> While not perfectly accurate today, LLMs are able to troll through Google's mess and pull out the information people are actually looking for. Over time, Google will be forced to conform and will do the only thing they know how - use your personal information to tune an LLM just for you.

I strongly believe this is a transient situation. LLMs are so useful today for generic search only because the scoundrels on-line got taken by surprise. Language models process websites differently than traditional search engines, and are able to see through all the usual SEO trickery. But it's only a matter of time before the scoundrels adapt, before SEO turns into LMO, before websites get redesigned to be full of subtle, plausibly deniable prompt injections, and the content itself optimized to maximize the amount of advertising payload that gets picked up as stowaways by LLMs, attaching themselves to the bits the language models extract.

Tuning the LLM "just for you" won't help you, because it'll still end up as an involuntary salesman for any vendor that applies LMO techniques. And even if it was possible, Google is the last company I'd trust with doing it.

That's a bit of a non sequitur. Quotes no longer working doesn't have anything to do with the JavaScript on the website. My theory about this is that Google has slowly and steadily A/B tested every useful feature out of their product, and I assume that's because power users are simply a statistically insignificant group.

> I assume that's because power users are simply a statistically insignificant group

They probably assume the same, but the problem with this assumption is that it's self-fulfilling. The reason power users are so small a group is, in part, because software and UI/UX design trends actively prevent it. Especially with SaaS, we live in the era of perpetual MVPs - features get offered the moment they clear the "demo" bar, and hardly ever improved afterwards, except to cut them down further. There is no space for mastery - what you learn to do in first 30 seconds is... all there is to do. More powerful functionality, if it existed, is already removed, after being first hidden away in a non-discoverable "advanced" menu, and then removed, citing low usage. Well, no shit, people won't be using things you go out of your way to hide from them.

And then there's the "attention economy", to which power users are anathema, as the attention economy's core idea is to make things as hard and as annoying as possible, and then make money on friction.

So honestly, I wouldn't trust such A/B tests alone - they generally cannot distinguish between something people like, vs. something people hate and have no chocice but to make do.

In this case, the A/B testing is mostly in the form of machine learning in their learn-to-rank scoring algorithm. The machine learning gets the final say as to if those quotes are important or not.

I'm not sure what they do to prevent learn-to-rank from over-optimizing the median case, but it seems to not be enough for the tastes of many power users.

and a big reason the web sucks is how google has made it this way.

recipe sites are terrible because the ones you find have been doing the google thing of increasing engagement, lots of info - blah blah.

No penalty for tons of ads from an ad company.

Google destroyed blog rolls, web rings, and so many other things that were user positive.

In some cases the google of years past was prodded to change (much of the censorship the hides so many results that were once popular back in the day are result of legal pushing or other outrage campaigns)

- however much of what they consider good to be in the top 10 is good for selling ads.

Google is the new yellow pages and that's all it will be so far as search goes imho - people will find what they want searching within portals and other apps more than using google for everything

- 'google it' - is no longer 'finding [obscure thing here'] - google it just means find what is curated... more and more it's 'go to reddit, amazon, tik, yout.. etc - google is known for being 'ad heavy' and prude.

Currently still good for finding accurate hours someplace is open, if you know the exact name and location of said place,

but if you are looking for a tow truck, locksmith, appliance repair, plumber, etc - and depend on google to find one - just like in the yellow pages - the first ones you find are over priced, and the deeper, smaller results may not be in business any longer -

cant wait for the less censored, more 'find the exact bit', less scroll through ads, 'definition of [thing you were looking for]' - ads, 'history of [thing you were looking for]' ads - 'part 1 of [thing you were looking for]' - ads, here's the 3 seconds of info you needed - ads

give me a different bot for each search, and less google and ads any day.

if brave browser or DDG can give me the answer without the 'history or, why you might want to bake a salmon, and 3 ads before I see it (in the search results), and 3 days before I get to the tiny info.. I could like that.

I've even enjoy a link to the info (that skips down the page to the info, auto-blocks any auto play video or audio or moving gifs/ html5 moving ads / banners) - then I'd actually enjoy searching, reading, and even clicking to verify context again.

Oh the web before google censored it into it's own desired ad filled prude image. It was a web and not a silo.