And I noticed my 2021 Macbook was unable to scroll to the bottom of the page. It was just chugging like crazy, and I couldn't see the content I wanted because of it.
Then I remembered I didn't install AdBlock on this browser. I installed it and went back to the page, and OK now I can actually use the website.
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What concerns me is not so much that there are lots of low quality sites looking to scrape pennies from Google or whatever.
It's that this kind of software development culture is normalized -- where government agencies and hospitals are sending data to Google and Facebook.
I would be interested to hear from somebody who works in those areas what the incentives are.
If you are working on the central park website, why are you adding ads to it? Isn't it funded by the government?
Specifically I opened up dev tools and I see like 297 blocked requests to
https://securepubads.g.doubleclick.net
I see ads for Lowe's Hardware Memorial Day sales and such. OK fine, but why are they locking up my computer and making the site unusable?
(Also does anyone remember the days when Google was "morally" against invasive image ads and irrelevant ads? They preached non-invasive and relevant, helpful ads. Those days seem SO far away now ...)
I live in India, haven't been to the US in 17 years, don't use a VPN.
Yet when I search for "St Petersburg Airport", it directs me to the airport for the city in Florida, and now the much older, much more densely populated, and much more culturally significant city in Russia (a city where I HAVE been once - and Google would likely know).
It's because everyone is trying to sell you something, no matter how irrelevant it is to you. The cost of transmitting information at scale is effectively zero, and gen AI makes generating information at scale also zero. It's noise at scale crowding out the non-scalable things that are of actual value to humans. Something has to give.
gives no matches for me, what does it show for you?
"Google hides search results count under tools section"
https://searchengineland.com/google-hides-search-results-cou...
A friend of mine wanted to find some lyrics and the lack of proper verbatim mode has made it impossible to know if he had the wrong lyrics or if the information is not there or if the search itself is failing.
If there are no matches whatsoever then tell me there's no matches. If there's partial matches tell me how close it is to my search terms. Like you might match all but one or two words and so on. These are the kind of useful features I'd expect on search.
The usefulness of AI, on my mind, might be more towards interpretation of the questions rather than generation of the answers.
If I were Google I'd try something like using genAI to rephrase the question to extract keywords and so on that can be used to enhance search. But then again, I think I put myself in a position of "how do we make search better and more accurate" and that's simply not the position Google finds themselves in.