what is up my dudes

I used to be *good* at search. It was a whole thing - I found people's "lost songs" or their unknown-source childhood stuffed toy or whatever from Google.

Now, you can't search for the exact brand/design name of something and get accurate answers. It drives me spare on Amazon - if I search for XYZ and you don't have any, or you only have 2, tell me that.

I used to be able to search for recipes and easily eliminate unwanted ingredients with a -. For example I'd look for low-carb desserts but without the zillions that use peanut butter simply by searching for something like:

low carb chocolate dessert recipe -peanut

And I'd get a slew of on-point suggestions. For some time now if you do -peanut Google ignores the - and assumes you want recipes stuffed with peanuts.

Where it's even worse now is now you get directed to sites full of bogus AI recipes that don't even make sense. But they have peanuts in them.

I used to be able to use reverse image searches to find out who made that awesome art so I could give credit in my share. They've removed that ability entirely and replaced it with Lens, which is AI BS just showing you more like what you looked for. (Rebecca Watson complained about this in her recent video about JD Vance jizz cup rumours and I apologise for that sentence but...yeah. Watson is great, go find her on Youtube and subscribe because she went into detail about how Google has become less and less useful for debunking.)

This isn't just about Google inserting shopping ads instead of what you wanted to learn about. That's bad. But the results now are just *broken*. The tools we used to have to make searches better have been removed. Google no longer wants us to find the answers we seek, but the answers they want us to have, and that's super creepy and dangerous.

And the alternatives are either using Google in the back end or have other significant barriers to use.

Someone just reblogged my AI rant literally saying, "I use ChatGPT as Google now because it actually understands what I'm looking for instead of returning random results."

#1 - No, it doesn't understand what you're looking for, it's making stuff up.

#2 - GOOGLE MADE ITSELF LIKE THIS. I'M SO SORRY TO THOSE OF YOU TOO YOUNG TO REMEMBER BUT GOOGLE USED TO WORK. Like, it makes me so irritated that we literally exist in a world where we're like, "Gee, wouldn't it be nice if we could search the internet, if only we could invent some way to search the internet." WE HAD A WAY TO SEARCH THE INTERNET OMG.

Nothing has convinced me of the failings of capitalism as much as the fact that in my lifetime -- and it's not like I've been around a century, I'm not that old -- but in my lifetime, virtually every major product has gotten worse instead of better. This is the exact opposite of how I was told capitalism worked when I was in high school. LIES.

this painting by andrew wyeth has got SO many ghosts in it. most andrew wyeth paintings have ghosts in, but this is off the scale!

this painting by dragan bibin has only one ghost as far as i can tell, but it's a really scary ghost (the dog thinks so too)

this painting by meraud guevara looks very peaceful, but unfortunately it has a ghost in it. i can't tell you where, but it does

you might think you can see the ghosts in this dorothea tanning painting, but you're wrong. the little girls are just ordinary girls. the actual ghost is behind one of those doors.