Did anyone notice all well known search engines going from bad to could-not-be-more-wrong-and-irrelevant? I just noticed this week. Was there a particular explanation? Like, the name of an author, title and date don't find a book at this point.

@screwlisp
every website blocks web scrapers and bots now 🤷

@hajovonta @screwlisp that is only half of the problem. I actively try to add content to search indexes and they just outright refuse to index my completely mundane (no spicy/illegal) content.

@screwlisp it’s not your imagination, it is a well documented fact that search engines are all useless now. Ed Zitron wrote an article on it..

I think enshitification explains it, at least in part. Also, free access to information and low cost education are the antithesis of a fascist dictatorship, so search engines had to be destroyed. What I mean is, it probably wasn’t just market forces, probably the political ideoligy of the Silicon Valley cult’s wealthy/elite had a hand in it as well.

@buherator @hajovonta

@ramin_hal9001
I had no idea that the person who tanked Yahoo Search by integrating ads with searches was the person who tanked google search by integrating ads with searches a decade later.
@buherator @hajovonta

@screwlisp
What lack of introspection does to a man…

@ramin_hal9001 @buherator @hajovonta

chatgpt prompt, but it's a mastodon compose-toot textbox.

@screwlisp
Weird. I gave up on them literally years ago; I'm baffled that you got them to work up to now.

@dougmerritt I had thought that combing through Mastodon for a book reference I remembered making to Ramin would have been harder than ddging | 1990-1995 boogle scholaring. But boy was I wrong. Eventually I figured out that I was saying the name of the lead editor of IPE rather than AIiP.

(Having in general also *mostly* not searched in about a decade)

Artificial General Intelligence would have pointed that out.
(Ha ha only serious.)

Try Markov chains by Andrey Andreyevich Markov and Markov algorithms by Andrey Andreyevich Markov.

@screwlisp @dougmerritt