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Junk websites filled with AI-generated text are pulling in money from programmatic ads
(www.technologyreview.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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And our time. I’m sick of googling something and getting nothing out these fluff pieces with little or no real information. It’s made Google near useless for entire subjects. Try searching for troubleshooting on anything Apple for example.
Yeah it’s even shit for dumb searches.
Decided to Google the most popular SUVs and I get a top 10 article where it expects me to click through each one so it can load a new page and ads for each item in the list.
Then you get the news tab in edge, msn news maybe and half the ads are literal scams.
The latter is infuriating to me. If I’m actually searching for a product, by all means show me an ad for the type of product I’m looking for. That’s a win-win scenario. How these mainstream sites put up literal scam ads I don’t understand. How can they be paying better than Ford?
We've come full circle. Original web searches sucked because you couldn't trust the results to be ranked in a useful way. You could search for a historical fact and you were just as likely to get an 8th grader's homework they posted online instead of a credible source. Then Google came along and solved that problem with their magic algorithm. Only took them a little more than 20 years to get to the point where their algorithm now sucks so bad that we're back to where we started. But instead of an 8th graders homework, we get AI articles that appear to be trained from said homework. Fascinating.
Google overall has just turned to shit. You can’t trust any new thing they do, and their existing ones are degrading all the time.
Especially true for Assistant, I've found. My Home speakers keep getting dumber and dumber all the time.
Yeah ads are a plague and not just online.
I can’t walk around my town without having billboards and super bright ads shoved down my throat.
Driving down the motorway, yeah we’ve got ads here too. Don’t look at your phone but sure read this advert as you fly past at 70mph.
This is why you need to add reddit to the search.
Which is sad as hell.
Or the fun variant where you intentionally search for something in your native tongue because you want results relevant to your country and get badly translated articles that nowhere inform you that they are translated.
Use bing chat, it's currently the best search engine out there
I tried it for a few days initially but it was confidently wrong a third of the time, or very slow.
Did you switch it from creative to precise? In creative mode it's genuinely awful, but with precise set, it always finds exactly what I'm looking for. It also has gpt-4 integration now.
Yes, but remember you're not Google's customer so ... win-win for them