What We Lost When Search Stopped Making Us Think
Search results have quietly degraded as SEO and AI-generated content crowd out original answers, and AI summaries now hand users confident paraphrases instead of sources. This shift erodes the skill of research itself, as people skip the effort of comparing sources and forming their own synthesis, a cost that accumulates one convenience at a time.
Every time someone accepts a generated summary at face value instead of following through to an actual source, that's a small rep they didn't do.