Sounds like your laptop is wholly out of date, you need to buy the next generation of laptops on Amazon that can handle the modern SEO load. I recommend the:

LEEZWOO 15.6" Laptop - 16GB RAM 512GB SSD PC Laptop, Quad-Core N95 Processor Up to 3.1GHz, Laptop Computers with Touch ID, WiFi, BT4.2, for Students/Business

Name rolls off the tongue doesn’t it

Or a Macbook.

No disagreement for the most part.

I used to be able to say search for Trek bike derailleur hanger and the first result would be what I wanted. Now I have to scroll past 5 ads to buy a new bike, one that's a broken link to a third party, and if I'm really lucky, at the bottom of page 1 will be the link to that part's page.

The shitification of the web is real.

R.I.P. Sheldon Brown T_T

(The Agner Fog of cycling?)

He was a legend.

If search is your metric, the web was dead long before OpenAI's release of GPT. I gave up on web search a long time ago.

> If I can in any way purchase something without the web, I'mma do that

To get to the milk you'll have to walk by 3 rows of chips and soda.

Yeah, this is why I still use the web to order things in a nutshell lol

Where do you order things online that you aren't inundated by ads?

Ad blocker. Even just putting https://12ft.io/ in front of your link gets you pretty far.

Ah, you mean the web version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkers_(horse_tack) . I don't think that helps when you're stopped in your tracks by an upsell. Dominos won't let you order a pizza online until you've declined garlic bread, cinnamon rolls and a liter of pepsi three times. And you can't just click "pepperoni pizza near me", you have to build your pepperoni pizza, after putting in your zip code, selecting the store, carry out, then click build again, sure you don't want buffalo wings too?, ....

It's a lot LOT easier for me as an adult to ignore ads online than it is for my kids in brick and mortar stores to ignore the candy and toys placed at their eye level.

The web is much more than a shopping site.

It is, but the SEO spammers who ruined the web want it to be shopping mall, and they can't even do a particularly good job at being one.

On Amazon, you used to be able to search the reviews and Q&A section via a search box. This was immensely useful. Now, that search box first routes your search to an LLM, which makes you wait 10-15 seconds while it searches for you. Then it presents its unhelpful summary, saying "some reviews said such and such", and I can finally click the button to show me the actual reviews and questions with the term I searched.

This is going to be the thing that makes me quit Amazon. If I'm missing something and there's still a way to to a direct search, please tell me.

You can still get to product reviews directly and search them. Here's an example:

Product page (copy the identifier at the end): https://www.amazon.com/Long-Thanks-Hitchhikers-Guide-Galaxy-...

Review page (paste the identifier at the end): https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B001OF5F1E/

This seems to bypass all of the LLM stuff for now.

Pretty good! Unfortunately it does not include the Q&As, which are often just as useful as the reviews.

Ran into this the other day. Amazon.ca still has the old version for now

There is a startup whose product is better search. The killer feature is that you pay for it, so you aren't the produdct. https://kagi.com/welcome

I suppose it is just Amazon problems. I have never lived in the area where Amazon is prevalent. Where I live, search engines still can't find synonyms or process misspellings.

for tech stuff I just use documentation, bug trackers and source code now. Web searching has become useless.

> Their old website was plain and worked great, letting me quickly search through their products and quickly purchase them. Last night I literally struggled to add things to cart and check out; it was actually harrowing.

Hey, who cares about making services that work when we can give people a cool chatbot assistant and a 1800 number with no real-person alternative to the decision tree

I've been slowly detaching myself from the web for the past 10 years. These days I mostly build offline apps using native technologies. Those capabilities are still around. They just receded for a while because they'd gotten so polluted with toolbars and malware. But now the malware is on the other side, and native apps are cool again. If you know where to look. Here's my shingle: https://akkartik.name/freewheeling-apps

On the other hand, what you call "The Web" seems to be just what you can get at through search engines. There's still the old web, the thing that's mediated by relationships and reputation rather than aggregation services with billions of users. Like the link I shared above. Or this heroically moderated site we're using right now.