AI is helping, but search engine results are horrible

What’s the saying? Three steps forward two steps backwards? Something like that.

That’s how it feels right now in terms of searching for information on the Internet.

Something that’s very concerning is that, despite advances in information searches online, actual search engine results can be really terrible. Especially in areas of Information Technology where things can change and information can become obsolete and inaccurate in a short amount of time.

Because of this, search results that are older that a couple years should basically be considered unreliable. It’s nice that AI is improving the availability of information, however it’s deeply concerning that traditional search results seem to be rotting.

I don’t say this lightly. I say it precisely because, when you obtain search results for IT topics, the results could clearly be arranged much better than they are.

The simplest solution would be to downgrade/suppress results that are older than a couple of years. Yet I find this is almost never the case.

Search for a specific IT topic that I need information about, and the top results returned can typically be answers that are 5 or more years old, sometimes over a decade old. This is insane.

It’s kind of sad to me but not unexpected that the tech giants are focusing so much energy on AI while basically neglecting traditional searching, not even bothering to implement some algorithms that could do a halfway decent job of curating results.