“One Reddit user says that killing yourself can alleviate some of the symptoms of seasonal allergies. Another mentions that staying indoors indefinitely prevented all of their symptoms.”
Thanks, google.
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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Both sound like good strategies. Lol
And both sound very reddit-esque
And technically correct
I like it when AI bots use Reddit for answers, it openly demonstrates its faults.
I find it interesting how people have to change their website content so Google will notice them and give them preferential treatment. Like those cooking websites where they have to tell their life story before giving the recipe.
Google is responsible for the bloat on the website, but also just stealing their content in the summary.
That's not entirely Google's fault. SEO people have been assaulting Google's algorithms for decades. Their unrelenting attempts to game the results for their own profit ruined the internet for everyone. They are the ones who produced bloat in unfathomable quantities to manipulate search results in their favor. Those cooking websites are just the casualties of the never-ending war between aggressive marketing departments and search engine algorithms. It's easy to blame Google because they're generally shit, but they're not really the only guilty party here, perhaps not even the most.
You're not wrong that it's a lot of people, but Google controls their own algorithms.
They do, but there's no magical button that they can press to cleanse the internet from marketing bloat or even prevent it from polluting the internet. Whatever they do, there will always be people actively trying to game Google's attempts to present useful search results for the user. There will always be very well funded marketing departments working full time trying to manipulate any search algorithm, any ranking method imaginable that Google might employ. And they can never be stopped, only managed. A battle that can't be won, only fought. It's an impossible task, and despite my burning hatred for Google I still think it's a miracle that their search results are as useful as they are, given the truly incomprehensibly enormous amount of spam that's out there.
Google isn't a victim in this. Their "attempts to present useful search results for the user" are financially based. Google wants people to pay for the right to be higher in the results, not game the system.
I understand your sympathy for google (cool album name, btw), but the problem I have with sympathizing with them is: what is their motivation? They already have a monopoly and they make more money if you click on an ad. In fact, if the number one search result is consistently good, you're much more likely to skip the ads every time. Therefore, Google's financial incentive is to make search just good enough that you don´t go to a competitor in disgust.
I'm not being cynical, either. There have been various people representing the old guard at Google who've come out and said the mission of the company is ever expanding profit at the expense of usability.
Theres literally buttons for all of that and they are owned by Google. The world's biggest ad company does have something to with the amount of marketing bloat, believe it or not.
I don’t know, Google controls the board and all the rules. The SEO people are just the players trying to play by those rules.
No, SEO people's job is to exploit those rules to maximize visibility at all costs. I've worked with those people. They will do all sorts of shit, put out all sorts of spam to rank one spot higher in the results. They expend insane amounts of effort trying to figure out how to trick search engines into ranking their stuff higher, into finding weaknesses in the algorithms. They're absolutely NOT innocent players of the game.
and that's before we get to AMP, where google will 1) outright refuse to show pages that don't follow their guidelines, and 2) just copy the content from those pages to display themselves because the guidelines are designed to make the copying easier for them.
Google is responsible for the bloat
We had SEO before Google. We'll have SEO after Google.
Yesterday it was a website with 47 different kinds of pop-up ads that contained every conceivable recipe in the meta-data of the header. Today it's a 12,000 word Martha Stewart rant about the time mom cooked a croquet madame before a two sentence recipe instruction. Tomorrow... who knows?
Maybe we'll only get recipes read to us during the performance of an elaborate TikTok dance. Maybe we'll need a thumbprint, a live camera photo, and three forms of state-issued ID to prove our identity before we can access FaceBook Presents: The One Cookbook Still Legally Allowed To Be Hosted On The Internet. Maybe everything will need to be translated from Chinese.
Only time will tell.
Point being that the SEO was forced onto the websites to make their websites a worse experience. Now they summarize the website so you don’t have to view that website anymore.
Brainwashing / Advertising is not an acceptable form of payment to use the internet. We need a different system for websites to get money for providing quality content to viewers.
Besides this, most websites today are so shit with cookies and banners and garbage I really don't want to see them. Ideally I'd like some local browser AI to do the searching and finding and collating.
I wish there was a way I could pay 5€ per month and see most websites like the firefox reader view, and they get some cents allocated from that monthly subscription.
What’s awesome is it’s not always right. Wikipedia blurbs are exactly what some are looking for and it does do that, nvm the fact that Wikipedia still gets it wrong sometimes.
Argue with it to correct it and it never disagrees with you.
I’ve found myself arguing with both healthcare staff and healthcare consumers about using this crap to answer their questions, both in the last month.
Healthcare blushes then spins it as they’re using the listed sources not the ai blurb. Sure.
Healthcare consumers are getting defensive, unlike past use of WebMD. The latter was most often sheepishly chuckled over. AI, I’m finding, is being fiercely defended, like it’s a trusted family doctor of the past 20 years.
My personal favorite was the guy who specifically used his chatGPT sub to sort out the meaning of his labs for him. When gently reminded to be careful with using AI for definitive answers, the guy bristled stating: it hasn’t gotten it wrong yet. Sir, if you don’t know the right answer, such that your consulting chatGPT for the answer, how would you know if it’s getting it right?
But he’s committed. He has a sub.
At some point (maybe we've reached it), I fully expect that many of the top-ranked websites by Google will be AI-generated themselves. There's a cottage industry (and has been a very long time) of websites engineered in such a way to game the algorithm. They target specific queries and load up the pages with ads and links to product pages on amazon which generate a kickback for the website. Google used to turn up pages written by passionate people, using the web of hyperlinks people created out of good will as a proxy for relevancy to a query. But when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Google Search was so good that everyone started to use it for everything and then we got the cottage industry wanting to generate money from people just seeking information. Vague queries like "best dog food" or "how often to water plants" or "tortilla recipe" are not likely to turn up anything except crap and that's pretty much a self-fulfilling prophesy. A top-ranked website for a popular query will bring so much traffic so as to overwhelm any site except the ones generating some money per page view. A site which doesn't do that goes offline and then is deranked by google. And the sorts of people who stoop to the level of putting ads and trackers on their site and aggressively SEO'ing their way to the top are not likely to care about providing you with the highest quality information. It goes the other way too; a passionate hobbyist does not want their website to be top-ranked as the traffic would bring the server or its costs to its knees. Neither do those old-school web forums who don't want hundreds of noobs coming in and ruining their fun time. I'd consider the possibility that google is ranking pages partly based on whether the site can tolerate and would welcome the load. A metric like that is almost certain to rank up the bad, ad-riddled sites. Google may have no choice in the matter. When a random person wants to know why their refrigerator smells bad, the only other person willing to spend their own resources answering their dumb question will be evil as fuck.
It was poor English literature grads writing those pages only because those were the only people who could write well. Now a computer can do that job. Take a guess where it's going to go. The people running these sites and prompting the AI will be the poorest people in the world with internet access, where the money from the kickbacks goes a lot further than it does in the West. The internet has no borders. You'll be getting information from an AI prompted by Raj in India, claiming to be Dave from NYC.
I think they are planning to go even further than that. There wont be a an internet made up of discrete websites full of facts, or web search as we understand it today. They want to make their AI the first and last stop for any question a person might have, and have the AI act as agent to perform any tasks that require interactions with the broader web.
It was poor English literature grads writing those pages only because those were the only people who could write well.
A lot of that work was outsourced overseas a long time ago. You don't need to write original content, you just need to reword the content from other sites. It's an industry in the Philippines and other place with low wages and people that know English.
I guess AI will replace that though. So it'll be AI summaries of AI content.
Yes of course. It depends on your search term, but I often find the top 3-5 sites are probably script/AI generaed (based on style and domain name history).
I like that Google is slowly killing their own business model. Increasing costs for websites as they are getting an increase in bots crawling them, without directing actual humans to those sites and not paying those site owners (with some exceptions like Reddit) anything. It’s just making it even more difficult for small websites to grow as the crawlers increase burdens like energy costs, but without sending traffic or payment. I don’t use Google services any more and haven’t in a long time. Highly recommend people move away from them.
Almost like capitalism is internally contradictory and the only thing that keeps it afloat is that the ecosystem it inhabits has buffers that delay the consequences of contradictory actions.
Sounds like Tankie talk to me.
Mods! Mods! Ban this man! His anti-Americanism is ruining Lemmy!
Don't know why you got downvoted. I chuckled
Make it a fruit store, make google offer juice from the fruits in the store. Exercise your creativity a bit bitte.
Source (link ‘em w/o self promo worry OP!):
https://thisecommercelife.com/blogs/comics/038-google-ai-summaries
My experience is more of:
"Here's the quick conversion of units you're looking for but without having to enable a host of other page require questionable javascript hosted sites as well as wading through a set of cookie challenges that require you to make multiple clicks just so they don't install tracking cookies on your device so they can see you long after you've left their one-visit-page. If you still want to go through, here's the direct deep link to the page on that site that contains the info you're searching for so you don't have to wade through piles of nested menus. I'm sorry I release 2 tons of CO2 giving you this answer, but its either that or expose yourself raw to that sketchy site for that trivial answer you're looking for."
The only thing worse than a Google-tier AI response is the twelve different pop-ups and banner ads that get plastered across your screen on the native page.
Really is just a rock and a hard place when it comes to getting useful information. Nevermind how fucking sketchy SEO has made these responses anyway.
You see ads?
google ai summary uses REDDIT for the most part.
The AI summary stops me having to wade through an SEO quagmire.
It's just the latest veneer over the enshittification.
Fortunately there's usually a couple of sources cited so I can go and read them directly.
How are the free websites making money?
How are the free websites making money?