In my last post I tried to give a top level view of how AI may impact local businesses who rely on local search. Today I’m looking at the issue from the opposite lens. As the pesky section that appears ubiquitously on Google search engine results page (more on that gripe later) might put it:

People also ask: Has AI ruined search?

Now there are two major ways that could possibly have a negative impact on a user’s experience with a search engine — the quality or accuracy of the results and how results are displayed on the SERP. It appears that since Google at least has been tailoring their results to be driven by AI, there is a degree of trouble with both.

Accuracy of results

Since the rise of AI’s role in returning results to a search query, anecdotal reports are legion in relating inaccurate and at times unintentionally comical results. Here’s a couple of my most recent ones:

I’m a huge Knicks fan and have been avidly following the new NBA season after anxiously waiting for it to begin since the end of last spring’s playoffs (some unfinished business there but you’d have to be a Knicks fan to know what I mean). So needing to get my hoops fix a couple of weeks ago, I googled to see what games were on TV that night and AI promptly informed me: “There are no NBA games on TV tonight because the season is over.”!

Also, we’ve been in a pretty severe drought here in North Florida, so a few weeks later, pounded by allergies because of the dry conditions, I googled to see how much rain (if any) we received in the last month or so, figuring regression to the mean might save me. AI’s response: “Although November is one of North Florida’s driest months, the Jacksonville area received 3.42 inches of rain two days ago.” (Punchline: At the time I entered that query Jacksonville had received exactly 0.02 inches of rain over the prior 30 days.)

Layout of the results page

I get even more frustrated comments from people on how results are displayed than the accuracy. First you get the aforementioned AI summary pretty close to the top, and even if there’s not an accuracy issue, you have to wade through that info and maybe, if you’re feeling ambitious, follow AI’s citations for validation, background and detail. (A major complaint of businesses and Web properties is that people tend not to, and the sites lose traffic).

Then, yes, there are those questions that people also ask. They tend to take up the next prime block of SERP real estate. Nothing wrong with that inherently, it just may not be the question that I may have. And quite often it isn’t. So by the time users get down to the part of the page where the most relevant results are (and that used to be at the top) they are either exhausted or have lost interest or both.

So in answer to that question at the top of the post, well if you ask me…