> On the other hand, the only reason I need AI to search the web is that the web is now a impenetrable forest of near unreadable, SEO-stuffed, spammy articles.

Unfortunately, that is nothing new. A big part of the reason why Google gained popularity, and maintained it for so long, was its resistance to SEO stuffed, spammy articles. The spammers continued escalating things, and now it pretty much takes AI to avoid their garbage.

The new part is AI makes it much easier and cheaper to produce garbage than ever before. So the ratio of garbage to non-garbage has been increasing rapidly.

> So the ratio of garbage to non-garbage has been increasing rapidly.

Is it actually, really? Even late 90s most stuff was garbage, and been like that for as long as I've been on the internet, or maybe I've just always been jaded. But the ratio of "garbage to non-garbage" seems constant for as long as I can remember, multiple decades at this point. The tools for finding the signal through the noise have changed over time though.

It's also all over YouTube.

But it is new. We have clearly crossed a threshold, and we know when it happened: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Google was not the first search engine, and it certainly isn't the first search engine to fall from grace.

There is basically only before and after Google. No search engine was ever as important to the Internet. It’s basically a pillar of what we have now.

I remember people using Yahoo and AltaVista a lot. And before gmail everyone had a yahoo email (if they didn't already have a hotmail). Times change, kings fall from grace.

Google has been the dominant force for about 80% of the internet’s existence. I understand things come and go, but Google is incredibly unique. Their importance cannot be overstated

Yes but they were mainly a force of evil. Despite their old motto. They made the internet everything it is today, a hellscape of tracking, advertising and other monetisation.

None of this is an endorsement of the company - I am almost done de-googling my life. They are terrible.

It doesn’t change the fact that they literally impacted the trajectory of how the internet developed in a very obvious, concrete way.

I'm not sure AI fully dodges it either. I've asked questions like "best [cuisine] in [place]" and the AI answers with a truly mediocre restaurant that has an amazing website.

Probably true. That said, I spend most of my time querying LLMs for more objective and less financially motivated information. The only time I ask for recommendations is for new routes to explore by bike, and even then it will adapt if you tell it why a route is bad.

I suspect that product and service recommendations will be a near impossible problem to solve. Any time there is a potential for financial gain, someone will figure out how to game the system. Even if it could be resolved, the queries would have to focus on objective criteria ("best" is too subjective).

Sure, we can't all agree on "the best tacos in San Diego" but we all know the answer isn't Taco Bell.

But then once you get shit results, don't you iterate on the prompt and try again? In this case, add what you actually care about, not just "best cuisine" which can mean a lot of things, and also straight up tell it to not focus on the website or whatever, then eventually you'll get somewhat reasonable and applicable results.

Nope--I was on vacation, walked to the place, and saw it looked like a disaster, but then everyone was hungry and we were already out and about. Too late for more research. I picked a place the old-fashioned way, by walking around and seeing what was nearby. We did fine.

I think the problem is Google stopped prioritizing search quality and instead let ads and now AI content dominate their search.

Ironic, isn't it? Same here.