16 ms·

As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

• danpalmer 2mo ago
  It's hard to get past the beginning of this article and take it at all seriously. The quote someone who missed a sunset because they asked google and supposedly got the wrong time... but they didn't think to look at the sun or lack thereof to check? Also when I put "when does the sun set today" I get a single exact figure at the top of my results, not from AI, which is honestly the best kind of result – an exact correct answer.
  • tayo42 2mo ago
    They were planning their day for a specific time to be somewhere. If you're looking at the sun it's to late...
    • BeetleB 2mo ago
      That's fine, but arguing that Google should give accurate times based on where you are is ... crazy? In the pre-LLM days it was cool that Google did weather, unit conversions, sports results, etc. But that's not even close to their value proposition. Even 5 years ago if someone told me they had planned a photograph and got it wrong because Google gave them the wrong time for sunset, I would have called them a moron for relying on Google! There are sites and apps dedicated to this. Use one of them!
      • Dylan16807 2mo ago
        I don't understand your argument. It's not their core value proposition so it's crazy? That's quite a leap. But giving a good answer is just as core as their search results. The answer is what you're there for and they get to show ads. It's not any stupider to use that info than a dedicated site. Both could be wrong, and you're not a moron if it is. Installing an app to learn a single time would be the real moron option.
        • BeetleB 2mo ago
          > But giving a good answer is just as core as their search results. What I'm saying is all Google has to do is stop giving those types of "custom" answers it already has. No one will abandon using Search if it goes away. > It's not any stupider to use that info than a dedicated site. Both could be wrong, and you're not a moron if it is. It is. Using a well vetted, dedicated app is the way to go, and it's extremely unlikely to be wrong - especially for something like sunset times. You know the dedicated app/site is, well, dedicated to providing that information. They exist to provide that information. Whereas the (pre-LLM) quick answers Google gave? All opaque. And smart people always knew that information being accurate was not something that matters that much to Google.
          • Dylan16807 2mo ago
            To borrow an analogy, installing a dedicated app starts at negative one hundred points. The risk of bad behavior and junky ads needs a lot of use to overcome. I'm not sure where "well vetted" came from since your first post but doing that vetting takes much longer than getting the answer! And without vetting there's a good enough chance a dedicated site is worse than a dedicated Google widget (the ai is bottom of the barrel). Let's not forget that Google's actual sunset widget does a good job.
    • mr_mitm 2mo ago
      From the article: > “I had the projector set up outside and was waiting for the sun to set,” wrote one Facebook user in Colorado Springs, “but to my surprise I was simply living in the past. AI informed me the sunset had already happened.” It does sound a bit bizarre.
      • Melatonic 2mo ago
        We really need a SarcasmAI to become a thing.
• georgemcbay 2mo ago
  From a user perspective, Google search is the most useful it has been in years, though that doesn't feel entirely like intentional improvement, just a lucky side effect of the move to "AI mode". And yes, if you take what the AI tells you at face value it could be wrong. But if you are aware of this and aware of the ways in which LLMs are likely to shit the bed, it is quicker to get from request to useful information than it has been with Google search since like 2017. And also, yes, the old balance of Google driving clicks to sites that will then generate revenue off more Google Ads being shown after you click through to them creating a virtuous cycle is completely busted, and that sucks. It does not impact me directly but it certainly seems like unless a better system is devised that it is one of a few ways in which AI is likely to stall out its own training funnel.
  • Gualdrapo 2mo ago
    > But if you are aware of this and aware of the ways in which LLMs are likely to shit the bed, it is quicker to get from request to useful information than it has been with Google search since like 2017. The point is not about 'quicker' requests but precise requests. It definitely has worsened, though not on a single degree on al levels like the HN hivemind claims, but some aspects are still somewhat precise but others are definitely crap. i.e. when searching about my neighborhood it still returns better results than bing, yahoo, ddg, yandex and what have you. But they are buried into a load of crap of alleged "relevant" results (those things past the ai stuff) that aren't relevant in any way.
    • bloaf 2mo ago
      Yandex is the only search engine left which still feels like the "old" web. It feels like you're actually getting a best effort search, and not just the results that someone paid to put in front of you.
  • bloaf 2mo ago
    As someone who regularly reads things online, then wants to read them again like 3 years later, Google has been monotonically declining in quality. Also I realized the other day how hard it is to find song lyrics for anything other than quite mainstream songs.
• novafunc 2mo ago
  I occasionally use Google Search when DuckDuckGo fails to give me relevant. Almost always, Google has better results. Though I can find its AI answers annoying aggressive. I'll look up like two search terms and the AI will bullshit multiple paragraphs out of despite having zero context of what I am looking for. DuckDuckGo seems to have detection of whether it should give an AI answer. And it allows you to have more granular control of when you want to get an AI answer. And is overall less distracting than Google's.
  • 8organicbits 2mo ago
    Interesting, I've seen much better results on DDG. Most recently was the search: `site:feeds.bbci.co.uk inurl:rss.xml` which works on DDG but gives zero results on Google. As far as I can tell, Google just decided not to index these.
    • jamesfinlayson 2mo ago
      Yeah I mostly still use Google out of habit but there have been a few times where Google has decided something isn't worth indexing (too niche, doesn't use SSL). I miss when Google was like a grep for the entire visible Internet. Now it tries to second-guess my search and direct me to a bunch of sites which all have identical information that isn't what I'm looking for.
      • Xyra 2mo ago
        hi, i've been working on this, grep.it.com. (i found your comment with it)
    • ehnto 2mo ago
      I find DDG is struggling to, or chosen not to, filter or derank obvious AI generated content farm sites. Of which there are an insane amount of already. We thought blogspam was bad, at least it was easy to ignore. It's hard to find authoritative sources for a number of topics, worryingly health advice is one of them.
• comrade1234 2mo ago
  I spent the last three days (off and on) using Gemini to configure my edge router 4 with my iOS devices on a vpn and it's been awesome. In the past I'd do a google search and read a few sources of documentation, do another google search and read another set of documentation. Now, Gemini aggregates multiple pages together so all of the work of reading source docs from multiple locations is now n a single step. Oh, I should mention though. There was no advertising at all. They didn't make any money off me. It was 100% Gemini which I recognize as not long-term feasible.
  • ls612 2mo ago
    I built a simple Claude Code container on my homelab to do the same. I can just SSH in and get tech support when I need it.
  • stringfood 2mo ago
    no, no, no. you are supposed to romanticize the hunt for correct information /s
    • mrweasel 2mo ago
      Even with the /s I think you misunderstand. If you just want to configure your router, then AI is neat. If you want to learn and understand what's going on in the router as you set it up, then being given the answers basically teaches you nothing. It's the same reason why we don't give students the answers to things, we teach them to find the answers.
      • stringfood 2mo ago
        Why would most people want to learn how a router works? It's the end goal that the vast majority of users want - i don't want to learn about routing tables, I just want to expose a port for plex, etc. Also, I could have AI craft a fascinating and engaging way of teaching router setup that actually helps me learn instead of wasting time searching through random forums form google results
• charcircuit 2mo ago
  It would be beneficial for the author to look at the revenue for Google Search. Revenue is still growing.
  • echelon 2mo ago
    There is probably a lag time before advertisers give up on AdSense. A lot of corporate ad spend is already planned, and Google can adjust the costs up as much as they like. They hold the lever.
    • charcircuit 2mo ago
      If search engine competitors were really eating Google's lunch then ad impressions would go down.
      • nitwit005 2mo ago
        They don't have much of an offering yet. OpenAI has some conventional ads, but everyone expects more involved advertising integrated into the conversation itself somehow.
        • charcircuit 2mo ago
          Even if the alternatives would have no advertising the number of ad impressions of Google Search would go down. In the article it mentions the rise of other search competitors like Qwant implying they are causing Google to die as it bleeds market share to them.
  • panarky 2mo ago
    Indeed. Not only is search revenue growing, but it is growing at an accelerating rate. At the same time, operating margins are expanding. I don't know the name of the logical fallacy where someone personally uses an LLM instead of Google Search and then infers that the search business is dying, without ever reading a financial statement.
  • Chinjut 2mo ago
• schaefer 2mo ago
  Kagi search today is better than Google search ever was. And it’s clear that Google’s Ad model ultimately created a priority inversion. The advertisers became the customer. I am so glad Kagi came along with a business model that is actually working.
  • onemoresoop 2mo ago
    I was wondering how would Kagi scale/expand if all of a sudden google were to stop serving search altogether (not likely) or alter search such that users look for alternatives.
    • Skunkleton 2mo ago
      Kagi is an aggregator for other, some paid, search APIs. They have, at least in the past, served some percentage of their results from Bing's API among others for example. Kagi seems to me to be dependent on these APIs being available, if they were to go away, so would Kagi. I am a happy subscriber of Kagi though, they provide a really excellent service.
      • SietrixDev 2mo ago
        I'm not sure Kagi has ever used the Bing API, because (according to Kagi) Bing prohibited changing the results, or merging them with others. Apparently Google is expected to provide access to its index via API soon. https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search
  • bigstrat2003 2mo ago
    I wouldn't say it's better, but it's certainly on par with Google in their best years. And it's light years better than what Google is now, or using an LLM.
  • jeorb 2mo ago
    I'm a long time Kagi user and I haven't used Google search in about a year. I tried out Google search for a few technical searches recently and it was surprisingly ad and AI free. Not bad at all and much better than I remember from last year. Then I put in some non-technical searches and it was all ads and AI and basically unusable.
• umvi 2mo ago
  I feel like collecting, curating, and protecting high quality corpuses of "truth" is going to become increasingly important for high quality AI. There will come a day (and probably soon) when "training on the public internet" (Reddit, etc) will taint your model with metric tons of corporate contamination, political poison, and other adversarial content intentionally crafted to bias AIs for various reasons (corporate gain, geopolitical information warfare, etc). Basically the AI-equivalent of SEO.
  • latexr 2mo ago
    > There will come a day (and probably soon) That day has already arrived, it is already happening.
  • hadlock 2mo ago
    I think most everyone already has a curated training library; Web scraping exists but I don't think anyone is still using it as a primary information vector
    • dylan604 2mo ago
      Otherwise they'd be slurping in their own slop
  • jessetemp 2mo ago
    All of that already existed for the purpose of biasing people and now it biases ai for free. A company would have to make an effort to remove or change the bias
  • asawfofor 2mo ago
    Isn’t this what the paper-bound encyclopedia companies do, albeit shallowly
  • satvikpendem 2mo ago
    This already exists, there are archives of Reddit or other sites, and Anna's Archive for papers and books.
• amazingamazing 2mo ago
  [2011] The Atlantic - Why Google Won't Survive the Facebook Threat. I’ll add this article to the list of incorrect predictions lol
• ElProlactin 2mo ago
  There's too much going on in this article and while I think some of the points are valid, others go too far. A lot of the "cultural record" the author refers to is just digital junk. Random digital content that very few people care about, if we're being honest. Trying to hoard every bit of digital information ever produced is not the same thing as preserving "culture". Case in point: > Even the increasing use of ephemeral formats like Instagram Stories and WhatsApp status updates means that large portions of cultural, social, and political communication are never conserved in the first place. As a society, we can probably survive bad search results and come up with another way to schedule a sunset make-out session. But we can’t aspire to sovereignty if we can’t retain and retrieve our collective memory. For most of human history, nobody was trying to "conserve" every cultural, social or political communication ever produced, and I fail to see how Instagram Stories and WhatsApp status updates, many of which aren't even truly broadcast publicly for all to see, are part of some imaginary "collective memory." If you find a web page, see an Instagram Story or receive a message that's important to you, save it or take a screenshot. But let's not pretend all these things belong in a global Digital Civilizational Archives.
  • bitwize 2mo ago
    On the other hand, when modern archaeologists discover "Claudius has a small dick" graffiti on the side of some God-forsaken wall in Pompeii, they're fascinated. The presence of such graffiti adds color and texture to the civilization inhabited by Virgil and Ovid. What's just disposable background noise to us may provide context into how we lived and thought to our far-future descendants.
    • ElProlactin 2mo ago
      > The presence of such graffiti adds color and texture to the civilization inhabited by Virgil and Ovid. It does, but do you think that people at that time thought anywhere near as much about preserving their scribbles as we do? I'd venture a guess that we've created more "content" since the advent of the internet than in all of human history prior, and most of it is stored on things that aren't even designed to last a human lifetime without failure. The idea that we're going to save every piece of digital junk for posterity just isn't realistic or healthy. > What's just disposable background noise to us may provide context into how we lived and thought to our far-future descendants. You're right, but you're also assuming that they're going to care that much, and that we're going to survive that long.
• forgetfreeman 2mo ago
  The most frustrating part of all of this is the underlying premise that the internet is, has been, or could ever be a credible cultural record is deeply stupid. Or maybe more charitably it's both historically and technically illiterate. It has always taken continuous unwavering effort on some person's part to keep any given piece of content online. And while managing a simple hosting account and updating domain registration periodically doesn't take a tremendous amount of effort 20 years is a long time to expect anyone to maintain enthusiasm. The internet has always been a frothy, ever changing blend of the odd nugget of truth drifting in a sea of unadulterated bullshit. Treating this, or worse what comes from statistically averaging it, as a source of capital T truth is totally unhinged. From whence did this mythology of online truth spring?
• qudat 2mo ago
  Funny as I just cancelled my Kagi sub to get the Gemini ai pro sub. The deal was too good to pass up
  • t-writescode 2mo ago
    Kagi does have AI too, for what it’s worth. I found it pretty damn good, but I wish I could give them more money. I have a year subscription so I’m stuck without being able to give them *anything* until it’s done.
    • dylan604 2mo ago
      Sign up for another account?
      • t-writescode 2mo ago
        That is an option for sure, but a very disappointing one. And it comes with a meaningful danger of ending up with 2 subscriptions: one yearly and one monthly. They really, really need to finish their “pay as you go” system. I don’t know why it’s not done yet and there’s been no word about it to my knowledge.
        • dylan604 2mo ago
          Maybe they should just enable a tip option? What do donations do to a company's tax liability and would it be worth their effort to enable something like that?
          • t-writescode 2mo ago
            They already have a system for “prepaying”, but it can’t be used to put more credits into your account, they just sit there, waiting to be used by a future subscription.
    • qudat 2mo ago
      Yes and this month I hit my $10 AI assistant cap for the first time, which is why I started looking around for other options. I do like Kagi but the Gemini deal was too good to pass up as it also gives my a code agent.
• flinux 2mo ago
  I see only one simple solution (though we should discuss the more complex ones): if Google directly answers a search query, then it must be held accountable for it, for better or for worse, and therefore assume all the benefits and (legal) liabilities that this entails
  • watson_engineer 2mo ago
    [flagged]
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    Already happened: https://www.dw.com/en/german-court-holds-google-liable-for-fake-ai-answers/a-77527661 https://www.dw.com/en/german-court-holds-google-liable-for-f...
• junofan 2mo ago
  What’s come next for me has been much better. I use ChatGPT cranked to Pro with “extended” thinking to one-shot whatever I would’ve spent time looking into with Google. It’ll plan the whole sunset bike ride or promposal or whatever from TFA.
• noosphr 2mo ago
  Gemini's highest tier of plan has the utility of Google search circa 2010. I'm paying $400 for the privilege.
• anigbrowl 2mo ago
  Overbroad claim. Dramatic corollary This clickbaity headline format cannot die fast enough
  • stdatomic 2mo ago
    It can't. People will simply stop clicking links.
• ilamont 2mo ago
  After publishers successfully sued the Internet Archive over its digital lending program, calling it unauthorized copying No. The court specifically determined that the Internet Archive was guilty of unauthorized copying. It was not simply an unfounded or unproven allegation. The Authors Guild, the National Writers Union, the European Writers Council, and the Society of Authors in the UK all came out against the Internet Archive, and supported the suit. Each new restriction limits the archive’s ability to act as a comprehensive backstop. This self-inflicted damage to the wayback machine is the real tragedy of this entire affair. When IA was asked to stop CDL - many times - founder Brewster Kahle continued. The National Writers Union tried to open a dialogue as early as 2010 but was ignored: The Internet Archive says it would rather talk with writers individually than talk to the NWU or other writers’ organizations. But requests by NWU members to talk to or meet with the Internet Archive have been ignored or rebuffed. https://nwu.org/nwu-denounces-cdl/ https://nwu.org/nwu-denounces-cdl/ When the requests to abandon CDL turned into demands, Kahle dug in his heels. When the inevitable lawsuits followed, and IA lost, he insisted that he was still in the right and plowed ahead with appeals. And here we are today.
  • arjie 2mo ago
    Seems inevitable, doesn’t it? Expecting otherwise would have been hoping that notorious atheist Richard Dawkins somehow spared one specific god. Making websites accessible with history ignoring copyright is sort of what it does. That he would do it with books seems entirely in keeping with the philosophy.
    • rmunn 2mo ago
      I was initially confused what Dawkins was doing with books, until I realized that the "he" in your last sentence was Kahle, not Dawkins. Might want to edit your comment to put his name in, because otherwise you have a pronoun referring to a person named in a different comment (rather than the person named in your comment), which could get quite confusing if more people comment on the parent and their comments push yours down the page.
      • 2mo ago
• CommieBobDole 2mo ago
  The article touches on something that I've been thinking about with regards to Google's AI strategy; the automatically-generated AI search summaries are not great. They very frequently confidently misinterpret what the user is searching for and generate half a page of useless information that pushes actual results down the page, and they are occasionally hilariously incorrect, with hallucinated facts. This is probably a difficult-to-solve problem; given that they generate billions of these a day, not even Google can afford to devote enough compute to each query to reliably generate quality results. You can see this by selecting the "AI mode" from the search interface after getting the mediocre summary - the results are much better and generally perfectly usable. Though even that is probably a special minimal-compute version of the lowest tier of Gemini, it's still maybe an order of magnitude more capable than whatever generates the search summaries. The bigger problem is that these search summaries are the default and by far the most common interaction that the general public has with "AI", and because this experience sucks, they just assume that all LLMs are similarly stupid and mostly useless. In non-technical spaces I frequently see the argument that "AI" is not useful for anything, all it generates is garbage hallucinations, and almost invariably they cite some actual terrible experience with the Google AI search summary. I would argue that the strategy of adding LLM summaries to every search is the worst of both worlds - it makes classic search worse while poisoning users against the idea of actual LLM-assisted search.
  • oblio 2mo ago
    > not even Google can afford to devote enough compute to each query to reliably generate quality results https://www.dw.com/en/german-court-holds-google-liable-for-fake-ai-answers/a-77527661 https://www.dw.com/en/german-court-holds-google-liable-for-f...
• smackeyacky 2mo ago
  Gemini has been a hilarious companion to my while I fixed the balance shaft chain guides in my old Mitsubishi triton (mighty max for US readers). First it told me I could just remove said balance shaft chain as an emergency repair. Sorry Gemini, it also drives the oil pump. Then it told me I could remove the water contaminated oil caused by removing the timing case by filling the crankcase with hot, soapy water and running the engine. Lord no. Then it gave the wrong instructions for putting new gears on the balance shafts which meant the chain guides didn’t align with the chain. I’ll do it my way thanks Gemini. The rest of the mistakes are too trivial to recount and sure it’s a pretty obscure subject but if I trusted it with a topic I’m not familiar with there is a huge potential for damage if you blindly follow it’s overconfidence. I miss normal searching.
  • ElFitz 2mo ago
    Meanwhile, ChatGPT correctly diagnosed what was wrong with my plant from a single photo, identified which leaves I should cut, and annotated the picture showing where to cut and what not to touch. I honestly expected a made-up useless generated image that matched the idea but not the actual thing. Guess I’m still living in 2024.
    • chrisjj 2mo ago
      What makes you think the chatbot's diagnosis is correct?
      • ElFitz 2mo ago
        From the description and picture it guessed dehydration caused by either lack of water or excessive heat, and that matched the context: leaving for two weeks during a heatwave. I had filled up the water reservoir compartment before leaving, which is usually enough, but it was dry when I came back.
• JohnMakin 2mo ago
  we built extremely powerful plausible bullshit machines targeted toward and trained on an electorate and population that has historically bad education and reading levels, built on top of an already fraught and fragile web which was also built off predatory basically unregulated behavior with a shaky relationship with “truth” and are surprised people have no idea what’s going on? This was the whole point of it all and why the people in power have bet the farm on it.
  • wartywhoa23 2mo ago
    I'd quit reading HN long time ago if not for comments like yours, when people call a spade precisely a spade and reignite my smoldering hope for the humankind.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    I think it's also brainwashed the people in power. Half of them have no idea about anything and got their positions by luck.
    • deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
• luciana1u 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  • andai 2mo ago
    So there's a new Internet Archive, it's just split across 3,000 AI labs.
    • ehnto 2mo ago
      I wonder if the AI labs will throw out their own copies of the Internet Archive after it's been sued out of existence. Probably not.
      • alightsoul 2mo ago
        Yes, yes they will. When money runs out, just hit delete on their aws account to immediately stop all billing.
  • renegat0x0 2mo ago
    In a world, where everything can be stolen it will be hard to produce anything. I still have hope though. Maybe the Internet will be better. Currently everything has to be monietized. Everything is ad heavy. At the beginning it was not so. People created things out of passion, or boredom. We can returned to that scheme. I have seen neocities, personal blogs created and maintained in this year. I know I run my own "Internet index" https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
    • oblio 2mo ago
      > People created things out of passion, or boredom. We can returned to that scheme. Turns out, people want food and shelter more than entertainment. And psycho billionaires want money more than fun.
    • mike_hearn 2mo ago
      This is a common misremembering of the early internet. The internet was never ad free. The first ad was posted online in the 1970s (for DEC)! It pissed people off but not everyone: supposedly it generated $18M in sales. There was very little advertising back then only because the internet was restricted to a handful of large companies and universities. The web itself was launched in 1991 and the early web was inaccessible to basically everyone as it required an extremely expensive NeXTStep machine. Windows didn't even ship a TCP stack in this era, iirc. So took a few years for the web to reach the point where it was usable at home. By 1995 the web was starting to become barely usable thanks to Win95 and Netscape, and DoubleClick launched immediately in the same year. My memory of the early web is that basically every website had DoubleClick ads on them, it was notorious for that. "Punch the Monkey" was an early campaign. Almost every topic oriented website carried ads, partly because bandwidth and servers were very expensive so that helped defray the costs. GeoCities took off because it handled the complexities of running ads for you, so you could publish for free.
• glum64 2mo ago
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• madhu_ghalame 2mo ago
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• jheriko 2mo ago
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• bsammon 2mo ago
  > While the web has always been organized around intermediaries that shape what survives online and who sees it, This statement, from the sixth paragraph of the article, is something that I would have liked to see addressed more in the article. The article implies that this is something that must always be true, or cannot be changed, and simply focuses on how we could have better/better funded/better protected intermediaries (AKA gatekeepers), and doesn't discuss the possibility of an internet (or part of the internet) without gatekeepers (and doesn't ask if it has ever existed/does exist/should exist)
• sgt 2mo ago
  Funny, I was just thinking this morning that Google searches are absolutely horrible these days. It's like it has amnesia, a lot of recent history seems to be just gone. Especially on non US specific sites too.
  • roysting 2mo ago
    [dead]
  • gspr 2mo ago
    They're so horrible that I've started defaulting to their AI summaries. And I hate those summaries. It's just that the regular results are so terrible now, and seemingly getting worse at a noticeable pace. I used to not worry. I was sure that a competitor would come along and fix search. But the longer that's not happening, the more nervous I'm getting that we'll actually lose search. If a few more years pass in the current state, I'm afraid the majority of people will forget what search was like and default to AI summaries. I've tried alternatives, including Kagi (not actually relevant because there's no way I'm – directly or indirectly – buying Russian products) and Uruky, but they're not good enough. (Edit: Added "directly or indirectly" about Kagi to point out that I'm not claiming that Kagi itself is Russian.)
    • onli 2mo ago
      Brave search works really well, I haven't switched to Google search for months.
      • gspr 2mo ago
        Thank you for your suggestion. I think I've discounted Brave automatically because my brain is numb to the dime-a-dozen chromium browsers out there. I'll definitely give the search a try!
      • spiderfarmer 2mo ago
        If I recall correctly Brave scrapes the web via their users, cannot be individually disallowed in robots.txt and Brandon Eich is conversing in a pretty hostile manner in every thread about him or his company.
• zkmon 2mo ago
  It happens when the deterministic precision was given away in return for the probabilistic guesses. It was one extreme until now (deterministic code), and we are swinging to the other extreme (probabilistic slop), but what the world wants could be somewhere in between. Some information does not need too much precision, while others do need precision.
  • germandiago 2mo ago
    That is a nice project -- classifying it based on reliability: human-made, sources, etc. + score. Maybe a job for an AI to do? :D
• cookiengineer 2mo ago
  I'm working on using the OpenZIM format to archive the web and to make the wikis seedable (and locally hostable for LLMs) so that the ongoing cat and mouse game anubis defense can stop. My hope is that with the torrent protocol we can make the archived knowledge discoverable and seedable, because currently there's only the web archive and the kiwix download servers for archived contents. Both of them still are centralized servers that bear the cost of hosting those files. - [1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/gozim https://github.com/cookiengineer/gozim - [2] https://github.com/cookiengineer/zimdex https://github.com/cookiengineer/zimdex
• p0w3n3d 2mo ago
  Hello negative feedback loop.
• ChiMan 2mo ago
  AI will kill the internet because it is killing the incentive to make it. It is an industrial-strength example of why we don’t allow stealing.
  • xnx 2mo ago
    I might be more motivated now because at least I know the bots will read it.
  • zombot 2mo ago
    > why we don’t allow stealing. With the not-so-minor qualification that the biggest thieves have always gotten away scot-free. AI is just the international whole-internet version of this.
    • smackeyacky 2mo ago
      Behind every great fortune is a great crime
      • HappyPanacea 2mo ago
        What is the great crime behind Norway's sovereign wealth fund?
        • inigyou 2mo ago
          It comes from selling oil and gas reserves, so they did destroy the environment.
      • Nasrudith 2mo ago
        Ah it is amazing how crimes just materalize from nowhere from envy.
        • smackeyacky 2mo ago
          Amazing how they appear when money is involved. Let’s talk bout AI intellectual property theft on a scale never seen before in human history, or Uber operating illegally until they were able to coerce permission, or the open collusion of robber barons in the guilded age, or the opium wars. Or slavery and the history of the new world. Let’s talk about that.
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• keiferski 2mo ago
  The concept of an almanac seems relevant again: a yearly printed book with verified, accurate information. No manipulation at a later date, no AI hallucinations, etc. The most famous one was probably Benjamin Franklin’s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_Richard%27s_Almanack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_Richard%27s_Almanack Paper encyclopedias might make a comeback for the same reason.
  • sevenzero 2mo ago
    > a yearly printed book with verified, accurate information Seems difficult to produce nowadays as even well researched topics are constantly attacked. Climate change papers as a small example.
    • inigyou 2mo ago
      It seems relevant that it's a one-way communication. If someone reads a social media thread about climate change they will also see all the comments from idiots. But if someone reads a book about climate change they don't. It isn't as strong an effect any more as people will discuss the book on social media and they will have already seen the idiot comments before reading the book anyway. So many former regular Fox News viewers have reported changing their mind when confronted with some alternative information sources for a while. News is also one-way, and most Fox victims aren't people who discuss issues with all sides.- they're in bubbles.
• larodi 2mo ago
  What a joke. Google did that already 10 year ago when they started evicting stuff from its page rank caches. AI is merely amplifying what social media and FAANG in general already have done to the 90s web.
  • Steve16384 2mo ago
    Before AI, the way people were gaming Google was by filling their pages with pages of verbose fluff (have you ever tried googling how to make a specific cocktail?). Now the AI just makes it easier to generate that fluff.
• lopis 2mo ago
  My personal anecdote is that I used to search for "xyz nutrition" quite often on Google. It used to provide a data table with lots of information. Sure, nutritional information is hard to get right, but at least that data was consistent. Now Google just gives you an AI answer with random values pulled from blogs and Reddit. It's almost always blatantly incorrect. I genuinely can't understand why Google would destroy its most valuable search features. Disclaimer: I work for Ecosia, so I know for a fact that users really value these search widgets, and it was often cited as a reason they couldn't leave Google.
  • tempfile 2mo ago
    [dead]
• kukkeliskuu 2mo ago
  The world needs an anti-SEO search engine, that explicitly penalizes for something that appears SEO.
  • maipen 2mo ago
    And use AI to detect it right?
    • kukkeliskuu 2mo ago
      I suspect many SEO practices could be detected automatically without LLMs: link farming typically uses cheaper domain names, commercial content might typically contain certain keywords, certain kind of tracking is more suspicious, affiliate links use known domains, etc.
• gaigalas 2mo ago
  Perhaps we should let the content economy crash so that the big monsters eating it starve and die. A new content economy could be built on their carcasses instead.
• monster_truck 2mo ago
  I just don't care man. Did these people just log on yesterday or something? The MUDs and MMOs I grew up with disappeared. The IRC networks, and especially forums I learned so much from are gone (these were largely killed for something even worse than AI: commercial blogs!). Effectively every social network I've ever cared about has been ruined, failed, or sold. Even games have become bottom line chasing, live service slop that you never truly own. If you want it so bad stop crying and make it, that's what I've been doing. It works a lot better than whatever this post and many of these comments are. There are dozens of us !
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    Libera (formerly Freenode) and Rizon are still around, moderately lower in absolute numbers, drastically lower in percentage of total internet usage.
  • tommek4077 2mo ago
    The old net is still there to a degree, but we live in pre-Alta Vista times again. It is hard to find. (I know as I run an old-school Forum and RPG-Game for more than 20 years now.)
  • pjc50 2mo ago
    I remember from the MUD era there was a paper (possibly by Richard Bartle) on the "MUD lifecycle", and how they tended to last on average two years before the operators got bored / burned out / the community left / there was an Incident.
    • inigyou 2mo ago
      Someone showed me something about Old-School Runescape recently and it struck me how quickly the game evolved. I played it in high school for two years at most. If you rewind or fast-forward in two year increments at a time, a lot about the game is barely recognizable each time. I think if you rewound two years from my play time, there was unlimited free trade, no grand exchange, and two or three fewer skills, and if you fast-forwarded two years, you got unlimited free trade again and the Evolution of Combat. It really puts in perspective how the people who make games are not planning the perfect game and then spending 10 years building it (except for Jon Blow) - they're flying by the seat of their pants. Apparently in 2001, the game's creators expected that nobody would ever reach the maximum level in any skill.
• BrucecarlL 2mo ago
  [dead]
• khalic 2mo ago
  It seems like a lot of techies should have chosen acting as a specialty, because I’ve never seen that much melodrama in one industry. FFS people, adapt, stop complaining
• figassis 2mo ago
  I called this maybe 3y ago, but I think so did everyone else that was sane. Sure, we get immense value from AI, but indiscriminately injecting into everything, the one thing we know to be unreliable above the threshold we used to fire people for, is probably the greatest undoing of all the good companies like Google brought to the internet. I mean what a way to destroy your legacy of democratizing information. The amount of harm (direct and indirect) this will cause, and the cost to return to baseline will be so immense, and yet we will not be able to point to the root cause. They won't be there to take responsibility.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    what value do we get from AI?
    • post-it 2mo ago
      It's really good at writing code.
      • aaronblohowiak 2mo ago
        It’s good at all kinds of stuff that is search adjacent, “find amesent parks with water feature within 100 miles of me that have rv parking nearby”, etc
        • wegwerf17377382 2mo ago
          This will of course never be underminded by aggressive marketing
        • gosub100 2mo ago
          Rote classification doesn't require AI. You described a SELECT statement that was developed half a century ago
        • skydhash 2mo ago
          Pseudo SQL select l.id, l.name from locations as l where l.type = 'amusement_park' and exists ( select id from locations as l2 where l2.type = 'rv_parking' and distance(l2.geo, l.geo) < $nearby_distance ) But what we should have is a good map software where you could filter by type and distance (How many amusement parks can be in that circle?) and quickly check if there's a RV parking nearby. The hard job is collecting the data.
• erfgh 2mo ago
  AI has killed reading-anything-written-after-AI for me. Due to this effect it is probably the worst invention in human history or pre-history.
  • nba456_ 2mo ago
    Then why are you on HN right now? Everything on this page was written after AI.
    • IshKebab 2mo ago
      Come on you know what he means. Blog posts, articles, that sort of thing. AI has definitely made reading things posted to HN a much worse experience (even if they aren't all slop). It doesn't seem to have infected the comments yet, mercifully. I guess for a quick comment it's still easier to write it yourself than get Claude to do it.
      • pessimizer 2mo ago
        It has infected the comments. Our patrons are fighting a good fight, but good slop is mostly indistinguishable from a worthless karma-farming comment. Mods are probably just cheating because there are people with 15-20 year old accounts, many of whom they personally know, and you can assume that the stuff they're interacting with is not slop or is at least worthy slop.
        • inflected00 2mo ago
          What's infected HN is the same old discourse; old people find the kids social tropes dangerous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seduction_of_the_Innocent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seduction_of_the_Innocent https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26328105 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26328105 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_Advisory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_Advisory What's more realistic; 50+ year olds of today just parroting sensory experience where they heard their dead or dying elders complain about the kids back in the 00s, 90s, 80s, 70s, 60s... etc etc Or the 50+ year olds actually figured out how everything must work for the next 1,000 years they won't be around for The olds who grew up in a PTSD addled post world war and cold war social reality while huffing leaded gas smog? They figured it out forever, everyone! ...No. You figured out yourselves relative to technology of your day. Tech will change and the living will figure themselves out relative to their technology. You're just engaged in parroting specifics of your own experience.
• ghm2199 2mo ago
  My sister, a journalist, mentioned to me that she only uses google search because she had learned how to get information typically only Google indexed in the country she lives in, in a way it was not exposed on chat bots. She often has to search for information like Old govt forms released as public record with a fixed a certain format photo scanned into a pdf and indexed by Google were often on the second page of the search and beyond. But they are there. She knew how the forms looked and what bigrans and trigrams matching a certain part of form for a certain piece of information to search for and Google search has it. Like an official order on a tender notice for some government department which is no longer in the .gov.* website gave her the official's name and then she could track down who to contact in an office... ChatGPT and other bots don't have it. Some how all these government documents became part of the government record and are the key for her to do her job. I sincerely hope google wont stop indexing that stuff just because of a PM in search "de/re-prioritizing" ranking in a way that makes this impossible.
  • nunez 2mo ago
    This is a conundrum I always found interesting. If you know how to use a search engine (i.e. knowing how to use operators and structure a search query), you're almost always able to find what you're looking for very quickly, and in most cases (well, before SEO), the results are high-quality. You'll spend the same amount of time trying to fact-check an LLM (since you'll likely skim the articles it used in generating its response _which you would have done anyway if you used the search engine directly_). I actually took a (required) class in middle school that taught us how to use a library. Amongst other things, the librarian taught us how to use Google effectively. Everything I learned then (this was in the early 2000s) still works today, since the process of using a search engine hasn't changed very much since its inception. So many people never learned (or never cared about learning) how to use a search engine, thus why we're here today.
    • jimmaswell 2mo ago
      > you're almost always able to find what you're looking for very quickly[...] You'll spend the same amount of time trying to fact-check an LLM I've been an expert Google user for over a decade and I can only partially agree with the first statement, and not at all with the second. Yes, a search engine alone is fantastic at finding things based on keywords if you know how to invoke it properly. However, there are lots of things one may want to find out which can't be reduced to a keyword search, because you can't have the vocabulary to search for it directly unless you already know the answer. Indirect questions such as "framework options to do x and y in z situation in this language". The best you could hope for pre-LLM was to find forum posts asking the same or a vaguely similar question and comparing a lot of options, finding out you picked a dud after spending an hour on it because it's fundamentally incompatible due to reasons, searching again, etc. It's hard to overstate what a massive improvement LLM's are for this kind of search to find and compare options for exactly what you're asking for given the context of your situation.
• gagan2020 2mo ago
  One word - Ouroboros I wrote about it almost 1 year ago in Aug only. The AI Ouroboros: How Artificial Intelligence is Eating Its Own Tail – And Reshaping Our World
  • GrinningFool 2mo ago
    Ironically in context of this discussion, when I search Google for "AI Ouroboros" your result is quite far down the list. Higher up are several ’24 and early '25 posts, many of them slop.
• wegwerf17377382 2mo ago
  I'm calling the return of personal websites with link lists. Not everyone will run them but we will find them and bookmark them. Not because it's better but because we'll have to. Try looking for help about pets. The internet is a cesspool of slop, not even trying to hide it. The domain names sound absolutely convincing but it's all stuffed with takeaway lists and checplay generated imagery. Whenever I find a good page, I will make sure I remember the site.
• kjex0 2mo ago
  quite telling that the EU search engine mentioned in the article (Quant) is currently "temporarily unavailable" when searching. We have a long way to go
  • kjex0 2mo ago
    Ok it's working again. But still, it's clearly not a stable alternative yet.
• GangstaAgents 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• pythonRon 2mo ago
  In the first year of Google search, it was possible to find exactly what you were looking for. The engine paid attention to inclusions, exclusions, the whole nine yards. It was a thing of beauty and it was why Google took over from all the other search engines that used to haunt the Internet of the late 1990's and early 2000's. And if what you were looking for didn't exist? You got 0 hits. (Sigh)
  • KellyCriterion 2mo ago
    ...and you could call a friend and say: "insert X into google, click the second result on page 2" - both of you had the same output back then
• sertraline 2mo ago
  I find it ironic how people talk with a high hand about "Google dying", "Internet dying" and "AI eating everything" and then I open their website and it forces me to waste 10 seconds as cloudflare "checks" my browser, then reloads, checks it again, finally lets me through and then I end up on a useless page because the scroll is broken - thanks javascript. Then I need to hit F5 and finally I can read in peace. Websites like these are the very reason nobody reads the web anymore. A clanker will give me an answer within 5 seconds. Old web used to load within 1 second, now it takes 10 to 15 and sometimes even >30 seconds until fully loaded. Using CF as a protection against LLMs is not even a valid excuse because CF gives your website's scraped contents in 1 click to anyone willing to pay. These websites waste insane amounts of time. Everybody defaults to AI because nobody is willing to deal with annoying browser checks, cookie popups, subscription letters, captchas and especially scroll hijacking. I may be a bad person, and I'm not even pro-AI, but if "thewalrus" goes offline I won't be missing it, because I regretted the time I wasted fighting their broken navigation.
  • duskdozer 2mo ago
    Yeah, stack overflow has recently either added cloudflare or changed its settings, so I am completely unable to access it. I assume I'll pretty much be locked out of the majority of the internet in a couple of years at most.
  • MSFT_Edging 2mo ago
    All of these speedbumps are due to the massive amount of botting and scraping that AI has enabled.
  • deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
• TonyAlicea10 2mo ago
  Google switching to hallucinating AI summaries has been to me an absolutely shocking abdication of care for both their users and their own reputation. It extends beyond search as well. I have had multiple incorrect Gmail summaries that, if I had only read them instead of the actual email, would have resulted in financial harm.
• fragmede 2mo ago
  yeah, but the article sucks. The title is Ting, but the author asks a thing in google's AI answer socks and then they spend a couple paragraphs pontificating about that then they participate some other bullshit like.. But here we are, talking about it. le sigh.
• dwedge 2mo ago
  Really well written article and interesting. I'm not sure how I feel about a governmental policy over retaining access to information though, the information is provides by us and we pay for the infrastructure, the idea that there must be some form of retention policy makes me feel uneasy and doesn't really fit with the analogy of governments maintaining roads. I'm on both sides. I hate dead links but I'd hate a policy that made me responsible for them without any compensation in the first place. It would probably make me stop producing at all
• Aeolun 2mo ago
  I think as AI eats the web ‘critical thinking’ is disappearing.
• beeforpork 2mo ago
  And the same holds for documentation about anything. Documentation is gone. Dead. Reference documentation, output from Doxygen or similar, and many other things that could be searched for hints on how to implement or generally do stuff. It's gone. When writing a simple Python script today and wondering about how an API for some library works, I ask AI, because there is no (findable) documentation anymore. (And yes, I usually still like to write it myself, but it's basically no difference: the AI writing that Python script would be the same point: docs are dead and gone.) This is really scary and it is progressing fast.
• 0x073 2mo ago
  I think it's a chance to return how the old web was, as the human web return to a small underdog and get splitted from the AI web.
• RinatNabiev 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• AKH_87 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• renegade-otter 2mo ago
  The web was getting kind of useless before AI crashed the party. This is why now curated content is key - newsletters, for example, is how I find most of my content.
  • svachalek 2mo ago
    Agreed. The combination of social media (walled gardens and plunging quality of content), advertising (I know what you were looking for but have this word from our sponsors instead), SEO (more advertising but we didn't pay for it), and plunging budgets (I don't remember the last time I went to a website expecting to find original quality work) did most of the job. AI just delivered the final chop.
• hellojomp 2mo ago
  So let it be. Why don't we build another place for our memories to go? Why don't we build the _unstructured_ internet, where the intelligence is not in the mind but in the eye and the pleasure is in finding not in disseminating?
• lifeisstillgood 2mo ago
  But this is a similar argument to “the 1950s were great let’s go back to then”. We never really were a united society with a common set of agreed facts. And depending on which “we” we mean the difference is radical. White America and Black America is a tiny gap between the gulfs of India, USA in the 1970s and 80s. Yet today, we don’t recognise the same facts but we do have access to all the facts all the time. And I think more of the narratives are being challenged in the “internet” -people might run from it but it’s hard not to be challenged - whereas I would be amazed if an American voter knew what the seesaw of foreign policy was doing in India US relations
• EGreg 2mo ago
  Can we go as far as this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35688266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35688266
• nobodyandproud 2mo ago
  What should be concerning to Westernized nations is that as decent stewards like Google fails; the information pipeline into our culture and minds still remain. i.e., it's not just the collective memory going away, but what will easily replace it and who will be motivated to influence.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 2mo ago
  Original HN title: Google Search Is Dying. What Comes Next Is Worse
• flippant 2mo ago
  >But what if the “truth” is harder to find online because the infrastructure that once stored it is breaking down? Some of that is wear and tear. Link rot erases pages every day. Key sections of the United States Constitution briefly disappeared from the Library of Congress website because of a coding error. This has bothered me for years. I think the solution lies in personal, private archives, and lending access to archived content within small communities. https://memoryhole.app/blog/welcome-all https://memoryhole.app/blog/welcome-all
• captainbland 2mo ago
  The internet might not be dead, but large parts of it are gangrenous and necrotic
• nedt 2mo ago
  Google wasn't great for a very long time. Switched to Duckduckgo years ago. I just love the bangs, because I tend to go to sources I trust anyway. Doesn't mean I'm not also using duck.ai. It makes searching faster and more targeted. But then it's still giving me links to verify and is actually more limited, which means less hallucination and more directly going to the sources. Also it avoids having to open five pages first which all either sell your data or want you to pay. I don't see the web or the internet dying yet. Just a lot of people not using the right tools and having a harder time accessing what's useful. But that hasn't started with AI.
• book_mike 2mo ago
  Technology and information migrates from one form to another. Let me get my papyrus.
• thataccount 2mo ago
  That's a feature, not a bug, for people that love AI and want it to take over. Then, you have no alternative other than to listen to AI or nothing at all.
• jdauriemma 2mo ago
  I see symptoms of this all the time. For example, it's a weekly annoyance for folks to pop into /r/strava to showcase their vibe-coded app that uses the Strava API to do $THING. Then someone invariably points out that an existing app (or even Strava itself) already does $THING, and often it's free. I don't mean to be negative, I think it's great that people are building useful niche software and I don't blame them for wanting to share it. A significant part of the problem is that it's much harder nowadays to find "prior art" because keyword/boolean web searches have been FUBAR.
  • stronglikedan 2mo ago
    I've used a lot of free features that I would have implemented differently, and now I can (if I weren't so lazy).
    • jdauriemma 2mo ago
      No doubt, but I'd expect that to be accompanied by something like "I know App X and App Y do $THING, but here's the distinction between how they do it and how my App Z does it." I don't think I've ever seen that sort of nuance expressed in this context, which makes me doubt that they grasp the ecosystem.
  • nixonpjoshua 2mo ago
    Hopefully now that AI provides quick answers, web search can go back to providing and respecting boolean and more advanced techniques. If web search is no longer the go to tool for most users, then search can do better what it can do uniquely?
    • jdauriemma 2mo ago
      One can hope!
    • TsiCClawOfLight 2mo ago
      Have you tried kagi? It's payed, but I definitely get my money's worth!
• MilkingCowboy49 2mo ago
  Development in AI needs to get a huge pause (AI Bubble). I see a lot of mistakes, recall, reset and costs from different industries. All I see is advance improvements in automation. It is still not AI.
• Invictus0 2mo ago
  Just don't use Google. There are other options
• cyanmoonx 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• lemonberry 2mo ago
  My father used to print websites up and put them in a 3-ring binder. Now it seems more prescient than anachronistic.
  • FLeXMurphy 2mo ago
    Unfathomably based. Are any of the binders for sale?
  • FeteCommuniste 2mo ago
    Ha, I used to do the same back in high school. Never know when a site's going to go down or change without warning.
  • _nickwhite 2mo ago
    I think the modern day equivalent to this is saving PDFs of webpages you want preserved. I have the feeling that I'm turning into my grandfather every time I do it, but it's proven valuable from time to time.
    • wanderingpixel 2mo ago
      check out karakeep
• killerstorm 2mo ago
  I don't think it's really an "AI problem", we just got to the "worse" part of the "Worse is better". Back in the day one of competitors of the World Wide Web was Project Xanadu. Project Xanadu was supposed to address the concerns like content persistence and version management within the core design. As such it was much more complex, opinionated and centralized. WWW on the other hand comes with no guarantees - you might get a document in response to a HTTP request, and that's it. But WWW service can be rolled out in a completely permissionless way, and is quite simple - effectively, the contents of the file system can be shared with the world, so e.g. a document can be published just by putting its file into a particular directory within the file system. Thus Web could get to a "good enough" state much faster and quickly spread all over the world. But its permissionlessness and simplicity lead to downsides: impersistence and chaos of broken links, web search provided by mega-corporations, etc. WWW evolution was, unfortunately, not "incentive compatible" with features like advanced persistence and identification clarity: there was much more focus on entertainment content and ads
  • bichiliad 2mo ago
    Who would have owned the centralization? I always thought that one of the lovely parts of the WWW was that anyone could have a part of it in theory, even if it was easier to let someone else host your website for you.
    • killerstorm 2mo ago
      I'm not saying "web" would be better if it was more centralized. WWW is optimal in the sense that it sits directly on top internet protocols, i.e. it just defines how to use TCP/IP to retrieve a document. I think in the "ideal world" we could get higher-level protocols on top of WWW, perhaps offering document persistence and global search. E.g. they could function in a federated way. We had a lot of interesting experiments -- Freenet, bittorrent, IPFS, "Semantic Web", ActivityPub -- but we haven't seen anything which directly competes with centralized services. Of course, it is hard to compete with well-capitalized companies. But also there might be over-reliance on "startups". As Peter Thiel explained, "startups" generally want to build monopolies, as you can't really make money by offering a commodity. So it's not really surprising that Google dropped support for XMPP, for example - they'd rather keep users within the ecosystem.
• Dove 2mo ago
  I find Brave search is superior to Google, particularly in linking me to more useful references.
• api 2mo ago
  Already happened: SEO, spam, all conversation moving to closed silos and social platforms. AI is maybe the last few nails in the coffin but the guy inside was already dead.
• dreamcompiler 2mo ago
  We already know how to compute sunset times accurately and doing so requires one millionth the computer power of LLM inference. It could even be cached for most big cities for every day of the year. https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/ https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/ The mystery is why Google doesn't just route such requests to the known algorithm. It would be a lot cheaper for them and it wouldn't risk reputational damage.
• JodieBenitez 2mo ago
  More than 25 years ago, the Web wiped out a lot of the things I loved. May it be devoured! But I have my doubts: there’s probably not much left of it anyway.
• esskay 2mo ago
  I'm honestly starting to struggle to see how the internets going to look in 2-5 years. If AI is ingesting AI generated content, which it must be at this point given how prevalent it is on the web its going to get dumber and dumber to the point where theres no desire or interest for a single person to use the internet anymore for anything other than ecommerce and i guess for some people who need it still, social media. Any form of information based internet usage is going to end up becoming rare at this rate.
• dxsecarch 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• HarHarVeryFunny 2mo ago
  I was asking Claude yesterday about some specific roman history when it appeared to hallucinate a fact I knew not to be true - when I questioned it, it said it sourced it from an Encyclopedia Brittanica page that was "flagged" as being an AI generated summary of their actual content, and admitted that the fact I challenged was not historically supported. So I guess we have entered the age of AI-generated "alternate facts" - one AI citing another AI's hallucinations as fact.
• SwtCyber 2mo ago
  Disney killing the FiveThirtyEight archives is just basic s3 cost optimization, not `ai devouring humanity's memory`. A dead site just doesn't run ads
• devondaley 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• nyanmatt 2mo ago
  > "Search can no longer pretend to be a neutral gateway to a stable body of knowledge." Search hasn't been neutral or stable in a very long time, although I agree it has been pretending to be those things.
  • joe_the_user 2mo ago
    Just making search the gateway diminished aspects of the Internet and collective memory - Google actually work to blunt this effect initially by following the structure of DMOZ portal, a human-curated tree of authoritative websites. It's ancient history by now but it's worth noting things have decay for as long as they have been being built. Oppositely, ChatGPT is a pretty "better google".
• akashy123 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• raintrees 2mo ago
  And from what I have read/heard, not just the internet's collective memory, as real world books are being scanned and then destroyed - Allegedly including rare books :(
• platevoltage 2mo ago
  It's great. Everything that is cool about the internet gets to die just so you can review 1000 line pull requests from your lazy co-worker. Exciting times.
• xp84 2mo ago
  > a German court recently held Google liable for false statements generated by its AI overview feature. The case arose after Google’s AI wrongly linked two publishing companies to scammy business practices. Because the search engine extracts and rewrites information in its own words, the court reasoned, it is doing more than impartially pointing users toward the public record. This is, I think, a really important topic. As a society (I mean all humans here) we don't yet have sufficient muscle memory for asking questions of the flawed oracle that is LLMs. We have deep cultural memory -- about a quarter century -- of asking Google for things and, for most of that time, getting back pointers to sources, and those sources being either reliable (e.g. respected newspaper, government website), or detectably suspect (some random blog you've never heard of, known propaganda site, The Onion...). Google's insane escapade of substituting the responses of an incredibly weak LLM model for the job we've been relying on it for for 25 years is especially unfortunate, because "Google says..." was, while imperfect, a reasonable approximation for a quick reality check in 2010. Today people say "Google says..." followed by whatever the stupid AI Overview model has output. I get that Google thinks they're saving a ton of money by not using anything close to a frontier model since they run this on billions of searches a day. The risk to Google is that people start to catch on that asking even free-tier ChatGPT is at least twice as likely to give back a correct answer, notice that Google barely provides webpage results other than AI slop anyway, and just stop using Google.com entirely. Anyway bringing it back to the quote, Google's used to having no responsibility for anything, 'we're just a search engine showing you pointers to other people's stuff.' But I actually hope that, due to liability problems, that habit will be beaten out of them and they'll make a shift to, especially outside the context of an actual chatbot, reduce reliance on their own AI output to 'answer questions with search results.' It's too risky to just show people, who are used to getting back mostly facts, to replace that with mostly BS coming from that same endpoint. Even with the fine print.
• nativeit 2mo ago
  > Wikipedia has become the infrastructure of its own demise: dwindling traffic means attention and donations no longer reliably flow back to the encyclopedia to keep it alive. It’s too bad this will drown out the feedback from folks like me, who ended their longtime recurring donation because of their resistance to their employees unionizing.
• jrnichols 2mo ago
  This source alone - Multiple ads. Overlays. Subscribe nags. What appear to be more clickbait ads. (Yes, I know Adblock exists. That isn't the point.) The way the web is these days, I think I'm actually ok with AI eating it. Using an AI nowadays reminds me of the old Gopher days - you get simple, plain text. Perhaps I'm just old enough to miss that.