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Well, crap. I may now be finally forced to shift to a different search engine because of this, but they all seem to be rushing full tilt like the Gadarene swine into AI-ifcation.
My expression right now: ðŸ˜
I may have overstated the problem - I need to test it more, I was having problems with the exact search function and it seems Google has a "verbatim mode" that might assuage my concerns - but I definitely am not happy with the overall trajectory.
Verbatim and minus have just meant "more/less of this please" to google for years now -- well before LLM influence. I'm not sure why exactly, but corporate policy seems to be that (even setting aside sponsored results) the algo knows what you want better than you do. And the algo is getting worse.
Usually in the past if I copy/pasted something into Google in quote marks, it would quickly point me towards the right thing.
A week or two ago when I was working on a project that required this, I had a weird experience. If I'm recalling the exact sequence right, it told me it didn't have any matches - but then, when I scrolled down, the correct match was something like third from the top - the algo seemed to only be checking the preponderance of the words, and thus even when it could correctly source what I was looking for, it wouldn't flag as a 100% match.
So even though it had exactly what I was looking for, it didn't act as if it did.
Even when it does point you to the right thing, it is also showing you other things now -- in the deep(ish) past, if you put something in quotes it would only show results containing that string. Similarly (although I think this went away first), a search for -(thing you don't want to see) used to result in zero results containing that term -- now if you search for "used cars -chevy" it probably shows you fewer chevys than otherwise, but you are still going to see some. Particularly harmful when you are looking for something with one extremely common straightforward set of results (that you are not interested in) and an alternate niche interpretation. (the thing you want to find!)
AI influence seems to be making this a bit worse, I suspect since the "this is probably what he really wants" is more strongly weighted -- but it might be corpus frequency effects too I suppose.
What's frustrating is that I am pretty sure a nonzero portion of this is simply due to boost ad revenue.
Death by a thousand straws on the back of the goose that laid the golden egg.
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The version of this that I hate the most right now, merely due to exposure, is in Windows, where the bottom-right notification pop-up gets selected or ignored if you click on the area just a few pixels out of it, as if I had accidentally clicked just outside the borders of it. No, I clicked on that specific pixel on purpose, because that pixel had the specific UI element that the pop-up box covered up that I wanted to select! If I click on a pixel directly adjacent to the pop-up box, I want it to be interpreted no differently from if I clicked on a pixel 500 away from the pop-up box. The only justification I can think of is for touchscreens, but those pop-up boxes aren't exactly tiny, and making UI behave differently based on input device (mouse vs touchscreen) is something that should be very very possible in Windows.
I'm showing my age perhaps, but I swear there was a time when double-clicking a word in windows selected just that word -- I understand that sometimes people would also want the trailing space, but now even if you drag-select, that gets helpfully added in many programs (eg. Word).
Clippy lives on as a sloppy ghost in the machine...
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