Intentional Searching
Search: Part 2 – Intentional searching and… the state of searching.
In case you missed it… Here’s a link to Part 1 on Search.
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Have you noticed that Google searches are somehow different recently?
Aside from the new distraction that if you search on your phone (or my phone at least) there’s a newsfeed with alarmingly good suggestions for things I might want to read. This is… very distracting.
It was bad enough when I went to search for ____________ and then would forget by the time I opened the app… not entirely unlike the effect of walking through a doorway or into another room.
The search results also seem… changed. Lower quality … even after you scroll beyond the wall of sponsored results.
They’re being pretty obvious about the oft-quoted line, “If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product.”
I’m pretty sure this is directly correlated with Google’s integration of Gemini AI into their search algorithms. This has transformed our go to search engine into something more in the vein of Chat GPT.
This could make getting at the information we’re seeking much more difficult in the not too distant future. It really depends on the whims of Big Tech.
Weird experience with AI recently. I did a Google search on how to process acorns and AI told me to put them in a cloth bag and let them sit in the river, and if I didn't have a river, to put them in my toilet tank... this is what happens when machines take over.