There’s a consensus that search has been getting worse. It used to be the case that search engines were actually good. You could be fairly confident that it would return useful results, with the most pertinent sites mostly under the top 5. Today, that’s no longer true. I often find myself sifting through a list of search results that have only a tangential relevance to my search terms.

At the same time, the amount of text on websites is growing quickly. It’s pretty obvious that site owners are using LLMs to pad out their sites. Presumably they don’t do this to improve usability – because, what’s easier to use?

  1. A page with a recipe that presents the name of the dish, an introductory paragraph for context, the list of ingredients, and the steps for preparation, or

  2. a recipe page that precedes all this with several paragraphs of vaguely relevant stories and other verbiage?

Of course, no. 1 is easier to use. But what we get is no. 2.

The goal is to maximize the number of advertisements that can be served, and to increase the amount of time you spend reading the page, so you’ll hopefully click on more ads.

The effect is that a lot of websites that used to be perfectly functional have now become a garbled haystack of text, leaving their users to dig for the needle of information that must be somewhere in there.

This is a problem for users. And the search companies have an answer: More LLMs!

This time, they sift through those mountains of empty words, and present a summary. The website itself becomes mere fodder for the machine, and a billboard for advertising. It no longer has its own meaning or message; we consume it only through the LLM’s layer of abstraction.

We might very well end up where we started 20 or 30 years ago: Back then, if you wanted to obtain information with a certain level of quality and relevance assured, you would buy a printed book. Writing and publishing a book is an expensive process, introducing a hurdle that only valuable content can surpass.

Perhaps we’ll all go back to just buying more books.