> Google did great search before AI overviews

not really... search was great in 2008 or 2014, but not in 2022. seo spammers won by then, and their writing was even worse than opus 5.

I remember that the sites google shown before were sites you could get lost in. often they were communities. often they were sites actually written by an enthusiast of a subject.

these sites died. I wonder whether google was the victim or the culprit. the death of these sites did end up making their product worse. however, any site that actually hooked you meant less ad revenue for google. google wants you to come back from the result, since that's a second chance for you to click the ad. a result you come back from however is inherently a bad result.