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Comment by Raidion | Hacker News Reader

I think Google still deserves a ton of credit. Online shopping is tricky, but information is incredibly easy to access, especially if you do know how to avoid clicking on Quora or WebMD style sites.

Google does a great job of shepherding you towards information and at the very least gives you additional context that you can use to corroborate or tune your search.

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Try searching for anything related to a recently released video game. Chat gpt spam has made it completely impossible. Even the reputable wikis are pushed down far enough to become very difficult to find.

This happened with the World of Warcraft subreddit. Any topic someone posted about, a gaming site was having ChatGPT (or whatever) write an article talking about how players were talking about X/Y/Z topic.

Well... the subreddit caught on, and started trolling the shit out of the site by making up fake things "fans were excited about."

https://www.engadget.com/redditors-troll-an-ai-content-farm-...

A related Internet malady that has cropped up lately: two or three people on Reddit mention that their brand-ABC phone has been having trouble communicating with their brand-XYZ car, or something like that. One of them wonders if it could have something to do with a recent phone OS update. By the next day, anyone searching for "ABC bluetooth dropouts" will get deluged with SEO'ed links to content farms with headlines like "Outraged users on Reddit blame recent ABC update for bricking their phones," accompanied by made-up stories with links pointing back to the same subreddit with the same handful of content-free comments.

This is going to get so much worse...

And all the filler text...! When you search for something like "Cyberpunk O'Five location", you'll likely get a page that has the information, but instead of the answer "Reward for the Beat The Brat fight in Arroyo", you get a wall of text that likely starts with "Cyberpunk 2077 was released by CDR in 2022... The O'Five is one of the most powerful sniper rifles". The page will have the answer, but it will take substantial time to find it. It's awful.

I just tried your query, and I got the answer in the featured snippet at the top, and I didn't have to read any wall of text:

> "How to get: After beating Buck in the fight in Arroyo, along with fighting off all of his friends, you can find this weapon lying on some barrels by where you first spoke with him"

Unfortunately Search is a hard problem to solve, considering how much the internet has grown from 90s or early 2000s to now.

Information search works a lot better because it has no commercial value. Therefore no SEO attack

That's not correct. When programs such as Amazon Affiliates cut their commissions a few years ago, many SEOs pivoted to info content monetized by display ads. The $ per page view is less, but it was still wildly profitable, at least until the most recent Google update frenzy.

Odd, I find Quora and WebMD to have some of the more useful information out there.

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