If search engines can't find a way to filter the bad information, all the automated scraping of knowledge will become perilously untrustworthy.
I suspect we may see domain trust become significantly more important, and that may have a chilling effect on legitimate websites gaining a foot hold in search indexes. We already have this issue mind you. Most of my searches for popular topics end up with generated or scraped content in them, unless there is a domain authority with major sway that takes up the majority of results.
Maybe we will see the return of curated web directories? Or maybe the web becomes a barren wasteland as everyone flees to social applications.
I think you're on to something here. The closest equivalent I can think of is academic publishing. There's tons and tons of total garbage among some good research, and pretty much the only way to find the good stuff is to look at what people at top institutions are doing or what the top journals are publishing.
I suspect we may see domain trust become significantly more important, and that may have a chilling effect on legitimate websites gaining a foot hold in search indexes. We already have this issue mind you. Most of my searches for popular topics end up with generated or scraped content in them, unless there is a domain authority with major sway that takes up the majority of results.
Maybe we will see the return of curated web directories? Or maybe the web becomes a barren wasteland as everyone flees to social applications.