I can't wait until you can give ChatGPT an ISBN and ask it to answer any question by citing that book. The SNR of a book may be high, but when the cost of finding that signal is having to go through 400 pages of dense material, line by line, word by word... well, Google wins.

wow. i love this idea

So Google Books? [1]

Only problem is that pesky copyright that makes you buy them

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books

Google Books is just a search engine. It doesn't yet have the natural language parsing and information synthesis power that chat gpt has

> Google has been SEOed to death essentially.

It's the nature of the incentive system that they set up. Their only grand vision for the internet was one where Google hit its growth targets every quarter. If you do the math on that, then Google has to be enormous in 2022. Guess what, Google is enormous in 2022, and the only way they could figure out how to do that was to keep growing their ad business. So here we are.

the only fix is to "pay what you can for good content"

Free means we the users become the commodity.

Or taxes. Imagine if all online transactions had a tax that went to supporting internet infrastructure. I know, I know, couldn't possibly.

Our imaginations have run out because those sweet ad dollars are too good to pass up.

Or... And bear with me...

Don't pollute the frigging index with SEO garbage. Google didn't tell everyone to SEO. People didn't even start doing SEO.

Then some arsehole went and had a brainwave about "what if we sold people on tweaking their pages to try to get all our customers fighting each other to show up on the front for the front page"?

I still remember my first time overhearing some SEO guys pitching to somebody while eating lunch. Spat out my food when it dawned on me what I was hearing unfold and started to realize that guy was likely not the only doing that.

The librarian's assistant in me had to be held back that day.

Why? Why would you pollute the Index that way? Monsters... Convincing people poisoning the town well was a good idea...

> Google didn't tell everyone to SEO.

Google gave lots and lots of ad money to websites that did SEO, so they effectively did tell everyone to SEO - crippling their own search product in favor of their ad machine.

Or the entire opposite direction, ensure that it's not possible to get paid for shitty content. Kill the web ads market by legal restrictions to tracking and targeting ads, facilitate ad blockers everywhere.

In this discussion, the people making the good content don't do it for the money, but the people creating spam do. Kill the money, and the commercial SEO crap goes away, and only the enthusiast content stays - as it was in the 'good old days' when simply getting clicks on your site could not get you any money.

ads market will always be a cat/mouse game, a wild goose chase. you'll never be able to kill it fully.

> the people making the good content don't do it for the money

citation needed. there're two driving forces:

- money

- clout

they're interchangeable. if you have one the other becomes much easier to obtain. if the writer don't do it directly for the money, they're most definitely doing it for the clout.

This. The problem outlined is that of finding that old post which has exactly the right answer, and instead being bombarded with new, not-quite-relevant fluff. That’s not a problem of technology, but of priorities.

I was trying to find some way to explain to people why google results used to be good (back in the days when signal to noise ratio was much better) and now are crap (combination of endless social media, marketing blogs, etc, and of course google's own need to generate money and hence pushing sites/advertisements to the top). I think you've captured it very succinctly. SEO'd to death, stealing this, thanks!