3 ms·
This is what baffles me about the discussions on AI making the search based experience of the web worse. Worse? Have you searched for anything in the last 10 y
by fnordpiglet 3y ago
This is what baffles me about the discussions on AI making the search based experience of the web worse. Worse? Have you searched for anything in the last 10 years? It’s just awful SEO garbage - at least the LLM SEO garbage might actually tell you how to pickle dog biscuits, while the human generated garbage just meticulously structures the text to imply they might tell you while they actually can’t because the don’t actually know.
But regardless of whether it’s LLM SEO or human SEO, a human decides to make fake pages about pickling dog biscuits because it was more important for them to make some money personally than for the search based internet to be anything but garbage. A human did that. The same humans that have been screwing everything up for everyone else for at least the last 10,000 years.
IMO I think this trend is just an acceleration and democratization of enshitification tools. But I think the future result is three fold:
1) dependence on automated algorithms to differentiate between garbage and quality is now demonstrably dead, while it just seemed dead before
2) open LLMs backed by information retrieval systems will be a much better tool for learning than a naked search engine
3) humans will need to curate lists of good material and depending and algorithms and automated information retrieval systems alone will be insufficient, and hence curated and editorialized directories will become the primary way of discovering human generated content of quality.
Looks like Yahoo was just 25 years too early!
- catchnear4321 3y agothis tracks, and makes an interesting argument for a modernized librarian curriculum. maybe there already is something of the sort under a different name. llm usage makes a lot of sense for dealing with… data. granted, universities are decaying in much the same way as information access online.
- paulcole 3y ago> a human decides to make fake pages about pickling dog biscuits because it was more important for them to make some money personally than for the search based internet to be anything but garbage If I think I make the best dog biscuits and I want to be found, then it’s not a “fake page” from my perspective — it’s just marketing and in a way I’m doing you a service because you’ll be happiest if you buy my dog biscuits.
- catchnear4321 3y agoso essentially lie to get attention, and that’s ok because you just wanted to help people find the best product - yours?
- paulcole 3y agoWhat’s the lie?
- rubyfan 3y agoThat’s a different scenario altogether. I think the parent is referring to link farming and arbitrage type pages that serve the purpose of netting a commission, not selling more first party products.
- wlesieutre 3y agoAnd no one will find your page with the best dog biscuits because it’s buried on page 30 of the search results behind all of the people trying to generate ad money who don’t actually know anything about dog biscuits
- fnordpiglet 3y agoDo you think you’ll be found? That’s not how search engines work. You’ll make your lovingly made page, but someone with a link farm will bury you 20 result pages deep. The internet as indexed by search engines hasn’t worked for at least 10 years.
- ryandrake 3y agoYea, this is the story that marketers tell themselves so they can sleep at night: "Well, I'm different! Unlike everyone else, my product is high quality! People will want to see it!" All ~10M marketers in the world excuse their actions with this rubbish.
- paulcole 3y agoWell one of them must be right, no? And many of them will have good products/offer a good value, too?
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]