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The internet has become nearly impossible to use for information. (hexbear.net)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I need to write a zoology paper on bugs

All search results are for pest control businesses or are AI generated garbage that have wrong information.

Yes, the internet always had problems, but I cannot stress how much worse it has gotten for information over the last ten years.

I used to be able to search a species and get scientific papers or at least articles that referenced scientific papers in the results. None of that anymore. All search results are for someone trying to sell you something, and articles are regurgitated AI monstrosities that waffle on with no real information and no references. If your search even manages to direct you to news articles every news site will have identical, poorly written tabloid hidden behind a paywall. All of it useless for even the most basic academic research.

I literally can't do my job if every search result for species identification is behind a paywall, or an AI generated image of a bug that doesn't really exist.

It's no longer the information age. But not because of Trumpism and other things liberal whine about, it's because capitalism has hollowed out the internet into a husk of what it was meant to be.

I literally had to go and buy an expensive field guide from a museum to finish this paper. I haven't had to do that before.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I don't look up bugs very much but I'm jealous you got to do my childhood dream of entomology in some way.

Can you add keywords such as prominent authors, publication names, terms only researchers would use etc? If you've been doing for a long time don't you have resources to start from such as works you've relied on previously? And there is always the trick of using the date search feature to exclude the past few years.

Is it possible that you have progressed in the level of work you are doing such that purchasing published resources rather than just typing the name of a creature into a searchengine is required? Maybe you would always have gotten to this point?

I agree with your overall point though. I would like to see more development in bespoke community search engines comparable to the fediverse for social media. If you and other people who are in your field could create your own search indexes from sources which are reputable. They could even have federation.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Nah, it used to be waaaaay easier to find shit that wasn't terrible.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It's going to be tough for people who never lived through the good times to understand that not everything used to be a "TOP 10 SENTENCES" article with affiliate links to buy alphabet stickers because you made the mistake of using to word "the" in your query. I fully know what you mean and it is infuriating.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

Me when I remember that the internet used to be essentially an encyclopaedia and a bunch of fan pages yes-honey-left kitty-cri

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

You can still do entomology... get into iNaturalist. I am not an entomologist but have learned a lot just from posting pictures of what I have found.