It's shocking how angry this article makes me. In an era of scummy ad-tech, decreasing search result quality, and explosion of crappy web content, I'd be embarrassed to publish this.
Yeah. Not my style.
However they don’t need to be. If someone created a niche search engine it would immediately invalidate all of the Google-optimized trash out there. If it solves a specific use case people will probably pay good money for it.
We know that the lowest-hanging fruit use case for gAI will be to pollute the web further with machine-written content and clip art. It isn't to improve anyone's search results, it's to make somebody's bottom line go up, at the expense of the rest of us.
I wish more people would be upset about that. I mean we can already see what's happened to the web via SEO gaming. An even worse fate is coming once gAI really takes off.
Google's reactions to SEO over the years (and other reactions and actions) - has led to downranking so many good sites and props up sites that fit in with certain agendas.
Once more AI takes off, I expect many more niche search and find portals to be accessed on a regular basis which will bypass google's deranking and censoring, and also bypass any google SEO problems that people think exist.