this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
881 points (94.9% liked)

Greentext

4464 readers
1254 users here now

This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.

Be warned:

If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] lemmylommy@lemmy.world 60 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Unfortunately this generation google is getting less proficient at search as well. It’s like it treats the search term as a vague idea and any syntax as a non binding suggestion.

[–] VieuxQueb@lemmy.ca 21 points 11 months ago (2 children)

And many sites use seo to attract traffic but dont have any content you are actually looking for. And ads.

[–] wagesj45@kbin.social 18 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] TheBat@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago

Google have been offering SEO courses for more than a decade now. They are largely responsible for this fucking mess.

[–] Monument@lemmy.sdf.org 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

That is as much monetary as it is a response to consumers.

I read an article a few weeks ago that - ironically - now I can’t find when searching for it, because all the search results are crowded by SEO blogspam. (Even though I’m using exact phrases I recall from the article!)

The gist of the article was that while your search terms are displayed in the address bar, Google will opaquely substitute words, add ‘invisible’ search terms in that it doesn’t tell you it’s added, or otherwise alter its search metrics to return results that are more heavily laden with advertisements and/or sites that advertise with Google Ads.

If a straightforward search no longer renders straightforward results, then there’s not a good feedback mechanism for users to learn how to be better at searching. We all are just getting rolled by the algorithm to look at advertisements.
I imagine folks who remember when the internet was good will take this as Google now being bad, but folks who don’t/aren’t of that age will just assume the internet always worked poorly. It might be why LLM’s are acceptable as “AI” despite their flaws.