I might be guilty of misinformation here - perhaps it was a forerunner to ChatGPT, or even a different (competing) chatbot entirely, where they would read an answer from the machine before deciding whether to send it on to the end user, whereas the novelty of ChatGPT was in throwing off such shackles present in an older incarnation? I do recall a story along the lines that I mentioned, but I cannot find it now so that lends some credence to that thought. In any case it would have been multiple generations behind the modern ones, so you are correct that it is not so relevant anymore.
Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Even the CEO has acknowledged this. They serve you what makes THEM the most profits, not what YOU wanted, ever.
For years now, the only way to find something technical related was to add “Reddit” to the search. But then Reddit imploded as well, chasing profits over the needs of its customers.
And Twitter/X likewise is now chasing profits over the needs of its customers, causing many to flee.
As too is happening in so many other places, such as Stack overflow, and most of Hollywood itself was on strike for months, bc they have been chasing profits over the needs of its customers.
Managers think they know better than customers what you want, or at least what you are willing to put up with.
And now they are pushing AI to the rescue, to put even above the SEO results, but soon they’ll have to think about actually monetizing those answers, and the cycle will repeat at the level of SEO’d AI answers.
DuckDuckGo works, for now. Maybe one day there will be a hostile takeover and it won’t anymore.
Btw this phenomenon is called https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification of the internet - yes that’s the official term afaik!!:-)