Cool! I like DDG, but I only heard about the GGL one
Sure. I had that with computer stuff. Troubleshooting, programming tutorials, particularly bad with comparing software and products. Same with cooking recipes and phrases/mottos/congratulations to write on someone’s birthday/wedding postcard… A good chunk is just slop. Or someone wrote a few sentences themselves but “enhanced” it to be surrounded by 5 pages of slop.
And doesn’t make a lot of sense for the reader. I mean if I wanted an AI answer, I could just ask ChatGPT directly. I don’t need someone else to pre-generate that and put it on a website?! That’d be kind of the point of AI.
100%.
I ran a team of techs for a few years. Before 2022, you had to eliminate possibilities, Google solutions, test, verify, etc… There could be any number of possibilities, depending on the problem. After LLMs, the sleuthing and learning became phrasing and forgetting. The phrasing being the prompt to the LLM.
I even find myself getting rounded off at the edges. I throw a script or code I write into an LLM and have it check it for continuity or errors when something doesn’t work. It’s a slippery slope.
