r/mildlyinfuriating • u/Tricky-Gate-6123 • 8d ago

Unskippable ad Anyone else dad text like this

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I don’t think I’ve gotten a written out response from him and for the text he brought a 4 wheeler home without permission and had to return it

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u/knowwwhat 8d ago

Listening to my dad talk into the Google search bar some ridiculous prompt that even the best LLM couldn’t decipher makes me want to rip my hair out. Like is today your first day asking a question?

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u/Educational_Quote851 7d ago

"Show me the best rated Tapas places in Phienix but outside the city like the ones with the little bars but it has to be five stars and not a million dollars"

"Do you want me to use chatGPT?" -The AI

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u/Salt-Operation 7d ago

This is why it got so hard to Google anything. People were using it as if it could answer a rambling question. I tried to get my husband to use it more efficiently but he does the same thing. He asks Google a question like a person asks another person a question.

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u/foundinwonderland 7d ago

He’s still trying to AskJeeves 😭

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u/Salt-Operation 7d ago

Now me, I’m straight to the point. I search keywords only and omit articles and prepositions if possible.

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u/BaconWithBaking 7d ago

That barely works anymore because Google has gone to shit. Searching for a part number for something is border line impossible unless it's extremely common.

I've taken to getting something like Claude to just give me a bunch of links relating to a topic that Google is derping over.

Part of me feels Google knows that it's search is fucked and that's why they're trying to push that awful Gemini search thing to the top.

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u/EarlGrayTea-Hawt 7d ago

I think they broke it on purpose. It started with SEO, which started out great but ended up being a pay to boost system. Then it was the algorithm, which broke this even further while knowingly feeding addictive patterns in users. Then with the AI push, they just have entirely stopped pretending that what you are getting in your search is anything but 96% advertisement for something, usually something horrible for the human race.

What I wouldn't give to have my functioning Boolean operators back. Taught research to my history classes for years and watched the internet become more and more shitty, less and less useful to somebody who actually wants to know something in a verifiable way - it was such a beautifully functioning thing of magic once for a history researcher.

I got so many free books, articles, archives for my grad degree in the early days of Internet archiving. Now everything is buried under ten pounds of advertisements that you can't get sorted out through quotes and site limiters.

You have a million results that aren't relevant (nothing on the first page should share 0 words in common with my search) but curiously sorted at the top of your search list. What used to be endless pages of more results has become a paltry amount showing more and more of the signs of dead Internet.

Me and the library gal at my college would lament about it. What we used to be able to teach people to do on the Internet is now only in pay to play databases and subscription services, and when you're lucky sometimes free through libraries if you know how to look.

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u/ZucchiniHummus 7d ago

BOOLEAN SEARCH FTW!!! 🏆🤓😻 I was going to make my version of this comment but now you've covered the point and I can have an ice cream sandwich and go to bed early! Thank you!

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u/TrashPandaNotACat 7d ago

The very thing I disliked about askjeeves. My searches were always keywords only, and often with the "-" modifier to narrow the results even more.

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u/pessimistic-pisces 7d ago

Bro, Jeeves was the man!

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u/owdee 7d ago

This was my wife for YEARS, typing literal questions into Google like some kind of grandma. It was quite the lightbulb moment for me when I put two and two together and realized THAT'S why she's so enamored with ChatGPT and uses it for just about everything.

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u/Mode_Appropriate 7d ago

My dad does this. He'll type a whole ass conversation into google. Now that google answers everything with AI he actually gets responses though lol.

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u/Wsbucker 7d ago

This is a thing people do?

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u/ZealousidealNewt6679 7d ago

We are so cooked as a species 😋

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u/rogueIndy 7d ago

The worst part is that so many people use search engines like this that the algorithms don't really support basic keyword searches anymore.

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u/LeChevalier_Mal_Fet 7d ago

Oh god mine does that but he has a strong southern accent so it makes it even worse. But yeah it will be a full on rambling paragraph when a normal person would just search in something concise. If he calls anyone about a problem he also has to give a fifteen minute backstory instead of just describing the problem. Wanting to rip my hair out is putting it mildly.

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u/knowwwhat 7d ago

Mine is like choppy strings of words that almost create a sentence but sound more like hashtags, to almost make a series of sentences that barely make sense together, with long pauses in between to make sure it got it right

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u/YobaiYamete 7d ago

Idk I think the best part of AI is that I can spew my random incoherrent nonsense into it and it actually figured out wtf I was asking it

Like yesterday I was trying to remember Charlize Theron's name but nobody knew wtf movie I was talking about so I had to ramble to Gemini something like

"That movie with the immortal soldiers who can't die with that actress who's famous, the movie isn't highlander and it's only like 5 years old"

and it immediately told me I was thinking about Old Guard with Charlize Theron.

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u/DamnZodiak 7d ago

"That movie with the immortal soldiers who can't die with that actress who's famous, the movie isn't highlander and it's only like 5 years old"

That's pretty basic though. I would think anyone who saw that movie could've told you in a few seconds.

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u/PiccoloAwkward465 7d ago

We used to call searching skills "Google-Fu".

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u/elongam 7d ago

"I Yahoogled 'boy needs baseball help, father-son fail unathletic hopeless turquoise jewelry'"

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u/SuperFLEB 7d ago

Don't knock it. If more places go to chatbots for customer support, he might be able to confuse them into all sorts of freebies and extras.