New post: how generative 'AI' pollutes search results https://www.bookandsword.com/2026/03/14/how-generative-ai-pollutes-search-results/ #llm #stateOfTheWeb

How Generative ‘AI’ Pollutes Search Results

In February 2026 I forgot to use noai.duckduckgo.com and saw a result from their AI assistant at the top of my search results. Like a lot of things produced by ‘generative AI’ it looks fun at first glance but sad as soon as you pay attention. Today I will post about what is wrong with this answer and with the whole premise

Search Assist is Confidently Wrong

The search assist box cites two sources. The first is a magazine article about how an investor told TV audience that YouTube was very profitable in 2008 and 2009. The very second sentence of the article says that Google itself denied this. Personally, I trust the CEO of a publicly traded company who can be thrown in prison if he lies over an investor, although it is certainly possible that there is some cooking of the books. In addition, a company can be profitable in one year but not in another. Based on this article it would be reasonable to say “an investor claimed that YouTube was profitable in 2009” but that is two major differences from the actual result The second source is a magazine article about Google’s growing revenues. Google does not seem to have discussed costs, and revenue and expenses can increase at the same time. Whereas services like Netflix only host things that large numbers of people want to pay for, YouTube hosts anything people want to share, and that is expensive. So the search-assist box has one false sentence, and one which is true but irrelevant. It pollutes results by making a simple, authoritative statement which is false.

Search results now contain many computer-generated articles like https://www.clrn.org/does-youtube-operate-at-a-loss/. This article cites no evidence but denies that YouTube operates at a loss anyways. It has no value over a reddit threat where people tell themselves that YouTube must be profitable because its big and has ads. Hosting unlimited videos and streaming them everywhere for free is expensive and Internet ads are probably a net negative.

The computer-generated results box and the computer-generated article have negative value. They add to the bog of confident speculation that flood social media, and increase the burden of wading through it. Every marketer and propagandist knows that repetition is powerful. So if you don’t want to be fooled, its a really good idea to block unreliable sources of information before you are exposed to them. Brandolini’s Law teaches us that its harder to prove something wrong than claim it, and the fable of John Henry teaches us that its foolish to try to work faster than a machine. A machine that spews plausible lies is a lot like the company’s steam drill.

Using an actual search, I have found statements by Google executives in 2010 and 2016 that YouTube was not yet profitable, and someone familiar with the figures who told a reporter that its income was roughly equal to its expenses in 2014.1 Their competitor vidme had trouble figuring out how Google could make the numbers work without feeding extra cash into YouTube. It also seems to me that if YouTube was profitable while so many streaming services and social media sites go bankrupt or go private, Google would boast about that. So it seems to me that YouTube was probably not profitable up to 2016, and that it probably still struggles.

The computer-generated answer reminds me of misleading headlines and captions on human journalism. People who flip past a headline like “Google sets all-time records as search and YouTube profits soar” might be surprised to read an article which just talks about YouTube revenues. If you sell something for less than it costs, your sales revenue may be high, but your costs will be even higher. Many people will never read the whole article and will just take away the headline (journalists used to be trained to write stories in a reverse pyramid, with the most important information at the start of the article where people will read it, but seem to have given up that practice). Reducing a complex story to a dozen words takes expertise and attention to detail and is easy to do badly.

This Is Bad Automation

This is the sort of thing that could be automated. Because press releases and journalism are posted online in English, it would be possible for a computer to sift through them and determine if any senior Google staffer has claimed that YouTube made a profit. Its possible that one day a computer could sort the same search results and say “Google is secretive about YouTube’s revenue. On three occasions from 2010 to 2016, Google executive said that it was losing money or just breaking even. An investor claimed that it was profitable in 2009 but was immediately contradicted.” But DuckDuckGo’s AiAssist cannot even do that right. Instead, it imitates something darker.

AiAssist imitates Pravda in the USSR and American journalism a few years ago. It tries to figure out the party line, and push that as hard as it can, rather than asking what is true and finding out empirically. To do this you don’t have to know anything about the world, just what authorities say about the world. It was pitiful to watch journalists with no scientific education try to learn the official truth on a topic like airborne infection control where the evidence is rapidly shifting and previous best practice turns out to have been made up. And its shameful watching reporters looking for the official truth when the only way to know if YouTube is profitable is to audit it or have someone share the books. You cannot know whether YouTube is profitable by searching the Internet, you have to investigate, and investigating and persuading sources to talk is their job! The closest I have found is a statement by “a person familiar with the figures” to the Wall Street Journal that YouTube roughly broke even in 2014 (archive).

Its hard and expensive to go out into the world and learn things. Its also difficult and pricey to become an expert who can evaluate large contradictory and diverse bodies of evidence with nuance. It takes time and effort to build trusted relationships with people who have access to secret information and might share it. And these companies can’t be bothered to code tools that answer “has any reliable source claimed this?” So instead they try to create a list of authorities and issue decrees based on them.

A few years ago, Google tried to rely more on authorities by upranking all results on certain domains. The result was a flood of sponsored content and mattress ads on formerly respected news and education sites, while specialist sites languished on the second and third page of results. This is a childish approach to epistemology, because most of us learn that uncle Roy has great advice on fishing or auto repair but should not be listened to on the Hollow Earth or the (((globalists))). People and sources are trustworthy on some topics but not others. It corrupts news organizations, because if they have been producing useful accurate information on some topics, it offers them wealth if they mix it with cheap propaganda. But making a list of good sites is cheap and easy to automate and that is all that the companies that dominate social media and web search care about.

These ‘high-tech’ companies have a way of deciding what is true which was respectable in the twelfth century. That bad thinking would just be their problem but they spew its consequences across the Internet and social media and leave it for the rest of us to clean up. If nobody knows something, the best search result is to say that, not to pretend that there is an unquestioned truth. And sifting through what others have said cannot substitute for going out and finding out what is true. Sometimes you can make people pretend that the emperor is wearing clothes. That won’t stop him from getting pneumonia if he spends all day in the rain wearing nothing but his crown and immense self-confidence.

I don’t publish ads or third-party content, but I do have to pay for the bandwidth that the chatbot companies use up. I am always glad when people share, comment, talk about my writing with friends, or donate.

(scheduled 12 March 2026)

1. All links are under The Political Economy of American Tech Companies Since 2008 (the model has changed a bit since the end of the Zero Real Interest Rates policy, but the ‘generative AI’ companies are still burning tens of billions of dollars of other people’s money a year by promising that some day soon they will build God or let the bosses fire everyone). ↩︎

Substack is a Greenhouse

Since 2017, the blogging platform Substack has been running the playbook “borrow lots of money, and spend it to pay people to post on your site, causing it to grow and your site to seem big and important.” The web boom of the 2000s was funded by Google which needed to give people reasons to make Google searches, see Google ads, and be surveilled by Google Analytics. In 2021 Substack spent $3 in advances to bloggers for every $1 they earned from those blogs. In the past this has always ended in tears, and the people who run and fund the site have shady ideas and ugly politics. You can find many people talking about specific Substack bloggers, their ideas, and whether Substack should host them.1 Not as many people talk about how the site as a whole is weird in a way which feels normal to wealthy and influential people in New York City and Southern California.

Who Writes Top Substack Blogs?

Substack has a leaderboard and 29 official categories. Afficionados tell each other that picking a category with less competition helps your blog grow. I had a look at the ten highest-earning Substack blogs in two different categories as of 9 October 2025.2 Its difficult to quickly learn about who runs these accounts because Substack does not encourage bloggers to share an autobiography on the site (the “about” section is usually brief and about the blog). When they have websites, Substackers often do not list their nationality, education, or place or residence. However, I can usually get a general sense of an author’s background.

The History Category is as follows:

1. Darryl Cooper, a US Navy veteran and untrained historian interested in the 20th century. Cooper thinks that Holocaust denier David Irving was wronged by unnamed “pressure groups” (Victor Davis Hanson thinks Cooper “does not know the facts about World War Two” and I expect I would agree with Hanson on that one!)3
2. Adam Tooze, a professional historian who is leaning in the direction of a trade writer or pundit. He is English but works in the USA.
3. The Culturist: an anonymous group blog about writings and writers you would find in a Great Books curriculum from the 20th century like the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, and Tolkien. One author is an Evan Amato who wants the Internet to judge Christopher Columbus by the standards of his time (contemporaries had him hauled back to Spain in chains for crimes too many and vicious to list here, although not everyone today agrees he was guilty of every charge)
4. Curtis Yarvin: an untrained far-right blogger from California who shares very strange ideas in very many words
5. Christopher Schwarz, the American woodworker from Lost Art Press
6. Jemar Tisby, PhD: A Black American historian of race and religion in the United States
7. Niall Ferguson: a pundit with a PhD in history and a CV full of positions at wealthy institutions in the USA and UK
8. Khalil Greene, an impressive young Black man with a bachelor’s degree in History from Yale
9. Lucy Worsley, a trained historian and beloved TV presenter in the UK
10. Robertas Petruskas: a Lithuanian sports commentator with a bachelor’s degree in History who is writing a series about WW II in Europe

The top 20 include Kamil Kazani (a Tatar from Russia who tells American officials that Russia is about to break up and release nations like the Tatars from the Prison of Nations) and Dan Jones of the Hardcore History podcast. Three of the top ten have written about World War II. Worsley seems to be the only out woman in the top 20 although some of the team at The Culturist could be women.

The Culture Category has more of a balance between genders:

1. Selvaggia Lucarelli: an Italian journalist
2. Blocked and Reported, a podcast about corporate social media culture by Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal, two professional sharers of opinions from the United States
3. Jessica Reed Kraus, “an American writer, Instagram influencer, and former mommyblogger” (Wikipedia)
4. Anne Helen Peterson, an American journalist formerly of BuzzFeed with a PhD in the history of the gossip industry
5. Matt Welch, “an American blogger, journalist, author, and Libertarian political pundit” (Wikipedia) who dropped out of college and now lives in Brooklyn
6. Niall Harbison, who touched the hearts of social media by feeding feral dogs while recovering from the effects of substance use
7. Sam Harris, an American writer on politics with a PhD in neuroscience
8. Jessica Valentini, a onetime feminist blogger who blogs about abortion rights in the USA and had to quit other social media after receiving graphic threats
9. Diaboloical Lies, a podcast by by American writers caro claire burke and Katie Gatti Tassin on topics like the “Disney-Industrial complex” and someone called Bari Weiss.
10. Triggernometry, a British podcast about topics in the news like “renewables aren’t as cheap as they say!” {{citationNeeded}} and the Rochdale grooming gangs

The next 10 include Old Media figures like feminist conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf and social media people like hereditarian Marxist Freddie deBoer. Looking at these high-earning bloggers is a very good way to get a feel for the site and the sort of things that it rewards, and stepping away from controversies about specific individuals or topics.

Substack is for Americans

I think its clear that the people who make lots of money on Substack are overwhelmingly Americans. Nine out of ten of the top-earning writers in both categories are either Americans or from rich English-speaking countries like the UK (and many of those have worked in the USA). It especially helps if those writers appeal to the chattering class in New York City and LA, or the West Coast surveillance and propaganda industry (people inside that industry sometimes call it tech). The Age of Invention blog by trained historian Anton Howes is great, but he is British writing about technological progress and economic growth in 16th-18th century Europe. Those make great conversation starters at a house party in Oakland whereas many aspects of history do not. The most exotic writer in English Wikipedia’s page on Substack is Salman Rushdie, born in pre-partition India, educated at Rugby and Cambridge, and migrated to New York City in 2000.

Most of these successful bloggers don’t bother to state their nationality, any more than a Roman in the fourth century CE thought of himself as having a nation (nations were for pagans and barbarians, being Christian and Roman was the right and proper state of mankind). Discouraging writers from sharing information about themselves discourages diversity, because if you need information to orient yourself, and that information is hard to find, you are likely to go somewhere else rather than work hard to understand what you are reading. We have all met people who like social media and respond to anything unfamiliar with a burst of sexual, ethnic, gender, and class stereotypes because that is easy and connecting with strangers as individuals is hard.4

The two high-earning Substack bloggers outside the Anglosphere do not even have English Wikipedia pages. That suggests to me that their audiences are in Lithuania and Italy not global, and that being famous on the Italian or Lithuanian Internet did not make English-speakers acknowledge their existence. As a historian and a craft worker and a fencer I was trained to take the best ideas from around the world, not the ideas that happen to be taught locally in my native language. Clearly, not everyone was trained the same way.

Brown people can make money on Substack. But it really helps if they have British or US citizenship and write about things that white Britons and Americans like to talk about such as race relations. I think that a Sikh talking about the Sikh diaspora and the Khalistani movement and the Indian government’s pressure on Sikhs would have a hard time making money on the site, because that is not something that professional sharers of opinion in New York City are used to sounding informed about.

Out of 29 categories, Substack has just three on politics: US, Health, and International. That would fly in a provincial newspaper like the Globe and Mail, but would look odd in The Economist. The world is so much bigger and more diverse than a handful of privileged people in three or four cities in the USA and UK!

Even the political controversies are controversies that a certain type of American likes to talk about in public. The Libertarian movement is very visible on American social media, even though it struggles to elect a dogcatcher, and the Green movement is less visible, even though it elects legislators and helps form governments on both sides of the Atlantic. Those legislators and governments are not in the USA, and the people who became fascinated by Libertarianism as young men are. Many Americans are fascinated with pseudoscience about race and IQ from a hundred years ago, so you can find people arguing about those ideas on Substack too.5 Even Substack’s proudly stated stance on free speech only makes sense within American thinking on that subject, and most of the critics accept that framing and respond with another perspective within the American tradition. That is not helpful if you want to find the best way of thinking about speech, but its helpful if you are Americans fighting over a microphone which some influential Americans listen to.

This Is Not Natural

There are all kinds of reasons why around 60% of donations in crowdfunding come from North America and almost all of the rest from Europe or East Asia.6 The United States still dominates the Internet, social media, and global finance. However, 60% American with many foreign influences is not 90% American with a few Brits and Canadians. One study of other social media noticed that Italian soccer commentator “Fabrizio Romano is mentioned by respondents in almost every country in our survey including South Africa, Kenya, Norway, and the United States.”7 How does a site become more American than Stack Overflow or Kickstarter?

I grew up in online communities which were gently tended like a garden. The founders usually had a plan, but something always died away, something always grew better than expected, and the birds or the raccoons always left a little gift with some strange seeds. Again and again, companies opened an online community and found that it refused to be a marketing arm for the owner and nothing but a marketing arm: people had arguments and new enthusiasms and someone had to keep the peace.8 My blogroll is very international, as is my Mastodon feed.9 The history of the open web is full of stories like “so Linguistics sent me to Asian Studies, and it turns out that our blogging platform is being used for opposition organizing in Thailand!” or “although we Japanese think of Mastodon as our site, it was actually invented by a German using a protocol designed by an American: who knew!” Armour scholars often find that someone on the Russian service VKontakt has shared a helpful photo. If a community is built around an interest or the affordances of a tool, it will spread across nations and cultures, because people around the world are interested in crochet or cat pictures or Bollywood films, and people around the world find Pandoc useful for converting files between formats. Even Wikipedia for all its faults is multinational and the different nations communicate with one another because often an English Wikipedia article is translated from the French or a Swiss Wikipedian can add some details about Erich von Däniken which have not yet appeared in English-language media.

Substack is more like a greenhouse where orderly racks of plants are tended with fertilizer and pesticide. It was founded by a handful of SoCal surveillance and propaganda workers, funded by SoCal people, and recruits specific types of writers. It has specific strategies like not seeking out sports writers because another site is preferred by sports writers in the USA.10 As yet the community does not seem to have broken free from the company and its Five-Year Plans. The plants in a greenhouse are there because the owner wanted them to be there and gave them everything they needed to thrive.

The trouble with greenhouses is that they need maintaining and plants can’t grow inside them forever. Its easy to look powerful if you are flooded with resources and don’t have to compete against anything you are not expecting. Substack recently borrowed even more money from a few very rich people, and if they had failed, I don’t think the site would have survived in its present form. (The non-profit platform Ghost, on the other hand, borrowed $300,000 on Kickstarter in 2013 and became self-sustaining a year later).11 One reason why I ignored an offer from Substack is that I don’t trust the site and any rewards it can offer to last.

It is absolutely possible to ignore the controversies and the long-term future and write my sort of thing on Substack. Joumana Medlej’s Carwansaray blog is full of curiosity, practical knowledge, and aesthetic pleasure (she is Lebanese but lives in Oxford and has received resources from a variety of British and US institutions). But if you are trying to decide how to think about the site, try rolling around the idea that it reflects the range of ideas which fashionable people talk about in San Francisco or New York City. It has Nazis and hucksters and people with odd ideas about gender because a cocktail party in those cities has Nazis and hucksters and people with odd ideas about gender. Those ideas and people brought our civilization to the brink of destruction, and they are not going to help us build a better one from the ruins.

Isidore of Seville had his bishopric in Spain, but I just have a few fruit trees and a humble day job. If you can, please support this site.

(scheduled 10 October 2025; based on a Mastodon thread)

Edit 2025-11-02: linked Culturist author Evan Amato

Edit 2025-11-03: formatted some links in footnotes, polished a phrase

Edit 2025-12-27: more statistics about Substack mixed in with political theory (some very serious Canadian journalists suspect that large media organizations other than the CBC are doomed and the future is small) https://talkingpointsmemo.com/tpm-25/patron-supported-journalism-cant-be-the-future-of-news

1. Three examples of controversial Substack bloggers are Scott Alexander (RationalWiki), Joseph Mercola (RationalWiki), and a “National Socialist Weekly Newsletter” (Usermag). I don’t want to talk about them further because I think my gentle readers agree that their controversial ideas are self-serving nonsense (Alexander likes the idea that his race has superior genes for intelligence, Mercola wants you to buy his health supplements not take free vaccines, and Nazis tend to be losers looking for some reason to feel good about themselves). ↩︎
2. You can find definitions at What are Substack leaderboards? on the Substack Help Center ↩︎
3. The New York Times could not be bothered to say where that quote came from, but I expect it comes from a react video of VDH talking about Cooper’s appearance with someone called Tucker Carlson. Currently the alternative ways of viewing YouTube don’t work and I no longer watch YouTube videos on the YT site because I remember the last pre-war Dutch census. ↩︎
4. Someone once accused me of being a cis man and fair enough; I also have a university degree, which is another category which includes about half the population. ↩︎
5. One take on how the evidence turned against the idea that some races had smarter genes than other races is Graham Richards, “Reconceptualizing the History of Race Psychology: Thomas Russell Garth (1872-1939) and How He Changed His Mind,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Winter 1998) pp. 15-32. In the history of cranks and quacks, there is an eternal return to outmoded ideas. ↩︎
6. Compare Statista, Volume of funds raised through digital capital raising models worldwide in 2025, by region, October 2025 with crowdsourcing.org, Crowdfunding Industry Report: Market Trends, Composition and Crowdfunding Platforms, May 2012 (summary on Statista) ↩︎
7. Nic Newman, Amy Ross Arguedas, Mitali Mukherjee, Richard Fletcher, Mapping news creators and influencers in social and video networks, Reuters Institute, 28 October 2025 ↩︎
8. A good example is the James Randi Educational Foundation forum, hived off as the International Skeptics Forum in 2014 because it was as much work to manage as the Foundation’s other activities. Many writers find that comments on their sites become a whole community which needs management, and some even create a new post every week or so just to give followers a comments-section to chat in. ↩︎
9. In October 2025, I count 62 websites in my blogroll, of which 32 are based in the USA, six from Canada, one from Australia (A Fencer’s Ramblings), two from Aotearoa NZ (Abandoned Footnotes and Kiwi Helenist), eight from the UK (Age of Invention, Bad Science, Beachcombing’s Bizarre History, Caitlyn R. Green, Carwansaray, A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe, Papyrus Stories, Sphinx Blog), nine in continental Europe (Aardvarchaeology, Ancient World Magazine, Artistic License, Backreaction, elamit.net, Letteratura artistica, The Melammu Project, Renaissance Mathematicus, West’s Meditations), and four unknown (Bow vs. Musket, Executed Today, Great Ming Military, Moving 17th Century Soldiers). I treat Language Log as mostly-USA and Papyrus Stories as UK even though the founder started it while living in Germany. 40 out of 58 from the USA or UK is 69%. ↩︎
10. Ben Strauss, Out-of-work sportswriters are turning to newsletters, hoping the economics can work. The Washington Post, 1 June 2020. Archived ↩︎
11. Two useful pages on the economics of Ghost are https://ghost.org/about/ and ChartMogul. Some rambling musings about the economics and business practices of Substack can be found at From Filmers to Farmers. ↩︎

I am No Longer on Academia.edu

academia.edu has introduced new terms of service allowing them to use your Member Content and your personal information, including your name, voice, signature (!), photograph, and likeness, for any purpose forever. That is clearly a proposal to let them generate fake podcasts or videos of you talking about your work, powered by bullshit generators. To delete your account next time you log in, click “privacy policy” not “accept terms of service,” then put your mouse over your username in the upper right, then click “account settings” and look for the option to delete.

By creating an Account with Academia.edu, you grant us a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license, permission, and consent for Academia.edu to use your Member Content and your personal information (including, but not limited to, your name, voice, signature, photograph, likeness, city, institutional affiliations, citations, mentions, publications, and areas of interest) in any manner, including for the purpose of advertising, selling, or soliciting the use or purchase of Academia.edu’s Services.

https://www.academia.edu/terms

Academia was popular with scholars in ancient world studies and Assyriology, so I used it by default but never uploaded any papers after my MA.

James Bailie recommends Knowledge Commons at hcommons.org as a place to host your papers which is run by scholars not shareholders and respects your rights.

If you are comfortable with programming gems, Ryan Baumann has a tool to download from the site without logging in and agreeing to the new terms of service. https://github.com/ryanfb/academia-dl

academia.edu is well known for spamming you and for making aggressive claims to anything you upload to it. Sarah Emily Bond already warned about it in 2017. And remember the last pre-war Dutch census!

Edit 2025-09-21: trackback https://www.ryanwomack.com/blog/2025/09/disappointing-developments/ and someone on LinkedIn. Thanks James Baillie https://scholar.social/@JubalBarca for the warning about the site!

Edit 2025-10-23: Thank economist John Quiggin for sharing it.

Edit 2025-10-24: see now Peter Tarras (September 19, 2025). Leaving Academia.edu: ‘AI’, Coercion, and Information Loss. Membra Dispersa Sinaitica. Retrieved October 24, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14ptq who links something called Daily Nous where the CEO of academia.edu promises to remove the offending terms. IMHO that is not enough and the company no longer deserves toleration.

(scheduled 18 September 2025)

#modern #socialMedia #stateOfTheWeb

What a weird snippet of a Wikipedia page!
Is that from Wikipedia or yet some more unadvised AI malarkey, I wonder?

#wikipedia #ai #stateOfTheWeb #duckduckgo

Google and the Culture of Searching

saying everything’s on the internet is great if you know how to use the internet. People who say it’s all on Google probably haven’t spent a lot of time watching people try to find what they want on Google. It’s challenging. There’s a lot of syntax to know, you’ve got know how to use a mouse, you’ve got to understand clicking, what’s a tab, what happens when I do this that and the other (thing), and there really isn’t a social institution dedicated to helping you figure it out. And then, that’s just for digitally divided folks, but for average folks who know how to use a computer, they still need to know how to be discerning about the information they get.

Jessamyn West, interview with Vermont Public Radio, 27 May 2016 https://medium.com/tilty/libraries-information-access-and-democracy-85e213086d22

“Don’t be evil” or not, Google has a great deal of power over Internet culture. One example is the way that Google discourages searchers from marking up their search (with quotes, Boolean logic, restrictions like “only from the following domain,” etc.) Google Advanced Search was removed first from their main page and then from their list of other Google tooks on google.com, and their algorithm takes more and more freedom to ignore quotes and deliver sites with only partial matches. Rather than encouraging users to become skilled searchers, it teaches them to type quickly and trust the algorithm.

I moved away from Google Search in 2012 when I learned about DuckDuckGo. And yet, DuckDuckGo itself tries to imitate Google’s “one field, negligible markup” format. Firefox also tries to erase the distinction between the search bar and the address bar. University library databases and Worldcat have made it harder and harder to search by title and author. When I search for a particular book in Innsbruck, I usually get a mess of reviews, citations, other works, and occasionally the book in question buried in the middle. I can’t believe that the librarians think that this is the best approach. But because it is most people’s default way for searching for information in a browser, Google Search has created expectations. And the choices which they make for one audience with a very wide range of education, age, seriousness, and so on are forced onto search in other contexts, even if those contexts are very different.

So I immediately went to my university’s terrible new library catalog (which has ditched entirely the old card-catalog derived system of author/title/subject searches and is instead trying to compete with Google for boolean searches, and failing), and even that craptastic software for our minimalist collection of books turned up half a dozen bios of (US senator Margaret Chase) Smith published in the past two decades or so. (One was a juvenile biography, the rest were scholarly bios.) The period 1995-2004 was a rich period for MCS biographies, which were probably inspired by the turn-of-the-century frenzy to wrap up the twentieth century and put a bow on the package.
…
There’s a rich irony here that the Great Historian of Great Men who is so desperately worried about the tragic ignorance of the Kids These Days can’t have bothered to enter “Margaret Chase Smith biography” at books.google.com

https://historiann.com/2017/05/27/history-will-repay-your-love-you-dont-have-to-be-a-jerk/

Moreover, Google Search creates the impression that research is not and should not be a skill. Others have talked about specific aspects of this: how Google results tend to be monolingual (because coders from California rarely read several languages), how their cataloguing of digitalized books is a disaster, etc. Academics are slowly responding with projects like the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Encyclopedia Iranica which have the rigor and judgement of traditional print references and the accessibility of websites. But as someone who has invested a great deal of time and money in learning the art of research, I find the suggestion that it is trivial and deserves to be passed off to a mindless algorithm disturbing.

Meanwhile, other parts of the Internet have been showing that you can design a web interface which educates users as they use it. Most forum software shows posters the marked-up version of their post, but also has a set of buttons which let them select text and click to highlight it or insert a link. Eventually, and with a little bit of advice from peers, most posters learn how to mark up their posts in bbcode by hand. Learning bbcode is part of learning the culture of forums.

I don’t think that Google meant to dumb down searching for students and academics. They are trying to make a search engine which works for ten-year-olds and octagenarians, people with multiple PhDs and people with an eighth-grade education. But they chose to design an interface which deskills users instead of encouraging them to educate themselves. I don’t think that Google is especially evil. But I will be very glad when they break up and several smaller companies take their place.

I pulled this out of my drafts file after a Mastodon post by @juliana@eldritch.cafe I don’t have a job with a salary just hourly pay. If you want me to keep writing for the Internet, please, support this site.

(written circa 2017, scheduled 2 July 2022)

Edit 2022-08-07: added link to Mastdon post instead of just a username and server

Edit 2022-11-09: https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over notes that the original Sergey Brin paper on search algorithms warned that ad-funded search engines would have inherent contradictions between serving the best results for the user and serving the best results for advertisers (but then turns into an ad for their machine-learning powered individualized search engine, sigh) It argues that as fewer and fewer links were visible to search engines and between sites, it became harder and harder to give useful search results (gave up Google around 2012 so can’t comment)

Edit 2023-07-25: Apparently Google and the Culture of Search is a book by Ken Hillis, Michael Petit, and Kylie Jarrett (Routledge 2012) https://archive.org/details/googlecultureofs0000hill

Edit 2024-01-03: Google Search staffer Danny Sullivan has cause and effect backwards (at least as quoted by a journalist, and journalists often transcribe incorrectly)

“We have an entire generation that grew up expecting the search box to do the work for them,” he said. “We might do a better job of matching for a bulk of people, but for people who are super sensitive, when they have that fail moment, now it becomes, ‘All my searches aren’t good.’”

https://www.theverge.com/features/23931789/seo-search-engine-optimization-experts-google-results

Since that generation was taught by Google that search was not a skill and any effort learning how to use Google Search would be wasted when Google started ignoring boolean operators or similar, this is like saying that Clovis the Frank was violent and brutal because his extended family had been killed (by Clovis)!

#deskilling #InternetCulture #modern #stateOfTheWeb

Understand trends and projections in the #type industry.

With insights from 4,777 participants across more than 13 countries, the 2024 Global Font Use & Forecasting Survey by Monotype and Censuswide  investigates what #design industry members are looking for and why they choose certain #fonts. 

https://www.monotype.com/resources/ebook/global-font-use-forecasting-survey-2024?zeldielocks

#fonts #typefaces #surveys #design #monotype #StateoftheWeb #StateofDesign

“As cool as any technology may be, we need to be sure we’re not rapidly generating inequality at scale.” @davatron5000

https://daverupert.com/2023/10/accessiblity-shamed/ #a11y #StateoftheWeb #DevelopersReflect

🟠🟡 Web Almanac
HTTP Archive 💾
@httparchive.org ’s annual
state of the web report
2024
#webdev #WebAlmanac #StateOfTheWeb

https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2024/

Auto-playing video on websites is the same energy as playing your music on speaker on the subway.
#web #stateoftheweb #firstworldproblems

…put another pot on the stove, it's a long one…

☕️🍵🫖🧉

#Fallout #rewild #rewilding #infrastructure #blog #resilience #sotw #StateOfTheWeb #search #internet #WalledGarden

Another, even better, piece about the state of the web:

https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

via the powerful Manual Moreale:
https://manuelmoreale.com

#rewild #rewilding #blog #resilience #sotw #StateOfTheWeb #search #internet

What’s in a job title? @elly explains why good old “web design” is the best way to understand what she does—and maybe what you do, too.

#webdesign #frontend #webstandards #design #stateoftheweb

https://zeldman.com/2024/04/03/the-more-things-change-or-whats-in-a-job-title/

In A List Apart, for people who make websites: @stegrainer reviews the history of the web, analyzes where we are now, and shares how we can shape a better web future.

https://alistapart.com/article/the-wax-and-the-wane-of-the-web/ Illustration: Dougal MacPherson

#StateoftheWeb #WebStrategy #webdesign #webdevelopment #ux

☞ “I built an Ultra-Lean, Web Components enhanced, no-build, no-dependencies boilerplate for PWAs, using only the Modern Web.”

https://medium.com/@neerventure/purepwa-a-radical-u-turn-in-web-development-a386c0dc092e

Hat tip: @Aaron #webstandards #StateoftheWeb #webdesign #development #webdevelopment #PWAs #W3C

I feel like a lot of the web nowadays is bloated, suffering from a chronic inability to "get to the point".

Most times, an article will tease you with a small piece of information and then run around in circles for three pages before revealing it.

While I understand why this happens (SEO, Google optimization, Ads), it's frustrating to say the least.

That's why I'm excited about LLMs and their capability to cut the fat out of an article when asked nicely.

#stateoftheweb #bingchat #llm

1/

Not how any of this works…

<button type="button" class="css-x3e7ag"><svg width="40" height="40" viewBox="0 0 18 10" fill="none" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" alt="chevron" loading="lazy" aria-hidden="true" focusable="false" class="css-1bs8wnl">…</svg></button>

#stateOfTheWeb

Leider wahr https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/ #stateOfTheWeb

That’s how people behave on the web in 2023. Some observations from real usability testing on what people do and what they don’t do on the web. From disabled copy-paste to magic link sign-in.