Obviously google was basically already unusable over the past five years but this is... this is something else. Any subject you want to look up will have the first three pages entirely comprised of procedurally generated fake blogs and websites. And there's nothing there. Just scraped text from articles mashed together with varying amounts of hallucinations on top. Not even selling a product, just to harvest ad revenue.
What's maybe even worse is the steady degradation of image searches too. Joe Everyman generates some slop, the image's metadata tags include a historical artist's name. Some one on pinterest pins it while trawling the web. Now there are fifty gooey generated sludge images when you look up the historical painter.
And its not just artists. Historical figures, animals too. Look up 'baby peacock' if you want a clear example of it.
It's a pretty funny bit google, I hope it keeps going.
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But the 90s internet was filled with very specific and equally active forums, goofy private websites, blogs and generally optimistic people who liked to connect and contribute to various projects without profit incentive. It felt very liberated
That shit is still out there. You just can't find it anymore, because all the connective sinew of early Web 1.0 internet portals and community networks has dissolved under big tech crawlers and spammers.
Ultimately, these connectors need to build itself up again. We know big search engines are unreliable, so we need to create new networks that are. That's happening even now, but its still in a nascent phase.
bring back webrings
it's called federating