Because "Fuck you, pay me"

the reason why google search results went to shit is because google did some basic maths.

99% of search queries actually ask for information that you can find on one of the top websites. only about 1% actually care about anything besides that.

so if you deliver results only due to a rather superficial algorithm, you will still retain about 99% of your userbase, but the computation cost for finding these results would go down dramatically. so you save a lot of money on electricity, while serving almost as many ads. it pays off for google.

SEO and decent search results were having a fist fight for years, then AI showed up and shot it in the face.

You might try to give one of the alternative search providers a try. There's duck duck go for the USA, and Qwant for the EU.

It's simple. Cause Search engines transformed to ad engines.

SEO did this. It started before LLM and chatGPT. Blogger make money be generating trafic. So they wrote shits in a format that please search engine.

That's why if you search "search into file Linux", instead of just a grep command line, you end up on 2000 lines article with introduction, paragraph, explanation, blablabla. Because search engine boost this kind of content. Title, introduction paragraph that repeat the title, subsections, etc...

Because the AI hallucinations are pushed ahead of traditional search engine results?

This evening I was repairing something. My google search gave an AI summary that gave two important dimensions of a part I needed. I was like "OK let's go eat"

Two hours later, because I didn't write anything down, I entered the same search verbatim and got a different AI summary missing one of the dimensions.

We have made computing non-deterministic. We're busy giving sentience to refrigerators that can't keep ice cream frozen.

I've never seen any search engine officially confirm this, but search across all search engines became terrible just a few months after the release of ChatGPT.
Which is why my assumption is that LLMs are being used to generate heaps of credible-looking, but ultimately worthless webpages. And search engines have to try to filter those out or their results would be even worse.

But then there's no obvious distinction between a human-crafted blog and some spam webpage, which means the human-crafted blog is likely to be caught in the crossfire and get filtered as well.

Well, and on top of that, search engines presumably got hit by AI scrapers looking for training data, so that's why I would assume, they now limit the search results to one page...

If I remember correctly, around 5 or 6 years ago, Google Search leadership changed such that the ads org started running it. The focus since then has been on advertisers rather than regular users.

This is literally the definition of enshittification: the company first focuses on gaining users, then switches the focus to business customers, then squeezes both of them.

I read an article about it somewhere, but, can't find it. Basically the guy in charge of search realized they were at the highest level of users they can get so the only way to increase search traffic is to make it just bad enough you have to search different phrasing a couple of times to get the result therefore increasing search traffic.

Because it makes AI much more appealing.

No more reading about the recipe author's grandma and how the food reminds them of home. AI will extract the useful info and ignore the SEO bullshit.

There was more money in showing you things than there was in helping you find things.

If you ever watched any of the saturday morning, over the air, wrestling "news" shows in the 80s and 90s, then that's all everything is now. There used to be a pretty good article about it.

If you're not paying for it, then you're not the user, you're the product.

It's called enshitification, basically web services get worse so that you spend more time on them and see more adds. Switching from Google to Duck Duck Go has made things a little bit better for me.

I know it's not the thing you likely want to hear, but... At this point, I'm glad I switched to a paid search engine (Kagi).

Theoretically, there's nothing stopping them from enshittifying down the road. But at least for now (and hopefully the future) they are a great search engine.

They have their own index (so no relying on google/bing), and it actually works as I remember Google working 7+ years ago. Minus the ads, and plus a ton of flexibility permanently boosting/removing sites from your searches, auto-grouping/ignoring listicle-type articles in results, flagging sites as AI slop and punishing them for it,...

They even have a fediverse search "lense" that actually works really well to search Lemmy/mastodon/...

I just realized I sound like a paid shill. Sorry about that. I'm not.

I do think that part of the problem is that so much up-to-date information is now trapped in discord, also that people are generally using forums and the like less to solve their technical problems because they're privately querying robots. This on top of enshittification... We did not know how good we had it 20 years ago

I use kagi and metager. They've solved it for the most part for me.

The goal of a search engine is to make the company money, not to aid you in finding what you are looking for.

Greed