It is a commonplace today to say that the use of answer engines is leading to less traditional online search, with many content creators seeing less traffic to their web sites accordingly--drastically, business-killing less. I know of nothing to contradict this claim, which I must admit I find intuitive and plausible, not least because I myself find myself using answer engines more and "traditional" search less--not least because I often get more satisfactory results. Consider, after all, the following two facts:
1. When we use an answer engines we can ask a question, even a complex, multi-part, highly nuanced question, and almost instantly get a complex, multi-part, highly nuanced answer. If it works, when it works (and my experience is that it often does work), it beats typing in keywords hoping a search engine will lead us to some piece of "content" that may contain something in some way relevant to the concerns that led us to enter those keywords into that search engine.
2. Long before the answer engines appeared traditional search was becoming an intolerable experience. One need not belabor the causes. What matters is that whether this was a matter of sleazy "gaming" of search engine algorithms by spamdexers and other such scum, "enshittification" of the service by the grifters of Big Tech, or simply the search engine technology so revolutionary in 2000 not being up to the challenge of making the web of 2020, let alone 2025, navigable, the point is that even in an Establishment butt rag like The Atlantic you saw pieces that (if only in their lame Establishment way) acknowledged the lousy experience. Meanwhile when the search process gets you to anything that seems worth clicking what you are likely to get more than ever are paywalls, adblock blocker popups, clickbait-packed margins, irrelevant and unwanted autoplay videos, etc., etc.. Subjection to even a very little of this is quite enough to make many people seethe--and doing much searching means being subjected to much, much more than just a little. By contrast the answer engine is likely to give you just the answer you want, providing the searcher control and protection from the vileness that the web has become.
All this is very, very good for the Internet user.
Of course, there are objections to their doing so. There is the objection that the answer engines' reliability is far from perfect, to which I can personally attest. What they seem to give us is an assessment based on a round-up of the content of the more accessible Internet search results, which can be much more useful and efficient than our personally searching the web, but which also has its pitfalls. For example, perhaps properly answering us requires information that is just not conveniently available on the web.
But then we wouldn't find that anyway through a regular search.
Another pitfall is that the answer engine might not always do as good a job as we would of sifting that content.
But in fairness you always had the responsibility of making sense of what you read, while the better answer engines make it easy for you to check the sources from which they derive what they tell you, commonly providing documentation in the form of very serviceable endnotes. Knowing something about the subject you are investigating is likely to be helpful, if not essential, in using an answer engine effectively--but so was it always helpful, if not essential, in using Internet search effectively.
Still another objection is that the answer engines are essentially parasitic, reliant on information others publish but which they get no benefit from since the answer engine is sucking up the traffic by which they live.
But then, some would say, so are many of the "content producers" they draw their information from, when they offer anything that could be considered informational at all. (Good journalism costs money, insist those who repeat Big Media's whine--while forgetting that this is one reason why Big Media gives us so little of it, "sourcing" its content, while in more recent years passing off opinion pieces as news, with these often the worse because the editors so often put out the deliberately bad just to make you click.) Those who worry about the news business would do better to look to its failures--all as they ought to remember that the complaints about answer engines' claiming their traffic do not in the slightest diminish the present obnoxiousness of the user experience glancing at the web editions of the more authoritative periodicals. (You have the right to put up a paywall. You have the right to tell the web surfer to turn off the ad-blocker if they want to read what you've got up there. But facing that the web surfer also has the right to click the back button--and never visit your site again.)
Given all that my advice would be to save your usage of the answer engines for those complex questions that demand some figuring out, rather than the kind of easy answers you can get just going straight to some familiar source. Want to know how NVIDIA's stock did these past five years, for instance? That information's simple enough to get with even the decrepit search engines with which we make do today. But an explanation of why it did how it did, and what we are to make of that? You may have a lot of web-searching ahead of you if you want to understand that--and the answer engine might just offer an advantage here. Should you take that route, phrase your questions carefully, read what you get in response critically, check up on anything that looks suspect in the answers and the citations, and be ready to ask follow-up questions (calling the answer engine out on an answer that is factually wrong, unsupported by the cited sources, etc. often gets better results), all while preferably bringing to the table some knowledge of what you are interested in. (Please, crack open a book at least once in a while.) Doing so you will probably find yourself getting further than you would simply sifting and clicking pages and pages of low-quality search rankings, possibly replacing hours of searching that in the end leave you with nothing with a comparative few minutes of more involved and deliberate activity more likely to give you something to show for the effort. I admit that not everyone is up to the relatively sophisticated usage I have described here (I suspect most people are just as lazy and sloppy uses of answer engines as they are search engines), but I doubt you would have read all the way to the bottom of this post if you were one of them. The result, I think, is that not just the lazy but also the discerning, who anyway are the kind who do have complex questions to ask, will increasingly favor answer engines over search engines for their more involved research as time goes on.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment