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Comment by reaperman | Hacker News Reader

SOTA = “State of the art”

“Implant” would be like any remotely installable persistent exploit that grants access to an attacker over a period of time.

Also, I’m pretty luddite when it comes to highly-hyped AI stuff, (in spite of my income being heavily tied to developing AI models) but I have found ChatGPT to be shockingly good at explaining super niche terminology and even jokes. So I do recommend people feel comfortable turning to that if they ever feel uncomfortable asking “dumb” questions publicly.

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@simonw made a custom GPT called the dejargonizer just for that purpose: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-3V1JcLD92-dejargonizer

Or you could just Google it. [0]

That's right. People can just Google things.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/1Yx0m1U.png

I googled "SOTA implant" and got something totally different.

Bit of a tangent, but..

Google has been going down hill for many years but since the December update a few weeks ago it has genuinely become atrocious.

In their quest to combat AI slop (good idea), they've gone and made domain authority so much more important than the content, that now when you search for A B C, you get 20 pages from very "authoritive" sites that are about A, are slighyly about B and don't even mention C. This is despite plenty of great pages about A B C existing and serving the content we're looking for - we just never get to see them because the places they're hosted on aren't "authoritive" enough. Before, you'd get 5 pages, 1 of which likely had what you were looking for, and maybe 1-2 were AI slop. Now zero of them are what you're looking for, but at least we no longer have the (generally very obvious) slop? Brilliant improvement for the users..

The reason behind this is pretty obvious: most AI slop that had been ranking well likely had 0 ad spend, meanwhile the "authoritive" sites tend to have high ad spend. Ads was seeing numbers go down and unhappy customers, and they run the company.

Using verbatim search generally improves the results.

When possible, sure, but this is often not viable. Just to give an example, looking for information on a local performance or exhibition. I can go and dubquote the name of it, but that still gives me 20 "authoritive" websites with vague info on last year's edition, not the few smaller local blogs that have info on this year's edition. Even if I add e.g. "2024". This got far worse since the December update, and many times there's no reasonable way to craft an arcane search query that fixes it.

I see. There’s also “after:2023”, but that only works if the pages with last year’s info don’t appear newer to Google. Personally I haven’t run into the issue you describe yet to a degree that I would have noticed, but we also may have different use cases for googling. Conversely I rather have the issue for certain search terms that Google shows me a page of shopping results before getting to the “authoritive” websites.

I'm sure locale matters. If you're in NYC, there's bound to be authoritive websites with the content you're looking for about almost anything you could possibly want. But the further away you get from the US, the less this is the case.

Though even in the US it largely holds for niche things. It's been a topic on HN for years, how Google has just stopped surfacing small websites with high quality information on a niche topic that can't be found elsewhere, but it's been greatly accelerated since last month.

Are the shopping results you're seeing ranked higher not from authoritive websites (Amazon, Walmart et al)?

Yeah except Google is just so often wrong or pushing crappy SEO results that I honestly think it's worthless nowadays.

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