The World of Warcraft subreddit recently realized that a website, zleague.gg (I am not linking to it), which runs a blog attached to some of sort of gaming app which is its main business, has been scraping reddit threads, feeding them through an AI and summarizing them
Absolute crap is an exaggeration. I went back and checked my history and almost all of my search results were accurate and I got my answer within the first page. I don't wanna be that guy but maybe you're doing it wrong. I'd love an example of an "absolute crap" result.
I'm a technical search engine user since AltaVista. That all search engine results declined in quality to become near-useless has been covered in multiple articles (e.g. HN). Reasons are SEO, counter-SEO and increasingly targeting mass users. I'm wondering about your use cases since you're not seeing it.
An easy example is to search for a product comparison. "Best ___ for 2023". Those have way too much SEO and most are barely one person's rambling opinions, possibly made with AI.
It is nearly impossible to find good product comparisons these days. Nearly all of them are generated off of Amazon reviews, which are terribly unreliable. I used to just append Reddit to the end of my search but now that isn’t much of an option anymore either..