Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release
(tegabrain.com)878 points by dmitrygr 2 days ago
878 points by dmitrygr 2 days ago
Are you aware of Kagi (kagi.com)?
With them, at least the AI stuff can be turned off.
Membership is presently about 61k, and seems to be growing about 2k per month: https://kagi.com/stats
I directly use Yandex sometimes, because there are huge blind spots for all the US-based engines I'm aware of, and it fills some of them in.
If someone can point me to a better index for that purpose, I'd love to avoid Yandex. Please inform me.
There are few other powerful countries, with countless Web services, who freely wages war(s) on other countries and support wars in many different ways. Is there a way to avoid their products?
I find this amusing, because it seems like Kagi's target audience dislikes this (politically polarized), and I as someone who is not Kagi's target audience likes this (politically neutral).
I don't like defending Russia which is a horrible country, but I find it hypocritical to only talk about their imperialism and pretend not to see that the most imperialist country in the world, the one that has started, financed, and participated in the most wars, is the United States, and yet the question of boycotting American companies is never brought up. Google has been intentionally sabotaged in terms of image search and reverse image search; Yandex is literally the best on the market, but Kagi should boycott them because their headquarters are in the wrong country?
Yandex has the best image search, and others are years behind it. Further more Nebius has sold all group’s businesses in Russia and certain international market. They are completely divested from Russia for a 1.5 years already: https://nebius.com/newsroom/ynv-announces-successful-complet...
The post you linked was posted when the divestment was already going underway, so it is at least dishonest if not malicious.
Damn. I didn't know that.
Now we need a 2nd Kagi, so we can switch to that one instead. :(
I don't agree with this logic. It implies that people who use Google, Bing and a million other products made by US-based companies are supportive of the huge amount of attrocities commited or aided by the United States. Or other countries. It feels very odd to single out Russia's invasion of Ukraine but to minimize the Israeli genocide of palestinians in Gaza, the multiple unjust wars waged by the United States all over the world etc.
Imo, Kagi is still the better option, because it isn't supporting the global surveillance mechanism we call advertising. All these people, missing the forest for the single yandex tree.
So if America invades Venezuela should we all stop using google? Should we have stopped using google when the U.S. invaded Iraq and killed 150,000 people[1]?
Should we stop using products imported from China for the cultural genocide they've perpetrated against the Uyghurs?[2]
Is Yandex Russia?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...
I'm surprised this is possible given the sanctions on Russia.
Why's that something to be aware of? Yandex is actually a good search engine, so I'm told, as long as you don't search for things related to Russian politics. Kagi presumably knows this and won't use their results related to Russian politics.
Feels more like a scare campaign to me - someone doesn't want you to use Kagi, and points to Yandex as a reason for that.
Meh. Most people, including myself, couldn't care less, and Yandex image search is very capable.
I remain amazed by the lack of attention given to this.
Regardless of one's position on the 'everything online is Russian propaganda, Russian bots or misinformation - invest in sickles and hammers, comrade / wtf just use basic common sense and the internet is as safe as it ever was' continuum, such universal enthusiasm for a Russian-owned, Russian-controlled search engine should generate a little more counter-argument, at the very least.
Absolutely no mention of Google, Bing, Startpage, DDG, or even Mojeek search engines usually pass online without somebody detailing the problems, flaws, or why they're not as good as the alternatives. Usually, at least 20% of the comments will be overtly critical, with at least 1 person passionately arguing that this search engine is going to destroy life as we know it / funds genocide / is an abomination unto God.
On open forums and spaces where a variety of users and tastes are represented, that minimum level of criticism usually applies to absolutely everything from movies to toothbrushing techniques to kids' TV to low-carb breakfasts. If more than 3 people care enough about something to discuss it, at least 1 of those people will hate it and feel the need to enunciate why.
Except Kagi. Kagi must enjoy the highest praise-criticism ratio of anything I've ever seen on the web, including concepts like sunshine and heaven and the eradication of polio.
Seriously. The only 'real' criticism I ever see of Kagi is like 'I personally don't like it because I don't think a search engine is worth more than $19.99' or 'unfortunately I need x feature', and it's always followed by a reply saying 'Ah, well Kagi is now available for $19.50' or 'you'll be thrilled to know that x feature can be enabled in Kagi by following these steps'.
And the occasional 'I don't use it because it seemed a bit wierd and wasn't worth it' comment languishing on the outskirts of the discussion.
So yeah. I do not expect this comment to stir much discussion, mainly because it's like 24 hours after the main debate and is on a pretty low-impact thread on hacker news from an uninspiring new ish account. But also because Kagi critical comments are written in sand, whatever the discussion or authority or audience.
That should make people more suspicious.
> But also because Kagi critical comments are written in sand, whatever the discussion or authority or audience.
Maybe people just turn up too late and their comments generally aren't seen?
I’ve had much better results with Kagi than with Google in the past few months. I’d trialed them a couple times in the past and been disappointed, but that’s no longer the case.
The AI stuff in google search can be turned off.
https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=kagi
How does Kagi know what is AI stuff? I don't see how they can 'just turn it off'
By "turn it off" I mostly mean that Kagi have their own AI driven tools available, but a toggle in your user settings disables it completely.
ie it's not forced down your throat, nor mysteriously/accidentally/etc turned back on occasionally
It's driven by community ratings.
what if there was an open source search engine that contributors kept making better but it was a paid subscription tool?
There is also the fact that automatically generated content predates ChatGPT by a lot. By around 2020 most Google searches already returned lots of SEO-optimized pages made from scrapped content or keyword soups made by rudimentary language models or markov chains.
Well there's also the fact that GPT-3 API was released in June 2020 and its writing capabilities were essentially on par with ChatGPT initial release. It was just a bit harder to use, because it wasn't yet trained to follow instructions, it only worked as a very good "autocomplete" model, so prompting was a bit "different" and you couldn't do stuff like "rewrite this existing article in your own words" at all, but if you just wanted to write some bullshit SEO spam from scratch it was already as good as ChatGPT would be 2 years later.
And 10 years ago, Reddit was already experimenting with auto-generated subreddits: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator.
It was popular way before 2020 but Google managed to keep up with SEO tricks for good decade+ before. Guess it got to breaking point.
> Google made the search results worse here
Did you mean:
worse results near me
are worse results worth it
worse results net worth
best worse results
worse results reddit
> if I search on Google search for specific terms, I am not interested in crap such as "others also searched for xyz" - that is just ruining the UI with irrelevant information
You assume the aim here is for you to find relevant information, not increase user retention time. (I just love the corporate speak for making people's lives worse in various ways.)
I think this is about trustworthy content, not about a good search engine per se
Honestly the biggest failing is just SEO spam sites got too good at defeating the algorithm. The amount of bloody listicles or quora nonsense or backlink farming websties that come up in search is crazy.
Certainly seems that way if you observed the waves of usability Google search underwent in the first 15 years. There was several distinct cycles where the results were great, then garbage, then great again. They would be flooded with SEO spam, then they would tweak and penalize the SEO spam heavily, then SEO would catch up.
The funny thing is that it seems like when they gave up it wasn't because some new advancement in the arms race. It was well before LLMs hit the scene. The SEO spam was still incredibly obvious to a human reader. Really seems like some data-driven approach demonstrated that surrendering on this front led to increased ad revenue.
Sites like Credit Karma / NerdWallet exist. While I think they are rife with affiliate link nonsense and paid promotion masquerading as advice, I'm also pretty sure they have paid researchers and writers generating genuine content. Not sure that quite falls into the bucket of SEO blogspam.
I had a coworker who kept up a blog about random purchases she’d made, where she would earn some money via affiliate links. I thought it was horrendously boring and weird, and the money made was basically pocket change, but she seemed to enjoy it. You might be surprised, people write about all sorts of things.
People used to do it early internet before affiliate marketing really took it over. Certainly it was more genuine and products were bemoaned for their compromises in one dimension as much as praised for their performance in another. Everything is a glowing review now and comparisons are therefore meaningless.
This is bullshit the search engines want you to believe. It's trivial to detect sites that "defeat" the algorithm; you simply detect their incentives (ads/affiliate links) instead.
Problem is that no mainstream search engine will do it because they happen to also be in the ad business and wouldn't want to reduce their own revenue stream.
Yes, this is true. It was revealed in Google emails released during antitrust hearings. Google absolutely made a deliberate decision to enshittify their search results for short term gains.
Though maybe it's a long term gain. I know many normal (i.e. non-IT) people who've noticed the poor search results, yet they continue to use Google search.
I've been using DuckDuckGo for the last... decade or so. And it still seems to return fairly relevant documentation towards the top.
To be fair, that's most of what I use search for these days is "<<Programming Language | Tool | Library | or whatever>> <<keyword | function | package>>" then navigate to the documentation, double check the versions align with what I'm writing software in, read... move on.
Sometimes I also search for "movie showtimes nyc" or for a specific venue or something.
So maybe my use cases are too specific to screw up, who knows. If not, maybe DDG is worth a try.
ML and AI killed it between 2011-2016 somewhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
> The problem
That's a separate problem. The search algorithm applied on top of the underlying content is a separate problem from the quality or origin of the underlying content, in aggregate.
Significant changes were made to Google and YouTube in 2016 and 2017 in response to the US election. The changes provided more editorial and reputation based filtering, over best content matching.
Counterpoint: The experience of quickly finding succinct accurate responses to queries has never been better.
Years ago, I would consider a search "failed" if the page with related information wasn't somewhere in the top 10. Now a search is "failed" if the AI answer doesn't give me exactly what I'm looking for directly.
Goodhart's law applies to links, too. Google monetized them and destroyed their value as a signal.
the main theory is that with bad results you have to search more and get more engaged in ads so more revenue for google. Its enshitification
somebody said once we are mining "low-background tokens" like we are mining low-background (radiation) steel post WW2 and i couldnt shake the concept out of my head
(wrote up in https://www.latent.space/i/139368545/the-concept-of-low-back... - but ironically repeating something somebody else said online is kinda what i'm willingly participating in, and it's unclear why human-origin tokens should be that much higher signal than ai-origin ones)
Low background steel is no longer necessary.
"...began to fall in 1963, when the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was enacted, and by 2008 it had decreased to only 0.005 mSv/yr above natural levels. This has made special low-background steel no longer necessary for most radiation-sensitive uses, as new steel now has a low enough radioactive signature."
We used a rather low number of atmospheric bombs, while we are carpet bombing the internet every day with AI marketing copy.
Multiple people have coined the idea repeatedly, way before you. The oldest comment on HN I could find was in December 2022 by user spawarotti: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33856172
Here is an even older comment chain about it from 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23895706
Apparently, comparing low-background steel to pre-LLM text is a rather obvious analogy.
i didnt claim to invent it.
i claimed swyx heard it through me - which he did
every human generation built upon the slop of the previous one
but we appreciated that, we called it "standing on the shoulders of giants"
> we called it "standing on the shoulders of giants"
We do not see nearly so far though.
Because these days we are standing on the shoulders of giants that have been put into a blender and ground down into a slippery pink paste and levelled out to a statistically typical 7.3mm high layer of goo.
This sounds like an Alan Kay quote. He meant that in regards to useful inventions. AI-generated spam just decreases the quality. We'd need a real alternative to this garbage from Google but all the other search engines are also bad. And their UI is also horrible - not as bad as Google, but also bad. Qwant just tries to copy/paste Google for instance (though interestingly enough, sometimes it has better results than Google - but also fewer in general, even ignornig false positive results).
Deep Research reports I think are above average internet quality, they collect hundreds of sources, synthesize and contrast them & provide backlinks. Almost like a generative wikipedia.
I think all we can expect from internet information is a good description of the distribution of materials out there, not truth. This is totally within the capabilities of LLMs. For additional confidence run 3 reports on different models.
We have two optimization mechanisms though which reduce noise with respect to their optimization functions: evolution and science. They are implicitly part of "standing on the shoulders of giants", you pick the giant to stand on (or it is picked for you).
Whether or not the optimization functions align with human survival, and thus our whole existence is not a slop, we're about to find out.
Every foundation needs some time to settle.
- Sir, this is an elevator.
You may have one point.
The industrial age was built on dinosaur slop, and they were giant.
There's a reason this is comedy:
Listen, lad. I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands.
[24] “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. [25] And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. [26] And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. [27] And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”
Capitalism, freedom of expression, the marketplace of ideas, democracy: at their best these things are ways to bend the wisdom of the crowds (such as it is) to the benefit of all; and their failures are when crowds are not wise.
The "slop" of capitalism is polluted skies, soil and water, are wage slaves and fast fashion that barely lasts one use, and are the reason why workplace health and safety rules are written in blood. The "slop" of freedom of expression includes dishonest marketing, libel, slander, and propaganda. The "slop" of democracy is populists promising everything to everyone with no way to deliver it all. The "slop" of the marketplace of ideas is every idiot demanding their own un-informed rambling be given the same weight as the considered opinions of experts.
None of these things contributed our social, technological, or economic advancement, they are simply things which happened at the same time.
AI has stuff to contribute, but using it to make an endless feed of mediocrity is not it. The flood of low-effort GenAI stuff filling feeds and drowning signal with noise, as others have said: just give us your prompt.
Somewhat related, the leaderboard of em-dash users on HN before ChatGPT:
https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...
I have used a dash - like that for almost 20 years, 100% of the time I ought to use a semi-colon and about half of the time for commas - it let's me just keep talking about things, the comma is harder pause. I've recently started seriously writing at a literary level, and I have fallen in love with the em dash - it has a fantastic function within established professional writing, where it is used often - its why the AI uses it so much.
They should include users who used a double hyphen, too -- not everyone has easy access to em dashes.
That's literally a standard use of em-dash being approximated by a double hyphen, though.
Does AI use double hyphens? I thought the point was to find who wasn't AI that used proper em dashes.
Anytime I do this — and I did it long before AI did — they are always em dashes, because iOS/macOS translates double dashes to em dashes.
I think there may be a way to disable this, but I don’t care enough to bother.
If people want to think my posts are AI generated, oh well.
Oof, I feel like you'll accidentally capture a lot of getopt_long() fans. ;)
Double-hyphen is an en-dash. Triple-hyphen is an em-dash.
Double hyphen is replaced in some software with an en-dash (and in those, a triple hyphen is often replaced with an em-dash), and in some with an em-dash; its usually used (other than as input to one of those pieces of software) in places where an em-dash would be appropriate, but in contexts where both an em-dash set closed and an en-dash set open might be used, it is often set open.
So, it’s not unambiguously s substitute for either is essentially its own punctuation mark used in ASCII-only environments with some influence from both the use of em-dashed and that of en-dashes in more formal environments.
Projects like this remind me of a plot point in the Cyberpunk 2077 game universe. The "first internet" got too infected with dangerous AIs, so much so that a massive firewall needed to be built, and a "new" internet was built that specifically kept out the harmful AIs.
(Or something like that: it's been awhile since I played the game, and I don't remember the specific details of the story.)
It makes me wonder if a new human-only internet will need to be made at some point. It's mostly sci-fi speculation at this point, and you'd really need to hash out the details, but I am thinking of something like a meatspace-first network that continually verifies your humanity in order for you to retain access. That doesn't solve the copy-paste problem, or a thousand other ones, but I'm just thinking out loud here.
The problem really is that it is impossible to verify that the content someone uploads came from their mind and not a computer program. And at some point probably all content is at least influenced by AI. The real issue is also not that I used chatgpt to look up a synonym or asked a question before writing an article, the problem is when I copy paste the content and claim I wrote it.
> The problem really is that it is impossible to verify that the content someone uploads came from their mind and not a computer program.
Er...digital id.
> the problem is when I copy paste the content and claim I wrote it
Why is this the problem and not the reverse - using AI without adding anything original into the soup? I could paraphrase an AI response in my own words and it will be no better. But even if I used AI, if it writes my ideas, then it would not be AI slop.
There doesn't need to be any difference in treatment between AI slop and human slop. The point isn't to keep AI out - it's to keep spam and slop out. It doesn't matter whether it's produced by a being made of carbon or silicon.
If someone can consistently produce high-quality content with AI assistance, so be it. Let them. Most don't, though.
I think the main issue is that when content is hand written you can be certain someone put at least the effort it takes to write into it. And while some people write fast, I would assume that at least means they have read their own writing once.
AIslop you can produce faster than you're able to read it. This makes it incredibly costly to filter out in comparison. It just messes so much with the signal to noise ratio on the web.
I share an opinion with Nick Bostrom, once a civilization disrupting idea (like LLMs) is pulled out of the bag, there is no putting it back. People in isolation will recreate it simply because it's now possible. All we can do is adapt.
That being said, the idea of a new freer internet is reality.. Mastodon is a great example. I think private havens like discord/matrix/telegram are an important step on the way.
In person web of trust in order to join any private community. It'll suck and be hard in the beginning, but once you reach a threshold, it'll be OK. Ban entire trees of users when you discover bots/puppets, to set an example.
If you play it again, make sure not to miss the Blackwall gateway quickhack:
https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Blackwall_Gateway
Absolutely brutal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD5z3GmQRXQ
---
I also noticed how simple the "new web" is when interacting with it. Of course, that's a game mechanic, but also kinda makes sense.
It's a shame that the Militech Canto only has 4 quickhack slots
Arguably this is already happening with much human-to-human interactions moving to private groups on Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.
There were also similar plot points mentioned in Peter Watts' Starfish trilogy, and Neal Stephenson's Anathem.
besides for training future models, is this really such a big deal? most of the AI-gened text content is just replacing content-farm SEO-spam anyway. the same stuff that any half-awares person wouldn't have read in the past is now slightly better written, using more em dashes and instances of the word "delve". if you're consistently being caught out by this stuff then likely you need to improve your search hygiene, nothing so drastic as this
the only place I've ever had any issue with AI content is r/chess, where people love to ask ChatGPT a question and then post the answer as if they wrote it, half the time seemingly innocently, which, call me racist, but I suspect is mostly due to the influence of the large and young Indian contingent. otherwise I really don't understand where the issue lies. follow the exact same rules you do for avoiding SEO spam and you will be fine
In the past, I'd find one wrong answer and I could easily spot the copies. Now there's a dozen different sites with the same wrong answer, just with better formatting and nicer text.
A colleague sent me a confident ChatGPT formatted bug report.
It misidentified what the actual bug was.
But the tone was so confident, and he replied to my later messages using chat gpt itself, which insisted I was wrong.
I don't like this future.
Did you call his ass out for being lazy and wasting your time?
It's not the future. Tell him not to do that. If it happens again, bring it to the attention of his manager. Because that's not what he's being paid for. If he continues to do it, that's grounds for firing.
What you're describing is not the future. It's a fireable offense.
> the only place I've ever had any issue with AI content is r/chess, where people love to ask ChatGPT a question and then post the answer as if they wrote it, half the time seemingly innocently
Some of the science, energy, and technology subreddits receive a lot of ChatGPT repost comment. There are a lot of people who think they’ve made a scientific or philosophical breakthrough with ChatGPT and need to share it with the world.
Even the /r/localllama subreddit gets constant AI spam from people who think they’ve vibecoded some new AI breakthrough. There have been some recent incidents where someone posted something convincing and then others wasted a lot of time until realizing the code didn’t accomplish what the post claimed it did.
Even on HN some of the “Show HN” posts are AI garbage from people trying to build portfolios. I wasted too much time trying to understand one of them until I realized they had (unknowingly?) duplicated some commits from upstream project and then let the LLM vibe code a README that sounded like an amazing breakthrough. It was actually good work, but it wasn’t theirs. It was just some vibecoding tool eventually arriving at the same code as upstream and then putting the classic LLM written, emoji-filled bullet points in the README
Yes it is a big deal. I cant find new artists without having a fear of their art being AI generated, same for books and music. I also cant post my stuff to the internet anymore because I know its going to be fed into LLM training data. The internet is dead to me mostly and thankfully I lost almost all interest of being on my computer as much as I used to be.
> besides for training future models, is this really such a big deal? most of the AI-gened text content is just replacing content-farm SEO-spam anyway.
Yes, it is because of the other side of the coin. If you are writing human-generated, curated content, previously you would just do it in your small patch of Internet, and probably SEs (Google...) will pick it up anyway because it was good quality content. You just didn't care about SEO-driven shit anyway. Now you nicely hand-written content is going to be fed into LLM training and it's going to be used - whatever you want it or not - in the next generation of AI slop content.
It's not slop if it is inspired from good content. Basically you need to add your original spices into the soup to make it not slop, or have the LLM do deep research kind of work to contrast among hundreds of sources.
Slop did not originate from AI itself, but from the feed ranking Algorithm which sets the criteria for visibility. They "prompt" humans to write slop.
AI slop is just an extension of this process, and it started long before LLMs. Platforms optimizing for their own interest at the expense of both users and creators is the source of slop.
SEO-spam was often at least somewhat factual and not complete generated garbage. Recipe sites, for example, usually have a button that lets you skip the SEO stuff and get to the actual recipe.
Also, the AI slop is covering almost every sentence or phrase you can think of to search. Before, if I used more niche search phrases and exact searches, I was pretty much guaranteed to get specific results. Now, I have to wade through pages and pages of nonsense.
if a potential defense is to simply the spammers, then the site was previously just as likely to start hiring content-farm human slop writers as they are now likely to use AI, i.e. the site probably wasn't that great in the first place and had equal potential to deteriorate, AI or no
The low-background steel of the internet
As mentioned half a year ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44239481
As mentioned 7 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43811732
As mentioned in this thread :P https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46103662
You don’t need an extension to do this. Simply add a “before:” search filter to your search query, eg - https://www.google.com/search?q=Happiness+before%3A2022
The other day I was researching with ChatGPT.
* ChatGPT hallucinated an answer
* ChatGPT put it in my memory, so it persisted between conversations
* When asked for a citation, ChatGPT found 2 AI created articles to back itself up
It took a while, but I eventually found human written documentation from the organization that created the technical thingy I was investigating.
This happens A LOT for topics on the edge of knowledge easily found on the Web. Where you have to do true research, evaluate sources, and make good decisions on what you trust.
AI reminds me of combing through stackoverflow answers. The first one might work... Or it might not. Try again, find a different SO problem and answer. Maybe third times the charm...
Except it's all via the chat bot and it isn't as easy to get it to move off of a broken solution.
Ultimately, once I had a spidey sense something was wrong I double checked ChatGPT using Claude
For images, https://same.energy is a nice option that, being abandoned but still functioning since a few years, seems to naturally not have crawled any AI images. And it’s all around a great product.
doesn't actually do anything anymore in Google or bing.
Searching Google for
chatgpt
vs
chatgpt before:2022-01-01
give me quite different results. In the 2nd query, most results have a date listed next to them in the results page, and that date is always prior to 2022. So the date filtering is "working". However, most of the dates are actually Google making a mistake and misinterpreting some unimportant date it found on the page as the date the page was created. At least one result is a Youtube video posted before 2022, that edited its title after Chatgpt was released to say Chatgpt.
Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on search.
How do we (or Kagi) know which ones are "SEO sites"? Is there some filter list or other method to determine that?
It seems like a mixture of heuristics, explicit filtering and user reports.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html
That's specifically for AI generated content, but there are other indicators like how many affiliate links are on the page and how many other users have downvoted the site in their results. The other aspect is network effect, in that everyone tunes their sites to rank highly on Google. That's presumably less effective on other indices?
Most of college courses and school books haven't changed in decades. Some reputed college keep courses for Pascal and Fortran instead of Python or Java, just because, it might affect their reputation of being classical or pure or to match their campus buildings style.
Or because the core knowledge stay the same no matter how it is expressed.
FWIW Mojeek (an organic search engine in the classic sense) can do this with the before: operator.
https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=britney+spears+before%3A2010...
You should call it Predecember, referring to the eternal December.
How about a search engine that only returns what you searched for, and not a million other unrelated things that it hopes you might like to buy?
This goes for you, too, website search.
If I want dead information I'll go find a newspaper. This is kind of silly. Even if AI rewrites the entire internet - we aren't going to live in a time capsule.
Plus, the AI already read everything made before 2023, so what does it matter?
Creatives need to think a bit bigger with this particular issue.
They are the same. I was looking for something and tried AI. It gave me a list of stuff. When I asked for its sources, it linked me to some SEO/Amazon affiliate slop.
All AI is doing is making it harder to know what is good information and what is slop, because it obscures the source, or people ignore the source links.
I've started just going to more things in person, asking friends for recommendations, and reading more books (should've been doing all of these anyway). There are some niche communities online I still like, and the fediverse is really neat, but I'm not sure we can stem the Great Pacific Garbage Patch-levels of slop, at this point. It's really sad. The web, as we know and love it, is well and truly dead.
I don't know how this works under the hood but it seems like no matter how it works, it could be gamed quite easily.
True, but there's probably many ways to do this and unless AI content starts falsifying tons of its metadata (which I'm sure would have other consequences), there's definitely a way.
Plus other sites that link to the content could also give away it's date of creation, which is out of the control of the AI content.
I have heard of a forum (I believe it was Physics Forums) which was very popular in the older days of the internet where some of the older posts were actually edited so that they were completely rewritten with new content. I forget what the reasoning behind it was, but it did feel shady and unethical. If I remember correctly, the impetus behind it was that the website probably went under new ownership and the new owners felt that it was okay to take over the accounts of people who hadn't logged on in several years and to completely rewrite the content of their posts.
I believe I learned about it through HN, and it was this blog post: https://hallofdreams.org/posts/physicsforums/
It kind of reminds me of why some people really covet older accounts when they are trying to do a social engineering attack.
> website probably went under new ownership
According to the article, it was the founder himself who was doing this.
Date displayed in Google Search results is often the self-described date from the document itself. Take a look at this "FOIA + before Jan 1, 1990" search: https://www.google.com/search?q=foia&tbs=cdr:1,cd_max:1/1/19...
None of these documents were actually published on the web by then, incl., a Watergate PDF bearing date of Nov 21, 1974 - almost 20 years before PDF format got released. Of course, WWW itself started in 1991.
Google Search's date filter is useful for finding documents about historical topics, but unreliable for proving when information actually became publicly available online.
Are you sure it works the same way for documents that Google indexed at the time of publication? (Because obviously for things that existed before Google, they had to accept the publication date at face value).
"Gamed quite easily" seems like a stretch, given that the target is definitionally not moving. The search engine is fundamentally searching an immutable dataset that "just" needs to be cleaned.
How? They have an index from a previous date and nothing new will be allowed since that date? A whole copy of the internet? I don't think so.... I'm guessing, like others, it's based on the date the user/website/blog lists in the post. Which they can change at any time.
I didn’t know “eccentric engineering” was even a term before reading this. It’s fascinating how much creativity went into solving problems before large models existed. There’s something refreshing about seeing humans brute force the weird edges of a system instead of outsourcing everything to an LLM.
It also makes me wonder how future kids will see this era. Maybe it will look the same way early mechanical computers look to us. A short period where people had to be unusually inquisitive just to make things work.
Maybe like how I view my dad and the punchcard era: cool and endearing that he went through that, but thankful that I don’t have to.
This is an imperfect search extension.
It's a hell of a lot better than nothing, if one is using chrome or Firefox (neither of which are my primary browsers).
I noticed AI-generated slop taking over google search results well before ChatGPT. So I don't agree with the premise on this site that you can be "you can be sure that it was written or produced by the human hand."
It doesn't really work. I tried my website and it shows up, while definitely being built after 2023. There is a mistake in the metadata of the page that shows it as from 2011.
ChatGPT also returns content only created before ChatGPT release, which is why I still have to google damn it!
it's a known problem in ML, I think grok solved it partially and chatGPT uses another model on top to search web like suggested below. Hence MLOps field appeared, to solve models management
I find it a bit annoying to navigate between hallucinations and outdated content. Too much invalid information to filter out.
I really thought this was going to be the Dewey Decimal system. Exclude sources from this century. It’s the only way to be sure.
The slop is getting worse, as there is so much llm generated shit online, now new models are getting trained on the slop. Slop training slop, and slop. We have gone full circle just in a matter of a few years.
I was replaying Cyberpunk 2077 and trying to think of all the ways one might have dialed up the dystopia to 11 (beyond what the game does). And pervasive AI slop was never on my radar. Kinda reminds me of the foreword in Neuromancer bringing attention to the fact the book was written before cellphones became popular. It's already fucking with my mind. I recently watched Frankenstein 2025 and 100% thought gen ai had a role in the CGI only to find out the director hates it so much he rather die than use it. I've been noticing little things in old movies and anime where I thought to myself (if I didn't know this was made before gen ai, I would have thought this was generated for sure). One example (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGSNhVQFbOc&t=412) cityscape background in this a outro scene with buildings built on top of buildings gave me ai vibes (really the only thing in this whole anime), yet this came out ~1990. So I can already recognize a paranoia / bias in myself and really can't reliably tell what's real.. Probably also other people have this and why some non-zero number of people always thinks every blog post that comes out was written by gen ai.
I had the same experience, watching a nature documentary on a streaming service recently. It was... not so good, at least at the beginning. I was wondering if this was a pilot for AI generated content on this streaming service.
Actually, it came out in 2015 and was just low budget.
For that purpose I do not update my book on LeanPub about Ruby. I just know one day people gonna read it more, because human-written content would be gold.
The real gold is content created before the internet!
> This is a search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT's first public release on November 30, 2022.
The problem is that Google's search engine - but, oddly enough, ALL search engines - got worse before that already. I noticed that search engines got worse several years before 2022. So, AI further decreased the quality, but the quality had a downwards trend already, as it was. There are some attempts to analyse this on youtube (also owned by Google - Google ruins our digital world); some explanations made sense to me, but even then I am not 100% certain why Google decided to ruin google search.
One key observation I made was that the youtube search, was copied onto Google's regular search, which makes no sense for google search. If I casually search for a video on youtube, I may be semi-interested in unrelated videos. But if I search on Google search for specific terms, I am not interested in crap such as "others also searched for xyz" - that is just ruining the UI with irrelevant information. This is not the only example, Google made the search results worse here and tries to confuse the user in clicking on things. Plus placement of ads. The quality really worsened.