The other day I realised something cursed, and maybe it's obvious but if you didn't think of it either, I now have to further ruin the world for you too.
Do you know how Google took a nosedive some three-four years ago when managers decided that retention matters more for engagement than user success and, as this process continued, all the results are now so vague and corporatey as to make many searches downright unusable? The way that your keywords are now only vague suggestions at best?
And do you know how that downward spiral got even worse after "AI" took off, not only because the Internet is now drowning in signal-shaped noise, not only because of the "AI snippets" that I'm told USA folk are forced to see, but because tech companies have bought into their own scam and started to use "AI" technology internally, with the effect of an overnight qualitative downstep in accuracy, speed, and resource usage?
So. imagine what this all looks like for the people who have substituted the search bar by the "AI" chatbot.
You search something in Google, say, "arrow materials designs Amazonian peoples". You only get fluff articles, clickbait news, videogame wikis, and a ton of identical "AI" noise articles barely connected to the keywords. No depth no details no info. Very frustrating experience.
You ask ChatGPT or Google Gemini or Duck.AI, as if it was a person, as if it had any idea what it's saying: What were the arrows of Amazonian cultures made of? What type of designs did they use? Can you compare arrows from different peoples? How did they change over time, are today's arrows different?
The bot happily responds in a wise, knowledgeable tone, weaving fiction into fact and conjecture into truth. Where it doesn't know something it just makes up an answer-shaped string of words. If you use an academese tone it will respond in a convincing pastiche of a journal article, and even link to references, though if you read the references they don't say what they're claimed to say but who ever checks that? And if you speak like a question-and-answer section it will respond like a geography magazine, and if you ask in a casual tone it will chat like your old buddy; like a succubus it will adapt to what you need it to be, all the while draining all the fluids you need to live.
From your point of view you had a great experience. no irrelevant results, no intrusive suggestion boxes, no spam articles; just you and the wise oracle who answered exactly what you wanted. Sometimes the bot says it doesn't know the answer, but you just ask again with different words ("prompt engineering") and a full answer comes. You compare that experience to the broken search bar. "Wow this is so much better!"
And sure, sometimes you find out an answer was fake, but what did you expect, perfection? It's a new technology and already so impressive, soon¹ they will fix the hallucination problem. It's my own dang fault for being lazy and not double-checking, haha, I'll be more careful next time.²
(1: never.)
(2: never.)
Imagine growing up with this. You've never even seen search bars that work. From your point of view, "AI" is just superior. You see some cool youtuber you like make a 45min detailed analysis of why "AI" does not and cannot ever work, and you're confused: it's already useful for me, though?
Like saying Marconi the mafia don already helped with my shop, what do you mean extortion? Mr Marconi is already beneficial to me? Why he even protected me from those thugs...
Meanwhile, from the point of view of the souless ghouls at Google? Engagement was atrocious when we had search bars that worked. People click the top result and are off their merry way, already out of the site. The search bar that doesn't work is a great improvement, it makes them hang around and click many more things for several minutes, number go up, ad opportunities, great success. And Gemini? whoa. So much user engagement out of Gemini. And how will Ublock Origin ever manage to block Gemini ads when we start monetising it by subtly recommending this or that product seamlessly within the answer text...
I believe I read somewhere that Wikimedia was some time ago (a decade ago? who knows and no point in trying to search for the article) exploring the idea of a human curated search engine. Perhaps an idea who's time has come.
A human-curated search engine would likely be easy to sell as well - the obvious approach to marketing it would be to bring attention to the human-curation involved, and claim no algorithms are involved in determining search results. This is arguably bullshit - you'll need an algorithm to sort the search results at minimum - but it'd evoke the idea that the engine is giving customers what they want, and not what someone else wants.
Additionally, you can pull out the somewhat old standby of claiming the search engine to be AI-free - with LLMs and slop generators defining how the public views AI, presenting yourself as a bulwark against the slop-nami will be an easy marketing win.
(Sidenote: Between the ever-growing backlash against AI, boiling resentment against Silicon Valley, and the fact I found this an easy sell, I suspect this idea's time has indeed come.)
I keep stopping myself from doing this exact project, with the fediverse as the curation source, several times. I’ve talked about this before, but interestingly Postgres’ full-text search is effectively the complete core of a search engine, minus what you’d need for crawling and ranking (which is where curation and a bit of scripting would come in)
other than resources and time, one big open question is how to do this kind of thing as a positive part of the fediverse — to not make the same mistake that a bunch of techbros already have and index the fediverse without consent. how does one make the curation process simultaneously consensual and also automated enough that it can be reasonably ruggedized against abuse?
It was a Jimmy Wales personal project, not an official WIkimedia project, and no, it didn't go anywhere