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.
Did you try Google scholar?
I get around that issue by using specific databases. NCBI-pubmed is great for biological sciences.
Another top: use Boolean operators to improve your search results.
I don’t look up bugs very much but I’m jealous you got to do my childhood dream of entomology in some way.
Can you add keywords such as prominent authors, publication names, terms only researchers would use etc? If you’ve been doing for a long time don’t you have resources to start from such as works you’ve relied on previously? And there is always the trick of using the date search feature to exclude the past few years.
Is it possible that you have progressed in the level of work you are doing such that purchasing published resources rather than just typing the name of a creature into a searchengine is required? Maybe you would always have gotten to this point?
I agree with your overall point though. I would like to see more development in bespoke community search engines comparable to the fediverse for social media. If you and other people who are in your field could create your own search indexes from sources which are reputable. They could even have federation.
It’s going to be tough for people who never lived through the good times to understand that not everything used to be a “TOP 10 SENTENCES” article with affiliate links to buy alphabet stickers because you made the mistake of using to word “the” in your query. I fully know what you mean and it is infuriating.
Give Yandex a try, it’s the only search engine where you can still just enter the keywords you think will be in the text you’re searching for and it gives you pages that contain those keywords you typed instead of feeding them into an incomprehensible language model trained to collect ad revenue.
I also find it’s a lot less censored for piracy than everything else.
I don’t know if this is because Yandex is tuned for the russian language, or if it really does work like they used to.
Yes. I too feel this every day, as someone who witnessed the birth, growth, and apparently the zenith of the internet, i know it in my bones that you are right. I know I’m waxing poetic, but i can’t help it when i remember the early days. i ran through its fields and loved them all, the weird corners you could find. I knew my way like a child knows the woods behind their house, and it is different. Gone. It’s just a gut sensation, impossible to express in words to those who didn’t experience it. It’s beyond my ability to encapsulate the feeling i have of loss from it’s passing, and of knowing just how much has been lost.
i ran through its fields and loved them all,
Everywhere is concrete suburbia now and we’re lucky to see a tree or a patch of greenery.
biologist here - I hear what you’re saying, but this information has really never been very available online bc people who go outside and catch bugs are not chronically online. The best botany guides are all locally published books
that being said … some resources:
iNaturalist forums - seriously, ask a question, ask for resources, experts such as nerdy self taught naturalists, college professors, and field workers will be chiming in
But yeah this isn’t an “anymore” issue for biology in particular. Good keys are just not available online. The production of keys is not a commercially viable product, so the people who write them don’t tend to make ebooks and such available so they can be sure they get paid via purchase of their books. Given the status of biology funding, I support this model in our current conditions. My local flora was funded by a local native plant society, written by (expert) retirees. I do believe they deserve compensation for their work, and it shouldn’t be though individual sales of books but at this point it is, so you can support them by checking out/requesting resources from your local library or buying the books (which you did). Welcome to biology.
