The difference between G+ and now is that Google search is actually bad now and they need to do something to fix it, but they just did the completely wrong thing…
The logical Destiny for a search engine which give more importance to SEO crap and surveillance advertising, than on relevant and reliable results. It’s a filter bubble platform like others which logs your searches. It’s like someone which always agree with you, even if you are wrong.
I mean if this is Google’s new Google+ moment there’s only one person we can call upon in our time of need:
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I legitimately can’t stop laughing at this omg
Yeah that’s what happens when you throw your engineers out for business majors at a tech company
If Google tries to lock me in, watch me lock me out.
For a brief moment in the beta for all this, it basically just summarized the top two or three reputable results, and attached a link to where it got the data.
They should have just left it at that, and not started mixing in random blogs and social media sites.
The ability to summarize the Wikipedia article and a random university professors page where they list every fact known to man about pine trees or something was actually helpful.If I want the AIs best guess about how to fuck up a pizza, I just go to the site where I can ask it. Bad advice when searching is just shit.
A tldr for “what is turpentine” is actually helpful.I liked that insider peek from Jenson - well I liked reading all of this, but especially that:-).
The difference is that Google+ was actually a wonderful product.
But a couple years down the line Google did what Google does and destroyed it from the inside making it worse and worse until it was just a shell of what it started out being.
Google did what Google does
I remember wrapping my head around “Google Wave” and being like “Hey that sounds nea–oh it’s gone already?”
Dude for real. Wave was awesome.
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If you were into tech, the tech people were amazing. Yonatan Zunger comes to mind. He was a backend engineer at Google and the guy was great.
I also met many people who are still friends, many of whom became real life friends too.
I even got an amazing job thanks to my contacts on g+.
The feed layout was awesome. The fact that everything got fed to rss. The fact that you could tailor posts so easily. God I miss it. Only social media I’ve ever really been a part of.
It was wonderful ♥️
Also basically every Linux big name posted there. It was so great. I’m still sad it’s gone
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Please don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying that your experience isn’t valid, I am merely providing a counterpoint based upon my own experience.
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A wonderful product or a wonderful community? It sounds like you’re describing the people who were on it and not the platform itself.
The platform was wonderful. Intuitive, powerful, everything every other platform was not. Google started killing it slowly long before it died, but in its heyday it was amazing.
I have to admit I mostly only used it for testing purposes. I worked on a product that integrated with it, and I remember it being frustrating to work with. I forget the details of what frustrated me about it, though.
How do you get the AI results on google.com? When I search for anything, it shows a summary and then all the results, sponsors, etc… Nothing is tagged as “AI”.
(I never visit google so forgive me if this has an obvious answer)
You can opt into it and other beta technologies at Google Labs.
Thank you!
I think it’s still in A/B testing stages, 80% of my searches don’t include the AI but it pops up occasionally. I also notice it more often on my phone, and rarely on my desktop where I’m not signed in.
Are you in the US?
Yeah
I’m not sure then. Maybe Google is just rolling it out in waves, and hasn’t gotten to you yet?
All good. I’ll just continue to mock their progress for now.
I can reproduce most results with Google app on Android. I’m in Europe, not in USA. It just appears as some text below the search box, not marked as anything. Except this one about smoking. Now it says smoking as bad. I guess Google already told the AI to behave.
This reminds me: I need to change my default search engine.
SearXNG: poor man’s Kagi (one seemingly reputable instance)
On iOS, I set my default search to DuckDuckGo, and enabled Hyperweb on the DDG domain to redirect to SearXNG. I use a Google Images bookmark saved as a favorite when I need images (SearXNG results inferior even when using Google as the sole engine).
I anecdotally suspect Kagi of astroturfing btw, but after some free trials it seems to be about the best Google alternative - gotta be [earning like] a [US-based] knowledge worker though, or really care about search.
ddg image search is superior to Google’s though.
I’m kidddddding I’m kidding!
You’ve once again reminded me to properly catalog my comparison searches. Only one I could find in my screenshots:
I start with !ddgi but more than half the time hit it with a !gi bang to go over to the Alphabet Adware Image search. I swear I’m gonna catalog this stuff and then maybe it’ll be apparent:
- I do weird searches
- Google is search bubbling me even when I’m private browsing
- I’m misperceiving the frequency at which DDG image searches actually fail me
Or maybe my use cases are fairly normal and Goog really is superior, TBD!
One thing that keeps me coming back to Google is shopping, or searching for online stores, or searching for prices. The shopping tab is somewhat useful and I don’t know any other search engine that does it (because it’s barely a search engine thing tho)
you don’t even have to go to the shopping tab anymore… even if you’re just looking for information on something they mix in shopping results right at the top
google is gigantic piece of shit
I’ve been really liking Kagi. It’s been my default for about 5 months now.
I think it is interesting to point out that AI will be good, maybe too good. It isn’t right now, it’s a novelty in the early stages of such mass adoption that a lot of the consequences are just starting to appear.
The phones owned by Gen A in 40 years will have a useful, realistic, and default AI assistant. It just sucks that the development of this technology is only driven by late-stage capitalism.
Google AI search is certainly good for memes
vs Andi AI
Jokes on you, I just shifted to DDG last week.
Asking Andisearch to generate AI jokes
OK I like the 3rd one actually
Yes, the sense of humor is still somewhat limited in AIs. Anyway, Andi is not designed to tell jokes, but rather to give reliable answers to questions and this it does quite well…
I am a software developer, this story isn’t really about that though. When I was first becoming interested in coding I was reading about vr and ar and how it would be this huge multi billion dollar market in the next few years and I thought that sounded awesome, as it could enhance our lived experiences with info for the curious, or decorate the real world with computer generated architecture, sculpture, even some ads to pay for the whole thing. I said I’m gonna get into computer programming and then transition into vr/ar once I learn a few things.
Of course this didn’t pan out. 2-3 huge tech companies rushed onto the market with somewhat crappy products just to own the patents so smaller companies couldn’t innovate. When they weren’t immediately profitable they started cutting back and shutting down. Just another big tech grift, like cryptocurrency and now AI. Ai is probably the worst example of all because it got pushed out to soak up a bunch of excess cloud computing when crypto crashed, and now its a huge real estate scheme as well since there’s a big rush to build data centers to handle the artificial demand. You wanna know the next big bubble to bet against? Its ai and all the related industries.
It requires massive amounts of computing power to accomplish the most mundane tasks, which require electricity created by burning fossil fuels. All so your boss can spend less time writing emails letting you know you’ve been laid off, and political advisors can mass produce legislation to take away your rights.
Of course this didn’t pan out. 2-3 huge tech companies rushed onto the market with somewhat crappy products just to own the patents so smaller companies couldn’t innovate. When they weren’t immediately profitable they started cutting back and shutting down.
The way advanced capitalism can’t even grow a product before trying to strangle it for every last penny is all that saves us from special Black Mirror levels of hell.
