If you showed a Google search engineer from 15 years ago today's results page they'd faint.

Not only do many queries have AI-generated results.

But also, every result above the fold is an ad, styled to be indistinguishable from the organic results.

This is what you get from rolling down a gradient.

Still, it would be shocking to see for someone from 15 years ago.^[c]

A wrinkle: many of the same people are still working on search from 15 years ago.

The villain isn't necessarily someone else who doesn't care about the ends as much as you did… it can sometimes just be a degraded version of you!

An off-color Red Dwarf episode on this same observation.