Via @rodhilton@mastodon.social
Right now if you search for “country in Africa that starts with the letter K”:
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DuckDuckGo will link to an alphabetical list of countries in Africa which includes Kenya.
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Google, as the first hit, links to a ChatGPT transcript where it claims that there are none, and summarizes to say the same.
This is because ChatGPT at some point ingested this popular joke:
“There are no countries in Africa that start with K.” “What about Kenya?” “Kenya suck deez nuts?”
Google Search is over.
Which starts with a “K” sound, but is actually spelled with a “K” sound
AI is truly magical
The second-highest hit gives a clue as to why:
Relevantly to Lemmy’s existence in the first place, it suggests Reddit as a pretty pivotal training data source, which Reddit tries to cash in on while also killing 3rd party apps due to apathy
Surprised your first ten results weren’t ads
Eh don’t worry, after WEI DRM has been in use for a while I’m willing to bet Google will show a full page interstitial ad with every search.
I’ve been using DDG for a year and like the search results but what bothers me is that you can’t exclude a word from your query with minus sign!
Chatgpt creating incorrect feedback loops like this is one of my main concerns about AI being used so prevalently. This and original thoughts disappearing because every new content in the web is generated by AI and not by a human.
I thought about this recently. It’s more likely that people will subscribe to sites that aren’t full of AI garbage.
@JoBo I just googled it and Kenya came up as the first hit in Search and in Bard.
Same. On my account and when logged out the first result is about Kenya. This is happening because of personalized search.
That’s not much of an excuse, if it’s meant to be one. Google “personalised” the results by making them worse?
It’s not doing it anymore
Compare with Kagi (this is a shared search for anyone who doesn’t have an account):
hasn’t been like it was for years now.
Someone recommended Kagi here, and tho it isn’t free, it’s the only engine I’ve found so far that can legitimately consistently outperform google
I’ve been using DDG for ages now and tested it against Google a handful of times over that course.
They were nearly identical in search returns. Bing, Yahoo, etc have all caught up to where search just isn’t a thing anymore. Not like how it used to be when Google first dropped and was light years ahead.
And not for nothing but Google has been caught exploiting their search results so not sure if I’d be looking to them as the shining beacon they once were.
AI generated content is pure search result pollution.
What Google should be doing rather than pushing Bard is detecting AI nonsense and purging it from their search database.
Now that I think about it, I haven’t used Google in a while, not even as a bang in DDG.
i use ddg and kagi for search
I left google search some 5 years ago. About twice a year I find myself trying it and being amazed by how crap it is.
DDG FTW!
Ddg is powered by bing isn’t it?
Yeah, it’s basically bing with no Microsoft tracking. What the hell kind of timeline is this where bing is the best search engine?
