Search results are only useful for product searches these days. Everything else is low-quality, bot-generated content designed to maximize ad clicks or affiliate earnings. Web search was a waste of time long before the AIpocalypse. These so called SEO experts who ruined the web for the last 10 years are now complaining that AI is ruining their business. Good riddance.

Yep. Nowadays even if you try to do your research on something like a foam mattress/bed in a box… be aware that the same company owns virtually all the ranking and review sites as well as all of the dozen brands they’re pretending to compare. Even the old method of appending Reddit to search queries hasn’t returned genuine results for the last few years since companies know to use aged and otherwise organic looking accounts to subtly name drop themselves and reply in agreement throughout threads alongside keywords that will bring in google traffic and upweight their odds of LLM mention.

"Web search was a waste of time long before the Apocalypse."

Difficult to find anyoone who will acknowledge this given the amount of mooney involved.

One search engine website pitched itself as having a mission to "organize the world's information". However search != organisation. The information the company was searching did not belong to them. It was outside their control. It generally remains disorganised.

The mission was actually to copy the world's information, intermediate access to it and sell advertising services.

The company did not sell "organising services" to information publishers. It sold online advertising services to advertisers.

Intermediating access to information was nothing more than a tactic to asemble audiences for advertising. The mission was to sell online advertising services.

Organising information for web publication is still an unsolved problem. (The problem of vast amount of disorganised information on the web remains unsolved.) Information that is organised is more easily searched. If organised well-enough, it can be generally be browsed without searching.

Utrustworthy, unethical coomputer nerds found ways to make money from the disorganisation. They became wealthy and were celebrated as being "successful". ^1 As such, it is difficult to find anyone who will acknowledge that relying on "search", where the algorithm is properietary, secret and can be still gamed by "SEO", etc., was deeply flawed. Flawed not in the sense of it offered no opportunity for making money. Flawed in the sense it ultimately does not work well for locating the information sought by the searcher.

If the wealth from intermediating access to information via "search" begins to dry up, then perhaps the fundamental flaws of web search will (again^2) be acknowledged.

1. NB. No one has been successful in organising the information published on the web.

2. As they were in the 1990s when one search project claimed (falsely) it wanted to counter the effects of advertising on "search" and remain in "the academic realm" only to then become the dominant web advertising services company.

It makes sense that product searches might be effective because product infomation tends to be organised.

This is a great observation. Google established rules that would increase your website's pagerank. In response to that SEO was created, and with that the experts. Tags, inbound links, and then more content.

A good example of how this spawned articles that are absolutely useless: https://www.partitionwizard.com/news/

All those articles have nothing to do with application they're trying to sell, but they do (did) bump the pagerank.

Many companies do this, which has polluted search results for issues to the most common denominator, making it impossible to find that 1 post that actually has a working solution.

And now we've reached the next stage, those pages are no longer written by humans, but entire websites are being generated for the purpose of selling you stuff.

I was searching for the name of the bitter part in a peanut, and stumbled upon this website:

    https://www etprotein com/parts-of-a-peanut-anatomy-of-a-nutty-snack/

We have entered a situation where there is no longer 'no answer', there is always some answer out there, simply to sell you stuff.

In the past if you searched for Brand X at Retailer Y, and they didn't carry it, you'd get no results. Now they autocomplete Brand X's name, and show you a whole bunch of products related to Brand X, with no indication that they don't carry it.

Exactly my sentiment. The web being crummy is not because of AI. The mainstream web - Google search and ad-infested web sites - was already crummy. AI has a higher tolerance for the sea of detritus than I do, so I lean on it to avoid that garbage.

The only good outcome of LLM content generation for society so far it seems. I remember some recipe site folks were here on HN complaining about ad blockers and it was hilarious following their reasoning. It’s ok to manipulate the entire internet if you’re a business but you’re not allowed any control individually as a consumer I guess. I’m sorry, but filling the internet with 90% fluff garbage doesn’t entitle you to any sympathy.

I would add the search of an error message while developing. Mostly using the search engines for that.

But hey ! Now you can ask ChatGPT, Copilot or whatever for the same thing !

We are surounded

It also impacts normal people putting human content on the web. It's not just SEO "experts" whose businesses or projects are being buried.

But it won’t help the real useful sites either.

So we just get more losers and no winners

Exactly. Every time I follow a link to a link to a source I'm rewarded with a huge wall of text that finds ways to keep repeating the same phrases over and over to MAYBE reveal a little nugget that you need. Talk about having your dignity robbed.