Somehow makes me think of the times before modern food safety regulations, when adulterations with substances such as formaldehyde or arsenic were common, apparently: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7323515/ We may be in a similar age regarding information now. Of course, this has always been a problem with the internet, but I would argue that AI (and the way oligopolistic companies are shoving it into everything) is making it infinitely worse.
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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I've already predicted that scraper activity would crash due to AI in my most recent MoreWrite essay, and seeing this only makes me confident in that assessment.
On a wider front, I suspect that web search in general's gonna dive in popularity - even if scraper activity remains the same during the AI winter, the bubble (with plenty of help from Google) has completely broken the web ecosystem which allowed search engines (near-exclusively Google) to thrive, through triggering a slop-nami that drowned human-made art, supercharging SEO's ability to bury quality output, and enabling AI Summary™ services which steal traffic through stealing work.
I guess the question here really boils down to: Can (less-than-perfect) capitalism solve this problem somehow (by allowing better solutions to prevail), or is it bound to fail due to the now-insurmountable market power of existing players?
I think the hardest part is the sheer volume of content to sift through and index on today's Internet. It is a completely different, and MUCH larger, beast than when Google was made in a garage in 1998 and quickly took the world by storm.
I have confidence that an open source/crowd sourced effort could beat Googles results, but the computational power and backend are I think the biggest gating factor. It would also need to be completely distributed with a lot of duplicate data for fault tolerance, but also a way to have a "source of truth" so that malicious users couldn't rewrite/poison data.
Yeah and for all its faults, google still works well at times, I try to use more ddgo, but at times it is easier to find what I want using google. (Or at all), doesnt always work however and google has a massive 'we are pointing to our own stuff/people who pay or might pay first'. Searched for 'lets play' recently and it was very obvious. (You can do that yourself, search for that and see how long it takes you to get to the something awful lets play page, and note the urls of all the results before that (also note not just how many publicates there are but how many are yr)), of course I could have searched for 'lets play something awful' but I wanted to see how long it took for it to show up. (And if SA appears that late, what chance do smaller new non-slop projects have, if only google has less sloppers).
It's also very difficult to get search results in English when this isn't set as your first language in Google, even if your entire search term is in English. Even "Advanced Search" doesn't seem to work reliably here, and of course, it always brings up the AI overview first, even if you clicked advanced search from the "Web" tab.
At least you can fix AI overview shit for yourself and others you know using the https://udm14.com/ method (click the how it works thing to see how it actually works so you can edit your search urls to include that).