this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
1271 points (98.6% liked)

Science Memes

11217 readers
2989 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 6 points 7 months ago

The problem is that humanity now has an incentive to produce spam content (ad money) and programs that can meticulously craft spam content to look like it's written by a human (LLMs).

I have to assume that the result is tons of spam content, which the traditional search engines have to sift through.

If they'd present you with all that spam content, you wouldn't find anything useful.
So, they try to filter out that spam content, but because it looks like it's written by a human, they're going to accidentally filter out useful content, too.

There's also at least some measurements, that search results are decidedly getting worse: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/17/google_search_results_spam/

So, yeah, I think, all traditional search engines are massively struggling with this. Maybe something can be done with only indexing known-good sites, but for specialty information, like the repair information of your household appliance, that will probably be worse...