What We Lost When Search Stopped Making Us Think
Search results have quietly degraded as SEO and AI-generated content crowd out original answers, and AI summaries now hand users confident paraphrases instead of sources. This shift erodes the skill of research itself, as people skip the effort of comparing sources and forming their own synthesis, a cost that accumulates one convenience at a time.
Every time someone accepts a generated summary at face value instead of following through to an actual source, that's a small rep they didn't do.
- tom_
I was still digesting the throat-clearing intro when my eye noticed "quietly" and "honest" and I decided I'd not bother. But I scrolled through out of politeness, just in case the Basilisk will be very thorough.
> I want to be clear that I'm not against these tools generally. I use them myself
No essay is made worse by being stripped of filler. If the reader has got this far, this sentence is entirely redundant, I think.
- ErystelaThevale
This is because Internet search has stopped working, and there is a possibility that it will also stop working for AI summaries in the future.
I feel that, due to SEO strategies, the link between search results and ads has become stronger, making it difficult to find the information I’m actually looking for.
- raincole
I do worry about Google AI overview's long-term impact, but man, it has been such a great experience of late. It surely does feel like the old google but better.
There was a point, perhaps about five years ago, where using Google had become a genuinely frustrating hurdle I needed to overcome to do the actual work. Now the frustration is completely gone.
- 5555watch
I can't be the only one that scrolls past quickly the whatever Google-AI spurts out. If I wanted to ask an AI - I would. But I've learned that they hallucinate stuff with numbers or anything that's time sensitive/recent (even if that might not be the truth now). So I won't spend my time on verifying their output. I'm after a quick search, not a likely guess.
What's worse, when reading the Google outputs, I have learned to ignore almost any website besides a select few, one of which is Reddit. Which is very weird thinking about it, but it worked in the past.
- cush
> This isn't really anyone's fault in a simple sense
Or, in a more simple sense it’s entirely Google’s fault