effort

I was thinking just yesterday how insane I must sound to younger generations when I say that a decade ago you could just type into google a few half remembered words or phrases from a quote, book, song or movie etc and boom you'd have the answer. Now if you type the artist/author/person/characters exact name and the exact quote you're still more likely to get things selling you stuff only broadly related or random articles that have maximised SEO and taken top spot etc. But it's true.

The future of the web was depressing enough with the return to AOL-style walled gardens through Facebook, Twitter, etc, (fuck, even shit like Elsevier)….now I believe there’s a possibility that the web just won’t exist in the future as how we understand it today. There will just be monetized LLMs that people publish stuff into. It’s not so much post-truth, as post-content.

Related problem: the internet has gotten so fucking atomized. There could be some cool as fuck website out there, which I will never know about.

Google has a "before:year" operator that I've had to use quite a bit, especially recently

It's not gonna work forever of course

But it helps for now

I literally had to go and buy an expensive field guide from a museum to finish this paper. I haven't had to do that before.

Big museum smh. In all seriousness though yes SEO and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. You'll programatically never going to get the best result from a search engine like Google, only the most "engaging" ones that know how to play the system.

I mean, these people also own YouTube where the same thing happens.

I've started searching almost exclusively in Google Books, the Internet archive books, worldcat, or like Cambridge/Oxford online to find anything remotely academic. It's so bad!

If it makes you feel any better, I've ran into the same problem with construction. I used to enjoy looking up new techniques and materials in a whole range of contractor work, now though it's all DIY and companies selling unregulated products with no real guarantees. The amount of people who self-post themselves fragrantly breaking the law with illegal systems or dangerous builds not up to any type of standard code is mind blowing. Without fail there's thousands of upvotes and hundreds of replies thanking the person for the horrible tips. I can't imagine the number of people who have died because of it, I don't think there will ever be any type of regulation or support for factual and safe information.

dusting off my encyclopedia brittanica set rn brb

Yes. I too feel this every day, as someone who witnessed the birth, growth, and apparently the zenith of the internet, i know it in my bones that you are right. I know I'm waxing poetic, but i can't help it when i remember the early days. i ran through its fields and loved them all, the weird corners you could find. I knew my way like a child knows the woods behind their house, and it is different. Gone. It's just a gut sensation, impossible to express in words to those who didn't experience it. It's beyond my ability to encapsulate the feeling i have of loss from it's passing, and of knowing just how much has been lost.

Most colleges have a worldcat portal that provides access to hundreds of publications, it's probably what I'd start with if you have access, some public libraries might have access too? I agree, general internet search isn't good anymore. Also, probably not good anymore, but worth a shot: scholar.google.com

It used to take so much longer to turn something good to trash. Literally was considered to the 21st century like electricity was to the 20th. We saw a temple and within a decade of its mass adoption it became purely for money changers. I'm not Dr. Computers but like, can't we just...make websites and stuff again? I want personal websites and finding stuff through their link pages again. I want it so when you Google any random thought the results could potentially keep you enraptured for years. I want the damn Time Cubes back. Everything has had every ounce of joy and humanity bled from it and turned into wealth and how fast the internet turned from the greatest invention that would change the world and fix everything became cable TV and tabloid news.

Give Yandex a try, it's the only search engine where you can still just enter the keywords you think will be in the text you're searching for and it gives you pages that contain those keywords you typed instead of feeding them into an incomprehensible language model trained to collect ad revenue.

I also find it's a lot less censored for piracy than everything else.

I don't know if this is because Yandex is tuned for the russian language, or if it really does work like they used to.

I don't look up bugs very much but I'm jealous you got to do my childhood dream of entomology in some way.

Can you add keywords such as prominent authors, publication names, terms only researchers would use etc? If you've been doing for a long time don't you have resources to start from such as works you've relied on previously? And there is always the trick of using the date search feature to exclude the past few years.

Is it possible that you have progressed in the level of work you are doing such that purchasing published resources rather than just typing the name of a creature into a searchengine is required? Maybe you would always have gotten to this point?

I agree with your overall point though. I would like to see more development in bespoke community search engines comparable to the fediverse for social media. If you and other people who are in your field could create your own search indexes from sources which are reputable. They could even have federation.

I was trying to find co-op games for me and my partner to play and the first results are almost always AI generated articles that try to obscure the the answer so that web crawlers can't get the summary and you have to click through. All of them are formatted like

Does XYZ Have Co-op?

XYZ is an open world survival first person shooter game developed by ABC...

[5 more paragraphs]

Sadly, players will have to each own a copy of the game to play together

[Autoload another article so that you can't just scroll to the bottom for a quick answer]

Did you try Google scholar?

I get around that issue by using specific databases. NCBI-pubmed is great for biological sciences.

Another top: use Boolean operators to improve your search results.

more and more i’ve started including before:2022 into my queries. sucks that things have happened since then tho

If I find another useless "gardening hack" while trying to do actual agricultural work in 110 degree heat I'm going to go full anprim.

Retvrn to webrings

Is this person trying to find information on sites like NatGeo or something lol. Use google scholar and Scihub (many times they’re already free), or use the college library or even your local library

While it costs money, the internet has been a lot more usable for me once I switched to Kagi. It has no ads, promotes small web creators, automatically deprioritizes websites with AI content and trackers, and lets you prioritize and deprioritize your own specific websites.

For example, I have right wing websites like Fox News Info Wars, shitty Fandom wikis with better alternatives, and AI art websites blocked. I have websites like high quality recipe websites that aren’t SEO spam and websites I regularly use raised.

I really hate to say this but AI has made my searching go back to useable and rarely better than search results have ever been