Comment by noirscape

Google has those problems because the company's revenue source (Ads) and the thing that puts it on the map (Search) are fundamentally at odds with one another.

A useful Search would ideally send a user to the site with the most signal and the fewest noise. Meanwhile, ads are inherently noise; they're extra pieces of information inserted into a webpage that at best tangentially correlate to the subject of a page.

Up until ~5 years ago, Google was able to strike a balance on keeping these two stable; you'd get results with some Ads but the signal generally outweighed the noise. Unfortunately from what I can tell from anecdotes and courtroom documents, the Ad team at Google has essentially hijacked every other aspect of the company by threatening that yearly bonuses won't be given out if they don't kowtow to the Ad teams wishes to optimize ad revenue somewhere in 2018-2019 and has no sign of stopping since there's no effective competition to Google. (There's like, Bing and Kagi? Nobody uses Bing though and Kagi is only used by tech enthusiasts. The problem with Google is that to copy it, you need a ton of computing resources upfront and are going up against a company with infinitely more money and ability to ensure users don't leave their ecosystem; go ahead and abandon Search, but good luck convincing others to give up say, their Gmail account, which keeps them locked to Google and Search will be there, enticing the average user.)

Google has absolutely zero incentive to filter out generative AI junk from their search results outside the amount of it that's damaging their PR since most of the SEO spam is also running Google Ads (since unless you're hosting adult content, Google's ad network is practically the only option). Their solution therefore isn't to remove the AI junk, but to instead reduce it enough to the degree where a user will not get the same type of AI junk twice.