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.

    • determinism2 [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      When someone says "you blew it up! you blew it all up! you maniacs!!!" they are angry because they think someone else made things so bad that everything fell apart. It's like they're saying "you kept blowing that balloon even though it was about to pop, and now look what you've done!"