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Headline fix: Google kills the one good thing it has going for it with AI
Search sucks for some time now. I’d say the best thing google offers today is Gmail - but there are plenty of arguments against that too.
Google Maps, their traffic data has no rivals, unlike gmail which has plenty of good competition. It’s the one thing I couldn’t easily replace yet.
True. I wanted to replace it with OSM or similar, but my main use of Maps after navigation is exploring places, reading reviews, and browsing pictures. They have a database that is tough to replace.
I prefer OSM since I can use the maps offline. Google maps is useless out in the middle of nowhere without any cell service.
Not to discourage usage of OSM at all, but you can absolutely download offline maps on mobile with Google Maps, they’ve just hidden it a bit. If you tap your account icon in the upper right, a menu pops up that includes offline maps, and it’ll let you select boundaries to download.
Its only car routes though, useless for footpaths and public transport
Edit: I may be stupid
It’s not only car routes
It has all the path data
Source: I just tested it
Far from any desire to give kudos to Google: Maps does allow offline maps.I had greater London available on my iphone recently, and that worked.
But what if you’re not in london
This is a great question.
The obvious answer is to then go to London.
But if you are unable to do so AND have no mobile network, you can download the maps via avian carrier.Sorry, only London available
If you want to experience offline maps, you gotta go to London
I do the same when I go on vacation. Take an old phone, no cell plan, just use the wireless at the hotel and take the phone as a map and camera. No cell plan means work can’t call me, map still works bc of GPS and bc the data is manually downloaded (under profile menu.)
Which makes it good for hiking, and I’ve found it’s better for bike routes too. However, I can’t easily search for places to go, there’s no recommendations, and generally you need to know the address of the place you’re going to (not just a restaurant/bar etc.).
I tried OSM and it completely failed. Downloaded the offline region, loaded it up at home fine. Went to the location and the offline map wouldn’t load. Had a connection and tried to load an online map, nothing. Ended up right back using Google maps. I support the concept of OSM, it just doesn’t work.
Strange, it’s been very very reliable for many years, for me. Did you use OsmAnd?
No, I used solely on my phone. It worked fine at home and looked promising. When I went out 2 days later it wouldn’t load anything, was on cell only with excellent 5g data. Tried for about an hour and it just wouldn’t load a map.
Uh, but…OsmAnd is a phone app. So you’re saying you used the website on your phone’s browser, then? I’m not sure if that has an offline function, though I never used it myself. Does it say it has that function? Otherwise I think you will have to install an app, first.
Maybe you downloaded the offline map files, but had nothing to open them with. Apps use their own versions of the map files, by the way, those files you download from the website are for other use-cases.
But what app did you use to access OSM and download the maps for offline use… was it a web browser? OsmAnd? Vespucci?
OSM is great for everything non-commercial. Hiking path, finding a playground, public toilets or even the closest with few benches to eat a sandwich.
But for everything commercial and car navigation google maps is unfortunately much better.
Yes, I also use and highly recommend OsmAnd, great for offline maps, outdoor activities and lots of stuff… but no traffic data.
I switched away from google maps to Apple Maps a few years ago and I honestly can’t tell any difference. If google maps traffic data is better, it’s not in any noticeable kind of way for regular day to day usage.
Honestly Apple Maps is better in my area by a decent margin. It’s up to date sooner and that matters in a rapidly growing city. Google still beats it in search but even then AM finds things it doesn’t at times. i just wish they’d move on from shitty Yelp. I vastly prefer AMs navigation over GM as well.
That would require me to buy an iPhone which I won’t do for many many reasons… but ok, maybe Apple Maps is a decent competitor nowadays, good to know.
their traffic data has no rivals
do you mean the waze traffic data, or does google actually have some of its own?
or does google actually have some of its own
every phone running Google’s version of Android with location enabled.
Waze is owned by Google.
And just like their ridiculous chat apps, they have no beneficial feature integration or consolidation between the two.
Google Maps has the ability to report speed traps and hazards, but none of that data comes from Waze or vice-versa.
How good can it be? I’ve been driving 35-40 miles to work and the same back for a year now and Apple Maps tells me what minute I’ll arrive and I usually arrive within 3-5 mins either side.
I only use google maps to find bussinesses. It’s pretty awful for navigating, which is kind of what maps are made for.
I’ll plug Mapy.cz here. I’ve been using it for about 7 years now. It has even the most obscure paths that you wouldn’t believe would be on a map (at least in Europe) and the bussiness search is alright.
No idea if it’s based on OSM or is its own thing, but if I were to guess, it is.
No, gmail’s Inbox is the best mail client out there!
…wait
ProtonMail is like the best if you can get if you’re a small user that regularly cleans their inbox and keeps things that matter.
I never use more than a handful of MBs, so I find 15GB of storage that GMail offers me a bit much. It’s been this way for me for years so ProtonMail does it.
I like most of their basic tool apps for being so basic. Notes, clock, calendar, Gmail, etc. I will lament the day they fuck all these up.
They don’t really have a choice. Classic website search will be useless in the near future because of the rapid rise of LLM-generated pages. Already for some searches 1 out of 3 results is generated crap.
Their only hope it’s that somehow they’ll be able to weed out LLM pages with LLM. Which is something that scientists say it’s impossible because LLMs cannot learn from LLM results so they won’t be able to reliably tell which content is good.
The fact they’re even trying this shows they’re desperate, so they will try.
If they can’t direct me to the right web site because they can’t tell what’s LLM junk, then how will they summarize an answer for me based on those same web sites they know about? It doesn’t seem like LLM summaries are a way to avoid that issue at all.
Well, it’s not exactly impossible because of that, it’s just unlikely they’ll use a discriminator for the task because great part of generated content is effectively indistinguishable from human-written content - either because the model was prompted to avoid “LLM speak”, or because the text was heavily edited. Thus they’d risk a high false positive rate.
Do you have a source for those scientists you’re referring to?
I know that LLMs can be trained on data output by other LLMs, but you’re basically diluting your results unless you do a lot of work to clean up the data.
I wouldn’t say it’s “impossible” to determine if content was generated by an LLM, but I agree that it will not be reliable.
So far I’m mostly unaffected by this. That’s probably because I usually internet mostly for niche hobbies and occasionally practical things and shopping. Like apartment hunting, since the industry is too spread out for anybody to get in bed with Google enough to get a big boost up the AI idiocy. Except maybe apartments.com, but that’s where I’ve always ended up anyway even back before Google’s enshitification.
Google search is still a very shitty product right now. In a blind test I would never conclude they are the market leader. It used to work a few years ago though.
Indeed. They started pushing things that make them profit before the things that you’re searching for. They love the revenue stream but are realizing now that it’s also killing their main product: googling.
But if they’re moving to AI it will probably be the same, trying to guide you into selling something instead of giving what you want. Microsoft too is trying to paper over their os with ads so you know what direction they’re going.
It’s so exhausting. Google “how to do thing” and it’s just dozens of links to webshops that sell barely related products to your search.
This is really funny to me because Google ruined their own search engine for advertising purposes; so much so that they now need to add “AI” to it to look good and hip again. Only if the “AI” results are actually good, it will hurt their advertising revenue, and it’s not quite so simple to tweak it the same way they cooked their search algorithms to serve you more ads, plus it will burn an ungodly amount of money to process each request. And if it’s bad, they’ll have wasted billions on it and will ruin their reputation even worse.
And if it’s bad, they’ll have wasted billions on it and will ruin their reputation even worse.
Ah, the Meta approach! I love to see it!
It will not hurt their revenue. There’s no way any of these companies haven’t thought about how to increase revenue with what they’re doing.
Just because we haven’t seen how yet, doesn’t mean it isn’t planned.
And it will not cost an “ungodly amount of money” to process these requests. Ofc Google will cache answers, because alot of what people ask, are the same. Then maybe the info can be updated sometimes, but ofc they won’t do it every time.
I think you have entirely too much faith in corporate executives.
Yeah, maybe. I’m just not amazed anymore how they’ll always figure out a way to screw customers over with new kind of ads.
I just think this will be the same.
Yeah, if there’s one thing gigantic corporations are bad at it’s making money
Nah. It’s not going to be “AI.” It’s going to be YouTube results, followed by Reddit results, followed by “Sponsored” results, followed by AI-written Bot results, then a couple pages of Amazon results and finally, on page 10 or so, a ten-year-old result that’s probably no longer relevant.
Just fix google back to how it was and create an entirely new search engine with AI and call it Sairch.
Sadly, old Google doesn’t work either thanks to the efforts of SEO and the AI generated garbage.
The problem with search is that the motives of those being searched aren’t to provide you with the most helpful answer. The motives are to get you to visit their website then stay/click/buy as much as possible. They’ll tailor their content to match whatever algorithm the engine is using.
That’s why Google’s new plan is to collect all of the information ahead of time and skip the “visit other websites” step. Then you can stay/click/buy on their website as much as possible.
Seriously though. Just skip all this nonsense, you selfish piece of shit, and open your wallet so the hungry corpos can feast on its contents - they have poor, innocent, starving shareholders to feed… you monster.
Is it Scottish?
I wonder how many Malaysian employees will be the brains behind this “AI” tech
AI = Absent Indians
I’m aware of a lot of the fake AI scandals, but it doesn’t apply here. Google has good models and human workers cannot go through your results in real time
I noticed DDG now has AI. Damn it
It has a chatbot you can interact with separately. It doesn’t uses AI in its search engine as far as I know.
It may summarise Wikipedia articles in your search results, though you can turn that off.
Everything now has AI in it. And if it doesn’t, it soon will. Get used to it.
Great. now the search engine will tell me “I am not designed to provide that information” when I don’t use the specific, constantly changing magic words it wants.
This also reminds me that I’m still annoyed my phone options are more or less limited Android and iPhone.
I dislike this AI-first approach because it provides only a small selection of results that are influenced by the phrasing of the query. You can’t just replace paginated results.
googles search results got so bad in the last few months that i switched to a searXNG instance and couldn’t be happier at the moment. no profit incentive, so i get no-bullshit results. they can keep their SEO-infested AI garbage results.
There has never been a better time for someone to swoop in and remake web search. Hell, there are probably dozens of software engineers from Google that have direct experience with search AND were laid off.
I’m surprised that no one is trying to compete with Google at the weakest point it’s been since going public.
I think the problem is that search does not make money. Ads make money, and subscriptions make money. Convincing people to switch from Google ads to New Google ads would involve dumping tons of money into becoming popular enough to attract advertisers. Convincing people to pay for search, like Kagi is doing, is probably even harder.
Google already lost me around 2016. All other search engines lost me to AI. Google is too late
You guys still use Google? 🥹
Trying really hard to mostly de-Google. Almost there.
How are you approaching de-googling? I am unable to think of a graceful solution to migrate my emails and photos while preserving their metadata.
Proton Mail has taken care of email for me. Their transfer process was extremely easy, and since I have my own domain and had already aliased an email to my previous one, I didn’t need to change my email on my accounts.
Google Photos is still a thorn on my side. It’s just too good to leave.
I’ve recently installed Immich and it’s basically a drop in replacement for Google photos. You do need to host it yourself however.
Ah! That really does make things easy for migrating emails. Unfortunately I don’t have my own domain yet.
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I have had proton mail with premium for the VPN and password manager for a good couple months now but how good is the mail. I really only have it for like steam and few game accounts
Edit: after looking through my light post history probably been on proton for six months. Man how time flies, by my question still stands even if I haven’t used the email as much as I’d have liked to
It’s really hard to give a review of an email service. It sends mail, it receives mail, and the user interface is pretty enough for what it needs to do.
It’s a bit cheaper than a comparable service from Google Workspace, and it encrypts emails when it’s possible to do so, which is nice.
An extra plus is that it allows you to use your domain as an alternate email, both for receiving and sending. So if you don’t like @proton.me, you can replace it with a domain that you own.
A minus is that you need to install a bridge to use standard SMTP clients like Thunderbird.
All in all, I’m happy, and I’ll continue to use it.
Nice. I’ve just been… what’s the word, not wary, maybe hesitant on it just because I didn’t know stuff like uptime and how quick mail came through
Don’t get me wrong I love proton i just…. I completely lost my train of thought lol
It still gives better results than DDG for many queries.
Not in my experience
Example
Nah. It’s shyte.
I don’t, but its good to know what’s happening over there
It’s going to be even shittier now. Lol
Aaaaaaand I’m entirely out. No thanks.
And it can go fuck it self all the way down. I can only think of one good thing to do with Google and that is to de-googlelize yourself.
