On the Obsolescence of Search Engines (Part 1)

In the prior fictional universe, one of the key technologies was a personal electronic device for communication, computing interface, and information access (plus, for Mars use, some basic safety monitoring of radiation, air quality, and other hazards unique to that environment). I worked out most of the details of this concept in January-May 2002, well before “smartphones” became a thing – the idea originated, as I recall, as a projection of where Palm and other phone-PDA combinations then popular might evolve over the next 50 years.

One key element I added, however, was a form of AI, that I called “simulacrum intelligence” to distinguish it from what we would now call artificial general intelligence or AGI. While this was useful for storytelling reasons, I felt it addressed a problem that I could see on the horizon even in 2002: the erosion of information quality and organization on the internet.

At that time, it was already apparent that people were using scripting/bots to autogenerate garbage information and garbage websites. Scams, yes, in many cases, but in many others just gibberish, the purpose of which I never understood. The obvious extrapolation was that, even with new and evolving tools to filter this crap out, the internet would be increasingly clogged with junk and fraud, noise that would gradually overwhelm signal to the point that it was useless for all but the most pedestrian functions. (In effect, I’d hit on a variation of the Dead Internet Theory years ahead, as well.)

I saw two major outcomes arising from this possibility:

1. The gradual segmenting of the wide-open, anything goes internet of the time into controlled-access subunits that kept the trash out and prohibited its creation within their individual purviews. The best metaphor I can think of here is having subscriptions to multiple streaming services – you aren’t limited to one, there are many overlapping options, and it’s not a centrally-controlled (i.e. government-run) structure. But of necessity, the variety and novelty of the information you’re able to access through any given service is limited to its specialization, business purpose, etc., and each would have its own priorities when it comes to censorship, I mean “misinformation regulation” – what topics it would permit to be discussed, and what it would not. (Note the similarity of this last point to the mass censorship applied by social media, search engines, commenting tools, and sharing sites, particularly in the 2019-2024 period but continuing in somewhat less-blatant form today – an obvious outcome I did not but really should have foreseen; instead, I foresaw the failure of social media as a whole.)
2. The emergence of primitive or early forms of AI, initially as a tool to wade through the garbage to find real information and ascertain its reliability and accuracy. “Simulacrum intelligence” wasn’t meant to be true, self-aware AI (and in the old fictional universe was never intended to be), but a research assistant one could use to overcome the shortcomings of search engines. Once invented, however, the foundational technology proved useful in many different areas (much like microprocessors, once invented, having found their way into everything from machine tools to toasters in the 1970s and 1980s) outside of information access.

#2 is really the point of this post. I resisted using any of the emerging AI myself, mainly because of my personal aversion to things I see as trends or fads – there was so much hype about it over the past couple of years that it completely turned me off to the technology (in practice, but not in fiction). In short, I just got sick of hearing about it.

But over the past month or so, while doing technical research for “Beneath a Silent Sky”, I’ve been forced to reevaluate this position. Not because I was warming to the idea of AI, but because the same trend that I predicted back in 2002, and bemoaned around 2018 as having already arrived, has to my eye gone asymptotic over the past year.

Example: I was just now looking for refill leads for one of my engineering pencils. Specifically, 0.35mm refill leads. Which I specified in the search engine query. The first two pages of results were for 0.5 leads, 0.3 leads, art supply stores (without reference to pencil leads, some of which didn’t even carry them), lead blocks for casting, lead testing services, lead detox pills of dubious quality and safety, and the like. I went to Amazon, put in a very specific search query (knowing that Amazon is worse than search engines in this regard), hoping that there I could at least limit the results to office products or art supplies, and again got page after page of results with the most tenuous relationship to the search query – or no obvious relationship at all. (With the added annoyance of most of the products being in fact the same chintzy-quality item from China marketed with the same Chinglish text and identical images by 2-3 dozen different retailers with gibberish names – like every other product on Amazon nowadays.)

A small indication of a very large problem, one I’ll discuss in following posts.