A few years ago anything you wanted to search for would generate hundreds of pages of results. From sources all over. If you structured your query well you could dramatically cut down the irrelevant results and then spend a bit of time skimming through the offerings until you found your target.
Searching felt like a hunt, it could take you to far flung corners of the web, and hitting the jackpot on some obscure forum was part of the fun.
Now searching anything feels incredibly frustrating. You know what you are looking for is out there somewhere but it feels impossible getting to it. Basically we have only two main routes now, Google and Bing (and I swear Bing is just copying Google's homework). I've tried a handful of others and they all fall very short.
Something has changed dramatically under the hood.
It seems like the results are very shallow and no amount of prodding will get either search engine to produce anything besides the laziest output. Any subject has a limited pool of sites they lean on and then pretend that that's all of the Internet.
It generalizes very quickly and if you try to counter by putting things in quotations it gives up.
Even in the rare moments I've buckled and used their stupid AI, it takes even more time browbeating the program to just deliver the damned specifics.
What is going on??
How do we get our old search back?
I swear every day of trying to navigate the web feels worse than the day before.
How did we get here?
There's got to be something better, right? Or something we can do to pave a new structure that benefits the denizens of the web better than the lazy slop our tech overlords scrape off the table for us. What can we do?
True, but that reeks of victim blaming. The spammers are to blame here, not the mathematical inevitability of antispammers being behind on the arms race. Also, fucking AI.
No. It’s a challenge to all the brainiacs out there hacking high security servers with a freaking TV remote. I hope that they’ll read “Nobody today can develop a search engine that can’t be spammed,” and say to themselves, “I accept that challenge.”
Also, AI has been spamming forever. One of the tricks they did in the 2000s was to spam forums with links to websites so that Google would think those sites were more important than they actually were. In 2009, I hosted a forum that went nowhere, left it unattended for a month and came back to find bots had spammed it into oblivion with links. AI isn’t a new problem.