It all makes sense when you realize that AI isn’t the product, control is.

When everyone depends on cloud services, especially storage, because they can’t afford hard drives or RAM anymore. Do you think the average normie is going to “stand up for principles of privacy and freedom of computing” or are they gonna say “it is what it is” and buy a tablet with 8GB of RAM and an office suite in the cloud?

Do you think these companies are above scanning everyone’s stuff to find out who is against them? Who is developing some great new idea? Who dissents the government?

Do you think these companies are above editing all saved copies of a news article and replacing it with something AI generated that looks real enough to memory hole something? (Copies of things in the cloud are already de-duplicated)

They don’t want us to be able to point out their flaws anymore. They want us to be submissive to them.

I have indeed noticed Google (and Google-based search engines like Startpage) has got worse in the past months. Even DuckDuckGo is better now (which as a long time ddg user is wild)

I'm at a point where I gladly pay for my search engine just to get good results.

One could argue we were always paying, with our data. But now we get less in return.

To be fair, Google has been fighting a war against SEO and spam basically since it was started.

I don't think they intentionally degraded their search engine. I think they just diverted resources away from fighting spam and SEO and instead dedicated those resources to AI stuff. Intentionally degrading their search results would require work. They'd have to convince their high-paid employees that for some reason they should make the results worse. But, just letting the stuff rot naturally as SEOs kept up their attacks, that's free.