Technology

I don't know about google because I don't use it unless I really can't find what I'm looking for, but here's a quick ddg search with a very unambiguous and specific question, and from sampling only the top 9 results I see 2 that are at all relevant (2nd and 5th):

In order to answer my question, I need to first mentally filter out 7/9 of the results visible on my screen, then open both of the relevant ones in new tabs and read through lengthy discussions in order to find out if anyone has shared a proper solution.

Here is the same search using perplexity's default model (not pro, which is a lot better at breaking down queries and including relevant references):

and I don't have to verify all the details because even if some of it is wrong, it is immediately more useful information to me.

I want to re-emphasise though that using LLMs for this can be incredibly frustrating too, because they will often insist assertively on falsehoods and generally act really dumb, so I'm not saying there aren't pros and cons. Sometimes a simple keyword-based search and manual curation of the results is preferred to the nonsense produced by a stupid language model.

Edit: I didn't answer your question about malicious, but I can give some example of what I consider malicious and you may agree that it happens frequently enough:

• AI generated articles
• irrelevant SEO results
• ads/sponsored results/commercial products or services
• blog spam by people who speak out of ignorance
• flame bait
• deliberate disinformation
• low-quality journalism
• websites designed to exploit people/optimised for purposes other than to contribute to a healthy internet

etc.