As LLMs become the go-to for quick answers, fewer people are posting questions on forums or social media. This shift could make online searches less fruitful in the future, with fewer discussions and solutions available publicly. Imagine troubleshooting a tech issue and finding nothing online because everyone else asked an LLM instead. You do the same, but the LLM only knows the manual, offering no further help. Stuck, you contact tech support, wait weeks for a reply, and the cycle continues—no new training data for LLMs or new pages for search engines to index. Could this lead to a future where both search results and LLMs are less effective?

  • sorghum@sh.itjust.works
    7·
    3 days ago

    What I’m worried about are traditional indexers being intentionally nerfed, discontinued, or left unmaintained at best. I’ve often wondered what it would take to self host a personal indexer. I remember a time when search giant Alta Vista had a full text index of the then known internet on their DEC Alpha server(s).

    • SW42@lemmy.world
      2·
      3 days ago

      The problem lies with the way the “modern” internet works by loading everything dynamically. Static pages to index are becoming more rare. Also a lot of information is being “lost” in proprietary systems like discord. Those also can’t be indexed (easily)