From Do Your Own Research to Do Your Own Search
The Web is full of garbage; search engines amplify this garbage
The Web is going through a transition. 5 years ago many people bemoaned bloat (JavaScript turning mere pages into 'Webapps', even where or even though simple text was sufficient with the occasional image/s). Nowadays people bemoan pages that are LLM slop (machine-generated nonsense) with slop images which disappoint rather than impress. Such images are often indicative of laziness and they tend to accompany fake material generated by what Dr. Stallman calls "bullshit generators" (they cannot be fixed; they'll inevitably spew out "bullshit").
When we argued that it is "Unlikely That LLM Slop Will Dominate the Web in the Long Run" we said so because we see how people respond. "LLM slop pisses me off a lot," Ryan said a few hours ago. "So much of it floats to the top of Google now. That and clickbait. It's just such a complete waste of time."
People simply cannot rely on Google to find things for them. Google is drowning in an ocean of slop (to which Google itself contributes), many sites are going offline, and many sites are simply not getting indexed (the aforementioned ocean of slop contributes to this capacity issue).
Many people have gotten dangerously accustomed to "Google" being a "friend" and Google always being there to find things for them. Suddenly they realise that what they deemed a friend is serving misinformation to them.
Implementing and/or hosting one's search is one mitigation strategy. The idea that one company should manage search for everything and everybody is absurd. The same is true for Social Control Media, where one company manages (or few companies manage) the writings of millions of not billions of people worldwide. █