alt Hacker NewsI wonder if web searches used to be pretty productive, then declined as sponsored results and SEO degraded things.
Nowadays an ai assist with a web search usually eliminates the search altogether and gives you a clear answer right away.
for example, "how much does a ford f-150 cost" will give you something ballpark in a second, compared to annoying "research" to find the answer shrouded in corporate obfuscation.
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Allegedly the 'clear' answer is much easier to manipulate than gaming PageRank ever was:
I used to be able to google a question like that and get an accurate answer within the top 3 results nearly every time about 20 years ago. Then it got worse and worse and became pretty much completely useless about 10 years ago.
Now AI will give me a confident answer that is outright wrong 20% of the time or kind of right but not really 30% of the time. So now I ask something using an AI chatbot and carefully word it so as to have it not get off topic and focus on what I actually want to know, wait 30 seconds for its long ass answer to finish, skim it for the relevant parts, then google the answer and try to see where the AI sourced its answer from and determine whether it misinterpreted/mixed up results or it's accurate. What used to be a 10 second google search is now a 2-3 minute exercise.
I can see very much how people say AI has somehow led to productivity losses. It's shit like this, and it floods the internet and makes real info harder to find, making this cycle worse and worse and take more and more time for basic stuff.
My mother lost her phone so I asked her to search for "find my iphone" on Google.
The result started with 3 "sponsored links" which threw her down the rabbit hole.
This used to be easy.
I was just thinking exactly the same. Basic web search has become so horrible that AI is being used as its replacement.
I found it a sad condemnation of how far the tech industry has fallen into enshittification and is failing to provide tools that are actually useful.
then declined as sponsored results and SEO degraded things
In the 2000s, everything was open because of the ad driven model. Then ad blockers, mobile subscription model, and the dominance of a few apps such as Instagram and Youtube sucking up all the ad revenue made having an open web unsustainable.
How many Hacker News style open forums are left? Most open forums are dead because discussions happen on login platforms like Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, X, Discord, etc. The only reason HN is alive is because HN doesn't make need to make money. It's an ad for Y Combinator.
SEO only became an issue when all there is for crawlers is SEO content instead of true genuine content.
> I wonder if web searches used to be pretty productive, then declined as sponsored results and SEO degraded things.
Used to be.
> Nowadays an ai assist with a web search usually eliminates the search altogether and gives you a clear answer right away.
Now.
The turning point was around when google stopped honoring Boolean ops and quotation marks