Googling Is for Old People. That’s a Problem for Google.
Googling Is for Old People. That’s a Problem for Google.
145 comments
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Another problem is they ruined their own search with AI.
Kicked themselves right in the nuts.
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They ruined it without AI before AI was commonplace. They ruined it with higher profit margins. 🥹
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Avid Amoeba is right that Google ruined their own search before LLMs entered the public consciousness (this does not mean LLMs didn't exist before this, but that they were not widely available for the general public to use or became part of the zeitgeist).
If you don't agree please listen to the Better Offline podcast episode "The Man That Destroyed Google Search". The episode goes through the rollbacks/changes Google made to their search Algorithm well before AI was commonplace.
Better Offline: CZM Rewind: The Man That Destroyed Google Search: https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/czm-rewind-the-man-that-destroyed-google-search
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They ruined it by setting themselves as untouchable and wanting bigger profit margins than “richer than God” money.
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They specifically made search less accurate so that users would search multiple times to boost the number of ads that get displayed to juice their numbers for quarterly earnings. You can blame Prabhakar Raghavan.
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Their search was shit before AI. Unless you like pinterest and quora spam.
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Their search algorithm was great.
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It's fucking awful with our without AI in 2024.
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They're even shoving AI into Youtube by placing a summary in plain text below some videos now. Don't know if it's opt-in or just randomly placed for testing but so far I'm not impressed because it skips over important things. I'm honestly puzzled as to why the hell they're doing this.
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I do like how AI works for referencing articles. You can tap on any sentence in the summary and it will display all links that contain that source information. It’s actually pretty useful.
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I find that in many cases, if you actually click the link to find the sourced information, it's not there. I've experienced this with nearly every LLM front-end platform.
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My younger sister searches tiktok for information and by that I mean she doesn't even use the search feature. The topics just show up in her feed. She thinks she's choosing/finding but is actually getting fed topics.
Its sad because everytime she tells me something she learned on tiktok I do like 2mins of research and find its not true or misleading. People lie about the most mundane things on that platform and I don't know why.
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That's why I think those platforms should be banned, especially for children.
We're creating a whole new generation of misinformed people.
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I really think we need a monitored internet for under 13s. The internet is just to fucked up at the moment. I never thought I would be someone advocating for this because i grew up on the wild west internet watching people getting beheaded and stuff. But all that is nothing compared to being bombarded with friendly, trustworthy (seeming) people that constantly spread lies and misinformation that shapes your world view.
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This is partially why I kind of agree with the government ban. Tiktok does have some good information but it's a lot of lowest common denominator stuff like all social media, the worst part is for non Chinese users 'the algorithm' pushes only dances and this misinformation or fights/arguments, while in China it's more educational and musical stuff that's promoted.
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Ya my little bro is the same. He'll announce some thing he's learned and it collapses under the barest scrutiny... I only hope that the rest of us are able to teach him to apply that scrutiny himself. It's pretty scary how kids just accept shit, if you take that into adulthood... Well, I think we see the results all around us in the world.
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They say stuff that isn't true because it gets them engagement from people who come to correct them. We figured out how to generate profit from misinformation.
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Oh my… searching TikTok for information is so misleading and so encouraged by the platform…
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It's because the truth is boring, sad, and unnoteworthy. That doesn't make for good you know what viral videos.
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Younger generations are using other platforms to gather information.
What's not being talked about here is that young people don't seem to give a damn if the information they research is accurate or not, it's whether or not it's peddled by their preferred streamer. Those "other platforms" are apparently Tiktok and Netflix, not exactly places known for speaking truth to power.
I've spent twenty years trying to believe that the children will be the saviors of the future, but I think maybe the conservatives actually succeeded in murdering education in it's crib. I am now nearly fully on team "You know, maybe these kids actually are a bunch of dumb fucks who won't save us after all."
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It’s not so much that they don’t give a damn, but that they can’t tell. I taught some basic English courses with a research component (most students in their first college semester), and I’d drag them to the library each semester for a boring day on how to generate topics, how to discern scholarly sources, then use databases like EBSCO or JSTOR to find articles to support arguments in the essays they’d be writing for the next couple years. Inevitably, I’d get back papers with so-and-so’s blog cited, PraegerU, Wikipedia, or Google’s own search results. Here’s where a lot of the problem lies: discerning sources, and knowing how to use syntax in searches, which is itself becoming irrelevant on Google etc. but NOT academic databases. So why take the time to give the “and” and “or” and “after: 1980” and “type: peer-reviewed” when you can just write a natural-language question into a search engine and get an answer right away that seems legit in the snippet? I’d argue the tech is the problem because it encourages a certain type of inquiry and quick answers that are plausible, but more often than not, lacking in any credibility.
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Is it the tech? Or is it media literacy?
I've messed around with AI on a lark, but would never dream of using it on anything important. I feel like it's pretty common knowledge that AI will just make shit up if it wants to, so even when I'm just playing around with it I take everything it says with a heavy grain of salt.
I think ease of use is definitely a component of it, but in reading your message I can't help but wonder if the problem instead lies in critical engagement. Can they read something and actively discern whether the source is to be trusted? Or are they simply reading what is put in front of them then turning around to you and saying "well, this is what the magic box says. I don't know what to tell you.".
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No, they also dont give a shit.
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This isn't a young person problem and it isn't new, it's just getting worse. See Fox news on Trump 8 years ago or more through now
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This is the big problem. Kids are trusting search results from a Chinese propaganda platform, and they don't give a shit.
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Its the older folks who muddled the walls between editorial and factual reporting, and now thats come home to roost. There are no facts anymore, and very little real journalism anymore. Theres no truth, justice, democracy, or human dignity either. Its not tiktok or youtube who led us where we are, its the double-be-damned boomers and centrists.
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at least it's not American propaganda
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I can see your point when talking about broader topics that people tend to absorb over time (politics, social dilemmas, economical condition) but this is more about users intentionally searching narrower topics. What's wrong with my code, how do I fix my car, what computer should I buy, what's the best way to get rid of termites - those kinds of things.
I unashamedly call myself an expert about exactly one car. I learned everything from it's most popular forum from 2010-2015. I admin a Facebook group for it. When I started just on the dedicated forum, we'd get basic questions all the time about super common issues but a few links to good threads and recommendations about using Google with site:thisforum added helped avoid "repeat customers" in the future. That's gone. The forum is forgotten because original owners have sold and new owners don't know about it. No one wants to make an account on a site for just one topic these days when Facebook and reddit are so easy to use. Shitty answer sites following in the footsteps of Yahoo Answers (such as quora, fixya, and justanswer) have dominated normal Google searches. Google often suggests appending "reddit" to searches which is an improvement over those sites, but still atrocious for unpopular niche topics such as my forgotten car, in comparison to the forum. Having an existing account on reddit or Facebook promotes joining a relevant group/sub, not even knowing how to vet them for accuracy, and just blind-firing questions into the void. Google can sparse reddit, but the internal reddit search is rough. Facebook is locked down and the search is even worse. As I've joined other groups for cars I know less about, I can't beleive the abysmal quality of answers I've gotten myself. People act as if I personally sent them a letter requesting information and I get answers that are overly generic, downright useless as they say they don't know, or tell me to try something I said in my main post I already tried. This is the state of the world. None of these platforms value solutions, they value interaction for the sake of user volume. Wanna know why FB Marketplace is continually awful to sift through? Because every minute spent groaning about irrelevant listings and ignoring search parameters is another minute not given to Craigslist, kajiji, or any other classifieds. They don't need you to win, they need the competition to lose.
I don't want to hear anyone's bullshit about ditching reddit and meta. We're a microscopic niche of the internet, here on the fediverse. Our little bubble is not swaying half the fucking planet off meta. Do not act smug and say just go back to the original forums when they're dead/devoid/deactivated because a handful of corporations socially engineered the ideal content streaming platforms.
Blaming kids for being dumb is a cop out. You have niche knowledge from your era about vetting content and avoiding scams/misinformation. You're saying new kids are dumb in those regards. I bet you think older people are dumb in those regards too. Please realize both of those groups have their own niches and think you're dumb, too, in some other topic. You are the peak of a decade, not a century. I don't know your age, you don't know mine, but consider this quote:
“Our youth now love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders, and they love to chatter instead of exercise. Children are now tyrants not servants of their household. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”
Sound accurate? Look up who said it.
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There's a big difference between "all kids are terrible today" and "some people have very successfully dismantled the education system, and it's impacting our youth to a point where we can't trust their levels of education can protect them against capitalism run amok."
To be clearer: failure to educate is squarely on adults not on children.
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Kids are as smart as we used to be. And we didn't save the then-future, now-present. Same deal with boomers.
Names will change, corporations will change, investors will stay the same. For us things won't get meaningfully better or worse than they are.
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People of all ages have great people and awful people in them. Always has been so and always will be.
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"I've heard of RFK Jr. and he says vaccines are bad. He's more famous than scientists, so I believe him for exposing their corruption. "
I can't wait for humanity to go extinct.
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I was Googling just fine until Google ruined it with "SEO" and AI so that completely irrelevant results dominate the first 2 or 3 pages.
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It's this last two years where it has gotten really bad in my opinion. Before you could at least navigate the ads ridden site. Now base Google search is tremendously worse.
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YouTube search is SO MUCH WORSE now. it just gives up and shows random stuff after like 3 results
I searched "friends invited me to lethal company". I got 6 results (one of which is a song?) before it gave up and showed "people also watched this" and "you might like this" aka anything even semi related to Lethal Company
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Don't get me wrong, fuck google, but how much can we blame google for SEO? That's just people gaming the system, and they'd be doing it no matter how google presented their results.
Maybe there is a whole cooperation aspect that I'm not aware of.
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Google did a rollback of anti-SEO indexing features because the intention is that users issue more searches. Ever since the ads side of the business won the war for the soul of Google the experience has gotten worse on purpose.
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Can't read this article thanks to shitty paywall. Yet it has 28 trackers even tho it just need pure HTML
Edit: thank you for archive link OP!
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And how do non-old people navigate the web? I mean I get it, you don't need to google the Wikipedia article about the French Revolution... You can ask AI. But how do you find business hours for the repair shop downtown? Which website sells the concert tickets? News from yesterday? The forum that tells you if 32GB of RAM fit into your laptop?
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Hours and menus normally come from Maps. News often comes from social media, unfortunately. But Google rarely helps me there either. Concert tickets is probably an app or venue website (but I don't really go to many concerts because fuck Ticketmaster).
Not that I don't Google stuff, but it's way less useful than it used to be.
I'm over fifty (though fuck does it feel unreal to say that).
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(but I don't really go to many concerts because fuck Ticketmaster)
You can often (though not always) buy tickets directly from the venue in person or over the phone. You avoid Ticketmaster fees this way, though they may end up emailing you the ticket in Ticketmaster anyway.
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Sure. I'm living in a different filter bubble anyways. Ticketmaster seems to be big but it isn't the only platform where I live. I guess I'm not really mainstream and I go to smaller concerts, festivals, art museums. And a lot of them have different ticket services. So I usually end up googling them and following the trail of links to the individual ticket shop.
I'm 10 years younger than you. Maybe a bit more. I grew up with the rise of social media. I still despise how it confines me into a filter bubble. Makes my world smaller (despite connecting me with the world) by choosing my perspective. I take care to occasionally read local news. And not take my political perspective from platforms with an algorithm tailored to shape my perspective.
But I get it. Not everyone does it like me. But I think we have a big problem with algorithms and media literacy.
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You ask your AI assistant.
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The thing with that is, it happily makes up business hours and venues. And you end up in some dark alley without any entertainment. Or a different kind than you envisioned...I doubt someone does this more than once or twice...
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What? I Google stuff all the time. Just not on Google (DuckDuckGo or Qwant)
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I hate to say it, but DDG results are shit. The only half-decent competition I've found is yandex, and I don't really trust it.
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Googling is for advertisers..
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Old people are the only ones with any money.
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The average American spent just over $60,000 a year in 2021, but spending habits vary significantly between age groups. Those born from 1965 to 1980 – spent the most money last year, with average expenditure of $83,357.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/10/americans-spend-their-money-by-generation/
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I've almost forgotten how shitty Google has become. Been using kagi search for a year now.
It's so nice to get clean unbiased search results.
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Have you seen a Gen Z-er trying to research something on the internet?
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It's almost like the tools they were taught to use were crippled out from under them in the name of serving more ads.
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Well as the builders of the current distopian present we were told all the time that we needed to create user interfaces and services where people would not need to know anything about tech and there was always a "design for the dumb user" since forever.
This is what we get by pushing that narrative I guess.
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Honestly it usually starts with chatgpt or ai. I've been watching my younger coworkers.
It's not a bad thing per-say but sometimes it's wildly wrong and they don't question where it comes from. Which bites them when we do reviews/code.
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per-say
I think you mean per se.
https://www.dictionary.com/e/per-say-or-per-se/ -
"sometimes it's wildly wrong and they don't question where it comes from"
A stark difference from google results surely
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Article is behind a paywall, what does it say "young people" do instead of "googling"?
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This shift is due largely to users’ bypassing Google to start their search for goods on Amazon. It’s handing Amazon billions in advertiser dollars. Meanwhile, TikTok has less than 4% of U.S. digital ad revenue, but significant potential to expand its share of the pie. A recent TikTok pitch to advertisers reported on by The Wall Street Journal said that 23% of its users searched for something within 30 seconds of opening the app, and its global search volume was three billion a day. The second threat is the rise of “answer engines” like Perplexity which, well, do what they say on the tin. OpenAI has added internet search to ChatGPT, Meta Platforms is exploring building its own search engine, and even AI chatbots that can’t search the internet are proving increasingly capable at addressing many questions. They’re also becoming ever more widespread, as Microsoft and Appleintegrate them directly into the operating systems of all the devices they make or support.
Non paywalled version: https://archive.today/?run=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Ftech%2Fgoogling-is-for-old-people-thats-a-problem-for-google-5188a6ed
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I can't see through the paywall either, but if it's like any of the hundreds of other articles that have been written on this topic, the answer is probably TikTok
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I would like two search engines displaying results side by side whenever I do a search. There's so much empty space on a wide screen display anyway.
Maybe I should check if there's an addon for this...
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Not sure if it's what you're looking for, but a searx instance can return commingled results from multiple engines
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Thanks - I'll have to look into this!
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This is an excellent idea. Did you happen to find any?
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Not really no!
There was a "Multi Web Search" by Oleksandr for Firefox but it was last updated five years ago. It also intermingles the results whereas I would've liked to see them side by side (to compare how different search engines rank the sites)
The SearX feature the other guy mentioned might be the best bet!
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Stopped using google some time ago.
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I still use Google search without an issue, just de-bullshitted by the whoogle frontend.
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why jump through hoops to keep using Google instead of just using another search engine
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I have gotten more reliable results from Google than other search engines even if it involves a middle man service that removes the bullshit
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Mental inertia. It's the same kind of thinking that keeps some people using Windows. They've convinced themselves that the option with the familiar name will take less effort to learn than the one with the new name, when in fact the mental effort required to make the familiar-named thing work properly is greater.
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The second threat is the rise of “answer engines” like Perplexity which, well, do what they say on the tin. OpenAI has added internet search to ChatGPT, Meta Platforms is exploring building its own search engine, and even AI chatbots that can’t search the internet are proving increasingly capable at addressing many questions. They’re also becoming ever more widespread, as Microsoft and Appleintegrate them directly into the operating systems of all the devices they make or support.
That is not an improvement, it's just also not really any worse.
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it's an improvement in a way. today marketing for most businesses is 80% google ads, 20% facebook ads. google is massively manipulating google ads to practically steal money because they're the only player in town. if adspace is spread thinner, google is fucked, and small business owners actually stand a chance against the big behemoths with infinite pockets.
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But in terms of actual information it could be worse thanks to AI hallucinations and poor training materials.
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I don’t even know why people use Google anymore besides maps and restaurant data. The rest is all SEO corporate junk.
I search directly on medical and research / studies sites now. The rest I use AI.
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You are seriously saying that AI is better than a normal Google search.
I understand there's a lot of gaming this system going on but that's better than AI. At least with a Google search you can read the sources and see how relevant they actually are, ai is just a black box.
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Honestly, i felt so multiple times.
Often, after googling and going through top results, when unable to find anything relevant.. I ask perplexity and it gives a tailored answer and gets relevant sources. I had been googling for more than a decade.
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That's why you use something like perplexity.ai instead of an LLM
It lists the sources where it found the information, so you can always doublecheck. The AI part is mostly just summarises of the websites that bypass the SEO bullshit.
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Not only that, but AI is a blackbox that doesn't know anything and feeds you with random words in a plausible way. It's just made up text with no knowledge whatsoever.
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I use it when shopping online because DuckDuckGo is shit for shopping in Holland.
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I believe DuckDuckGo uses Bing as it's underlying search engine, which explains a lot.
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145 comments