Just heard this today - co worker used an LLM to find him some shoes that fit. Basically prompted it to find specific shoes that fit wider/narrower feet and it just scraped reviews and told him what to get. I guess it worked perfectly for him.
I hate this sort of thing - however this is why normies love LLM’s. It’s going to be the new way every single person uses the internet. Hell, on a new win 11 install the first thing that comes up is copilot saying “hey use me i’m better than google!!”
Frustrating.
Search engines have cratered.
There’s a need to skim through all the crap to find what’s valuable, and AI offers to do that.
I have used it to learn things, specifically how to use Angular. Angular has enough versions, all still used somewhere, that genuinely valid and helpful advice from a few years ago is misleading. AI didn’t so much take the place of a tutorial, it took my whole code and reviewed it, telling me what was wrong. Then I fact-checked its answers because I don’t trust it, and yeah, it wasn’t always correct itself, but it was more than 80% of the time, and even when it was wrong, it got me close enough that I could find the right answer where it failed.
Also, it does a great job with CSS right out of the gate, no mistakes yet on that front.
But that’s literally already the job of a search engine?
The reason there’s “all the crap” is because genAI is destroying the fabric of the open web.
We need to support tools like Kagi, discussion forums and chat rooms where real people help, and be proactive in posting solutions and tutorials on indie blogs which simultaneously block AI crawlers. GenAI tooling is fundamentally unethical and unsustainable; regurgitating other people’s content while harming the environment. I understand you have a need to search for some solutions to some problems. That’s fine. What’s not fine is reaching for the destroyer of worlds. I encourage you to find alternative methods.
It’s a huge factor, but sweatshop-written spam and SEO honeypots were destroying the web well before LLMs were a usable thing, as was Google’s decision not to derank them.
This is 100% correct. Sure AI might help it go faster, but “search” was enshittified to an extreme level before AI ever showed up
If by “search” you mean Google. I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for close to a decade. It’s been pretty good. Kagi is now even better.
Ehhh, I get tons of spam from DDG, even though its my default search.
So we have two problems: SEO gamification and now slopification. Expecting the same sorts of companies who let these problems become existential to fix these problems is…well, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell ya. 😂
I don’t expect a fix, heh. I expect it to be squeezed past the grave. The search-crawlable internet is burning down, and no one with power is slowing it.
I suspect the ‘web’ will just get more balkanized into apps and such, and all the AI/search providers will reach into their own little silos for stuff.