How do you find things online?

Search engines, easy, right? what else can we use? LLMs depend on search engines as well, so still search engines. So basically, a thing exists in the internet if a search engine can find it and list it. There we go, if a search engine doesn’t see it, then this thing doesn’t exist for us. So in other words, search engines are the internet.

Now here’s one of the most primitive problems, the internet is huge, which results should you see first? you might answer with “well, the most relevant thing to my question”. There’s still a problem here and a search engine can’t rank based on the question alone. Now comes collaborative suggestions, if a million people found that certain websites are more worthy to check, that search engine should boost that up a bit.

It all looks good so far

Now here’s a twist, search engines have profit-driven corporations behind them, so another criteria on what should be displayed on top is also what this corporation is trying to promote for a variety of reasons (financial, ideological, ..)

Do you ever remember the times when you make a search online and come up across some fantastic blog? Well, I do and I still have, to this day, some blogs saved, authors that I would like to be among the first people who read their newest posts (like this and this).

Where did it all go to shit?

Here’s the second piece now, search engines (that I refuse to name explicitly) promised us that we will get more visibility if we will follow certain guidelines (SEO). Well, that seems nice, I can promote myself, my business, …, by doing just that!

Do you notice the shift? search engines promised more visibility using a number of criteria, quality of content, SEO things, other custom criteria (the ideology governments impose comes first). It still kinda looks good.

Now the problem is how much importance, each criteria has? when you search for a keyword that exist as a title in the official Python documentation and the first results are not the Python documentation, but rather some SEO boosted garbage websites, then that’s a good sign that things went to shit already. That to me is the end of the internet - important things are not going to be found and SEO boosted garbage always shows up first.