I 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.

▲ monkpit 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The turning point was around when google stopped honoring Boolean ops and quotation marks

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Antibabelic 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

When did this happen? I do exact searches on Google almost every day and it seems to honor the quotation marks just fine for me.

	▲	shakna 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		At least 2022, if not earlier. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30130535

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Wobbles42 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The killer app for AI might just be unenshittifying search for a couple of years.

Then SEO will catch up and we'll have spam again, but now we'll be paying by the token for it. Probably right around the time hallucination drops off enough to have made this viable.

I kind of want to become Amish sometimes.

▲ aurareturn an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

   then declined as sponsored results and SEO degraded things

It didn't decline because of this. It declined because of a general decade long trend of websites becoming paywalled and hidden behind a login. The best and most useful data is often inaccessible to crawlers.

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.

▲ gtowey 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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gh0stcat 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We always had the technology to do things better, it's the money making part that has made things worse technologically speaking. In this same way, I don't see how AI will resolve the problem - our productivity was never the goal, and that won't change any time soon.

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johnnyanmac 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And it'll happen again when AI models start resorting to ads once again.

	▲	emptybits 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yup. Any LLM recommendation for a product or service should be viewed with suspicion (no different than web search results or asking a commission-based human their opinion). Sponsored placements. Affiliate links. Etc. Or when asking an LLM for a comparison matrix or pros and cons between choices ... beware paid placements or sponsors. Bias could be a result of available training data (forgivable?) or due to paid prioritization (or de-prioritizing of competitors!)

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Wobbles42 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Their tools are very useful. To their customers. Not to their users.