880
people are so dumb (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
66 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 138 points 4 months ago (12 children)

Sadly I have generally watched in horror as my friends quote Gemini slop as fact checking on the regular, because it's the default search result.

I speak up about it, and explain why it's problematic. Doesn't matter. It's convenient.

Convenience always wins.

We're cooked.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 12 child comments
    •
  • [–] 31 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    I know people that will complain about the crappy results but then not use a different search engine. Like it's too much cognitive load to go to duckduckgo or qwant or whatever

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    To be fair, duck duck go also has some garbage results compared to like 2015 google. I have used ddg for the past several years and many topics yield terrible results. I was "the good googler" amongst my peers at the time. I haven't tried qwant, so it might be better. A lot of search engines are worse and I'm guessing it's partially because the web is just bloated with trash now.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    A lot of search engines are worse and I’m guessing it’s partially because the web is just bloated with trash now.

    That's sadly a big part of it. Other is that search engines in general are worse today as everything apparently needs to be AI. Google spesifically has gotten worse over the years, but it's not alone. And that indirectly affects other engines, like duckduck, which at least partly uses other engines at the background.

    But with DDG bangs are pretty neat. If you don't find what you're looking for via DDG search just add '!g' to the query and you'll get same search from Google. Or pick from "a few" other engines with their own bangs.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (4 children)

    Hmm, makes me wonder if a big factor is that it reads the first couple of results and summarizes it. Like if it was turned off, people wouldn't bother clicking through and reading, so they just leave and and "fact" get saved in their brains. If they were really motivated, they would click through and read and come to the same incorrect conclusions but most don't bother so the misinformation doesn't propagate as easily

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    This was always a thing. The results on page 1 had a much greater click rate than on page 2+

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago* (2 children)

    That used to be a direct result of how good the search was. In the aughts it was generally on page 1 or you had to rephrase your query; the remaining results were the era’s equivalent of ‘slop’, link trees and redirect rabbit holes and plaintext sites with random stolen content. I was met with genuine surprise any time I found what I was looking for on page 3 or 4

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •