I don’t think it’s intentional, but I think the sheer quantity of AI slop and web crawlers trying to train new AI models is the main problem. Good websites are blocking access to search engines to try to slow crawler traffic, while shitty websites are being made at an unprecedented speed. I legitimately don’t know how you fix this as a search engine provider.
Cmon. How many people used to say something was not done intentionally, only to be proven wrong again and again. Remember the syphilis experiments on black people that the USA gov secretly did? And that doctors co-operated with? The panama papers? The Phobos Cartel?
Always assume they are doing it on purpose! At least someone is aware they are sabotaging their search engine, and plans to profit from it.
Occam’s razor. We know for a fact that websites are are stopping web crawlers to try and prevent the AI which is going to reduce the searchability in the search engine
We know that there are more websites being created now than in the past every single day
Combine these two things and it’s going to mean that search engines are less useful
Conspiracies help no one and they are very very rarely accurate when they are accurate it’s because there is not a single conceivable possible simple solution to the problem
In this case, there is a simple solution that answers everything. So why there could be and there probably is intelligent design behind why things have gone worse the chances of it being the main reason is zero
When search engine optimization becomes a target, content suffers. If Google changed their algorithm to only rank websites with high quality content instead of keyword-stuffed content, we’d see a great improvement in the quality of the internet.
The real kicker is how you even decide what quality is. A one line script that updates a driver may be a solution to your issue. A four page walkthrough that rambles and gets you to your answer but only after an hour is still a solution, but is it better quality? The issue is that you can’t quantify quality. Even if you managed to for something like programming, you couldn’t apply that same logic to horticulture. The issue is that quality isn’t something you can stick in an algorithm.
Right, quality is not something that is easy to figure out algorithmically. But adding arbitrary rules like “content length” or “time on page” directly ruins quality by incentivizing content manipulation.
I’ve never seen convincing arguments for that. However, if you think about it, Google wants you to stay scrolling through it forever. The more sponsored links and ads they can show, the more money they make. They didn’t need to make it worse for AI, they made it worse for profit
Im encountering alot of AI created websites that explain concepts like “side effects of X pill” (a recent example) and there was basically no real medical websites in the top results, Just clearly AI using thousands of words to say nothing that I cant trust.
I was considering locally hosting a search engine to circumvent my need for them entirely. Search engine optimization seems like a nightmare, if they were trying to give me useful results. So im not sure if that would be a spend 5 hours to save 5 minutes situation.
As you and others said, Its been getting worse for years so its probably just a coincidence that its also profitable for AI.
Im convinced they made search engines worse to promote AI usage.
I don’t think it’s intentional, but I think the sheer quantity of AI slop and web crawlers trying to train new AI models is the main problem. Good websites are blocking access to search engines to try to slow crawler traffic, while shitty websites are being made at an unprecedented speed. I legitimately don’t know how you fix this as a search engine provider.
Cmon. How many people used to say something was not done intentionally, only to be proven wrong again and again. Remember the syphilis experiments on black people that the USA gov secretly did? And that doctors co-operated with? The panama papers? The Phobos Cartel?
Always assume they are doing it on purpose! At least someone is aware they are sabotaging their search engine, and plans to profit from it.
Occam’s razor. We know for a fact that websites are are stopping web crawlers to try and prevent the AI which is going to reduce the searchability in the search engine
We know that there are more websites being created now than in the past every single day
Combine these two things and it’s going to mean that search engines are less useful
Conspiracies help no one and they are very very rarely accurate when they are accurate it’s because there is not a single conceivable possible simple solution to the problem
In this case, there is a simple solution that answers everything. So why there could be and there probably is intelligent design behind why things have gone worse the chances of it being the main reason is zero
Search engines were returning shit more and more, before LLMs even existed.
So they were enshittifying search engines in advance, so what? AI wasn’t born yesterday.
When search engine optimization becomes a target, content suffers. If Google changed their algorithm to only rank websites with high quality content instead of keyword-stuffed content, we’d see a great improvement in the quality of the internet.
The real kicker is how you even decide what quality is. A one line script that updates a driver may be a solution to your issue. A four page walkthrough that rambles and gets you to your answer but only after an hour is still a solution, but is it better quality? The issue is that you can’t quantify quality. Even if you managed to for something like programming, you couldn’t apply that same logic to horticulture. The issue is that quality isn’t something you can stick in an algorithm.
Right, quality is not something that is easy to figure out algorithmically. But adding arbitrary rules like “content length” or “time on page” directly ruins quality by incentivizing content manipulation.
Then someone targets them for pushing their biases because they are deciding quality.
I’ve never seen convincing arguments for that. However, if you think about it, Google wants you to stay scrolling through it forever. The more sponsored links and ads they can show, the more money they make. They didn’t need to make it worse for AI, they made it worse for profit
Im encountering alot of AI created websites that explain concepts like “side effects of X pill” (a recent example) and there was basically no real medical websites in the top results, Just clearly AI using thousands of words to say nothing that I cant trust.
I was considering locally hosting a search engine to circumvent my need for them entirely. Search engine optimization seems like a nightmare, if they were trying to give me useful results. So im not sure if that would be a spend 5 hours to save 5 minutes situation.
As you and others said, Its been getting worse for years so its probably just a coincidence that its also profitable for AI.