> search keeps getting worse

For a lot of use cases, you don't need a general purpose search engine – a search over a curated knowledge base works even better.

There are plenty of freely available data sets you can use, depending on the application; plus in many cases you will want to use internal-only knowledge bases containing non-public information (e.g. documentation for a corporation's internal systems and procedures). There are also many paid subscription domain-specific knowledge services available.

Generally I agree, with two caveats/thoughts:

Providing not just any a baseline, but a correct and useful one, is ever more important the less the model is grounded in world knowledge – misunderstandings probably compound faster if there is no general grasp of (broadly) “life on earth”, or computers, or whatever.

And secondly, I think (consumer-oriented) search becoming worse and worse is a challenge that’s mostly solvable (but far from solved!) for the big labs: (Mostly) trusted or even editorialized/reviewed sources like published work, Wikipedia, etc. is something they could index internally, it doesn’t need to come from a random blog site on the public internet. Furthermore, there’s a whole slew of companies specializing in crawling-for-LLM (i.e., bypassing bot protections) now as well.

search isnt that super hard to solve. the problem is that incentives are misaligned - which means companies who sell something have an incentive to share their index with the corporation that pays to be the default search provider. for a simple search engine that just delivers facts there's very little incentive to keep its index up-to-date: because that company wont get the apis to retrieve the content efficiently, so it needs more compute, bandwidth and storage to run.

the technicals of search did not get worse. the economics of the search provider did. If government wasn't stuck in the 50s mindset, search provider would have been nationalized just like a utility.