Sarah J. Jackson: I’m so mad at Google for ruining search results with its crap new ai. It’s really bad over at Google scholar.

I’m so mad at Google for ruining search results with its crap new ai. It’s really bad over at Google scholar.

So bad. Feels very "you had one job"

I can't see it as anything but deliberate what with the rest of the attacks on academia

Yeah, it's bleak out here.

Even when it works, Google Scholar, tends to link to paywalled articles. Sometimes, I can find non-paywalled versions, and Google Scholar should be linking to those when available. Sometimes, I have to ask our office librarian to track down a copy.

I mean that's always been the case. I wouldn't want it to leave our articles from journals that aren't open even if I wish more journals were open. Usually there's an indicator. I just look in my library directory for the titles.

That works for professors and people with university connections, not so much for the rest of the world. I remember debates at the Bad Place among professors about what value paywalling journals brings to the general discourse, & I thought the folks arguing against paywalling had better arguments.

I miss having @brianlfrye.bsky.social as part of the dialog here. I hope he eventually tires of the Bad Place and migrates here.

I'm lurking at least!

How -- seriously -- HOW do you fuck up the one and only thing we all liked about your brand? The only truly useful thing? I can keep my calendar on paper. I can make a phone call instead of emailing someone. But nothing else can search the Internet except a search engine, and they broke it

Back to web rings we go. The download link will appear once you vote for my website.

I literally just searched for something in quotation marks and nothing on the first page actually had that phrase. I just gave up.

This is me, a concept I know the lit on and the first result was masters thesis (😭) that use the phrase without citing the originator, really bad.

😱🤮🤬

Yikes! 😳

Ugh, yes - I feel like this is going to trip up a lot of people who are used to relying on Google for accuracy

Excuse me what. They added that to *scholar*???

Yes :(

I’m not getting results that include it, really (morbidly) curious how bad it is.

What a fustercluck

They added it to Adobe too. Just waiting the few days it will take for work to just block all access to PDFs I try to look at online due to security risks from their pointless AI tool…

Fuck

Oh FFS.

I hate having to switch to Verbatim manually, but it's worth the few extra clicks.

*googles (sob) Verbatim*

Above your search results, all the way to the right, it's under tools -> results.

Thank you!!!! I didn't know this existed.

Oooh! Thank you!

Thank you.

it's soooo bad 😭

It’s so frustrating. Having to take so much time weeding through results to find something legit defeats the whole point.

Oh no

Oh, yeah. I stopped using Google for anything a few months ago. I’m still testing the other search engines out there but they’re all blighted by their own flaws even without AI. Giving me 25 results of websites selling a product when I’m looking for data or information is a top annoyance.

Oh no! Not Google Scholar! That was the one thing left on the internet that actually worked okay!

they ruined it with ads and monopolistic version and incentivizing content farms long ago

i know that word version was something else… behavior maybe?

A few weeks ago, I used regular Google search to try and explore a specific post-chemotherapy symptom. Apropos of nothing, Google started showing me stuff about Kate Middleton within the first few results. 😐

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Gotta use "-ai -prompt" in every search now.

What issues are you finding with Scholar? I was using it today but only to search for specific articles when my library login wouldn't cough up a .pdf of a particular search result (*JFC Wiley some of your journal databases are misconfigured). I haven't done a topic search there in a while.

The algorithm is shooting student masters theses and various other unpublished works to the top of results rather than peer reviewed publications for keyword/concept searches and using quotation marks no longer gets results for each terms it’s been doing this for some months for me

I spotted your other comment after posting my question - that seriously sucks.

OTOH, I wish folks with library access would use GS less and the direct databases more (I've literally had students who didn't know how to get into the library's list of databases, or even the library catalogue). OTOH, it's a real time-saver sometimes and invaluable for those w/o library access.

And on the gripping hand, putting titles into GH and hitting the "cite" button is even faster than using Citation Machine. Basically, fuck those assholes at Google.

Hmm Scholar hasn't changed for me yet

AI will never work as a fact engine, this will either ruin Google or science.

Well, my talk for the Society of Scholarly Publishing meeting says google’s now a mugs game for publishers and they need stronger links with their readers, but this is beyond what I was predicting.

Oh no. When will they realize that AI isn’t intelligent yet?

WTF. The point (IMO) of Google Scholar is finding reputable references on a particular topic. Assuming that whatever ChatGPT spews out in answer to a question is correct seems to be very much not that.

No way, it's built into Google Scholar now too? We're screwed

God damn it

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