If you’re old enough to remember search before and after Google, you remember how good Google search was at the beginning.
Google used links to rank what to show to searchers. In the old web, before Google, every link was, in essence, an endorsement. We linked to what we thought was good, that other people should read.
It was a pristine “state of nature” system.
But the minute Google became dominant in search, everyone started manipulating links and metadata and everything else to get Google to send them more traffic. Links were no longer organic, no longer endorsements, but attempts to manipulate the algo. The more that was true, the more it became necessary to engage in “search engine optimization”, and the more algorithmic search engines sucked. Of course, Google also self-sabotaged, by trying to optimize search results so that Google would make the most money possible.
I recently read a regular traveler saying he never reads travel blogs and magazines any more, because AI is so much better. I’m sure he’s right.
But AI is better because it’s reading all the travel blogs and magazines, sorting and summarizing. AI being better, readership is cratering, and so the blogs and magazines will slowly die off. Travel’s one of those activities where you need relatively recent information, where was great to stay years ago isn’t very helpful. So, as the blogs and magazines die, the AI’s results will slowly get worse, until they’re crap scraped from official websites of hotels, museums and other travel destinations, since that’s all that will remain.
AI, in other words, in this and other ways, many of them similar, will destroy the ecosystem required for it to be good, same as Google did.
This is “eating the seedcorn/destroying the soil’s fertility” type of stupidity. If you destroy an ecosystem you’re dependent on (and we’re all dependent on some ecosystems) then whatever you’re doing is only short term viable.
So enjoy AI as an alternative to search for now (but always check its source, because it does hallucinate) but understand this is a moment in time, a moment which is destroying what makes it possible.
