[Searching] for a clearly-written one-line programming question used to produce excellent results from Google Search. For a number of years, though, search results for queries like that — both at Google and competing search engines — have been littered with junk generated by content farms. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack sometimes, combing through the query results for a proper solution.^[1]

Gruber makes an excellent point here that has been getting pointier for years. It used to be impressively useful to ask Google. Just type a question, especially a code related question, or paste in an error message, and the first result would be the correct answer.

A few years later, the first two result would become an ad and I got used to scrolling past them before reading anything. And even a few years more, the number of ads increased and I got used to scrolling past those as well. But these days the ads are sometimes more useful than the search results. The top-most ad usually is either a content-farm spam-page that tries to lure you in with seemingly helpful key phrases, or, like one third of the time, an actually useful search result.

Microsoft collaborating with OpenAI to connect Bing and ChatGPT might — dare I say will? — revolutionize search. We might finally have found a truly awesome SPAM filter: We let AI read the human-made mess and ask it to write unique replies to our questions. This is great! Part of me still wants to find a way to shut down content farms, but I guess this might just do the trick…

Update, same day

This should not just be stressful for Google, it may also be the end of SEO as we know it.

Update, Feb 16, 2023

Looks like Sydney, uhm Bing, the language model Microsoft used to build the chat interface, has some weird quirks (for an algorithm that is): (link: /blog/2023/February/chatGPT-bing text: The problem with language models (Bing / ChatGPT))

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