Web search is such a routine part of daily life that it’s easy to forget how marvelous it is. Type into a little text box and a complex array of technologies—vast data centers, ravenous web crawlers, and stacks of algorithms that poke and parse a query—spring into action to serve you a simple set of relevant results.
At least, that’s the idea. The age of generative AI threatens to sprinkle epistemological sand into the gears of web search by fooling algorithms designed for a time when the web was mostly written by humans.
Take what I learned this week about Claude Shannon, the brilliant mathematician and engineer known especially for his
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