I need to write a zoology paper on bugs

All search results are for pest control businesses or are AI generated garbage that have wrong information.

Yes, the internet always had problems, but I cannot stress how much worse it has gotten for information over the last ten years.

I used to be able to search a species and get scientific papers or at least articles that referenced scientific papers in the results. None of that anymore. All search results are for someone trying to sell you something, and articles are regurgitated AI monstrosities that waffle on with no real information and no references. If your search even manages to direct you to news articles every news site will have identical, poorly written tabloid hidden behind a paywall. All of it useless for even the most basic academic research.

I literally can’t do my job if every search result for species identification is behind a paywall, or an AI generated image of a bug that doesn’t really exist.

It’s no longer the information age. But not because of Trumpism and other things liberal whine about, it’s because capitalism has hollowed out the internet into a husk of what it was meant to be.

I literally had to go and buy an expensive field guide from a museum to finish this paper. I haven’t had to do that before.

  • ComradeEchidna@hexbear.netEnglish
    59·
    7 months ago

    I was thinking just yesterday how insane I must sound to younger generations when I say that a decade ago you could just type into google a few half remembered words or phrases from a quote, book, song or movie etc and boom you’d have the answer. Now if you type the artist/author/person/characters exact name and the exact quote you’re still more likely to get things selling you stuff only broadly related or random articles that have maximised SEO and taken top spot etc. But it’s true.

    • TechnoUnionTypeBeat [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      24·
      7 months ago

      I’ve had to start adding any random YouTube video I like to my favourites because there’s a fucking solid chance that even searching the exact title will result in the algorithm refusing to find the video for me

      And YouTube for some reason loves to serve slop with absolutely disgusting thumbnails for literally anything one can search kiryu-pain

    • Dessa [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      18·
      7 months ago

      Its weird because for some things you can see the change still. I’m replaying an old pokemon game (platinum), and if I add platinum to the search for a bit of info, I get the old reliable sites: Bulbapedia, Serebii, Pokemondb. Specific questions route to gamefaqs, top answer is exactly what I need.

      If I do this for the latest pokemon, i get gamesradar, game8, gamewith. I have to scroll past asinine bullshit that nobody was ever asking to begin with, and the info is months out of date or incomplete. Thankfully, the old sites still keep that info up and old heads search out the good sites specifically, so it always hits the top page .

      Interesting to have the comparison right there and see directly how things have changed.

      I honestly think the death of forum culture was a huge mistake. Reddit was so convenient woth its single login but wow is it not the place to build a subculture.

    • InevitableSwing [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      13·
      7 months ago

      I’m actually surprised some company hasn’t created an SEO gaming trick to send their totally automated AI crafted neo-listical garbage to the top of the google results.

      a few half remembered words or phrases from a quote, book, song or movie etc and boom you’d have the answer

      1001 Best Movies!
      1001 Best Songs!
      1001 Best Books!
      1001 Best Movies Quotes!
      1001 Best Songs Quotes!
      1001 Best Books Quotes!
      1001 Best [Whatever]…

  • BigBoyKarlLiebknecht [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    39·
    7 months ago

    The future of the web was depressing enough with the return to AOL-style walled gardens through Facebook, Twitter, etc, (fuck, even shit like Elsevier)….now I believe there’s a possibility that the web just won’t exist in the future as how we understand it today. There will just be monetized LLMs that people publish stuff into. It’s not so much post-truth, as post-content.

    • GlueBear [they/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      13·
      7 months ago

      How I feel about gardening information on the web. Many techniques and style of grafts out there, online communities, and even shops that I know are out there but that I’ll never find.

      I recently found a site for heirloom roses and one for wild flower seed mixes

  • JayTwo [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    35·
    7 months ago

    Google has a “before:year” operator that I’ve had to use quite a bit, especially recently

    It’s not gonna work forever of course

    But it helps for now

    • RyanGosling [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      26·
      7 months ago

      They have an option that filters it by the exact date range you want. But it’s hidden under tools

      But depending on when and where you use google, it might be hidden under some other name or won’t even be available whatsoever.

  • hello_hello [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    31·
    7 months ago

    I literally had to go and buy an expensive field guide from a museum to finish this paper. I haven’t had to do that before.

    Big museum smh. In all seriousness though yes SEO and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. You’ll programatically never going to get the best result from a search engine like Google, only the most “engaging” ones that know how to play the system.

    I mean, these people also own YouTube where the same thing happens.

  • JamesConeZone [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    29·
    7 months ago

    I’ve started searching almost exclusively in Google Books, the Internet archive books, worldcat, or like Cambridge/Oxford online to find anything remotely academic. It’s so bad!

  • CataphractEnglish
    28·
    7 months ago

    If it makes you feel any better, I’ve ran into the same problem with construction. I used to enjoy looking up new techniques and materials in a whole range of contractor work, now though it’s all DIY and companies selling unregulated products with no real guarantees. The amount of people who self-post themselves fragrantly breaking the law with illegal systems or dangerous builds not up to any type of standard code is mind blowing. Without fail there’s thousands of upvotes and hundreds of replies thanking the person for the horrible tips. I can’t imagine the number of people who have died because of it, I don’t think there will ever be any type of regulation or support for factual and safe information.

    • Dessa [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      14·
      7 months ago

      I’m trying to get into gardening, and its so damn hard to get basic facts that I know for a fact were readily available years ago. Nothing fucking works anymore. It’s not just the net, it’s everything

    • OgdenTO [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      5·
      7 months ago

      For construction stuff I’ve found the This Old House forum and a couple of other forums to be a great source of information. As well as the building sciences forums. So, I usually add “forum” or “building science” to the search and it sometimes helps. Not for videos, though, which are extremely unreliable

  • the_post_of_tom_joad [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    27·
    7 months ago

    Yes. I too feel this every day, as someone who witnessed the birth, growth, and apparently the zenith of the internet, i know it in my bones that you are right. I know I’m waxing poetic, but i can’t help it when i remember the early days. i ran through its fields and loved them all, the weird corners you could find. I knew my way like a child knows the woods behind their house, and it is different. Gone. It’s just a gut sensation, impossible to express in words to those who didn’t experience it. It’s beyond my ability to encapsulate the feeling i have of loss from it’s passing, and of knowing just how much has been lost.

  • Hexbear2 [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    25·
    7 months ago

    Most colleges have a worldcat portal that provides access to hundreds of publications, it’s probably what I’d start with if you have access, some public libraries might have access too? I agree, general internet search isn’t good anymore. Also, probably not good anymore, but worth a shot: scholar.google.com

  • GalaxyBrain [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    24·
    7 months ago

    It used to take so much longer to turn something good to trash. Literally was considered to the 21st century like electricity was to the 20th. We saw a temple and within a decade of its mass adoption it became purely for money changers. I’m not Dr. Computers but like, can’t we just…make websites and stuff again? I want personal websites and finding stuff through their link pages again. I want it so when you Google any random thought the results could potentially keep you enraptured for years. I want the damn Time Cubes back. Everything has had every ounce of joy and humanity bled from it and turned into wealth and how fast the internet turned from the greatest invention that would change the world and fix everything became cable TV and tabloid news.

  • unperson [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    21·
    7 months ago

    Give Yandex a try, it’s the only search engine where you can still just enter the keywords you think will be in the text you’re searching for and it gives you pages that contain those keywords you typed instead of feeding them into an incomprehensible language model trained to collect ad revenue.

    I also find it’s a lot less censored for piracy than everything else.

    I don’t know if this is because Yandex is tuned for the russian language, or if it really does work like they used to.

  • gramxi [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    20·
    7 months ago

    I was trying to find co-op games for me and my partner to play and the first results are almost always AI generated articles that try to obscure the the answer so that web crawlers can’t get the summary and you have to click through. All of them are formatted like

    Does XYZ Have Co-op?

    XYZ is an open world survival first person shooter game developed by ABC…

    [5 more paragraphs]

    Sadly, players will have to each own a copy of the game to play together

    [Autoload another article so that you can’t just scroll to the bottom for a quick answer]

  • GlueBear [they/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    20·
    7 months ago

    Did you try Google scholar?

    I get around that issue by using specific databases. NCBI-pubmed is great for biological sciences.

    Another top: use Boolean operators to improve your search results.

  • callTheQuestion [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    20·
    7 months ago

    I don’t look up bugs very much but I’m jealous you got to do my childhood dream of entomology in some way.

    Can you add keywords such as prominent authors, publication names, terms only researchers would use etc? If you’ve been doing for a long time don’t you have resources to start from such as works you’ve relied on previously? And there is always the trick of using the date search feature to exclude the past few years.

    Is it possible that you have progressed in the level of work you are doing such that purchasing published resources rather than just typing the name of a creature into a searchengine is required? Maybe you would always have gotten to this point?

    I agree with your overall point though. I would like to see more development in bespoke community search engines comparable to the fediverse for social media. If you and other people who are in your field could create your own search indexes from sources which are reputable. They could even have federation.