Ben Daubney has an excellent post titled ‘The web used to be a reliable library. AI has ruined it.’
A real-life Duck Duck Go (Bing) search he ran netted him six “AI slop” entries in the top 10, and I’m betting that Google isn’t any better.
If search engines had kept up with the game, they would have also known which sites were more trustworthy, and continued developing algorithms that could weed out both links from untrustworthy sites and sites that have “AI” patterns. Goodness knows it was easy for me to spot the disinformation series on me last year; and it was also incredibly simple to find and report the bot accounts on Meta and Facebook. If a human can spot these patterns, and if computer boffins at Big Tech outfits are as smart as they say they are, then they should have the nous to make search better.
But we know that Google intentionally makes search worse. I can’t speak for Bing as no evidence has emerged.
Ben is right when he recalls that, in the 1990s, you were more likely to find real information.
Altavista et al. were better than the search engines today in serving us relevant pages (from a World Wide Web that was far, far smaller).
When Google came along in 1999, it blew them all away because of how well it ranked the results.
Eventually Ben found his answer offline, and those of us who have paper references are looking like the information-rich, well educated bunch again. The web is no longer the leveller—or at least the primary means through which we find information on the web is no longer the leveller.
I recently recycled a tatty, 1980 UBD map but my car still has a 1985 edition that is falling apart. Finally I bought a Kiwimaps replacement at Whitcoulls, to be told at the checkout that this was the last of their stock.
These are all map books, rather than fold-out ones, since there is nothing more annoying than having to unfold a giant sheet of paper inside a car just to look for where you’re going.
Actually, there is one thing more annoying.
I regularly see sat-nav on my phone tell me I am in a completely different city to where I really am, and the Whitcoulls checkout person agreed. He said Google Maps often had him in Auckland, where he has not been in a long time.
Above: Here Maps plots a course from Hutt City to Whitby. The trouble is I was in Whitby when I took this screenshot. I have not been to Ngaengae for months, if not over a year.
Assuming phones give the correct location—they did 10 years ago, not so much now—I also find relying on a gadget to tell you what to do at each intersection terribly annoying. Just look on a map, use your photographic memory to get the lay of the land, and drive, for goodness’ sake.
Waiting for sat-nav to give you an instruction must cause anxiety, especially if your instincts are pretty good and you wonder if the software is sending you to completely the wrong place. The novelty wore off long before COVID escaped. Dead trees are, once again, superior, and one copy every 40 years doesn’t seem too environmentally harmful, assuming the new ones are printed on paper from sustainable forests. That’s probably not enough to keep Kiwimaps and Hema Maps ticking over—though with the failure of cellphone programs like Google Maps and Here Maps, maybe they should wait it out. At some point US Big Tech will want to charge you for a version that is more accurate, and the free one will have enshittified to an extent it sends you to advertisers’ locations en route to your chosen one.
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