I need to write a zoology paper on bugs
All search results are for pest control businesses or are AI generated garbage that have wrong information.
Yes, the internet always had problems, but I cannot stress how much worse it has gotten for information over the last ten years.
I used to be able to search a species and get scientific papers or at least articles that referenced scientific papers in the results. None of that anymore. All search results are for someone trying to sell you something, and articles are regurgitated AI monstrosities that waffle on with no real information and no references. If your search even manages to direct you to news articles every news site will have identical, poorly written tabloid hidden behind a paywall. All of it useless for even the most basic academic research.
I literally can’t do my job if every search result for species identification is behind a paywall, or an AI generated image of a bug that doesn’t really exist.
It’s no longer the information age. But not because of Trumpism and other things liberal whine about, it’s because capitalism has hollowed out the internet into a husk of what it was meant to be.
I literally had to go and buy an expensive field guide from a museum to finish this paper. I haven’t had to do that before.
I was thinking just yesterday how insane I must sound to younger generations when I say that a decade ago you could just type into google a few half remembered words or phrases from a quote, book, song or movie etc and boom you’d have the answer. Now if you type the artist/author/person/characters exact name and the exact quote you’re still more likely to get things selling you stuff only broadly related or random articles that have maximised SEO and taken top spot etc. But it’s true.
I’ve had to start adding any random YouTube video I like to my favourites because there’s a fucking solid chance that even searching the exact title will result in the algorithm refusing to find the video for me
And YouTube for some reason loves to serve slop with absolutely disgusting thumbnails for literally anything one can search
Relevant video about this: https://youtu.be/Z3dSkkEr-wk
Its weird because for some things you can see the change still. I’m replaying an old pokemon game (platinum), and if I add platinum to the search for a bit of info, I get the old reliable sites: Bulbapedia, Serebii, Pokemondb. Specific questions route to gamefaqs, top answer is exactly what I need.
If I do this for the latest pokemon, i get gamesradar, game8, gamewith. I have to scroll past asinine bullshit that nobody was ever asking to begin with, and the info is months out of date or incomplete. Thankfully, the old sites still keep that info up and old heads search out the good sites specifically, so it always hits the top page .
Interesting to have the comparison right there and see directly how things have changed.
I honestly think the death of forum culture was a huge mistake. Reddit was so convenient woth its single login but wow is it not the place to build a subculture.
I’m actually surprised some company hasn’t created an SEO gaming trick to send their totally automated AI crafted neo-listical garbage to the top of the google results.
a few half remembered words or phrases from a quote, book, song or movie etc and boom you’d have the answer
1001 Best Movies!
1001 Best Songs!
1001 Best Books!
1001 Best Movies Quotes!
1001 Best Songs Quotes!
1001 Best Books Quotes!
1001 Best [Whatever]…
The future of the web was depressing enough with the return to AOL-style walled gardens through Facebook, Twitter, etc, (fuck, even shit like Elsevier)….now I believe there’s a possibility that the web just won’t exist in the future as how we understand it today. There will just be monetized LLMs that people publish stuff into. It’s not so much post-truth, as post-content.
Related problem: the internet has gotten so fucking atomized. There could be some cool as fuck website out there, which I will never know about.
Google has a “before:year” operator that I’ve had to use quite a bit, especially recently
It’s not gonna work forever of course
But it helps for now
I literally had to go and buy an expensive field guide from a museum to finish this paper. I haven’t had to do that before.
Big museum smh. In all seriousness though yes SEO and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. You’ll programatically never going to get the best result from a search engine like Google, only the most “engaging” ones that know how to play the system.
I mean, these people also own YouTube where the same thing happens.
