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.
That's fine. It's always been fine. I don't need Google to read my mind and fulfill my dreams.
The problem isn't that they're not divinely perfect. The problem is that they used to be good enough, and now they're not.
> 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.
What solutions are there that fulfill all the use cases of a search engine, while definitively not being a search engine? An AI chatbot that gives me synopses of the same websites that I was searching for does not count.