About a Quarter of Today's "linux" News in Google News Came From One Domain and It's a Slopfarm
Not kidding!
Google is circling down the drain. So does Google News, which had mass layoffs almost 2 years ago. Last night I surveyed what Google News was spewing out when searching for "linux" and about a quarter of the results up until now (3:30AM) are the following:
Google News was not this awful before. It keeps sending traffic to fake news, pages that contain slop images (notice the similarity above) and fake text with fake author names.
That last one above was explained last night: Microsoft and Windows Have Many Back Doors, But LLM Slop Keep Claiming That Linux Has "Backdoor"
As Andy put it yesterday: "Google can bring you back a hundred thousand answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one. [...] Having dumped it's commitment to not being "Evil", Google, again without a jot of hubris, assumed responsibility for "organising the world's information". To see why their "AI" project continues the company's remarkable tradition of abandoning pithy mission statements, we need to see how "AI" in its present form is much more like The Oracle than The Librarian. [...] Google's historic role in the WWW is essential to understand here. Without search engines the Web was stuck. Many great engines emerged in the late 1990s, but one dominated, with its clean, fast interface and better indexing algorithm. Nonetheless, throughout all of its evolution, the purpose of Google Search has been to connect seekers of information with documents… with books of the modern kind. Google wished to be the global village librarian. [...] With bourgeois professions dropping out of fashion faster then "Jim'll Fix It" badges, Google - ever ready to hoist the populist flag and bury old, loyal, but no longer needed friends - is moving on. Indeed Google officially disavowed the World Wide Web. "AI search", is not a "Web Search". You are not searching or asking "The Internet". It's a change to a completely different model of information retrieval and processing, and an abandonment of commitment to verifiable, objective "truth" implied in the librarian model. [...] Google and friends are epistemically naive. "AI search" may look superficially like indexing actual documents, but it could hardly be more different." █