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.

  • 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.