Anyone else feel like there's some kind of gaslight campaign behind how awful contemporary internet search is? You complain about it and it's just faceless chump after faceless chump telling you that {search_engine} is better than it's ever been you're just doing it wrong. Or accusations of misremembering the past and associated "nostalgia-goggle" insults?

5 months ago · 👍 cobradile94, genxalt

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6 Replies

The AI-gen content taking over the first page of search results are really annoying. It reminds me of the days back before I had internet, when I had to dig/search through lots of stuff to find an answer. What concerns me is that idk if younger generations have the information literacy to recognize how much of the data is junk/repeated. (And I don't even mean "comes from a political narrative that I don't like" here, so much as "it aggregated reddit and wikipedia, and still didn't answer your question, and yet you're acting like you don't have to think critically about it anymore") · 5 months ago

idk about a gaslighting campaign. There might be money in it for Big Search. Paying schills or bots to argue for your case is not a new strategy for anyone's business or political playbook. · 5 months ago

Plausible. But you talk where? You have to be fanatically accurate in this kind of analysis. Take YouTube: I don't know about bot doing something like you suppose, but about one week ago I replied to a comment asking for a song on Spotify ,and it was instantly incinerated, and I hadn't post any url, only hint & keywords. On a very niche question w. lot of likes. How many users had their comment gone? That made me almost sure there are bots and routines actively purging reference to competitors in any form to keep the market dominance, and if governments worth a tenth of what they used to Antitrust authorities would take these giants and shatter them into pieces. · 5 months ago

I'm going to agree with these other two, I never hear anyone say anything positive about modern search engines. · 5 months ago

Honestly, I can't remember the last time I heard someone say anything positive about internet searching. As far as anyone I've talked to is concerned, it's just gotten universally worse. · 5 months ago

not here. only agreement when I mentioned this to friends · 5 months ago