David Revoy | Mastodon | Bonus Timelapse

Transcript

The Degraded Search Engine

A comic in four panels:

Panel 1. Cepper, the gothic sorceress, walks toward a large steampunk machine in the center of the library written “Gooblin” on it, colored letters. The machine resembles a rusty block, with a threadmill on one side, a seat and a typewriter-style keyboard.

Cepper: “A good old ‘search engine’, this is what I need for my research!”

Panel 2. Close up, Cepper types on the typewriter keyboard, looking at the screen.

Cepper: “R.I.N.G. O.F. F.I.R.E S.P.E.L.L.S. enter”
Cepper: “…And voilà.”

Panel 3. The machine spits out dozens of scrolls and books. Cepper reads them.

Cepper: “Wait… Why are these results so bad?..”
Book 1: “(Ad) Ten Fire Spells That Will Change Your Life (You Won’t Believe the 7th!)”
Book 2: “(Sponsored) 15 Spicy Onion Ring Recipes”
Book 3: “(For you) Top 5 Best Engagement Rings”
Book 4: “(ad) How to Start a Campfire: A Comprehensive Guide”
Book 5: “Is Your Fire Spell Not Working? (Try This One Simple Trick!)”
Book 6: “(Sponsored) Cheap Fire-Resistant Panties! (50% Off Today Only!)”

Panel 4. A librarian approaches, their AI Parrot perched on their shoulder, pointing it. Cepper looks defeated, her eyes blasé.

Librarian: “Yeah, they tuned it this way so everyone just uses their Avian Intelligence for searching now…” Cepper: “…How unsurprising.”

  • Holyginz@lemmy.world
    3·
    7 days ago

    This is why I do not use Google anymore. I use kagi, which is paid but I do not get any ads and it reminds me of Google before it went to shit. Im sure shitty website design still messes with search results but its not even close to as bad as current Google. I actually get good results without having to scroll through all the sponsored bullshit.

  • ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip
    76·
    8 days ago

    People often say “search engines are getting worse.” But I think they’re missing the problem with that. The Internet’s content on average is getting worse. Search engines (correctly) prefer more recent content, but if all content internet-wide is getting worse, the engine will give you worse results.

    • nialv7@lemmy.world
      33·
      8 days ago

      I think the best content on the Internet hasn’t gotten worse, but there is so much trash now so the average got dragged down.

      Search engines are supposed to find the best content for us but have failed miserably as of late.

        • InputZero@lemmy.world
          8·
          7 days ago

          You can actually go as far as 2022 if you’re okay with a little easily spotted AI in the search. It was 2023 when LLMs really took off, but if you want to be certain then use 2020.

    • Rothe@piefed.socialEnglish
      13·
      7 days ago

      It’s both though. Entshittification of search engines and internet content is a symbiotic process.

    • katze@lemmy.4d2.org
      9·
      7 days ago

      I don’t think that is true. For example, when it comes to cooking, I know a few hand-made non-seo pages that I frequent that have a nice selection and presentation of recipes. Those never come up in the search results, only the shit sites.

    • AmyAye@nord.pubEnglish
      4·
      7 days ago

      They are worse though for power user types. They do shit like omit “of” in “Ring of Fire Spells” because it seems it as meaningless but people who use search like it’s a computer instead of “Dear Gooblin pwees five me spells for rings made of fire” and get all generic and shit, it sucks.

      Because power user types are precise in their search, and search engines are increasingly stripping that precision for stupid reasons.

  • deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz
    38·
    8 days ago

    TL;DR: it’s an arms race.

    In the before times: the WWW gets big enough to need search engines.

    • Crappy sites learn to goose their rankings.

    • Search engines get better (I.e. PageRank).

    • Crappy sites learn to SEO (a new industry is born).

    While this is going on…

    • Search engine owners want profit.

    • Search engines pollute results with ads.

    Eventually the signal to noise ratio for actual results to paid results goes asymptotic.

    • LLM’s are developed that can regurgitate the signal and discard the noise (or at least probabilistically mimic that).

    What happens tomorrow? Who knows?

    • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      6·
      7 days ago
      • LLM’s are developed that can regurgitate the signal and discard the noise (or at least probabilistically mimic that).

      What happens tomorrow? Who knows?

      Actually, the signal to noise ratio of LLMs has already begun deteriorating and now that they’re mostly fed data by themselves and/or other LLMs, it’s only going to get worse. Probably exponentially so.

  • darthelmet@lemmy.world
    17·
    7 days ago

    I just ask the room full of magic talking lemmings. Although a lot of the time they’ll give you solutions that involve using the olde magiks.

    EDIT: I keep thinking of additions to this joke, so I will shamelessly edit them in:

    • Some of them are arch wizards and they will let you know this.

    • Mugix

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
    16·
    7 days ago

    That’s not technically true.

    Avaian Intelligence uses basically the same search as people, and the degredation happened before that.

    It was a simple choice to ignore known spam, to boost short term revenue. It had nothing to do with pushing people to chatbots:

    https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

    I know this seems pedantic, but I think people should realize it’s, fundamentally, search engine companies and their dev decisions that are ruining the internet. Pinning it on their LLMs excludes them of culpability, which is exactly the kind of revisionist history they want.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
      6·
      7 days ago

      I think this is giving Google too much credit.

      Sure, some of it was about getting people to search multiple times so they get more ad impressions.

      But, a big part of it is that Google has been waging war against SEO and spam from day 1, and they’re losing ground / lost.

      This explanation that it was just a way to make more money implies that if Google wanted they could show you the exact results you wanted, but I don’t think that’s true anymore.

      Google’s initial algorithm was Page Rank. They looked at how many sites linked to your site. The more sites that linked to it, the more people who thought your site was high quality. You couldn’t game it by anything you put on your site because the ranking came from other people’s impressions of you. But with enough money, that was easily defeated by buying up / starting up thousands of sites and promoting another site by linking to it.

      Since then it has been a cat and mouse game. Google tweaks their process to reduce inauthentic “recommendations”, the SEO people change their methods and get back into the top results. For a while Google was winning, but even before AI, they were already losing more and more often.

      The rise of Facebook and other social media just made it worse. Google didn’t have deep visibility into these sites, so they couldn’t carefully look over metadata to help judge whether something was authentic. Meanwhile, it became cheaper and cheaper to put up inauthentic content that attempted to boost a site’s placement on Google.

      I think the pivot to AI is as much Google admitting defeat in the war against SEOs as it is about them trying to make money from a new venture.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
        4·
        7 days ago

        This is a fair point, +1. I didn’t mean to, but looking at my comment I gave Google too much credit here.

        But, they contributed to the SEO industry that led to this. The whole system is driven by how Google structures their ads, and it wouldn’t have snowballed into such a beast if Google had fought the bad incentives at cost to their own short-term profits.

    • thevoidzero@lemmy.world
      5·
      7 days ago

      It wasn’t to push people to use chatbot, but it does helo understand why so many people use chatbots. I had to use Google search in a computer (extra: without adblocks) after years, then it made me think it finally makes sense why people ask chatbots everything instead of just searching.

    • boonhet@lemmy.zip
      4·
      7 days ago

      Dev decisions lmao

      I guarantee not a single dev wants to optimize for ad impressions, particularly in search where that means you have to make search worse so it would take multiple queries to find your results. No, that’s a business decision. Comes from up high. Prabhakar Raghavan may have been a computer scientist early on in his career but he’d been in the C suite on again off again at different companies for well over a decade by the time they deposed the head of search at Google and put search under the leadership of the ads division (Raghavan).

  • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
    9·
    7 days ago

    Naw, it wasn’t to push AI. This is actually just the culmination of over a decade of incestual hiring practices (oh your know Dave? You’re in!), toxic leadership, and general brain drain at Google.

    The Good ones are mostly gone now, I believe.