Darkoshi

One concern I have about ChatGPT and similar things is how they will affect us being able to find reliable and useful information online.

In the last few years, I've noticed more and more webpages which appear to consist of data scraped from other places on the web. These pages contain a series of questions and answers on a particular topic. One can tell a human didn't write or compose the page, because the questions are repetitive and include many variations of the same question. The answers in one part of the page sometimes contradict other answers on the same page.

Presumably these pages have ads on them, and the people who create them do so to get money from ad-traffic. I don't usually see that due to my ad-blockers.

Now with ChatGPT, I imagine that rather than generating pages like that with data scraped from the web, people will generate pages with questions answered by ChatGPT. The text on these pages will look much more convincing than the ones out there now. The information will probably be less reliable. The reliable information sources will be greatly outnumbered by the unreliable ones, and it will be difficult to distinguish them.

Maybe it has already happened. For example, this page: Are American Toads Poisonous to Humans, Dogs, or Cats? doesn't seem like one of those generated/scraped pages. But it repeats itself multiple times which makes me suspicious. I can't tell from reading it whether I should trust it or not. I know that I probably shouldn't trust anything, especially not a random website I've come across, but for non-critical questions, it's nice to do a search and find a plausible answer that satisfies my curiosity or need-to-know, and then get on with my life. It's nicer if the plausible answers are true or at least based on what someone believes to be true, as opposed to some made-up answer.

I worry that there will be fake accounts on sites like Dreamwidth, posting content generated by tools like ChatGPT. I worry that someday I won't be able to tell which accounts are real people and which not, even when I interact with them. Will that affect my desire to interact with other people online?

I worry about art and music and poems, that I won't be able to tell if a human had a large part in making them or not. And that I won't feel as enthusiastic about them, for not knowing.

The design of the Google Search results page has changed lately. I don't remember exactly how it looked before (it often changes in subtle ways), so it is hard to be sure what changed and when.

Each search result having an icon is a change, I think.

There seems to be a lot of wasted space on the right side of the page. I don't remember what used to be there.
Oh, I see. Depending on what you search on, it shows something in the upper right. I remember now, it often links to Wikipedia there.
Searching on famous people, the layout of results definitely looks different than they used to.

The semi-continuous scrolling is definitely new. It now loads 15 pages of results before showing a "More results" button. The bottom of each results page no longer has links to the next/previous pages of results and the links to the 2nd/3rd/4th/etc./last pages of results.

The Settings button lets you turn off continuous scrolling, but then it still only shows a "More results" button at the bottom of the page instead of the old style navigation links.


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Google Introduces Updated Desktop Search Design (2023/03/08)

Google Search Website Design History
This is a nice history, but the last example of the search results page is from 2012.

Yahoo Answers to shut down May 4, 2021

First Yahoo Groups, now Yahoo Answers. Sounds like it won't even be left available in read-only mode, as that's what it is saying it is set to now already.

Most of the time, the answers I found posted in Yahoo Answers weren't very good. But every once in a while I'd find something there which I didn't find anywhere else.
Oh, well.

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Paper books whose content can't be searched by a simple typed query.
It occurred to me again recently how outdated that feels to me now.
Each book its own private trove of information, only accessible to those who make the effort required to explore it. Each person having to make their own map, their own index and bookmarks, of what is where inside the book, if they want to find the way back to a particular place in it.

It's so easy nowadays with the internet to look up information and to share information with others.

When I was a kid, if I wanted an answer to a question, I'd have to ask people, or look it up in the encyclopedia or dictionary that we had at home, or go to a library and search through books. But even if you did all that, the answer might not be found.

That isn't to say that I spent much time as a child searching the library for answers to hard questions.

But still. Even if you had a whole library of books, where would you look up the answer to a question like, "Why do my shoes squeak and creak, and how can I make them stop?"

Sometimes you can figure out answers by yourself. In the past, when my shoes squeaked, it was usually due to friction between the tongue and the top of the shoe, or due to small holes in the sole. I found ways to prevent those noises.

This time, the culprit was neither the tongues nor the soles. Internet searching provided some answers I hadn't thought of. The foam layers on one of the insoles* were coming apart. So I glued them back together with silicon sealer. That fixed one of the squeaks. I also sprinkled talcum** powder under the insoles, and after a few repetitions, that got rid of most of the creaks. One of the creaks kept coming back, which I now suspect was due to a thick thread that was under the insole, perhaps letting air in. I trimmed the thread. For the time being, the squeaks and creaks are all gone. Yay.

*I originally thought that insoles are glued in, but in many cases they aren't, and you can simply pull them out.
**Corn starch didn't sound like a good idea, as it might get pasty when wet. Nor did I want my shoes to smell like baby powder. Luckily, I found that non-baby-scented talcum powder can be found in the pharmacy foot-care section. The one I got smells like wintergreen!

Anyway, I was thinking about the above, and also thinking about what will happen to that kind of data over time. People die. Then what happens to the data they've posted to the internet? If they had their own website domain, and if no one takes over paying the domain fees or web hosting provider fees after they die, their website will be gone. If they've posted data on other sites, then it will depend on how long those sites stay around. Websites are not permanent, and most will disappear or radically change over time. Some data may get archived on various sites. But the Internet Archive, for instance, while it has old webpages, isn't very searchable in the normal sense. Google's cache is sometimes useful, but I'm not sure how long Google maintains cached data, once the original websites are gone.

So the answers that I can find today while doing an internet search, may someday no longer be there to be found. Or may no longer be found in the same places. New people will have to post the answers in new places.

Another useful piece of info I found today is that if your Lotus Notes locks up for a long time whenever you paste rich text from a webpage into an email, check the Lotus Notes proxy settings. Make sure it doesn't list an old proxy server which is no longer valid.

Once automated transcriptions and automated translations both work better, we'll be able to watch videos in other languages, with captions generated in our own language. Maybe they'll even be able to update the audio stream so that you hear the same voice, but speaking your language instead of the original language.

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And in other news, a cricket was crawling up the wall. The first one this year, inside the house. It was given an armed escort back outside.

I want to diversify my search engine usage. I like Google, but some of its "features" annoy me. Such as when it slows down my typing by searching on every keystroke, and when it returns results for a similar search phrase rather than the exact search I entered. Some of those features can be turned off, but it requires being logged in and/or allowing Google to store cookies, which I'd rather not.

I suppose I could simply use a different interface to the Google Search engine, rather than using its website. But I'd also like to branch out and start getting results from other engines too. So a meta-search engine might be ideal. Or perhaps a plug-in that searches multiple configurable search engines at once.

I've found lists of lots of search engines. But if any of you would like to share with me which ones other than Google are your favorites, please do.

I was thinking... (I do a lot of that, btw)... about how much I rely on Google for looking up information. And yet, how Google hasn't re-indexed the pages I've submitted to it since I moved my site earlier this year, even though a couple of those pages used to get a lot of hits on my old site. Of course, I can't expect those pages to remain popular indefinitely. But still, I was thinking about how, if Google were to choose to specifically filter its results... filter out certain pages or certain topics from its search results, how people like me might never be aware of what we were missing. It could be a kind of subtle censorship.

When using Google, I generally think of myself "searching the whole internet", when really, I'm just searching a part of it - those pages that Google has indexed.

At work today I was doing a Google-search related to a problem we were having, and found a page containing a question regarding the same problem, posted by someone else on my team. That got indexed fast.