You underestimate how many people have just forgone the usage of search engines. Most people these days just go to their preferred AI site or app and just take at face value whatever slop it spits out. No one reads or verifies anymore. It would be something if they were using that “saved time” on something productive but alas it’s just to go back to doom scrolling or something else just as meaningless. It’s depressing :/

Do you have any data to back up that claim? I have the same feeling with some people, but I wouldn’t go as far as stating this as general truth for most.

I think it’s intentional. It’s a royal pain in the ass to search for anything now. I’m resorting to using old hard drives to find old memes and software.

It wouldn’t surprise me that companies collaborate to get rid of things. I still can’t find the original iShit meme from 2006.

Introducing the iShit; It looks so good, you won’t even notice the smell.

Search engines have been corrupted by SEO garbage and ads presented as legitimate search results. Calling an ad “sponsored” is disingenuous at best. Using LLMs instead of searching is a logical progression. Slightly related to that are the people that search and just read the LLM summary at the top.

I’ve heard from marketing people that they’re starting to publish blog spam to try and steer people’s LLM conversations, so I think even the current LLM usage will eventually be even worse than search is currently.

Search results also really suck these days. It’s pages upon pages of SEO slop.

I agree, they don’t read summaries, they stop at headlines.

Consider the news articles lately about restaurants using AI-generated pictures of their food. It takes only the briefest glance at the picture to see and think “Holy fucking shit, that looks fucking revolting.”

But they post, and sometimes even print these pictures. Which indicates that they’re not even giving that one, brief glance at the output.

To be fair they used to have those menus done by specialized “design agencies” that didn’t give a shit and they didn’t really look at the output. All they’re seeing is that the design agency now costs nothing. I think the bitter lesson is that there are tasks where quality really doesn’t matter and never did.

I used to work for a company that had a built-in AI summary in their search engine.

1: We were required to click the links that got printed out in the summaries. 2: That rule also applied to our helpline with worse consequences.

I’d occasionally call our helpline when I couldn’t figure something out/wanted a second opinion on a judgment call. The amount of times I got told “The AI said-” yes but WHAT DO THE DOCS SAY??? I don’t care what the digital meat grinder that tells me to break the law once an hours says!

All to say, yeah, people don’t click through on those links. I’d wager most people who use it don’t

People have rarely ever read past the first paragraph of an article. Even during newspaper times.