Over the last year, its become palpable.
Google has such utility in this regard that in some cases, a hallucinating lie-machine offers better answer than an index of what information is available on the internet.
This issue with with Googles failure to respond to the deluge of SEO driven content in their searches. They can do better. They've chosen to not do so.
It can only index stuff that's on the Web. Stuff on the Web is, contrary to what is popularly asserted, only a tiny fraction of all human knowledge.
I think people are forgetting how bad search was before Google. Google drove Web directories to extinction. Remember Yahoo!? Back in that era, if I were looking for something as simple as the University of Michigan, I clicked and drilled down through a Yahoo directory. The obvious search query would have been useless. Google changed all that.
I view Google as the yellow pages. It works well for that. Is it an oracle of knowledge? Of course not. How could I possibly expect to find knowledge on a place where there is no reward for making it available? People producing knowledge don't work for free.
I've tried ChatGPT and it's no better. It serves up stuff that is flat-out wrong.
It's not that the content doesn't exist or isn't indexed, its that its been drowned out by noise. Sifting through noise better was the entire reason google took off from more standard crawlers. It now returns results worse than crawlers from the previous era.
That is an absurd exaggeration.
Before the results would just not match what I was looking for. Now they do match what I was looking for, except some AI procedurally generated the content to show up when I searched those terms, with no regard for the accuracy of what the page says.
If I say "show me the best winter gloves, and only from sites that you can verify actually product tested" and it follows the instruction (ignoring sites that just have a list of popular search results aggregated) then it is better. If it doesn't do what I want, I expect to be able to follow up and teach it.
I expect the chat style stateful search to take instruction for what type of sites I want results from. "Return me a list of websites with recipes for Bolognese that do not have a long story above the recipe. Build a table with the top five results normalized for portion size, comparing and contrasting the ingredients. Highlight unique ingredients in bold."