Discussion
For years I've talked about the decline in the quality of search engines. Google, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Qwant and many others. I've tried many search engines and all of them have the same problem:
The top results for far too many searches are AI-generated SEO boosting fake information pages with a high density of text and very low quality images and information.
Every time I bring this up I get a new suggestion for a search engine, and I take those suggestions, but the problem persists.
Naturally we have all learned what will happen once the search market is captured. The higher quality results that attracted users to these tools will be eroded by advertising, new SEO spam and junk. The circle of life. Or death?
Is there any non-profit group working on making better search to help us navigate this internet filled with so much trash?
@futurebird I think, search engines should be run by a public library institutions, with some diversity through private and academic alternatives. They're basically a public service anyway.
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Do you know what won't give you an AI generated page as a top result? An LLM.
I don't know if the AI generated SEO slop is just hard to filter, or if it's just that no one cares about improving traditional search anymore, but the vectors are aligning to push people away from using search and towards using LLMs.
It is true that the design of a LLM doesn't really make sense for a search engine and the marketing play here is obvious. But most search engines are just that bad.