But what if the “truth” is harder to find online because the infrastructure that once stored it is breaking down? Some of that is wear and tear. Link rot erases pages every day. Key sections of the United States Constitution briefly disappeared from the Library of Congress website because of a coding error. But by interposing an error-prone AI between us and an original source, Google has ensured that if an underlying page exists, it can become practically undiscoverable. Meanwhile, pollution is now moving upstream: 404 Media reports companies are planting content on Reddit to influence the answers generated by AI search, contaminating the public record from which those systems draw their summaries.
Source: Google Search Is Dying. What Comes Next Is Worse | The Walrus