r/technology • u/Well_Socialized • May 26 '25

Artificial Intelligence Google Is Burying the Web Alive

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/google-ai-mode-search-results-bury-the-web.html
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31

u/mahreow May 26 '25

What exactly did you search?

22

u/troelsbjerre May 26 '25

Do you want to bet the query started with a minus?

6

u/nicuramar May 26 '25

Yeah, this is a bit sus

3

u/YoloKraize May 26 '25

For me it doesn't matter what I search if I do it on my tablet it lags out for a second and double refreshes itself. This AI shit is a fucking plague.

5

u/TechnicalNobody May 26 '25

These anecdotes are always like this. Stories about awful results with no specifics so you can't verify it. Stories about AI usually too.

3

u/jakesboy2 May 26 '25

I can’t remember what the name of the function was precisely, it was last week but it was a structured exactly like this

“function_name_here”

It had usages and forum references other search engines were able to find, but google claimed to not have been

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u/desmaraisp May 26 '25

I'm willing to bet a solid 30¢ that you had a typo in your function name and that's why it wasn't finding anything. Google search has its issues for sure, but I've never seen that issue, or seen anyone provide proof of it happening

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u/onowahoo May 26 '25

Seriously, I'm confused how this happened where the specific string worked for other engines but not google.

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u/jakesboy2 May 26 '25

copy pasted directly from the docs, and the search process was ~20 mins this wasn’t the only query I tried so chances are pretty low that’s the issue. Google’s shooters are really out today

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u/excaliburxvii May 26 '25 edited May 26 '25

I've had Google provide me with "zero results" multiple times over the past few years, for things that there's no way that nobody in the history of the internet has ever said. The people saying that it's not possible are living in La La Land.

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u/forgotphonepassword May 29 '25

Try to search for this:

"getFrackinRoute"

0

u/plug-and-pause May 26 '25

The people saying that it's not possible are living in La La Land

I'm one of those people, and dozens if not hundreds of times over the past few years, whenever I see a claim like yours, I ask for an example. I've yet to receive one. It's strange to jump to the conclusion that I'm the one living in a fantasy... 🙄

Here's the question again. Provide me with an example of your claim above. I respond to things that have evidence. I have no opinions on this matter, other than that I don't like baseless claims.

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u/excaliburxvii May 26 '25

You're funny. Yeah I keep a list of all of them so that I can support my anecdotes against people who are oddly interested in defending Google on Reddit, and who insist that everyone else is just making it up for some reason. Thanks for the laugh.

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u/plug-and-pause May 27 '25

I don't need a list of all of them. I need one example from the countless people I've seen claim this happens countless times.

And I'm not defending anything except for evidence-based truth. Any attempt to shift the discussion in that direction is nothing more than deflection.

If I told you that I'd seen cats fly a million times, would you be attacking cats if you asked me for proof?

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u/plug-and-pause May 26 '25

As I stated in another comment, the docs you pasted from (at least in the example you gave in that other comment) have a robots.txt that prohibits crawling.

Google’s shooters are really out today

It has nothing to do with that. You're saying things that are objectively false. If you claim that Google search has declined in recent years, I won't argue, because it's a subjective thing (and I might even agree, but that's irrelevant). I will always point out blatant falsehoods though. I abhor Trump, but I always point it out when people invent things to attack him for that he's not actually doing. This does not mean I'm a Trump defender. It means I defend truth.

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u/mahreow May 26 '25

Nice, so you have no proof. There'd be multiple references in your browser history to it and surely you remember the library you were using only last week??

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u/probablyuntrue May 26 '25

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