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.

  • Owl [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Earlier today I was trying to remember the name of the game Supraland, and typed into Google "video game where you play as a toy in a back yard." It was really good at this sort of vagueness-based question back in ~2014 when they switched to their "knowledge graph" tech. Now it shows reaction videos to the most recent game to fit that description, inexplicable results from the US patent office, and then endless Amazon results for physical lawn toys.