The End Of Google? - iProgrammer

There are moments where technology changes just enough to disrupt a situation that you thought would survive forever. Is the success of foundational models like ChatGPT one of them? Google seems to think so.

Can you remember what we had before Google? How did we find anything on the web before search engines? It wasn't easy and when Google automated the process of finding answers to queries we all jumped on board - because it worked. Over time the clever algorithm, Page Rank, that Google used has been diluted by ad-hoc methods that are kept very secret. The reason for not coming clean and revealing the algorithm is that the web has become an SEO battleground. If you know the rules that Google uses to value a website, you can make use of them to make it value a useless website that just happens to earn you some revenue.

SEO is the reason we all think that Google's search results have become worse. If you are a programmer and you search for informative articles on a topic, you will know that results are generally stuffed with useless pages of recycled and usually not-quite-right explanations. Finding out how to do something is getting harder and it's because generating good stuff is hard and recycling what is already on the web is very easy.

I've long thought that the eventual solution to the problem would be one of the advantages of AI. Indeed, Google has admitted to using more AI-based methods in its search engine, but again details are scarce to avoid SEO making use...