this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2026
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Open source search engine will not solve this problem. The AI generated websites will simply optimize to be shown on it.
It would solve a lot, the search engines are willingly making their results less useful, together, in a trust, a shit-trust. While one way is my example, and they are not blameless in allowing these shit results to be displayed, that is only one way they have started to not serve the user of their product but rather their clients.
But, what do you think would solve it? Obviously a search engine, and index, that is open source wouldn't solve everything regarding the internet being taken over by ai and bots, but it would help with a lot, not the only thing we need to do by a long shot.
It's a war between search and seo. An ad company offers good enough search for free. I think more competition is the best bet. And it cannot be ad supported and it has to be free. Possibly if Apple is not allowed to be paid by Google (anti trust contract), or if universities/libraries run search engines.
universities rely on google scholar mostly, since they pa subscription to journals.
Search engines are being flooded by shit content gaming their ranks algorithms. I guess open source engine could be so niche that no one would try to game it and it could help. The moment enough people start using it, it would have the same problem as all the other engines.
They are also purposfully not returning content we are asking for. We know it can work, because it did work. They will put forward results from people that pay them, remove material that people pay them to remove, and otherwise are not giving us what we ask for.
Which is to say nothing of removing answers from the search page itself and only giving it via their ai.
This is not a good faith enshitification, search engines are not blameless victims, and stopping seo websites from gaming their system is their fucking job, that they did for a long time and now don't.
I honestly don't know what part of this is enshitification and what part it's actual inability to protect their ranking algorithms. There's so much money in SEO now companies are willing to do crazy things to position their spam. They host entire networks of sites that link to one another, pay people to write spam content and so on. Maybe they could spend more money on detection and keep fighting it, maybe at this point it's impossible.
Give Marginalia search a try, see how well it works out for you.