Search engines in the AI era

Other Technology
1

I am probably not alone and old enough to remember what the internet looked like in the pre-google era, like Altavista search engine, web sites directories etc.
How google shaped the web with a FAST and precise search engine.

Then a couple of years ago the AI craze came and searching something on the web is becoming almost a mission impossible for some reasons.
The search query is apparently no more related to contents inside the web site, but to what AI agents “think” you are asking them.

Honestly I am quite old school, and I want to query their DB to search for a web page or site related content, not for hallucinated “answers”.

Microsoft was probably one of the first pioneering the automated responses. More then once I stomped on their answers forum only to find what looked like a pile of… machine generated “suboptimal” content. Even the users were likely fake profiles of “MSP experts” or “external consultants”: if you looked at one of them you would find interactions in multiple languages, many replies with generic workflows and apparently unrelated to the question.
IMHO it was a big experiment of the big M

I am switching to duckduckgo, but their quality is not so good and it is starting to get poisoned from AI and getting slower and slower.
By comparison Bing and Google are taking more time, (compared to 5 years ago a lot of time and likely computational resources) to output garbage.

Am I the one hallucinating here?
Google was FAST, now it is unbearable SLOW and irrelevant content is everywhere.

2

It’s not just the AI. ALL search engine results are bought and paid for. The more you pay, the closer to the top you get.

3

That used to be a thing in the past too, but since a couple of year ago I started to see lot of garbage results, not even close to what I am looking for. That is my main concern.

I can filter ads with a custom hosts file and with some browser extension I could clean up lot of paid contents from results, but the quality of the very results I get from my queries is just bad. It was not so bad in the past, at least I could get the website I was looking for, or its cached copy…now they took away the cached copy and return random contents trying to answer my question??

4

Almost all results are paid.

In order for our website to appear in the top 100 results, we have to pay an SEO. If we want to appear in the top 10, we have to pay an SEO way more.

There may not be a “sponsored” label next to it, but if it appears on the first few pages of a google search, someone paid to have that position