boag:

We used to dunk on people asking random users on here questions they could’ve googled but now that every single google search gives you an AI generated response it’s actually better for the environment to just ask a random tumblr user and see what they have to say.

Dunking on people for not using Google has been bad practice for decades, because even in the 00’s and early 10’s it was well known that Google customized its results depending on the IP address and prior search history of who was searching.

One of the first TED talks I ever saw was about this. Google has always been focused on giving users the results that it “thinks” are best suited to them.

In practice, this has increasingly meant “the results most likely to get them to buy something from the advertisers.” But even from the beginning, it was based on what sorts of results the user was assumed to want, based on their location, likely demographics, and what they’d looked at before.

Which has never reliably coincided with “what will give the user an accurate and helpful understanding of the topic.”

But people bringing up this issue were always drowned out by the much louder voices yelling that it was everyone’s own responsibility to educate themselves and that “Google is free” (which was only ever true in the same sense that food and shelter are free for farm animals).

So it just went ignored until it became too big to fix. Like most problems in this stupid world.