It wasn't to push people to use chatbot, but it does helo understand why so many people use chatbots. I had to use Google search in a computer (extra: without adblocks) after years, then it made me think it finally makes sense why people ask chatbots everything instead of just searching.

I think this is giving Google too much credit.

Sure, some of it was about getting people to search multiple times so they get more ad impressions.

But, a big part of it is that Google has been waging war against SEO and spam from day 1, and they're losing ground / lost.

This explanation that it was just a way to make more money implies that if Google wanted they could show you the exact results you wanted, but I don't think that's true anymore.

Google's initial algorithm was Page Rank. They looked at how many sites linked to your site. The more sites that linked to it, the more people who thought your site was high quality. You couldn't game it by anything you put on your site because the ranking came from other people's impressions of you. But with enough money, that was easily defeated by buying up / starting up thousands of sites and promoting another site by linking to it.

Since then it has been a cat and mouse game. Google tweaks their process to reduce inauthentic "recommendations", the SEO people change their methods and get back into the top results. For a while Google was winning, but even before AI, they were already losing more and more often.

The rise of Facebook and other social media just made it worse. Google didn't have deep visibility into these sites, so they couldn't carefully look over metadata to help judge whether something was authentic. Meanwhile, it became cheaper and cheaper to put up inauthentic content that attempted to boost a site's placement on Google.

I think the pivot to AI is as much Google admitting defeat in the war against SEOs as it is about them trying to make money from a new venture.

Dev decisions lmao

I guarantee not a single dev wants to optimize for ad impressions, particularly in search where that means you have to make search worse so it would take multiple queries to find your results. No, that's a business decision. Comes from up high. Prabhakar Raghavan may have been a computer scientist early on in his career but he'd been in the C suite on again off again at different companies for well over a decade by the time they deposed the head of search at Google and put search under the leadership of the ads division (Raghavan).

damnit, if I didn't already have my search engine name in use....

DDG is sadly just a Bing frontend and has disastrous results as well. Even worse than Google somehow.

I am here to let you know I am an Arch wizard

Indeed! The old magiks were good enough. Thye young ones today could do well to learn some lines of command!

They are worse though for power user types. They do shit like omit "of" in "Ring of Fire Spells" because it seems it as meaningless but people who use search like it's a computer instead of "Dear Gooblin pwees five me spells for rings made of fire" and get all generic and shit, it sucks.

Because power user types are precise in their search, and search engines are increasingly stripping that precision for stupid reasons.

I don't think that is true. For example, when it comes to cooking, I know a few hand-made non-seo pages that I frequent that have a nice selection and presentation of recipes. Those never come up in the search results, only the shit sites.

It's both though. Entshittification of search engines and internet content is a symbiotic process.

I think the best content on the Internet hasn't gotten worse, but there is so much trash now so the average got dragged down.

Search engines are supposed to find the best content for us but have failed miserably as of late.

• LLM's are developed that can regurgitate the signal and discard the noise (or at least probabilistically mimic that).

What happens tomorrow? Who knows?

Actually, the signal to noise ratio of LLMs has already begun deteriorating and now that they're mostly fed data by themselves and/or other LLMs, it's only going to get worse. Probably exponentially so.

I'm sure tomorrow it's gonna get worse still just like everything else out there.