[fastneutron]

We got to this point because search engine results have become so polluted with sponsored links, low quality blogspam and SEO’d clones of Wikipedia and Stack Overflow that LLM responses are the only source of direct information that actually answers the original question.

[gosub100]

isn't it funny that we've come full circle to just paying for search results? Which was something Google could have done long ago (and there's a new company offering paid-search services that people talk about on here, I can't recall the name).

So they create the problem by increasing ads and spam in the result, then sell you the A.I. solution. What's next? Put more insidious ads that still answer the original query but have an oblique reference to a paid product?

[thfuran]

Google charging users for search would help clear up search results a bit if they didn't also charge sites for higher placement, but it wouldn't fix SEO. As long as sites have a way to get money for you clicking on them, whether by ad views or product sales, they'll have an incentive to get ranked higher in search results.

[kevincali]

The paid search service is called Kagi. It's pretty good.