Slop Evader - I've grown distrustful of web searches
Web search has been getting increasingly enshittified over the past few years. Everyone knows that, not a secret. Recently, and in large part due to LLMs, this has reached a breaking point for me where I frequently am unable to find useful information regardless of search engine.
My web browser routines are simple. If I want a specific kind of information, I first go to sites that I like (newspapers, wikis, forums) directly by the link, and if I need to find a specific page on them I do a search with Startpage,1 ie. "audio configuration gentoo wiki". For the final segment, which is general information that could lie anywhere (food recipes, specific animal images, information about a location), I do a normal search with a search engine. For me, it is this final one that feels as if it's been poisoned.
This is where the browser extension Slop Evader comes into the picture. Quite simply it allows you to automatically query Google2 to only show results before the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, ensuring that what you read is actually written by a human and not just SEO-spammed LLM-slop. Every now and then some newer sites are able to slip past the filter, but 9/10 times this works and 10/10 times it gives me more useful results than without it. The only downside? Well, uh, you kind of uhm, won't find anything that is new there.
However. Not everything we look for actually needs to be completely up to date.
If I want to find an image, a recipe, or even vast amounts of different information I can open Slop Evader with little-to-no issues. It's not as if capivaras have drastically changed look wise in four years, nor as if the recipes for sweet rice or a nice curry has been drastically revolutionized. Information wise this doesn't have to be a problem either unless something is undergoing drastic changes, the same way that it doesn't have to be a problem to read a book that was published in 2002; this widely cited article by Poore and Nemecek was published in 2018 but is still really solid today. Same thing for this one by Holck in 2008.
Is this extension a solution to all my problems? Absolutely not. Does using it come with it's own set of risks and issues? Definitely, and it's not like I disagree with any of the immediate criticism that shows up when hearing about the concept. But all in all, Slop Evader does make my problems with web search just a tiny bit more manageable.
LLMs are creating a hellscape I don't know how to escape. This lets me slip past at least a little bit of it.