Search engines are optimized to maximize profits for the owner of the search engines above being wholly accurate, succinct, or reflexive of the actual search query. This has the result of promoting results that are similar enough in most cases, but may not consistently be what your looking for–especially true when looking for historic relevancy.

I’m a developer who loves to tinker. This leads me to having weird technical errors at times (like black screens on new hardware with fresh windows installs on any version of a GPU driver). No amount of searching yielded anything relevant or actionable to resolve that issue. Plenty of posts trying to sell me the exact GPU I had purchased though.

I like small time musical artists. I’ll occasionally search one to pull up their discography only to find … the artist I’ve been listening to for years apparently doesn’t exist. Plenty of results for streaming apps though.

I’ll occasionally search lyrics verbatim only to find completely unrelated media as the only results.

Searching for product numbers and error messages often yields 0 results.

Google doesn’t even honor quotation marks to indicate exact matches anymore.

I’m glad you continue to have a good experience with search engines, but the experience I’ve had is one of severe degradation and intentional enshitification over the last 10-15 years or so.

You must not have niche hobbies or errors.

Some folks maybe aren’t prepared to do that themselves, but the more you use AI, the more confident you’ll become in leveraging those tools

Unfortunately it’s not the confidence in using AI that’s lacking. It’s the confidence in the output.

I trust that they will aid in extrajudicial surveillance and autonomous killings.