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I researched my local place, and it was 80% pure slop. (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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I decided to lookup some history of my local area, and i was reading a whole page until i noticed some things didnt add up. It was stating some obscure things such as it (the local place) has it's own currency and whatnot.

I decided to check the sources they used, and i noticed it was some stupid wiki page made by Grok.

Sure i can't fact chek all of it, small point's were correct but for crying out loud. Please.

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[–] 58 points 3 months ago (16 children)

DuckDuckGo is pretty much useless now. The overwhelming majority of links it throws at me for any search are just the most obvious AI slop. This is a dark time for the internet.

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  • [–] 22 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    It's such a weird coincidence that the two largest companies involved in search engines, Google and Microsoft, are fully invested in AI. It almost feels like they have made their search engines useless so that people are pushed to use AI chatbots instead. Really makes you think.

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  • [–] 15 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    noai.duckduckgo.com

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  • [–] 12 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    I don't think people, including the ones responding to you, have the causality right. It's not that searching is broken (although it is) but the actual human internet is dead. You can switch from Google to Bing to DDG to No AI DDG to Ecosia to Kaji, but they're all just pointing to different orders of the same low quality junk websites. I don't think we can optimally search our way out of the sea of slop and referral links that makes up the vast majority of the internet now.

    RIP human internet (1980ish - 2020ish). We had a good run.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

    Except that there are publicly available court documents from a case against Google showing that in the 2010s they started intentionally reducing the quality of search results (or at bare minimum refusing to roll out fully built and tested improvements to it) in order to artificially boost impressions and click through of the paid ads on their search results. See "The Man Who Killed Google Search" by Ed Zitron on his Where's your Ed At blog.

    So it's a combination. Things started going downhill with the popular search engines far earlier in attempts to boost ads and with the hyperproliferation of sketchy SEO tactics, then the whole house of cards got fucking bulldozed by AI.

    But I'd also argue that the human internet is hanging on fine, it's just a massive pain in the ass to find good sources and maintain your own personal list of "go to"s.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    This is probably a case of blind men touching an elephant, but Kagi to me genuinely feels like Google did 15 years ago.

    The actually-useful static content of the internet is still there buried under the deluge of slop.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience.

    Whatever they are doing over there, it's not working.

    I also noticed that majority of results from DDG are some random website with no relation to my query whatsoever, having bot written article picked up by some SEO trickery. e.g garbage site about cooking (doubt) having tech related article written by bot. These sites seem to have articles for everything.

    Another complain is how they detect simple unit conversion (or calculator) query. DDG have converter UI and still shove garbage converter sites up my face, I don't even know how these sites managed to have some specific "convert x unit a to y unit b" indexed. Annoying AF.

    SEO is a broken game and index/crawler should change the way they do things. As it is, I see no point putting in effort to cater to good crawler anymore. Might as well block them all and go back to early 00's style neighbor links, slap tar pit and anubis on it for good measure.

    I would love some suggestion for alternative privacy respecting search engine that have some "sense" of what they are actually indexing.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I also noticed that majority of results from DDG are some random website with no relation to my query whatsoever

    ....that's an exaggeration. I use ddg daily and it works fine most of the time for me. And when it doesn't I cannot remember ever once thinking "no relation whatsoever to my query"...

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    Nowadays you can’t just read a random website without bumping into slop. Reading stuff online has always been risky, but nowadays you have to be extra critical.

    Bad sources have always existed, so these are not radically new skills. The amount of unreliable text out there has completely exploded though, which means most of the material available to you is not worth reading.

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    • [–] 36 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    That sounds like Elon musk's shitty project to rewrite Wikipedia using grok.

    It's basically just the facts from Wikipedia plus right wing talking points and AI hallucinations.

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    • [–] 5 points 3 months ago

    Dude I just had the same experience yesterday. Wanted to know a bit about the folklore of my place and I guess it was kind of right when cross referencing but it just fucking sucks.

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    [–] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    point's

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    • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    That's frustrating.

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    [–] -2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Wikipedia has been abused for literal decades. People will just make up sources to cite and hope nobody notices. That's why the first thing they teach you (or taught, not been in school for a while), is to never use wikipedia as a source. Local libraries, local newspapers and, funny enough, pubs (always some old guy who knows everything and will have books n shit). Check those places out.

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