In the Dark

In the course of double-checking the time of perihelion for yesterday’s post I did a quick Google search. What came up first was this:

Google search results nowadays are prefaced by a short summary like this one, presumably generated by some sort of AI. This one – like many others I’ve seen recently – is just plain wrong. The time of perihelion was 13.28 Universal Time, not 09.00.

I am old enough to remember when Google Search first appeared in 1998. It was so much better than other search engines at that time, largely because of the PageRank algorithm; see this piece for a bit of the history and the reason it worked so well. Some years ago, however, Google Search underwent a transition from being a useful facility for web browsers to a piece of adtech useful only for marketing companies who pay to have their sites artificially boosted. Every time you do a search nowadays you have to scroll through a deluge of promoted pages that have very little to do with what you searched for. Google is now so corrupted as to be virtually useless. Adding garbled AI junk to the mixture is just making it worse. It’s not only frustrating but potentially dangerous. Information can be manipulated for purposes other than selling things; the systematic spread of misinformation by those in power has potentially catastrophic consequences.

This entry was posted on January 5, 2025 at 12:09 pm and is filed under History, mathematics with tags Google Search, perihelion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.