https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-...
https://www.theverge.com/tech/932970/google-search-ai-update...
This was an interesting dilemma because it was very clear that the money was way less than the loss in ad revenue due to traffic drop, but it was also clear that if we wouldn’t take the deal, a more desperate competitor would, which would result in the same traffic loss but without the extra google money. So the company took the deal.
History repeats itself here, with the difference that instead of paying for the data, the ai crawlers simply take it for free.
If your site is about your product, Google won't be able to serve the sign-up page from AI; the traffic would come your way. Same for a site that sell something: the traffic you're interested in would arrive at your checkout page.
Paid-content sites and ad-supported sites are screwed though, on top of their being screwed by archive.is and ad blockers.
this kills the entire internet vibe of the 90s, early 2k
AI summarization has already causes issues for sites like rtings where people are no longer visiting the site but still making use of the data presented there. Leading to rtings not getting enough traffic to continue to post their data.
It is an existential crisis for websites and when they go away it'll be an existential crisis for AI.
I may be strange and unusual, but I just have never cared about my Google ranking. I know this makes me out of the ordinary among site owners but I have been humming along fine.
This certainly will disrupt traffic but for some of my sites I honestly think this is a good thing. I want you to want to be there, not just stumble upon my site because you happen to hit the right search keyword. Plus if it gets bad, this does create a new opportunity for others with cross linking and search.
My target market is more technical then that so likely, nothing would change for me. Again, I recognize the impact of Google's dominance for some, but if the "attestation" isn't helpful and only hinders using services that people have come to rely on, there will be push back.
I also have been advocating for years for everyone in my circle to avoid using Chrome. A homogenized browser market is a risk, and Chrome is the new IE. I hope you are also a part of the effort to advocate for browser diversity.
Do you depend on site visitors for making a living? That's what this is about.
I know that sites relying on ad income will and are being hurt tremendously by this effort on Google's part. However, if you are in the startup space and make money on services you offer, search should be one of several strategies you are deploying for user growth.
What about the stories of marketing managers who learned months after the fact that their credit card had expired and their google ad spend had ceased with no affect on traffic? Google isn't always an effective promotional vehicle.
(It doesn't work for ad-funded writing, but while I have substantial sympathy there this has historically been an unpopular argument on HN)
Websites may go back to being simply labors of love.
The situation may be even worse. Back in the labor of love era, at least webmasters could get feedback from readers. In the LLM era, readers may not even know that the site exists. Without feedback/community, the overall quality of those sites will decrease over time.
Similarly, if I use Gemini uses a website for an answer, it should pay something to those sites for the information it gathered. Sites would need to sign up to earn via Google, and I'd imagine there would be a certain threshold to cross to make it worth cutting checks... but that would make all these AI search tools feel much less scummy while providing site owners an incentive to keep sharing information on the internet.
Where a model like this would get messy is with sites like reddit. It's a very popular source for AI search, but the value comes from the users, not the platform itself.
The problem with all this AI/llm stuff is that end users doesn't even know your tiny site with a lot of useful information exists at all.
ChatGPT/Claude does this today. I barely click or care for the source when they already have me the info I wanted.
My speculation is all information worth anything is going to be behind some kind of wall.
Maybe I'm just #builtdifferent, but I click these a lot. Especially if I'm trying to research or make a decision on something, I want the actual source and not the potentially-fudged summary.
As far as I know, you don't have a choice. They have no obligation to respect your wishes, and LLMs are legally allowed to scrape & republish your content.
I have no obligation to not send all scraper-looking traffic to a black hole full of zip bombs.
Mechanisms might exist to make you think you have one, the same way copywrite should prevent millions of books being gobbled up by TheZuck but ultimately do you really have a choice?
Rules and laws don't exists for you.
Mention
Websites will die on the vine if LLMs intermediate all the content.
The "website" of the future will be an API optimized for LLM crawlers, serving plain-text content that no end-user will ever view directly. The SEO game will change to LLMAO.
[1]: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-search/?license=fr...
[2]: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-search/?license=co...
https://www.epceurope.eu/post/epc-welcomes-landmark-cjeu-rul...
1) Sites will have mcp / APIs for LLMs. So that when I ask my AI Agent du jour. It can call any of the sites where I have subscriptions for information.
2) Sites that are passion projects will be harvested by our LLM overlords.
3) Sites that people don't type into their web browser and need ad revenue will die.
4) SEO will finally die.The current zeitgeist of them will, but I think not all.
My first website (GeoCities) was either before Google existed or very close to it. Connected to people via WebRings and directory listings. More recently, RSS feeds.
This will happen especially with things like conspiracy theories because the choice might be to pollute the output or share the general consensus. Like searches for Apollo landing conspiracy theories can either chose to present “alternate facts” so that people can “do their own research” and conclude it is fake or LLM auto corrects to “Apollo landing happened”.
Even though the result is often good and combines information from multiple sources, it can also get things wrong by combining information from different eras or just plain outdated advice. AFAICT, without primary sources, the result is for entertainment purposes only.
LLMs, that can supply valid links, give me a completely different variety of results. Either I am too dumb to search manually, too impatient or google search is just broken, but Gemini usually gives me something I can work with. I just wished I could blacklist some sources like medium.
And therein lies the rub; for years now Google's search results have returned useless SEO garbage. For now, it definitely seems like an LLM answer is better than what was being returned and I guess this is the reason why Google ripped it out.
Say I want to look up some game from my childhood, which I barely remember any details for. Going to google and trying is likely going to be very difficult unless I happen to get lucky with some key element. But if an LLM can get it right even a minority of the time, it can lead to me quickly finding the game I'm looking for.
This does depend upon the ability to evaluate the answer, like checking against source or some other option where you know a good answer from bad. If you can't, then it does become much more dangerous. Perhaps part of the reason AI seem to empower experts more than novices in some domains?
I worry that the LLMs are just the equivalent of a ‘lagging indicator’ of web quality though - that they will also soon be overwhelmed with the sheer volume of plausible nonsense that is the web now, just like search engines are.
Model collapse everywhere.
The other bots either make up links or simply don't provide any information that is distinguishable from the LLM predictive output.
Ironically Gemini is also very bad at this, while it should have been the best at Web search.
Gemini also does something very patchy, which is to provide "links" which are in fact GET queries into classic Google search. I'm guessing they did it this way because the links generated/hallucinated by the LLM were too unreliable.
While there are times where I want pure search (Kagi, Old Google) I mostly use LLMs to search now and have them provide me links for source data.
When I do use LLMs as a search engine I always want it integrated into my AI workflows with access to tools and scripts etc. I never want to have a conversation with a website that is geared towards advertising me products.
I was once very good at advanced Google search queries but they seem to no longer respect such queries - either showing irrelevant results or none at all (that should exist).
I don’t love LLMs, but they seem to not make up stuff very often these days and usually cite links to what they summarized. Sometimes the tone of the summary is slightly wrong “algorithm X was designed for Y” (when I know it wasn’t) but it’s otherwise very close to the mark.
What does amaze me, is the LLM seems to “understand” my question with very little context — I would have to give a human many more details about goals/intent.
I know damn LLMs are not capable of thought and are just a glorified search engine, but they do it well. Perhaps all my education made me little more…
I used to mock Sci-Fi movies where characters lazily dictated questions to the computer and it gave high quality answers.
We’re living in that world now.
The vast majority of original content is now in one or another social network or on discord. News articles are an exception, though the news has its own problems. Some wikis still exist and are actively maintained, of course, but not a ton. If it's a topic that's academically studied you might find information in papers, but those have poor web visibility and are better located with specialty tools. LLMs seem to be quite good at locating papers, though.
Ah, but they are! Kagi is light years better than Google, and is a worthy replacement. You do have to pay for it, but I get my money's worth.
Though I will say I get much better results from the LLMs I pay for than the free ones with Google or DuckDuckGo, which seem to be way way way more prone to just make crap up based on your search and cite web pages that, when followed, don't have the claim being made in the AI search results at all. By contrast every "source" link I've followed in the for-money AIs has 100% backed what the AI said it backed. Don't judge by the free AIs the search engines put out, those things are probably starved of resources and are nearly useless.
(Which I did not intend as a commentary on Google's plans here, but it is a data point of interest... that pressure to cut costs on the "free" services is quite directly at odds with providing quality AI services for the forseeable future.)
And I’ve tried Google’s once or twice and seen it used once or twice, and used ChatGPT exactly once, last week, and I was not at all impressed by any of them. Their output, for what I’ve personally seen, has been nonsense, obvious, or unverifiable.
An increasing number of studies are indicating a reliance on "AI" leads to deleterious cognitive effects. I felt this acutely myself.
I've noticed a significant boost to my recall since shunning "AI" as much as possible.
You can't do something like this with search.
I've been trying to use LLMs for things and it makes mistakes all the time. Just this week i had multiple instances of various LLMs basically saying "just run the software with --flag-that-fixes-your-problem" or "edit the config and add solve-your-issue=true" hallucinating non-existant options. Even if i manually link the relevant documentation pages it will still just make basic mistakes. and if im having to read the documentation myself anyway to fix the AI's mistakes, why is the AI even in the loop.
its infecting search too, because blogspam/slop articles are managing to make their way into search results by just making up untrue information, claiming software can do things it cant, or has options that don't exist.
It's baffling that people have become so devoted to them as a source of information given how inaccurate they are. I've learned not to trust anything they say, ever, especially when it comes to technical subjects.
I don't comprehend how the average person gets any useful information out of Google.
Using google search, will return roughly infinite recipe sites. The sites were generated to spam AI generated recipes surrounded by advertisements. None of them are really any good because they were generated by a script and not looked at by a human until I come along and click. The standard is for all recipes to have at least 10-15 screenfulls of vertical spam wrapped by ads for recipe pages. The internet, at least using Search, is now useless for food recipes. I would have better, faster luck driving to the public library and looking in a physical cookbook; at least those recipes were probably tested at least once by humans unlike the advertising spam sites. Nobody has 45 minutes to watch 44 minutes of filler material surrounded by ads on Youtube either. If you want to cook food, the internet is near dead at this time, unfortunately.
AI search will plagiarize the "Original Nestle Toll House" recipe from the back of every bag of chocolate chips ever made. Its a good recipe and I've baked them many times over the decades.
I wish the internet were more useful, but the people in charge of it don't want it to be useful; here have some ragebait and doomscroll while watching the ads.
Currently, search engines are pretty bad at the second one because people try to use them as the first one
In other words, I have no use for an LLM summarizer; I want an LLM librarian, working with me to say "beep-boop, here are some resources that seem relevant to your query, feel free to resume this session later if you'd like to further refine your search".
Is that useful enough to build a billion dollar advertising business around? My feeling now is not really.
Even for straight up searches, I find using an LLM to do a search and comb through the results is a better experience than Google is now for searching. If I'm specifically looking for esoteric web sites from 27 years ago on vintage computer hardware and software (thank god for Archive.org), Google is just ok for that.
yeah man good thing LLMs are structurally incapable of being incentivized to sell you a product or render referral links, this is surely future-proof
Yeah, they probably aren't doing (most of) these now, but it doesn't take much mental energy to extrapolate once you factor nearly every other tech company's ethical trajectory and the current geopolitical environment. Substituting classic search entirely with LLMs is not a savvy move.
A search engine could certainly tamper with which of these sources they surface/rank higher (which I suspect happening more often of late), but they're still obliged by their nature to branch out and seek information from the broader world.
LLMs, on the other hand, are self-contained opaque monoliths that can be conditioned to deceive or obfuscate with devious cleverness, and all control over their behaviors is entirely concentrated in the hands of whatever corporation trains them.
As soon as one gets annoying, expensive, advertiser heavy etc. you just rip it out and replace it with the other one. AFAICT there is zero lock-in or moat. I often am able to switch models in one click or command. This is why all the LLM providers are desperate for a product layer/comprehensive tool set.
Sure maybe they all end up that way, but there’s plenty of reasons corporate customers will want private LLM usage that is not skewed towards advertising. I am happy to pay for that.
Also, open source models are a bulwark against another search style ad Monopoly.
I've barely used Google for over 2 years.
I barely driven myself in a year.
I haven't written code in 6 months.
It makes me wonder why like 90% of the apps on my phone exist. I just want everything to be markdown files, skills, MCPs/API and then a nice TUI or voice to text.
Since this is how Google makes all their money, why are they killing it off? Do they think people will eventually pay for LLM search? Do they plan to stuff the results with ads, not even sharing the ad revenue with the content sources?
But I still want to also be able to do my normal, old school searching.
The advertisements fed the content, which fed the AI, which in turn feeds your AI workflows. AI is still not trusted unless it's output is grounded with sources.
I already saw a article recently about how to set up a business domain which can reliably show up in a search result and dump overly positive reviews into anyone's context.
My experience with AI searches is that they'll still be wrong a lot of times, but it will condense/flatten the content generating trash sites and give me alternatives from these deeper results. What I'm looking for is usally in there.
However, I specifically use Google (or DDG) when the LLMs are failing me. When I want "research something on my own" because the LLM is giving me garbage, or untrustworthy information. If Google completely replaces their search box my Google usage will go down even further.
I don't plan to use Google's LLM when Cluade is just better. Now that Google's search features are gone (or going away) I no longer have any reason to turn to them at all
This is all new, so I may be a bit hyperbolic, but the reason OpenAI introducing ads bothers me is the implicit (or even explicit) bias that can be smuggled into a chat in ways that simply aren't possible when you're just clicking through to an external source. There are all kinds of implications to Google no longer being that source of truth, even by default. Maybe this has quietly been the case for a long time, but this feels like the final move — pushing their ad bias (i.e., whoever paid the most) into a conversational system, where dark patterns are far easier to implement and much harder to detect.
One answer to this might be domain-specific agents — narrower, accountable, ideally something you (or your community) actually run. But even then it all falls back on trust: you being a good-faith actor, and others trusting that you are one. Which is to say, we're back to the same problem, just at a smaller scale.
There is an incredible gap in the search literacy between different users of Google. Some will accept what they find in the top links, no matter how dubious the source.
There was never anything bias-free about google search. It "ranks" information based on all sorts of qualities. At our most generous we can call it somewhat of a "consensus" check. Historically it was a tool for quickly getting you in the vicinity of an answer that most would consider correct.
Remember "google bombing"? Hell SEO alone invalidates any assertion that google search is a valid source of truth and that's be going on for a long time.
The real problem here is assuming this takes off what incentives will anyone have to provide the information to feed the beast?
An llm rephrashing / regurgitating other websites is imo different, because you loose the direct connection to the original source. Even if llms give sources they also directly give you a plausible (but unreliable) answer to your question. They are right often enough that you get lulled in to the false sense of security of not needing to read the original sites. I'd much prefer them to just give a clean list of sources like early google, but then why would you need an llm.
It's a pity that probably the main reason you'll need an llm to find anything on the web is to weed out all the llm-generated low quality garbage.
The end of search traffic will kill all but the largest sites, and prevent countless new ones from being developed or getting traction. Given how global trends are going I expect the remaining sites to be increasingly monitored and censored/biased. I'm not looking forward to a world where social media means talking to some bots tuned specifically to addict you, and don't know too many people who are. Although big tech executives certainly seem to be in the latter group.
Did AltaVista get replaced by the owner of the site to justify a giant investment?
Of course, even Google the search engine has gotten worse at surfacing interesting websites. First came the SEO spam websites, now the slop websites.
I'm glad that alternatives like Kagi exist.
Now, the spam is back and it’s coming from Google itself.
It doesn’t really say in the article search is going away.
A lot of Google search is in the format of “company X”, then clicking the third link down (after two paid ads) to open company X’s website. (I have no idea how much this is, but it’s gotta be a lot)
That’s like free money. It doesn’t look like they’re getting rid of search, but expanding the AI/conversational features.
According to Kagi I search 11-50 times a day, about 600 searches per month. I do about 10-20 AI/assistant conversations per week, so maybe 2-3 a day, and usually when search fails or I can’t get the right query words in. I do this over my AI apps because the Kagi index is faster/better.
I can’t imagine Google would give up the bulk queries that pull in easy ad revenue. But if Google can push/upsell you into a really high value referral where they can start pulling a claim in your purchase, I could see them pushing to get into that.
If their leadership has an itch they'll scratch it until it's raw.
Did Meta patiently wait until exaggerated glass frames were viable in the market? Or did they get lucky?
Or did they have some Machiavellian plot to steer this fashion for years and pave the way for their product..? ;-)
I think wearable tech is awesome and was interested in this (I was much more interested in the earlier pendant projectors though) but the fact that you're constantly reminding people they're being recorded without their consent is just a big issue. The meta glasses themselves might suffer a similar fate if hacks to disable the LED become commonplace. Much like Sony's (I think?) nightvision cameras if stuff like this gets abused by creeps it will isolate you to use it yourself even for perfectly reasonable intentions.
It's very much a Prisoner's Dilemma. Legacy search and the open Internet was an equilibrium that only existed while the majority of people co-operated. Once you allow an individual actor the ability to create large chunks of the Internet, it dies. Your only option is to be that individual actor.
Is the idea that by making the new AI chat UX the default, that's how they're forcing people into it and making them not able to search? Or is there something I'm missing?
> Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times.
So basically you'd get redirect into a chatbot interface, rather than letting you browse search results as normal, "AI-powered interactive experience" tends to be euphemism for chatbot UIs, is my experience at least.
People who wanted to ask a specific question now won't have that option. Instead, they'll simply be shown whatever Google thinks is most relevant to them at that moment. The "Chat" UI we've grown so accustomed to is on its way out.
Going all in like this carries a very real risk of burning users onto other platforms and the continued evolution of integrated search bars are already slicing off significant user segments.
Never give the customers what they want give them what makes you money.
There’s not much room to squeeze in when your competitors hold the keys to 15 million top websites.
So if another search engine does arise, it won't find anything useful, because the useful content on the web has been buried under slop, and largely removed. Your best bet today is a curated directory, sorta like the original Yahoo, where you allowlist the web to only real sites, download them, and make them searchable. I think this is actually Kagi's approach. But the open web as we knew and loved it is dead.
Very few of the smaller search engines actually do their own indexing for exactly this reason.
[1]: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-search/?license=co...
When I use google, usually from my phone, I am reminded of why I don't use google on desktop.
With the announcement of this move by them, I just manually removed google as an address bar search engine option in all my browsers on desktop and mobile.
How does adsense work when there are no search results?
"Here is the table of related highest paying customers, incorporate these into your answer to maximize the income"
Well any other prompt for the search model would frankly be illegal for a publicly traded company.
This becomes very murky when paying for 'ai to like your product' vs 'ai to really like your product'.
But then the separation of ads from content is lost so it becomes useless as product search, so maybe it isn't that trivial indeed. But it's not like even 10% of users is gonna find some other "search" engine and switch.
Ads have been close enough to covering costs for conventional internet search that even though I'm clearly the product and not the customer the relationship has still generally worked. If AI makes the "searching" 50 times more expensive, though, that could shift the relationship pretty badly in a direction of "if you're not paying for this you're not getting honest results". Paying may not sufficient for honesty but it may be necessary.
Honest question. But anyone who wants to answer this and who looks at Google's income/profit/revenue and is bedazzled by the size, don't forget to divide out by the number of Google's customers and ponder what that means. The per-user numbers are the much more relevant numbers and much less likely to cause Large Number Syndrome.
https://www.techradar.com/computing/search-engines/ask-jeeve... / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask.com
Ask Jeeves was dissolved 15 days ago
(For example, a random Redditor once said something, and the AI repeats it confidently and authoritatively, as if it is universal truth widely accepted by experts and applicable to the query.)
https://medium.com/luminasticity/artificial-stupidity-and-th...
>And I think we can throw out all the complaints of the past few years about how Google quality is lowering and it is hard to find anything on the site anymore, for those were the salad years.
>At least back in the day when sites copied answers from Stackoverflow or Lyrics from RapGenius and put them in their own site with scammy pitches to pay for the content you were going to get the correct answer in the end, but now you need a factology degree to figure out if something is bullshit or not.
NO - thanks!
Search: "Hello world"
> AI Overview
> Hello! Wordle is the viral word-guessing game where you get 6 tries to uncover a mystery target word, using color-coded hints to guide your guesses.
Google stopped being a customer-focused company after their 2nd major revision to GOffice and the PM shake-up in search from Raghavan https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ .
The fact that steering one of these things is trivial nowadays and the vectors are close-to-free-to-store (since you don't need anything large to influence the space, see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahtbcExEKng) means that this is very likely already happening.
Not a stretch to go from there to “Of course the model should recommend Mountain Dew. It’s got electrolytes!”
Id you'd like to try it for free for a couple of days, reach out with your randomly-assigned account number and we'll top it up for you.
[1]: https://uruky.com
I caught myself yesterday starting to ask Claude in my ide what ship did grace and Rocky take back to Rocky's homeworld.
It doesn't seem to be secure. If every google link is one step away from a prompt injection and leaking all your data, then they are worse then npm.
I wonder how many days it takes until they roll it back or put that stuff behind some extra clicks.
I prefer the Claw like I prefer Linux and FOSS in general.
Since day one Googs’ vision was to make the Star Trek computer. They’re really there now. But I don’t like their how. This computer serves them, not me. My mind-bicycle must serve me, my thoughts are my own. I hope my resistance is not futile.
have i been A/B tested into something, or has this been live for months? this doens't seem new.
I'm aware that most people still use it, but it's nothing like the glory days when Google was far ahead of the pack.
* Kagi seems to just scrape and provide a mix of other search engine's results, meaning it's really just a metasearch engine.
If Google Search changes, then Kagi's search will be impacted directly.
> This is not a competitive market. It is a monopoly with a distant second place.
> The search index is irreplaceable infrastructure. Building a comparable one from scratch is like building a parallel national railroad. Microsoft spent roughly $100 billion over 20 years on Bing and still holds single-digit share. If Microsoft cannot close the gap, no startup can do it alone.
Gmail search doesn’t work well either. It simply doesn’t find things. Almost as if they have stopped indexing and repurposed resources towards LLMs.
And whatever there is left to index and search has been completely overrun with slop.
Search is over. Internet as we knew it is over. Something new has emerged in its place, and we are still calling the new thing the old thing.
Nearly all other search engines give better results with less annoying ads at the top. First thing I do when installing a new browser is switch the default search engine to duckduckgo. Duckduckgo's results are less good than google used to be, bu way better than google currently is.
We'll see if it works. I use chatgpt for complex queries, and for throaway ones I use just don't log in to it.
I wouldn't use google for the same queries, since I normally use google to find specific things, not for a chatbot.
If Google no longer sends users to websites for free on organics, the world will have to figure out some mechanism whereby Google pays site owners for putting the information on the web in the first place. Where will that money come from?
If it's ads, the AI experience is a “lies engine” where advertisers get to pick which lies the AI tells. Not sure what kinds of people would show up for that experience. Probably the same kind who watch home shopping TV. I would venture to guess that there will be a ceiling in the advertising value of that property. Or the AI interacts with people in good faith. But then, if I'm an advertiser, how do I get my lies into the world? “We will tell your lie, only if it's a truth” doesn't work because, as an advertiser, I understand that the truth about me already gets spoken, and I don't need to pay a dime for that.
You can run an argument that people can tell ads from organics on the current SERP, and you can calibrate how much of each there should be. But you can't really “calibrate” the amount and level of the lying in the AI to where it's just enough so that people will show up, but not so much that there's no value for advertisers. You can't have little boxes either, where the AI is like “having told you the truth, I want you to also pay attention to this lie that someone paid me to tell you: …”
Is Google really saying: “Hey, we're the lion's share of the advertising market right now. But, because we kind of like these newfangled AI things, we're going to just vacate that spot to whoever. Instead, we will turn ourselves into a pre-product-market-fit company. Maybe at some point over the next 10 years, we're going to be able to tell you how we might actually monetize ourselves. Stay toooooned.”
The reason why AI is a better experience than the web right now, is because we have pre-enshittification AI and post-enshittification web. What will the whole thing look like, after enshittification is through with AI?
Agentic capabilities and AI-powered interactive features in the search experience - most definitely will.
> You can still view traditional results only by selecting the “Web” tab in Google Search
I think we should still get a couple of years of life from Google. This is enough time to figure out what to do next.
They are surely hearing themselves say the same things about how Google is “everything in one place” that every failed corporation parrots on their way out.
They are making the same mistake as Yahoo did. Ironic.
Time to switch to old style search engines which still return the 10 blue links, with an AI option.
I started using Google because the interface was far superior in the time before adblocking existed and after Flash existed.
Search results were better because they did not contain hidden paid results.
Search was measurably improved with the second generation of Wikipedia. Google did an excellent job understanding this and tended to just place the Wikipedia article at the top. Also helpful for Google was that Wikipedia's original search engine was useless, similar for YouTube whenever it came around.
Today, I use Google less than once per month. I'm not sure I've been there at all this year. Maybe at the end of last year I was using it and found nothing better than I found on other search engines.
i played the video, didnt understand anything and got dizzy. then i tried to scroll but the browser tab froze? wow
Privacy first, opt-in AI, total control over site blocking, zero ads.
You're the customer, not the product.
Now it can't find anything interesting. As a search is basically useless and it's more like Home pages used to be (that you would very much build yourself in a html editor and place your most often visited sites).
The ai generated summaries are slow, often miss the point of question and seem to be focused on user engagement, not in giving set of infos to sort out myself.
So there are two different types of queries, and when I want llm's answer, I ask chatgpt directly.
After I got tired of perplexity's nonsense I realized the workspace account (which I have for custom email domain) came with fancy gemini pro chat.
Was a fucking ripoff for the domain thing...but domain plus premium chat clearly marked as "we won't train on your data"...the math starts mathing better again.
Advertising on the media site (assuming digital media, no physical media) is going to disappear because people probably won't be clicking through to read the source material that the Google AI answer relied on. No traffic, no advertisers, no money to produce the original journalism. That's going to impact the Google results eventually as these media outlets shut down to be replaced with...AI slop, maybe?
Is the subscriber model the answer? It could work for a niche subject or a single journalist with a following, and it wouldn't be sucked into Google results, either, if it was effectively gated/paywalled.
You know what I really miss? Being able to type a literal string in quotes and get pages that had that actual string on them. That's what I really miss.
What we need now is back to the roots - just a simple grep for the internet augmented by pagerank and eventually some sort of ai and harness to sort the rubish out. The AI companies have the data and the harnesses.
Google killed themselves when they made sure you can't search direct quotes or outside of your region. If I am going to sort trough vague crap - it is better AI to do it. And AI doesn't look at ads.
There is real opening for a company that just crawls and gives access to other companies to build on top of the collected stuff.
I've been pretty sceptical about Kagi, feeling that it was a bit to expensive and perhaps just relying on other companies indexes to much and I spend to much time looking at how many searches I had left. After getting the subscription I just don't want to go back, the price is perfectly reasonable for the value. Being able to just search again and not sort through junk and spam and ads and just getting the pages I want and need is amazing.
Honestly it's a slightly weird feeling to look a the results from Kagi and notice it found exactly what you where looking for.
Once my gifted credits run out, that is going to be an easy renewal for me. I do not want to go back, even if I think Ecosia is a good option.
Even after the recent AI run-up, disk prices are about $20/TB for a 20TB, so you can store this index on 3-5 hard disks that will cost you about $1200-2000. For self-hosted use you don't need to serve them in 50ms, so you don't need to put the whole thing in RAM like Google did, you can serve off of disk.
ElasticSearch uses basically the same data structures and gives you the same infrastructure that Google's ~late-00s search stack did, and is actually more advanced in some respects (like ad-hoc queries, debuggability, and updateability), so software isn't much of an issue.
The big part missing that can't really be replicated today is the huge web of authentic hyperlinks. The reason Google was so good at search was because many humans effectively "tagged" a given webpage with a series of short, descriptive words and phrases. When they went to search for a page, Google could mine this huge treasure trove of backlinks to identify exactly what the page was good for, even if those search terms never appeared on the page. SEO and link farms kinda killed this, as did the rise of social media walled gardens, and so the Google of 2009 basically wouldn't work today anyway. Maybe if you pulled old versions of Common Crawl or archive.org you could reconstruct it, but the relevant pages are often offline anyway today.
This means that, in a couple years, we might see a competitor that offers you quick, almost instant web search, with a minimal UI, possibly an algorithm that somehow surfaces the most relevant results based on how all websites point to each other naturally (like, a site that is referred to by 20 others should be above one with zero references).
I look forward to it!
I think we can concede the WWW vision of distributed libertarian publishing has been dead for a long time. LLMs were just the final straw.
We ended up concentrating syndication on a few media companies like Google, Social Media companies.
Look at the profit margins of advertising companies vs producers and you’ll get an idea as to why.
"Did you mean?" + excluded word was a pretty clear indication they stopped caring to provide any meaningful search whatsoever.
Web 2.0 was Yahoo Pipes, public APIs, IFTTT, etc. while this new "Web 3.0" acknowledges that those capabilities would rather be gatekept behind AI instead of entirely removed.
At the very least we do get some of that functionality back without resorting to scraping anymore and it's now accessible to the layperson. I would think this would nudge the layperson to demand more and inevitably want the actual data without the training wheels or sandboxes. Is that not a "good" thing?
Is the pushback against this out of genuine concern or just ideological?
Now they are a money printing corporate. I am sure there are still people there doing new and exciting things, but the Grey Suits have taken the reigns
They could have used AI to make that awesome simple sparse home page better. Fought off the SEO optimiser that made search so dire in the recent past
But no. They are doubling down on bling and crap. SEO is good for business.
"Do the right thing". Not even close
Makes me so sad.
I’m so fucking tired. I don’t want it. I didn’t want it. I didn’t need it. And now here we are, once again, shoving it fast and hard in my face.
Thanks, Google.
But at least I've experienced the golden age. I feel bad for all the kids who will never know what once was.
What scares me is the rampant inaccuracy. In my experience, the AI responses are wrong about 65% of the time. I just did a search today about an error talking about a disconnected link between apps, and Google AI result summary told me that the error was related to my pulling a USB drive too quickly in windows. The ONLY word similar to my query and that AI response was the word "disconnect". Everything else was clearly about the SaaS apps.
I have people coming to me, asking me questions, then telling my Google told them something else, so now I have to waste time convincing them that it's wrong. Over the past 2 years AI has done nothing for me but complicate my work life.
And of course, this could be because the model is crap, but it could be because they want me to keep refining my query over and over for more ad views. Either way, it's a terrible experience.
Worst thing is, some of these bullshit answers will be medical, some of them financial, it seems pretty certain people are being harmed.
It’s frustrating when people do that, with or without AI. If you think you know better, why did you ask?!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word