[HWR_14]

> a really cool and advanced search engine frontend

This is the saddest version of ChatGPT I can imagine. I found that as search engines emulated natural language, their results got steadily worse.

I just want the Google results and interface from a long time ago.

[dbrueck]

> I found that as search engines emulated natural language, their results got steadily worse

I would wager that that has not been the experience for the general population (read: non-technical people) and/or that degradation of results has not been because of emulating natural language but because of other factors (like advertising dollars).

Search engines have become incredibly more accessible for non-techies during the past 3 decades. Sure, even today a techie is usually able to coax higher quality results out of a search engine, but it's still a pretty recent advancement that an average Joe can just announce their question out loud and a device on the shelf will not only figure out what they are asking with a decent degree of accuracy, but it will also go search for something relevant, extract an answer, and then speak it back to the user in a pretty sensible way.

It is in this senses in particular that ChatGPT feels like a natural progression for search engines.

[HWR_14]

I completely agree that my experience has not been the same as the the general population's. But that doesn't really help me. My searches are still worse. Just find me pages that match the text I specify please. Add some boolean operators and I'm happy.

And because the majority of people have a better experience, I dismiss your second option of other factors being at play.

[dbrueck]

> And because the majority of people have a better experience, I dismiss your second option of other factors being at play.

That's fine, though the point I was (clumsily?) trying to make was that there are different factors here that allow multiple things to be true at the same time: power users routinely feel like search result quality is going down, and I think you can pretty objectively show that to be true in many cases.

Simultaneously, though, the barriers for "normal" people to do decent searches have dropped dramatically - there was an accessibility hurdle that was previously challenging for a lot of people and it's incredibly better now vs just a few years ago. This too, I believe, can be shown to be objectively true in many cases. (anecdotally as well - just last week I watched a number of very un-technical senior citizens get what they wanted out of Google and I didn't see much evidence that it was because of their skill at crafting good search queries).