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1. Aether (aether@poa.st)'s status on Friday, 16-Jun-2023 10:57:39 JST Aether
   Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts.
   
   theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759942/google-reddit-subreddit-blackout-protests
   
   It says a lot about the state of the internet when Reddit is considered one of the more valuable resources.
   • Wrongthink (wrongthink@cdrom.tokyo)'s status on Friday, 16-Jun-2023 10:57:38 JST Wrongthink

     in reply to

     • Ame

     @AmericanChampion @Aether

     I’ve talked to several very skilled CS/AI people in my lifetime, and they all agree that search engines died around 2018.

     My experiences agree with this approximate timeframe. I think the last time I didn’t have to fight with a search query in order to get the results I was looking even predated then.

   • Ame (americanchampion@poa.st)'s status on Friday, 16-Jun-2023 10:57:39 JST Ame

     in reply to
     @Aether I've talked to several very skilled CS/AI people in my lifetime, and they all agree that search engines died around 2018. I don't know if they all knew why, but we know why - there was a huge push to get rid of the old algorithms that optimized, quite spectacularly, towards giving users what they wanted.
     
     People have talked about using LLMs instead. They can certainly do a few of the things that Old Google could, but there are some things that they can't manage, and probably won't ever manage. They can walk you through the trivial stuff, but falter whenever they face something that the meta-learning inherent to their training process isn't capable of grasping with limited data.
     
     Some people have tried to make their own, like Brave Search. I get the feeling that these are half-assed efforts, without a real team or any real resources behind them, but even so, I think you had to have scale to get the old algorithms to work. Might be like peak oil - no way to get back once the initial route has been run.
   • charliebrownau (charliebrownau@poa.st)'s status on Friday, 16-Jun-2023 10:59:33 JST charliebrownau

     in reply to

     • Ame
     @AmericanChampion @Aether I recommend using SearX or SearXNG
     github.com/searx/searx
     docs.searxng.org/
     Wrongthink likes this.
   • Machismo (zerglingman@freespeechextremist.com)'s status on Friday, 16-Jun-2023 19:03:57 JST Machismo

     in reply to
     @Aether betterthanexpected