Google is about advertising. And SEO. The "sources" are generally what their algorithm considers to be 'good sources' but we have no indication that they have any validity. It remains to be seen whether AIs can somehow validate whether a source makes sense. "Reputable" at this point is irrelevant for anything except breaking news. Even in academia, citations dont mean much other than "this person knew how to promote their work well". We live in era of too many citations/references , and that has been detrimental. If we are going to be using machine learning from now on instead of 'reputation' , that is a good thing. At least we can know transparently what are the objectives the ML system is optimizing
Yes, and ultimately a search engine has to be a research tool, to find the best links. If there's a simple answer, it should be right there. That's what snippets were about, though they need development.
Once the search prompts becomes the end point for answers, and they never follow reference links, we're on to something else, something completely different. What happens to the web when that happens? Not many people are talking about that.
Some day I'll happily walk away from Google, but I respect that their model, through schema.org and being based on the open web, creates generally useful metadata. Sure, it's open to being gamed, which has had drastic negative effects, but that's not completely their fault, there's no easy answer to any of this.
