The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

I mostly agree with TFA, with one glaring exception: The quality of Google search results has regressed so badly in the past years (played by SEO experts), that AI was actually a welcome improvement.

User issue. Every single time this comes up.

People don't know how to search, that's it. Even the HN population.

Every time this gets posted, I ask for one example of thing you tried to find and what keywords you used. So I'm giving you the same offer, give me for one thing you couldn't find easily on Google and the keywords you used, and I'll show you Google search is just fine.

Allright, had this recently since i keep forgetting luks commands.

How do you set up an encrypted file on linux that can be mounted and accessed same as a hard drive.

(note: luks, a few commands)

You will see a nonsensical ai summarization, lots of videos and junk websites being promoted then you'll likely find a few blogs with the actual commands needed. Nowhere is there a link to a manual for luks or similar.

This in the past had the no-ad straightforward blogs as first links, then some man pages, then other unrelated things for the same searches that i do now and get garbage.

FWIW, when I put <<linux create file image encrypted file system>> into Google (this was the first thing I tried, though without knowledge that it might be a tricky case I might have been less careful picking keywords) I get what look like plausible results.

At the top there's a "featured snippet" from opensource.com, allegedly from 2021, that begins with: create an empty file (this turns out to mean a file of given size with no useful data in it, not a size-0 file), then make a LUKS volume using cryptsetup, etc.

First actual search result is a question on Ask Ubuntu (the Stack Exchange site dedicated to Ubuntu) headed "How do I create an encrypted filesystem inside a file?" which unless I'm confused is at least the correct question. Top answer there (from 2017) looks plausible and seems to be describing the same steps as the "featured snippet". A couple of other links to Ask Ubuntu are given below that one but they seem worse.

Next search result is a Reddit thread that describes how to do something different but possibly still of interest to someone who wants to do the thing you describe.

Next search result is a question on unix.stackexchange.com that turns out to be about something different; under it are other results from the same site, the first of which has a cryptsetup-based recipe that seems similar to the other plausible ones mentioned above.

Further search results continue to have a good density of plausible-looking answers to essentially the intended question.

This all seems fairly satisfactory assuming the specific answers don't turn out to be garbage, which doesn't look very likely; it seems like Google has done a decent job here. It doesn't specifically turn up the LUKS manual, but then that wasn't the question you actually asked.

Having done that search to find that the relevant command seems to be cryptsetup and the underlying facility is called LUKS, searches for <<cryptsetup manual>> and <<luks documentation>> (again, the first search terms that came to mind) look to me like they find the right things.

(Google isn't my first-choice search engine at present; DuckDuckGo provides similar results in all these cases.)

I am not taking any sides on the broader question of whether in general Google can give good search results if one picks the right words for it, but in this particular case it seems OK.