As Search Engines Increasingly Turn To AI They Are Harming Search

For more than half a century our digital search engines have relied upon the humble keyword. Yet over the past few years, search engines of all kinds have increasingly turned to deep learning-powered categorization and recommendation algorithms to augment and slowly replace the traditional keyword search. Behavioral and interest-based personalization has further eroded the impact of keyword searches, meaning that if ten people all search for the same thing, they may all get different results. As search engines depreciate traditional raw "search" in favor of AI-assisted navigation, the concept of informational access is being harmed and our digital world is being redefined by the limitations of today's AI. At first glance, the evolution of search from simple TF-IDF keyword queries into today's AI-powered personalized digital navigation is a positive step towards making the digital world more accessible to the general public.