Obviously google was basically already unusable over the past five years but this is... this is something else. Any subject you want to look up will have the first three pages entirely comprised of procedurally generated fake blogs and websites. And there's nothing there. Just scraped text from articles mashed together with varying amounts of hallucinations on top. Not even selling a product, just to harvest ad revenue.

What's maybe even worse is the steady degradation of image searches too. Joe Everyman generates some slop, the image's metadata tags include a historical artist's name. Some one on pinterest pins it while trawling the web. Now there are fifty gooey generated sludge images when you look up the historical painter.

And its not just artists. Historical figures, animals too. Look up 'baby peacock' if you want a clear example of it.

It's a pretty funny bit google, I hope it keeps going.

  • dat_math [they/them]
    ·
    1 year ago

    I unironically should email my high school librarian to thank them for teaching me how to use jstore and the other various big library search engines

    • laziestflagellant [they/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      god imagine being a high schooler trying to do a homework assignment in this day and age

      Teachers in 2013: Wikipedia is not a source

      Teachers in 2023: Read the sources linked in the Wikipedia article. Don't use any other websites besides .edu ones for information.

    • chickentendrils [any, comrade/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Journals (and especially Scihub/libgen) are starting to get a trickle of these machine-generated fake papers too now. Past a certain point everything's going to be pretty suspect.

      • dat_math [they/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        My local library has a subscription but otherwise yeah

        If you know you're looking for a scientific scholarly journal (as opposed to a humanities journal or a more broad media search in a library) you can almost surely get most of what you need from google scholar still.

      • solaranus
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        deleted by creator