Since DuckDuckGo introduced AI search I switched to Qwant. Now they also force you to look at stupid and sponsored AI slop results. As these are both privacy focused sites I am starting to wonder if we will lose real search (i.e. I click on links I think are interesting) Switching to startpage.com for now.

Somehow this country is excluded from it:

Even if he eventually merges with an AI.

Looks like cancer is having a field day with the fascists.

Karma is a bitch...

might have to switch entirely to sidelaoding.issue is banking apps

Article

(this is just a joke - of course farmwork still has physically demanding parts)

Susan Collins doomed her, along with Cheney, Rumsfeld + the specter of "national security"

The group surveyed over 1,000 UK children and their parents, and while it did report some positive effects from changes made under the OSA, many children saw age verification as an easy-to-bypass hurdle rather than something that kept them genuinely safe.

A full 46 percent of children even said that age checks were easy to bypass, while just 17 percent said that they were difficult to fool. The methods kids use to fool age gates vary, but most are pretty simple: There's the classic use of a video game character to fool video selfie systems, while in other instances, children reported just entering a fake birthday or using someone else's ID card when that was required.

Does anyone find this surprising ?Ask anyone who know how the internet works and most will say this won't work

When Google was founded in 1998 it solved a big problem: spammy and chaotic web. Does this sound familiar? Because it's happening again. The World-Wide-Web is still a place for everyone, but if it doesn't have good SEO nobody will find it. AI webs and images are surrounding the internet.

How is Google handling that? By deleting blue links and replacing them with AI agents. How are other search engines handling that? By creating blacklists and scanning websites using AI detectors. That will never work.

Well, I have an idea...

[ ? ] Basic concept

Basically, imagine Wikidata (a big database of lots of things filled with data, similar to Wikipedia), but not for objects, but for websites. Websites would have their own pages with information about them - what kind of website it is, whether it has ads, a short description, when it was created/who founded it, how big it is, etc. It would be all open-source and managed by the community.

[ * ] Features

Sounds weird, right? Why would someone do it? Well because of the advantages:

• You can filter your search in hundreds of ways! One example: you want to find something on a small forums, that are ad-free and founded more than four years ago for no AI garbage. On google? Impossible. In this idea you would just type it into the search. Super useful. Do you know any other search engines where you can do this? I don't.
• What about the history of websites? Normal search engines only work with how the pages look at the moment. But that's not always efficient. With a database of website history, a search engine can find out that a website has been changed (all its content) four times in a month. That's not how normal websites look, is it?
• Another thing is SEO. SEO requires experts and a lot of money. In this system, you just enter data into a database - anyone can do it!

[ @ ] Image search

These days, some AI images are that that realistic, that is impossible to tell if the image is AI or not. So we have to do it differently, not by checking when the image is already taken, but by when the image is being taken - insert cryptic metadata into the photo. And I'm not talking about that garbage EXIF metadata that can be overwritten, but about C2PA.

It's still not mainstream, but it's groundbreaking. It’s also the only way to make sure that the photo was taken by a human.

[ # ] Potential Challenges

As every project in it early stage, it have potential challenges. But they are not impossible to solve, they only require some effort. The database can be filled it can be full of spam from random people, from bots from anyone. To solve this problem, we would need to implement a system similar to the one used by Wikipedia.

Another thing, MONEY. I don't have any idea, how much it can cost, but it will be not for free.

The internet is changing rapidly. It would hard to keep the database fresh, hm? Well, bots can help a lot, by checking important info (if website is only or not and countless other details).

[ / ] Final though

I am releasing this here, because I want someone to make it real. I'm not planning to do it myself, I don't havr enough skills to do it. I just want to make search fun again.

If Wikipedia could build the world’s biggest encyclopedia from scratch, it's possible to build the world’s biggest web directory.

So there’s something I need to get off my chest, and if I post it on my LinkedIn it would be career suicide at my level.

In a company, the largest line item by far is usually payroll. I have been at a number of companies that are trying to cut costs and don’t care if you come up with the correct amount via other OpEx categories, they want headcount reduced because “it’s so much”.

So along comes the promise of a computer bot that understands the normal person and also:

• Does not require sick/vacation time
• Does not take FMLA
• Does not want a bonus/profit sharing/equity
• Don’t have to pay unemployment taxes, Medicare or SSI
• Does not require them to spend money on health insurance
• Will not form a union
• Wont ever file a lawsuit for any number of reasons
• Will work 24/7

And this right there is the exact reason so many CEOs are salivating at the idea of AI. Not for worker efficiency, not for any number of “positive” benefits they may taut, but they finally have a glimpse of the chance to rid themselves of one of the largest headaches that they perceive in a company.