I'm not sure that I've phrased this question well, or that I even know how to ask this question well.
Once upon a time, I looked at the web as akin to an igneous rock, whereas now I think of it as a sedimentary rock.
The web has changed a lot in the last ~5 years. Sure, it can withstand a nuclear blast or whatever it was designed to withstand, but it clearly wasn't designed to have usage patterns designed to endure.
For me, the thing that really drove this point home was a (possibly fake, possibly a joke) business card I once saw online. I don't specifically remember where I saw it, but I remember it was like a name and then where the title would typically go, it said "bounty hunter, soldier of fortune," and other dubious jobs. When I saw it, I thought it was hilarious. However, when I tried to find it again years later, I could not.
That experience got me to thinking that the primary usage pattern I had come to expect was not prevalent. Moreover, I remember having to cite sources in school papers by listing URLs, and I was never also taught that those links are transient -- that was something I learned via living.
Obviously, a public school college professor is not like a magic oracle that knows all the right answers and how the future unfolds, I get that. This all just gets me to thinking about the ephemerality of knowledge. I remember being very enthusiastic about Google once upon a time. I saw a Google video where someone from there said Google's mission was to make all human knowledge universally accessible. I was like majorly seduced by that. Now ~20 years later, the web -- you know: the one Google owns ๐ -- is like a maze of ads. That isn't really what I had in mind when I heard "all human knowledge."
Anyway, I mention all of this because my first impression was that humans sought to record what was known so as to build upon that. Now, my impression is that the digital commons got turned into forum of captive buyers without the language used ever changing, so it's a shift that's difficult to detect.
A couple of comments.
The Google of old isn't today's Google. They dropped the don't be evil for a reason. Their unspoken motto is now - We're Evil with a capital E. Everything is dual use. E.g. Google maps makes getting around new areas easy, but the US also now has precision targeting data of everything globally. Equally, you are the product not the customer. US military and corporate power get google's good stuff. You get ads and enshittification. Your disappointment is because you aren't aware of your proper place in the grand scheme of things, and are just now on the verge of understanding with this post.
Postsecondary papers are only supposed to cite academically rigorous research from respectable journals. You are talking about high school "research" methods outside of acceptable contexts. I was just talking to my son minutes ago about how most web searches now pull up bot slop, and the dead internet theory is no longer a theory.
As for enduring usage patterns, life is evolution. Technology is exponentially more so. This is why science fiction is full of dystopian tech gone wrong. We literally know humans can't keep up and its only a matter of time before this all gets away from us.
We were already drowning in too much data that can't be synthesized 40 years ago. Now it's infinitely more so. To counter this, LLMs will sift through the data and escalate as required.