Mildly Infuriating

I miss the days when you would get a cached page highlighting the exact places where the search engine found your keywords. The pool of websites felt bottomless and the only thing holding you back was the challenge of picking the exact perfect combination of search terms and operators to narrow it down.

Search engines have no nuance anymore. It feels like they just dumb down your search to the most relevant thing you can buy now and fill out the rest with vaguely related filler sites. That or they dump you on quora where they will harass you to log in to read anything and spam you mercilessly if you do.

I have the feeling that it's reddit showing that ai slop when they see the crawler

A user makes a post expressing mild infuriation on a search result with an AI summary, and gets various results from other users. Some users express delight at summaries, others prefer to use their preferred AI interface.

I agree, this is annoying. It's taking the place of what used to be an excerpt, giving me a hint about actual text on the page.

I haven't seen that yet... hopefully it's on the Duckduckgo side and a setting I can turn off. But it's probably Reddit continuing to be frustrating.

I'm not against having the AI summary and I do see the utility, it should just be very clearly separated from the real content.

I've noticed this a month ago or so, but not on Reddit but for Wikipedia. And it's genuinely so awful, and cringe and bad in comparison to the normal description that just works great.

Most likely DDG, but you can disable it with a couple of clicks.

Jesus Christ. Enshittification because of "AI" is getting out of hand.

If this isn't happening in other search engines, then DDG is likely doing it, which would be awful as it neuters the point of showing snippets for search results.

EDIT: I just tried on DDG, and I'm not seeing that summary result, even when I enable AI features. It's entirely possible that DDG (or reddit) is A/B testing this as a future feature. You should have an option of "leaving feedback" in the three dot menu beside that search result.

Next they are going to index the ai summary instead of the page. So we can get steam cleaning tips when we are trying to figure out how to change a setting in Steam desktop

I saw that yesterday specifically on Reddit posts in my search for a software issue, and not on sites like stackoverflow, so my money is on reddit

I should use this AI to make helpful comments for my code.

//Add 1 to i
i = i + 1;

//Check if a number is even
bool isEven(int num)

Iirc reddit only allows google to index them, all reddit results should be old ones so I doubt they implemented ai for that.

Digg does this too and I really enjoy it. I don’t see the problem.

cool!