- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Sigh. AI has basically added a rocket booster to the enshittification train.
Hopefully this doesn’t impact DDG.
I mentioned this in another thread, but I do worry that google is eventually going infect the APIs that metasearch engines like DDG, Kagi, searchxng, etc depend on.
In my experience, a lot of the sysadmins who run high traffic sites will treat all bots as scrapers that have to be blocked or slowed to a crawl. Then they make special allowances for googlebot, bing/msnbot, and a few others. That means there is a massive uphill climb (beyond the technical one) to making a new search engine from scratch. With Google and MS both betting the farm on LLMs I fear we’re going to lose access to two of the most valuable web reverse indexes out there.
I fear that as well. I use Searx-NG at home, so am expecting that to start dying a death of a thousand cuts soon.
Was thinking about standing up (or contributing to) either YaCY or Stract, but you made a good point about the bot allowances for the Googlebot et al crawler UAs. Wonder how frowned upon it would be to spoof the crawler UA in a self-hosted one?
I’ve just started using Searxng… you expect it to die soon? Is it because you expect other search engines to follow suit until there are no search engines anymore, only hallucination machines?
s it because you expect other search engines to follow suit until there are no search engines anymore, only hallucination machines?
Basically, yeah.
I hope there’s enough of a market for non-ai content that it doesn’t come to that. I think we already reached the pushback stage with image generation.
When I was running a site, I had special rules in my firewall to look for things that said they were googlebot but which didn’t come from one of googles published public IPs.
…yeah.
I had that thought after I replied when I realized that most of the reputable search crawlers will publish the IPs/ranges they use in addition to the UA. The disreputable ones (cough Bytedance cough Xiaomi cough) will just spoof Chrome on Windows 10 and flood you with requests from AWS datacenters in Shanghai or Singapore.
That said, I may still continue looking into working with one of the actual self-hosted search engines (vs meta search) and see how well that works.
Yeah. This is going to suck worse before it gets any better. The good news is that all the useful content (outside of sales gardens) is going to be here in the Fediverse.
The other good news is that the state of Cybersecurity investment is abysmal, and the walled garden content is going to get breached/leaked/pirated a lot, for a long time to come.
Hopefully it doesn’t impact them too much. So tired of this AI train man.
Same. I don’t mind it as an option if that’s what some people want, but stop “enhancing” the default experience with it and shoving it down my throat. No lo quiero.
Oh good, now when I search I’ll have to wade through the effluent of AI-produced pablum to find an actual human journalism product.
Bold of you to assume you’ll find an actual human journalism product
Large language models are going to replace search. Naturally concise recommendations are easier for humans to interact with than a swath of web pages. The problem that you get here is this is going to disincentive the creation of new web content outside of the walled gardens we already have. The walls are just going to get higher.
Google has been unusable in English for at least 2 years now. Searching in Estonian makes Google behave like it did when it was still good. I wonder how long that’s going to last.
BRB, gonna learn Estonian.
See on väärt oskus, meid on lausa tosinaid!
And layoffs all the way down.
how seo game this? the sooner you start…
Yes please. Shoot yourself in the foot. It seems like it’s the only way people will even consider switching.
I’d like to check in as part of the problem; I pay for google ads and I show up at the top of certain search screens. I’m in a small local market, and google is primed to make about $350,000 off about $3mm of work this year if things keep up the way they are. We have no choice but to play the game to reach our consumers. Sorry guys.
I wish they undid a lot of their stupid redesigns instead of doubling down on it.
I’m getting Pixel 8a ads and I usually trade-in my older a if I start having problems or the new one has a feature. 8a finally has wireless charging (7 mightve, was too soon) but it has this bullshit now. Damnit.