Comment by LarryDarrell
6 hours ago
I've been a subscriber to Kagi for a few years and just started using the AI assistant.
On the one hand, it's made me a believer in AI as it relates to web searching.
On the other hand, the only reason I need AI to search the web is that the web is now a impenetrable forest of near unreadable, SEO-stuffed, spammy articles.
Ironic, isn't it? Same here.
> On the other hand, the only reason I need AI to search the web is that the web is now a impenetrable forest of near unreadable, SEO-stuffed, spammy articles.
Unfortunately, that is nothing new. A big part of the reason why Google gained popularity, and maintained it for so long, was its resistance to SEO stuffed, spammy articles. The spammers continued escalating things, and now it pretty much takes AI to avoid their garbage.
The new part is AI makes it much easier and cheaper to produce garbage than ever before. So the ratio of garbage to non-garbage has been increasing rapidly.
I'm not sure AI fully dodges it either. I've asked questions like "best [cuisine] in [place]" and the AI answers with a truly mediocre restaurant that has an amazing website.
I think the problem is Google stopped prioritizing search quality and instead let ads and now AI content dominate their search.
But it is new. We have clearly crossed a threshold, and we know when it happened: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/