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Laittakaa meemejä tänne.
Im convinced they made search engines worse to promote AI usage.
Search engines were returning shit more and more, before LLMs even existed.
When search engine optimization becomes a target, content suffers. If Google changed their algorithm to only rank websites with high quality content instead of keyword-stuffed content, we’d see a great improvement in the quality of the internet.
The real kicker is how you even decide what quality is. A one line script that updates a driver may be a solution to your issue. A four page walkthrough that rambles and gets you to your answer but only after an hour is still a solution, but is it better quality? The issue is that you can't quantify quality. Even if you managed to for something like programming, you couldn't apply that same logic to horticulture. The issue is that quality isn't something you can stick in an algorithm.
Right, quality is not something that is easy to figure out algorithmically. But adding arbitrary rules like “content length” or “time on page” directly ruins quality by incentivizing content manipulation.
Then someone targets them for pushing their biases because they are deciding quality.
So they were enshittifying search engines in advance, so what? AI wasn't born yesterday.
I've never seen convincing arguments for that. However, if you think about it, Google wants you to stay scrolling through it forever. The more sponsored links and ads they can show, the more money they make. They didn't need to make it worse for AI, they made it worse for profit
Im encountering alot of AI created websites that explain concepts like "side effects of X pill" (a recent example) and there was basically no real medical websites in the top results, Just clearly AI using thousands of words to say nothing that I cant trust.
I was considering locally hosting a search engine to circumvent my need for them entirely. Search engine optimization seems like a nightmare, if they were trying to give me useful results. So im not sure if that would be a spend 5 hours to save 5 minutes situation.
As you and others said, Its been getting worse for years so its probably just a coincidence that its also profitable for AI.
I don't think it's intentional, but I think the sheer quantity of AI slop and web crawlers trying to train new AI models is the main problem. Good websites are blocking access to search engines to try to slow crawler traffic, while shitty websites are being made at an unprecedented speed. I legitimately don't know how you fix this as a search engine provider.
Literally never had this happen. Every time I have caved after exhausting all other options the LLM has just made it worse. I never go back anymore.
They're by no means the end-all solution. And they usually aren't my first choice.
But when I'm out of ideas prompting gemini with a couple sentences hyper-specifically describing a problem, has often given me something actionable. I've had almost no success with asking it for specific instructions without specific details about what I'm doing. That's when it just makes shit up.
But a recent example. I was trying to re-install windows on a lenovo ARM laptop. Lenovos own docs were generic for all their laptops, and intended for x86. You could not use just any windows iso. While I was able to figure out how to create the recovery image media for the specific device at hand, there were no instructions on how to actually use it, and entering the BIOS didn't have any relevant entries.
Writing half a dozen sentences describing this into Gemini, instantly informed me that there is a tiny pin-hole button on the laptop that boots into a special separate menu that isn't in the bios. A lo, that was it.
Then again, if normal search still worked like it did a decade ago, and didn't give me a shitload of irrelevant crap, I wouldn't have needed an LLM to "think" it's way to this factoid. I could have found it myself.
They seem to be pretty good at language. One time i forgot the word "tact" and I was trying to remember it. I even asked some people and no one could think of the word I was thinking of even after I described approximately what it meant. But I asked AI and it got it in one go.
Well there Well there is a reason the word language is in the name. Asking them general questions like this is basically their bread and butter. It's one of only things if not the only thing they are good at.
Happened to me yesterday. I have an old 4K TV, every component I used to connect to it had HDMI 2.0+ capabilities. Neither laptop nor Steam Deck would output 4K60, only 4K30. Tried getting another cable and a hub, same result. And I know that my Chromecast outputs 4K60 to this TV, so I was extra confused. In my desperation, asked GPT-5 what was I missing, and it plainly told me that those old Samsung TVs turn off HDMI 2.0 support unless you explicitly turn it on in TV settings under "UHD Color". Apparently Chromecast was doing chroma subsampling, but computers refused and wanted full HDMI 2.0 bandwidth...
They are great if you know what the right answer is just don't know how to get it right now
Asking genAI questions I already know the answer to is how I know the AI is wrong more than it is right.
They’re regularly properly useful to me but it’s pointless to get in arguments in their defense. 🤷
It doesn't generally completely figure it out but to be honest it does a much better job than google for finding the relevant key words which can then be used for a more detailed search.
Me yesterday, except I only thought it figured it out, then found out hours later I must revert back to my workaround because it didn't really work fully and was fragile as fuck.
Doesn't always help but I am unfortunately thankful it exists sometimes when I feel like giving up and it gets me on the right track.
It never gives me good code, but the text it returns can sometimes spark an idea that works.
me, vibe-debugging my Debian machine
I have found LLMs are good for getting your bearings and overall idea in place. I just used it for an overview of ESPHome for a specific LED I am trying to program a sunrise effect. It got me some wrong pseudocode, but did in fact point me in the direction of where to go to flash and what to do to compile the yaml file, and the relevant documentation for what I was trying to achieve. And the wrong pseudocode was actually a useful starting point to get a feel for the syntax.
It's a useful tool. But it can totally talk you out of good ideas and make you feel like you explored all options when it has absolutely not.
