You might remember a company called Google. In 1998, they came up with an amazing product — a web search that didn’t suck! And it could find things! With the state of search in 1998, this was incre…
  • flamingos-cant (hopepunk arc)@feddit.ukEnglish
    33·
    15 days ago

    Information-gathering agents are an evolution of Google Alerts. Beyond spotting changes, they can make sense of them, too.

    … Links will become an afterthought with the coming changes to the Search results experience.

    Web publishers should honestly just block googlebot at this point. Why should they provide credibility to whatever Google’s stochastic parrot hallucinates if Google won’t even give them any kickback?

    So what do we search with instead of Google? There isn’t a lot of choice. There’s various flavours of Google or Bing.

    Microsoft deprecated their Bing API back in August, instead telling people to use some Azure AI thing. DDG and the like weren’t affected because they have contracts, but I can’t imagine they’ll be renewed.

    • smeenz@lemmy.nzEnglish
      5·
      13 days ago

      If sites start blocking googlebot en masse, then googlebot will just start ignoring robots.txt

      • ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        4·
        13 days ago

        Can they just put an EULA on the site and then sue Google for unauthorized access?

        Not in the US of course, but in the EU or something

        • smeenz@lemmy.nzEnglish
          2·
          12 days ago

          Then the user agent string will just quietly become randomised so you can’t match it reliably because it turns out that honouring robots.txt was always little more than a “gentleman’s handshake”.

            • Evinceo@awful.systemsEnglish
              2·
              9 days ago

              Yeah an adversary like Google isn’t something you can easily block without really annoying legitimate users unfortunately. Nothing is stopping them from turning every chrome instance into a botnet node except for the angry article that would run in Ars Technica.

          • flowerysong@awful.systemsEnglish
            4·
            14 days ago

            Unfortunately DuckDuckGo sucks ass at search, even compared to how much the Google search results have degraded over time. I use the no-AI version as my primary search engine, but I have to resort to using Google to find the thing I’m looking for about 1 in 5 times.

            • TrashGoblin@awful.systemsEnglish
              1·
              7 days ago

              Probably 2 in 5 ddg searches are worthless for me, but trying again on Google rarely if ever helps. Usually, both are returning SEO slop or Product™️ rather than the thing I was looking for.

            • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
              7·
              14 days ago

              DDG has been my main search engine for over a decade but it has degraded as it became basically a reseller of Bing results after Russia started the current phase of the Ukraine war and they stopped partnering with Yandex.