The Death Knell of Digital Search

> But I would really prefer if Search just worked the way it did in the first place.

Which is one thing technologists often screw up: They misinterpret how people react to change; and they misinterpret how people really use their products.

Google Search used to be (and still is) a way to find places on the internet. As much as I like AI in searches, I agree; when I want to find the thing, I don't want AI getting in the way.

"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket"

- Eric Hoffer

I've been playing the Ocarina of Time remake and whenever I get stuck trying to get a certain item or progress on a quest, I'll fire up Claude voice chat and ask it for guidance, and it regularly gets confused and gives me wrong answers (somewhere around ~30% of the time).

Given how long these models have been out and that it's a highly constrained game world from almost 30 years ago which is documented top to bottom, I struggle to understand how Claude is still so bad at straightforward questions with straightforward answers. This was a solved problem (albeit with a less modern UX) in the legacy internet and it doesn't actually feel like getting the right answer is necessarily easier.

I remember in around 2011 realizing that ~85% of the first page of Google search results was ads. I haven’t used Google search much in the last 5 years, mostly due to this but also because of how they rewarded blog spam.

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