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by acdha 1222 days ago
That last part is key: search didn’t just happen to get worse, chasing ad revenue made it that way. Once Google started allowed ethically dubious SEO like Quora’s search cloaking it marked the end of the era where search quality was the main focus.

It’s very easy to imagine tools like ChatGPT following a similar arc, only harder to discern if it’s not legally required to mark when advice is sponsored.