Can we talk about Google Search et al.'s planned obsolescence?

Question

Specifically, the way that both "backbone" search engines seem to have been degraded in order to push users towards AI offerings. Queries that used to reliably find useful links, now don't. But Gemini and ChatGPT find them (after a much longer "thinking" process). It's like they've hidden the older, actually effective functions behind the LLM chatbot interfaces.No one else is alarmed by this?

n1xis10t · Accepted Answer

Yes, it seems to be the case. Yes, it alarms me too. The question is what can be done about it? There are supposed to be good alternatives to Google, but for whatever reason search engines keep disappearing. Here is an article that I read about that: https://archive.org/details/search-timelineI think that before progress can be made, someone has to figure out if it really is just super hard to make a search engine (and if that&rsquo;s the case maybe solutions can be found depending on what the specific problems are) or if there is something else going on. I think the only way to do that might be to try making a search engine and see what happens.