Comment by piokoch

Well, the cycle is over.

I remember the rise and the fall of AltaVista search engine.

I remember the rise of Google that was able to circumvent all the "old days" SEO efforts by spamming keywords in the HTML headers. Then everyone was trying to guess how to game Google page rank algo.

Finally people learned how to cheat Google, searches on many topics are returning endless pages of spam, marketing content that is supposed to earn AdSenens money (Google's "disruption" of online ads, better than all those cringe banners, that, eventually, destroyed Google search).

Right now Bing is working better for me (Bing! WTF?), for some stuff I use Yandex (shrug), but most of the stuff goes through AI, if you ask them to provide source of the information and you check it, this seems to be working fine...

For the time being, until people learn how to feed AI bots with the manipulated content they want. This will be probably more complicated, but it will happen (gaming page rank was also harder than adding "right" words to HTML keywords), unless AI providers will be careful with what they give as a food for their hungry Nvidia GPUs.

But this will be more expensive than blindly scanning the internet. That's why I see here a proper place where governments should step in, finance curation of the content for AI, as this will benefit society in a big way.

I see here an opportunity for smaller players, like Mistral, who can get some gov/EU funding and provide more quality than others who will devour whatever they find.