Once AI is handling search for us, many may never learn the concept of “search term”
You can already outsource a lot of this to Bing. If you need to know the right temperature for making french fries, you can google a bunch of “recipes” (AKA life story of the author + history + vacation photos + cooking instructions) read them through and… actually better make some coffee while you’re at it because this is going to take a while. Anyway, the other option is to ask: “Hey Bing, I’m making french fries, but I don’t know how hot the oven should be.”
Spoiler: 220 °C
The scary thing is, what happens when people start doing this for more important things, such as what to do if your child has swallowed something or how to parallel park your car.
200 or 220, depends on if you are using a convection oven. But that’s beside the point, I really hope AI finally kills SEO.
I’m making french fries, but I don’t know how hot the oven should be.
Contents:
- What French fries are
- Why you might want some
- The dangers of French fries
- Where to buy French fries
- Ways of preparing French fries
- Other names for French fries
And so on.
Quality content right there, if you don’t mind going down some rabbit holes.
French fries aren’t made in an oven though.
Correct. However, if you buy frozen ones, you do need to heat them up some way. I ran out of nuclear weapons again, my flamer was out of gasoline, so using the oven was my best option.
Good thing those frozen ones come with the required cooking temperature on the package.
Hey Spez, can you throw some more subreddits into the dumpster fire. The temperature is almost right for popping some popcorn.
Oven cooked french fries are a thing, and have a surprisingly high popularity
Doesn’t the very nature of being fries, require them to be fried? Otherwise, they’re baked potato sticks.
Yes.
Source: I’m a chef.
Ours are pre-fried at the factory, then frozen and packaged. We typically then finish cooking them in the oven.
This is the way.
In my just under 40 years on this rock, the only time I’ve seen someone deepfrying french fries at home has been on American TV shows. It’s a lot more popular to cook them in the oven around here.
Ask Jeeves was just ahead of its time
“AI” is already handling the search for you. The big search engines are probably the first mass scale adopters of machine learning.
And they have lost the war with SEO spam to a hilarious extent. What makes you think the same won’t happen with chat bot AIs? Bad actors (including PR agencies) will inevitably figure out where and how to spam comments in order to bias the AI models in favor of their agendas or products.
If the data they consume is filled with something like “fossil fuels don’t cause global warming because XYZ”, the chat bots will repeat it. They don’t have the capacity to reason.
There hasn’t been a reason to flood the internet with low effort spam because it’s easily detected by humans who read it. But the ML algorithms will be a lot easier to trick.
Apologies, I used the overly vague term “AI”. Any company creating an LLM that has web search + scraping capabilities will be at the mercy of the search results.
That said, LLMs are actually quite skilled at ignoring noise (repetitive data), so gaming SEO may lose popularity. Hell, the practice will DEFINITELY lose appeal once LLMs are just browsing for relevant content and summarizing without any citations (links to the sites). And even of they do cite, no one will click them.
Convenience > Fact
tldr; This additional layer of obfuscation between search and result will reshape the fabric of the internet with time
Injecting stuff into the data consumed by LLMs is the new type of SEO.
True but they will learn the concept ‘inefficency increases individual profits’. Google has been getting worse and so will AI search eventually.
I think communicating with AI will become an art form the same way googling was/is.
It already is. If you want to play a game of D&D with chatGPT, there’s a very specific prompt carefully crafted for that. If you want to chat with a with a total psycho, there’s a prompt for that. If you want your AI to do something it was specifically forbidden from doing, just craft a very specific prompt for that, and you’re good to go. You can even find sites that collect various prompts for just about any purpose you can imagine.
Tea. Earl Grey. Hot
In the Greatest Generation postcast they posit that you can actually get anything you want materialized at a certain temperature.
A Stradivarius violin. Luke warm.
Hm, and I guess in any variant state. Janeway always gets “Coffee. Black.”
Is is possible for something to be replicated that if one of its defining features is the person who built it?
If the violin was replicated, it was not built by Stradivari, and thus is by definition not a Stradivarius.
In the 24th century, where ownership is a foreign concept, I don’t think they give a flying fuck what ancient neck-beard built the instrument if it’s per-atom perfect. They don’t give a fuck about materials, only outcomes.
Until they’re sponsored
“I realize you seem frustrated from my responses. Nature’s Choice has a fantastic Stress Reducing gummy available at your local CVS”
Yeah, the gentle product hints at first will be driving people away quicker than a Monstered up Uber driver.
It’s the same idea I think, figuring out how to describe what you mean or phrase the question the right way to get the right kind of results.
Ignorance is bliss, give me some pls
I used to work for Google. Now I pay for Kagi.
For certain questions/information, ChatGPT provides better summary information than standard search engines like Google/Bing
A slightly dangerous part is that ChatGPT makes up convincing texts that may be wrong due to misunderstanding and or biased.
Yeah I had a coworker say she likes to use ChatGPT to find answers and explanations to questions she has that you would normally Google.
This is a terrible idea. While it may contain legitimate info, ChatGPT was not designed to give factual answers. It comes up with convincing answers based on text it has read. You’re going to end up with some bad information and it’s a bit dangerous to hear that people are starting to use it that way.
Fair, but that’s not much different then google or Siri’s summaries based on biased site’s manipulation of SEO.
In the end, you have to do your own research and validation to decide what to trust.
Half the time I look at a website or article it is just AI generated crap anyway. Oh you want a product review? Here are a half dozen articles that have summarised the Amazon reviews of an item, with no first hand experience.
Google “Best vacuum cleaner”
Top 6 hits: “We evaluated the 5 brands that paid us the most and found that they all suck up your dirt. We can’t really speak ill of any of them because this is an ad and we signed a contract. Please use our embedded links so we can have more money.”
And the website is called something like Best-Vacuum-Cleaners-Blog.com
What’s worse is most of what comes up isn’t even a hands on review, it’s literally someone doing what I just did, which is type “vacuum cleaner” into Amazon and see what came up. Then they give it reviews based on the bullshit in the description.
I want a review from someone who sees these everyday and has a deep hatred of every vacuum in existence. He’s the one who knows that such and such used to be good until they replaced this part with plastic because they have a new CEO, and now it’s no better than a dirt devil.
At least with vacuums however, there’s a few guys out there with carpet swathes, children, and dogs at home that get to take vacuums from work and do youtube tests with them. Unfortunately they usually don’t try to game the algorithm so they’re pretty deep in there.
Wasn’t seo revamped like decades ago because it was prone to spam? And now is best bid get to be in the first pages/results?
Search engine protocol:
Ignore first few results (ads)
Ignore next few results (bullshit spam comparison farms)
Ignore really annoying site you think is ok but is a usability nightmare
Ignore subsection of reddit links
Find 0-1 useful links on first page
Regret
Trying to find the tiny “show more results” button sandwiched between the first page of shit results and the weird AI bubbles of shit results just to find semi-decent shit on pages 2-3 makes me wish i was dead every single time.
Could be worse. Could be infinite scroll
The sad thing is the Reddit Links probably contain the most useful answers that google will show you
I know. But I’ll use them as a last resort
Use them, costs bandwidth and CPU cycles.
Yes but it will be offset by traffic boosts for advertisers
Use an adblocker. Unless, you mean people go on the internet without using protection?
That won’t make a difference. Reddit knows how much traffic they get and they use that number to sell ads
They do. Either due to technical ineptitude (like approximately everyone’s parents) or, and that might be worse, with the conviction of doing “the right thing,” like a friend of mine.
Junk data that costs the advertisement without a return on investment
That’s not how it works. Reddit is able to even get interest because of traffic counts. Same for IPO values
If you’re blocking their ads and not logged in, you are costing them.
wait until the AI chatbots are optimized with SEO spam.
Nah.
What the average user is looking for is almost certainly gonna be near the top of a Google search.
True, and it should be taught way better. There are so many nifty tricks when it comes to search engines that the average user don’t know about.
Sadly most of the tricks have been removed or are ignored these days 😔
If you have avoided learing how to use the internet/search engines till now you probably couldn’t learn if you tryed
How do we find information these days? I still default to my search engine, which is often google. I moonlight over to DDG often, but usually an operating system upgrade gets me back on Google for a while.
I use DDG and think it does a great job, at least as good as google these days. There are certainly times that it falls short when compared with other search engines, but at that point I just use bangs and that effectively solves any problems I have had with it.
Duckduckgo is basically just bing results. But, I still use it for the bangs and lessened tracking. Being able to search any engine from the same search bar is remarkably convenient.
I used to just use Google but add reddit to the end of the search, and it’d usually pick up several relevant posts/conversations that would have the answer I wanted somewhere in the comments. I’ll still keep doing that for a while probably, but given how reddit has been going, and with people erasing their accounts, I doubt that will last long. I’m holding out hope for a good search functionality on lemmy, since reddits own search was pretty unusable.
Somebody mentioned something about a thing in outer space called a dark star. It sounded interesting so I googled it and got millions of links about a Grateful Dead tribute band called the Dark Star Orchestra. I’m sure I’ll be seeing ads for that for months. 😂 ChatGPT gave me a nice summary but of course I didn’t have any way of knowing whose work I was reading.
Or even if it was accurate.
The future seemed so much more promising when I was a teenager. Now I’m mid 30s and the present is very… corporate and lame. Very lame. They’ve even programmed the younger generation to be sanitized and accepting of blandness. Imagine growing up with only one or two genuinely creative movies being released a year. Zoomers don’t even have their own music genre, it’s all just nostalgia. Sigh.
I totally agree with you, but googling ‘dark star space’ or ‘dark star science’ you get what you’re looking for.
Googling “dark star astronomy” comes up with plenty of info on it.
Knowing how to do what you did is vital for using a search engine effectively. It’s not possible for a search engine to know what you want when a word has multiple meanings (well, not yet, anyway). It could have just as easily have been the other way around, where OP wanted to search for a niche band but all they could find is astronomy things.
Adding context like “band”, “astronomy”, etc is important if you’re googling anything non trivial. Sometimes you even need to identify different words to search. Eg, there’s a programming language called Go. But “go” is such a generic word that it’s hard to search for. Searching for “golang” tends to help a lot.
Did you use any search operators, like quotes or minus signs to get rid of the clutter?
A lot of the time those don’t even work anymore. ~Cherri
It’s rather tragic that a tribute band called Dark Star gets priority over a scientific Dark Star. I don’t know if it’s because more people search for the band or because this search engine is trying to sell you albums by this band…
To be fair, the band puts a lot of effort into marketing and keyword targeting, and scientific teams researching dark stars only publish for specific spaces towards other scientific people that are already looking at those places.
I don’t mind it. I just think we all should value scientific research into astronomy, no matter the volume of interest, more than marketing strategies for a product, be it art or not. I might be wrong tho…
That’s why I use Kagi. It’s a paid search engine and the results are actually really good.
That’s why I use brave search, it’s a free search engine and the results are actually really good
Even if it’s good, their long term goal will always be to appease their advertising customers, not you. Google has the ability more than anyone else to make the perfect search engine but they’re not spending their time and resources on that because that’s not what will increase their revenue. That model is just fundamentally broken.
I used it before and unfortunately, it sucks in comparison to Kagi.
Idk, I found it to be quite good but it may be just me knowing how to search stuff (even tho Google just gives shitty results and DDG is hit or miss)
I also know how to use keywords, etc. And maybe I went a bit overboard when I said Brave Search sucks. It doesn’t suck, but with Kagi, I don’t feel like a product any more and the search results make sense again, like with Google a couple years ago. Most free search engines just don’t work that good any more.
If you would’ve told me 2 years ago that I’ll be paying for a search engine in the future… Well, I would’ve thought that you’re crazy. But here I am now.
This whole thread reads like astroturfers
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When we’re talking about the issues of search engines, and a whole bunch of people come in and “organically” promote a paid service, then my astroturfing detection rises up. This is how modern advertisement works and it fucking sucks.
I haven’t used kagi, but the service being paid is not the red flag you think it is, as long as the privacy policy and ToS make sense.
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Literally every person in this subthread who said something positive about Kagi is very clearly just a normal user who has recently posted things completely unrelated to it, judging by their history.
Yes, this is exactly how it works. This behavior is well documented.
Not saying 100% all these users are astroturfing accounts, but I’m just pointing out this looks like it
It’s tough, because people also like to recommend things they like. If a friend in real life told you about the new CastX® Iron Extreme™ cast iron skillet that they got and how they love its rich iron flavor, you would just think they just like their new pan.
Do they already have their own index? Last time I used it (when it was still beta) it was quite okay, but it was basically yandex or whatever with a different front-end and site-pinning
Look at https://kagi.com/faq .
They basically query other search engines and APIs in a privatized manner and they use their own indexes as well. I used Google, Ecosia, StartPage, DDG, a self-hosted SearXNG instance and then Brave. I liked DDG and I kinda liked Brave Search, as well. But in comparison to Kagi, they’re all not that good in my opinion.
The image search of Kagi is especially what blows me away. It just shows relevant results for my queries and I’m satisfied.
I love kagi. I use it mainly for work, where it gives much better results. It even has a programmer lens so that it shows results that are relevant to programmers. But its image search didn’t work that well for me. Not sure if I’m just not formulating the queries right though.
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I just started my trial, so far it’s looking good!
Google is trash. I guess people suck for doing SEO like asshats
idk - you can’t really blame website owners for optimizing their SEO, it’s google’s fault for using such a game-able system IMO
It’s a little bit of both, but you’re right. Google has had years to improve their algorithms.
But as an advertising company at heart, the more time people waste on those bullshit sites, the more Google profits.
There’s definitely a need for regulation, but I’m not going to pretend I know where to begin.
SEO is an inevitable result of capitalism and the existence of search engines. If food and shelter for your family depends on it, you will become an asshat too.
I ran a business, built my website and done SEO according to advice found on the internet practically just using keywords related to my business. My goal was not to be on page 2 or 3 when people look for similar businesses. The site ended up always as a first result. I did not tinker with it, never paid for adwords/adsense. I don’t think I was being an asshole, just trying to make a living.
The problem seems to lie with Google. I remember days when I could search it for topics of interest and get results that were informative and didn’t try to sell me shit. Google is now reminiscent more of a mall and search results are shop fronts in the mall.
Yeah I don’t think businesses doing SEO is really the issue here.
It’s the millions of low-quality, garbage blogspam websites that have SEOd their way into filling the first 10 pages of every single search.
What’s a good canister vacuum? What I can I do for fun in Sparks, Nevada? Why is my cat throwing up? It doesn’t matter what you search for, you’re going to get articles filled with 6000 words of barely-passable English that you have to scroll through, with an add between every paragraph, until you finally get to the part where they “answer” the question with the most common-sense, useless, vague pile of word vomit that proves the author doesn’t know any more about the topic than you do.
But it’s no accident that that’s what Google has tuned their algorithm to prioritize. They’ve got as much of an interest in making you look at those ads as the website, because the ads come from Google and that’s their entire business model.
This. Searching for topic information back in the 1990s could be frustrating because you couldn’t find the sites until you found the one that had that links page that would lead you to a number of others about that topic. Searching today through the modern “search engines” means getting the same regurgitated, irrelevant and/or common sense non-answers from all the “top” sites. I don’t bother looking that way anymore because sites like SearXNG, Mojeek, even sometimes Brave Browser can often do better. It’s like we circled around to the same problem, but this time knee-deep in garbage, too.
Oh shoot, I had forgotten the “links” page
Try duck duck go, brief subject, possibly include the word “forum” or “howto” or “Reddit” (I know I know) and then try to narrow down your search terms from there. Use quotation marks for keywords, and site: to denote specific websites that you want to limit your search to.
And that’s basically the magic right there. Another key term to use is if you get too many results of a certain type, like if you search the word constitution and keep getting the ship, include the term -ship and that should remove those results.
Awesome tips, I’ll give those a try, thanks
I’m finding that those searches will be advertisement for a vet clinic, hotels in Sparks, Nevada and they will all have a blog about this and that in vague terms advising you to spend money on the issue. Years ago I was building a water garden and found tons of useful info, a couple of years ago I decided to make a big pond and all those sites with the useful info are either gone or buried on page 73. What’s at the front is retailers of pond/garden/aquatic equipment with the same drivel about your cat throwing up.
