> what's the point of image search any more?

The same could be said for regular search. Pretty much anything I search for yields a page of ads followed by pages of content farmers followed by pages of "almost sounds like experts but is still just a content farmer."

Financing the Internet with advertising has really made it difficult to find good quality content. The incentives are completely misaligned, unless you are a 'content creator' or Google.

Watermarking I think is supposed to be the goal, but I don’t think anyone can think that the web is in anything but managed decline. The AI feeding itself AI will just end it all. I think Platformer describes it best: https://www.platformer.news/google-io-ai-search-sundar-picha...

The question is what comes next, and I don’t think anyone has an answer to that.

Well, and once this kills the web then Google's AI no longer has a data source its AI can tap to answer questions about anything that happens afterward, so it kind of needs the web to at least limp along.

Google was for the Open Web since day 1 but their aggressive ad based business model kind of doomed the Open Web because a lot of people were also incentivized cause of Google to aggressively peruse ad revenue. I think the first degree of separation between websites should be which ones are commercial and which ones are non-commercial. Of course that doesn't mean that commercial websites are bad because essentially what you want is quality information and content but at least you know what you are getting into. E.g. if you are consuming content and information from non-commercial website you know that the owner of the website is not trying to sell you something via promoted content or via affiliate link or via something else. The main question is how do you support the Open Web? Is it ads, subscription, donations etc. Hobbyists are the champions of the Open Web because they produce quality information and content free of charge for the sake of helping people and because they love creating it.

aggressively pursue ad revenue*

I think what comes next is interest-based, influencer-moderated, semi-private chat rooms. For example a lot of hobby youtuber have moderated discord servers. My diy 3d printing communities have discord servers. I have a few invite-only discord servers for various circles of friends and family.

The problem is - how does Google get paid for providing this service. In a way, the better the service they offer, the less money they make. It really sucks.

Would you pay money to Google or some other company in exchange for a genuinely good search service that prioritizes well written content, and avoids AI (or human) generated crapticles?

What do you mean "solve"? This is solving the problem. If people see things they consider good enough, that's all they care about.

Source: every other piece of news or social media on the planet.

Their image search is presumably not profitable anyway so not sure they care

I assume this is one example of why big tech lobbies for stricter AI controls. They aren't afraid of AI takeover; they are afraid of AI destroying their businesses.

Maybe they will generate the images themselves and show a mix of both.

They're more likely to solve it so that you can't tell the baby peacocks are AI-generated