I decided to lookup some history of my local area, and i was reading a whole page until i noticed some things didnt add up. It was stating some obscure things such as it (the local place) has it’s own currency and whatnot.
I decided to check the sources they used, and i noticed it was some stupid wiki page made by Grok.
Sure i can’t fact chek all of it, small point’s were correct but for crying out loud. Please.
I don’t think people, including the ones responding to you, have the causality right. It’s not that searching is broken (although it is) but the actual human internet is dead. You can switch from Google to Bing to DDG to No AI DDG to Ecosia to Kaji, but they’re all just pointing to different orders of the same low quality junk websites. I don’t think we can optimally search our way out of the sea of slop and referral links that makes up the vast majority of the internet now.
RIP human internet (1980ish - 2020ish). We had a good run.
Except that there are publicly available court documents from a case against Google showing that in the 2010s they started intentionally reducing the quality of search results (or at bare minimum refusing to roll out fully built and tested improvements to it) in order to artificially boost impressions and click through of the paid ads on their search results. See “The Man Who Killed Google Search” by Ed Zitron on his Where’s your Ed At blog.
So it’s a combination. Things started going downhill with the popular search engines far earlier in attempts to boost ads and with the hyperproliferation of sketchy SEO tactics, then the whole house of cards got fucking bulldozed by AI.
But I’d also argue that the human internet is hanging on fine, it’s just a massive pain in the ass to find good sources and maintain your own personal list of "go to"s.
I downloaded Wikipedia in 2020 just to have something
Wait thats smart, have every wiki page archived pre LLM
This is probably a case of blind men touching an elephant, but Kagi to me genuinely feels like Google did 15 years ago.
The actually-useful static content of the internet is still there buried under the deluge of slop.
Kagi is the one big alternative I haven’t tried because of the paywall, but maybe I’ll finally bite the bullet.