So by this definition, do we already have "knowledge collapse" by Wikipedia? Because if you search for a random concept, that's usually the first hit, and it's also what countless other sources draw on.
Elsewhere Phaedrus echoes with a very modern complaint (even though search engines wouldn't arrive for another 2'300 years): They would say in reply that he is a madman or a pedant who fancies that he is a physician because he has read something in a book, or has stumbled on a prescription or two, although he has no real understanding of the art of medicine.
This is kind of the threat that tools like LLM's pose. Their power to generate decent results means that far more people will eschew practice for "good enough" LLM produced results. Creation will become even more transactional, and (many) people will quickly fail to "see the point" in practicing until we have a culture that's degraded even further than it already has today.
Google is great at finding official webpages by their exact title. If you type the title of a news headline from the 90s, Google will give you the link to it. I think that is amazing. Basically anything that has a canonical URL, Google is good at finding.
But when you search for "how to do X" for example, there will be several results that are perfectly valid and they will still need to be ranked in a list. Because it's not a "list" of results, it's ranking of relevancy. So to avoid showing spam, Google will push to the top websites it finds trustworthy. And now every top result comes from the same website. If you need an explanation for the Xz incident, for example, there is no canonical URL for it. There will be several news websites, youtube channels, etc. that have talked about it, competing to be the top result.
Google still has to rank them even though the algorithm can't tell fact apart from parody, so no matter what Google does, Google will be the one judging which content most people will read when they want to know about a certain topic.
To borrow my fellow robot's words, people are finding knowledge through an algorithmically curated aperture: Google's SERP.
If they're evil, they have the power to control everyone on Earth. If they're good, they must be going insane with what to do with their users' crippling dependency on them as a source of truth.
It does seem to have biases toward recency and product pages, but finding things by their title isn't a thing Google is bad at.
Clicking again on my original query, or liberal use of quotation marks, then does the trick, but it's annoying af. Maybe there's a setting somewhere for "show me the results of my query first, not the 'did you mean' first"?
EDIT: upon reflection, the problem is that I use Google in an early XXI manner: if I've been someplace before I use the URL bar, and it's for places I haven't been, that aren't common knowledge, that I want a search engine. There was a time when Google was optimised for this use case, and although that time is long past (in particular, no one buys ads for my queries), the annoyance is recent because now they actively pessimise.
and it is not without justification! https://undark.org/2021/08/12/wikipedia-has-a-language-probl...
It may not be entirely new, but AI might accelerate it to really harmful speeds.
Just pondering this, of course.