this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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In the late 90s and early 2000s, internet search engines were designed to actually find relevant things ... it's what made Google famous
Since the 2010s, internet search engines have all been about monetizing, optimizing, directing, misdirecting, manipulating searches in order to drive users to the highest paying companies or businesses, groups or individuals that best knew how to use Search Engine Optimization. For the past 20 years, we've created an internet based on how we can manipulate everyone and everything in order to make someone money. The internet is no longer designed to freely and openly share information ... it's now just a wasteland of misinformation, disinformation, nonsense and manipulation because we are all trying to make money off one another in some way.
AI is just making all those problems bigger, faster and more chaotic. It's trying to make money for someone but it doesn't know how yet .... but they sure are working on trying to figure it out.
Not just the search engines, but the websites themselves as well. Gaming the search engines is now an entire profitable industry, not just people putting links to their friends' websites at the bottom of their webpage, or making a webring.
It's just been a race to the bottom. The search engines get worse, as do the websites, and the whole thing is exacerbated by people today being able to churn out entire websites by the hundreds. Anyone trying to do things without playing the game simply ends up buried under layers of rubbish.
The Sages of the modern day are the lucky few who know which old and boring sites to ask for an answer.
I'd say it's a reflection of society.