@darius On DuckDuck it's beneath a stack of summaries aimed at middleschoolers cheating on their homework. 😅

@darius I was surprised it was as high as 12th (for my search anyhow) but I skip over video results as "Obviously not a book" (a librarian superpower in this day and age).

@darius Pointing to free content like that doesn't enhance shareholder value.

@darius @anildash these days for old books i tend to go first to Standard EBooks https://standardebooks.org (and yes, Moby Dick is there 🐳)

@darius Why bother with the old and busted original? Surely, in 2024, they can get their AI server farm to confabulate a shiny new Moby Dick for you wholesale.

@darius two ads, a wikipedia summary, a couple more sites and then Gutenberg. IDK why anyone still uses google search in this decade

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Moby-Dick+by+Herman+Melville&ia=web

@darius I’m going to use my mid-2000s (the decade) SEO knowledge and do something about that!

@darius 4th hit via Kagi: https://kagi.com/search?q=moby+dick+by+herman+melville

@darius I learned the "before:" trick yesterday, If you search with "before:2020" for example it removes some of the SEO fuckery. Works if you're looking for more internet historical things and know roughly the date you're after.

@darius On Google after Wikipedia I get online booksellers, for the next thirty-forty results at least.

On ddg Gutenberg is in the top ten, after some different language Wikipedia entries.

@darius also irksome: the difficulty in finding non-ecom-site review-posts for a book. (I prefer blog posts or MSM reviews over stream-posts to GoodReads, Amazon, etc)

@darius in mine it's 8th. I wonder if Google prioritize based on what I've previously clicked? Even if they do, most of the higher-ranked links aren't somewhere I've clicked recently so still weird.

@darius
this is all planned.
create corporate owned AI
train it on all available knowledge
then destroy the public knowledge to prevent competitors
advertise to all ppl to use AI, because it gives better results
have a networo effect, critical mass of AI user, to get exclusive access to all the new knowledge, to cement your position forever.

it is playing out in front of our eyes slowly, but also quite fast.

@darius mo' bi-dick