Google stops letting sites like Forbes rule search for "Best CBD Gummies"

Hopefully this is a step in the right direction. Google's search results have gotten so bad - seems like even some of the simplest searches are just packed with AI generated and SEO garbage. I don't even want SearchGPT do take over the search market space because I'm almost sure it will still be garbage. Just bring back the google from 5-10 years ago please :(.

You can't go back to the way things were. The world moves forward and changes, and we have to adapt to it.

Web search has always been an extremely messy solution to many problems. Think about the premise: type in anything, and somehow it will read your mind, intuit who you are and what you really wanted, find the exact thing amid the morass of the whole web, and then give it to you?

That's impossible. So it uses tricks to make it seem like it worked. It uses information about you to refine results. It uses curated, human-edited search and result heuristics for the most common or difficult search queries. It uses a giant corups of data, and shows you things that are like what you wanted.

You don't notice that it isn't giving you the best result, because there are so many mediocre-but-acceptable results to look at. And it doesn't have to work perfectly every time, because we can "sift through" results and "refine" our search. Often we are flooded with results that are targeted at us, rather than what we want, because, remember: Google is an advertising company, and the entire Web is now a shopping mall, where either you're being sold-to, or you're just being sold.

You will get results, and they will sort-of seem like what you wanted, so you will just sort of sigh and accept it. Because what other option is there?

There are more intelligent, more accurate, more safe, ways to solve the problems people have, that are not "a search engine". It's time we start implementing them.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted, this is a pointed analysis of why crawl-based search is insufficient for an Internet of our current scale. There is no corporate-curated algorithm that is up to the task, especially when the primary purpose is to profit from advertising.