Several months ago, I saw a complaint on Mastodon about the prevalence of 'AI'-created websites. The poster said they searched Google for a food recipe, but the results were SEO nonsense spat out from LLMs, so the poster had to reach for a cookbook instead. The growing presence, if not outright invasive overgrowth, of so-called 'AI' generated content is troublesome, and how search engines (really, Google) respond is certainly a fascinating and fraught topic. What most piqued my interest, like a fish noticing water, was: why do we use a web search (Google) as the source for everything?
The answer, of course, is convenience. We type a query, spelling errors and all, into a little box at the top of our browser window and voilà: the answer appears. Or so, that's how the story goes. In reality there's some more hunting and inspection of sources ("should I trust c00ks.com or eater.com? wait, are those zeros?") and let's not even think about what level of trust we assign Google's mystery-meat bento boxes shown alongside the heaped slices of spam.
One looks at the modern Google results page and wonders how did we get here? Painting a full picture is out of scope here, but it's the same as it ever was. In the beginning, Google was simple and good, but it grew until, like any good megafauna, a shaped environment coevolved around it, crushing some and showering others with nutrients in the life of the web, including the SEO symbiotes. Eventually, the search page disappeared into the little box at the top of browser. Bit by bit, we stopped thinking about primary sources and left everything up to the best algorithms a global ad monopoly could buy. Now even starting to type in a source first sends the results off for analysis by your search engine of choice. This is all rather stultifying.
Since seeing that post on Mastodon, I've tried to change my habits. When I catch myself about to search, I first try to think of a primary source for the information instead. Often, I go to Wikipedia and find what I want there. If I want news, I go to the publisher most likely to carry the coverage I want. Skip the middleman. Find places you trust and use bookmarks. I personally don't want to be so beholden to Google (or DuckDuckGo, my actual search of choice) that I flail around trying to cook dinner. Maybe I need to pick up a book first.