If I had trillions like google does, I'd invest in hiring a whole bunch of humans to curate a search index that is actually useful. It's something a new player will never be able to scale up to.
This is going to be a honey pot for the antitrust authorities. Google's main defense is that its ranking is done in an algorithmic way and human rating can affect the result only in an indirect manner following their rating guideline, which is carefully reviewed by lawyers. When you add some subjectivity from random human, they occasionally make some unfair mistake then it makes all the way through the media outlets, you know what's going to happen.
Algorithmic search has been useless for 5+ years. LLMs will just generate those spam pages faster, but they're already there.
They obviously have the training data. Even if they needed to manually label a bunch of it.
The problem must be that they make too much money from the web pages that are just "500 words rephrasing the headline plus constantly-refreshing ads between every paragraph"
I'd love a way to search for things, and exclude anything created after 2020.
Sure, it won't help me find reviews of new restaurants, or understand new products or programming languages.
On the other hand, if I'm interested in reviews of a novel written in 1988, or how to solve some particular problem using calculus, that information isn't likely to go stale.
Google definitely isn't needed for that.
Curated and sorted link lists were a big thing back in the early days of the WWW. So ... back to the roots, yes?
Where should the ones you ask get information about the best options?
It seems much more likely that someone bought something for the wrong reason (easiest to find, being fooled by fake reviews etc) and then are recommending it onward because they are reasonably happy with it.
You ask multiple acquaintances who've purchased different things, and focus on the specifics of their experiences with those products or services, and figure out whether those things would work for you.
> and then are recommending it onward because they are reasonably happy with it.
If they're reasonably happy with it, why wouldn't I be reasonably happy with it?
This honestly seems unrelated to their poor search quality—hell, I'm even open to AI generated content for some queries. I blame catering to their clients and attempting to manipulate the content on the internet in the name of SEO for why I find useful results buried beneath products and ads.
The temptation for a for-profit company to corrupt that index would be too great to resist forever.
What modern capitalism really seems to do is produce cycles of improvement to gain marketshare followed by enshittification to cash in. The average of the cycle leans more towards the enshittified state than the improved state.