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.

Earlier today, I searched "pixel 10 wifi 7" because I was confused that GSMArena showed my Pixel 8 supports Wifi 7, but the Pixel 10 only Wifi 6. Gemini confidently claimed that the Pixel 10 does support Wifi 7 -- but that's not true at all. Only the Pixel 10 _Pro_ supports it, as I discovered when actually reading the non-AI search results.

And this is a question about a Google product!

It's really depressing how bad things are getting...

Though the inconsistency of results between users is definitely another frustrating thing.

It's really amazing we can make machines do that, and it's really depressing that we think a stochastic bullshit machine is going to give us something we can rely on.

Why would a human know specs for a random phone off the top of their head? The human response is either "I don't know" or "let me look that up", not a hallucination.

Claude is OK at saying when it can’t find good information, but it’s still 50/50 on citing a source that has nothing to do with its claim.

They can still be useful, e.g. they're significantly better at finding "I want a thing that does x but not y and it must be blue, or maybe two things that can be glued together to do that" than classic search. But they'll routinely miss extremely obvious answers because the related search it ran didn't find it, or completely screw up what something can actually do. Checking more pages of results by hand or asking humans who know even a little about those fields is still wildly more useful... but they're absolutely slaughtering the sites where people do that, by stealing all the real traffic and sending DDoS-level automated requests.

An interesting aspect of this is the decrease in quality feedback on th organic links. If most people never get down to the actual links there is very little to tell which ones were good or if they had any relevance.

There is also that less incentive to properly maintain the search algorithms to fight SEO and spam.

For all intents and purpose, organic search results have been given a death sentence and are just waiting for the last moment.

What a wildly irresponsible company

It's a bold position to say that it's the users fault for being lied to by Google. There isn't a "single answer" to most questions. It's still Google's job to provide answers that are accurate and reflect the best information available on complicated topics. That's what they're trying to sell us anyway. When google's AI can't live up to the hype "You shouldn't be asking AI such difficult questions" is not a great response, especially when people are just trying to get web search results and AI is suddenly interrupting with an opinion nobody asked for.

There's even the meme where people ask if the code was the result of a stack overflow question, or answer

I have no idea why this is, but it is impossible that these links are primary sources of the data, if such things even exists at all. In which case, why list them?

It is certainly seems possible that the actual sources of the data is the output of some other LLM.

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fn...

  > What scares me is the rampant inaccuracy

With AI ads you get all the power from big data aggregation, the trust/framing of an authoritative voice, and cheap personalization that specifically optimizes for what convinces you. It's too powerful. Even if it only works a small percentage of the time we're interacting with these things so frequently that a small percent is a large number. They're already feeding user profiles into these machines and there's explicit talk about having the LLMs optimize ad campaigns. It's already dystopian if it's ads to get you to spend your money, but people seem to dismiss that. Do we not care that this is also being used in the same way to convince you to believe certain things? To join certain political organizations?

Yeah, these things help me write more lines of code faster (if we include all the lines from our design docs) but I don't like the idea of pointing a supercomputer at my brain and someone else using it to try to manipulate me. That's not a game I'll win. It's not a game you'll win either.

Whatever it says is a waste of time 99% of the time. Although people believe it, or consider it worthwhile majority of the time because its so simple to use. It's always there, always instant and appears at the very top.

I would much rather people shove a question into a locally running Qwen model and tell me what it said rather than use the nonsense search model. I hate it.

/rant over.

e.g. search for "how do you make money with options"

Google's AI says

"When you buy a Call, you are betting the stock price will go up. When you buy a Put, you are betting it will go down."

Wrong right off the bat, because it ingested a whole bunch of get-rich-quick bull on the internet. The correct version is that if you buy a call you are betting the stock price will go up more than the market expects it to.

While I agree that AI gets things wrong a lot, and someone should read significantly more before getting into actually trading options, this does give a decent overview to give a layperson an idea of what they are, and some key terms on what to look for if they want to dive deeper. That said, with this info alone, there are some sharp edges that would leave the person open to unnecessary risk if they went on this information alone.

> Call Options: You buy these when you believe a stock's price will go up. If the stock rises past your strike price, the option's value increases, allowing you to sell it for a profit or exercise it to buy the stock at a discount.

> Put Options: You buy these when you believe a stock's price will go down. If the stock falls below your strike price, you profit.

Which leaves me wondering if changing the search textually busts some cache that they update using a slower/smarter model.

I hope it at least has real citations to actual websites like, I dunno, fidelity or some other reasonably competent authority that can explain all the details?

It's an answer that's too short for an expert to find useful, and useless to a layperson unless all they want to do is reply to a post on twitter.

I've never searched for a financial question where I did not want to know all the weird details because why would I search for it unless I was considering doing it? Seems like someone who doesn't care about the answer is going to be more an edge case than I am.

People shoot themselves in the foot because they think NVDA is going to go up after earnings, buy call options, and then even though the stock goes up they lose money because they did not understand IV crush.

People looking for one-sentence explanations should really not be playing with options. In finance you should understand what you're buying thoroughly. If you just want to bet that "NVDA goes up", you should just buy NVDA stock; that is the trade that accurately captures that bet.

Newtonian physics is actually wrong, the founding of any country will be wrong, biology is wrong, nutrition is wrong… what can we even teach? what should we teach in this lens? serious question.

If you want to learn about finance, you can learn about it from people who actually know what they're talking about. You can choose to listen to Jim Simons or Warren Buffet or whoever actually knows a thing or two instead of the rando dude you met at the bar. The AI summaries, on the other hand, ingested a lot of internet garbage.

I picked finance as an example because anecdotally, most of the information on the internet by pure token volume is wrong. The Youtubers drawing lines on charts want your attention because they make money from page views; the financial advisors want your annual fees; the brokerages want you to gamble and get your commisions or PFOF (in the case of zero-commision brokers); the market makers and HFTs want your spreads; Reddit users want to show off their lucky, statistically insignificant profit charts for karma points. None of the above have an intention to give you good information.

You can easily make money buying a call without the stock price moving a single cent (IV increases). Funny enough the stock can even go down and with a large enough IV increase you still make money.

You better make sure your ad spend is high enough that your product's matter-of-fact result will be positive. That's a nice product you have there. It'd be a real shame if nobody knew about it.

Primarily to avoid even more headphone dent, not an audiophile

I also encourage finding the right tips. Tips are cheap and finding proper fitting ones is important.

Why didn’t you tell the robot that, as your query?

and has been for some time!,

was my point ^.^

The issue is, Google has mixed the two in a way that promotes the AI response as primary. This has resulted in dubious answers being presented as “official” summaries (to the lay person).

At the very least, one would expect it to be a little smarter—perhaps by automatically doing things like you suggested—instead of basing things off a single source, as it seems to enjoy doing.

What was worrying is only some of the claims were supported by the linked study, and most of the response content was drawn from the spam sites.

Without "random comments", Google wouldn't have anything to say about "does an air purifier help my asthma, if yes: which one?" or "find the problem with this Hibernate annotation".

They also don't make much effort to exclude sloppy sites, to the contrary, they made way more efforts against SEO spam in the time when Google was a search engine, not trying to be an AI "oracle".

I think their end game is that the only metrics relevant for ranking sources are:

- agreeability (works well as a proxy for correctness with many questions!)

- originality, but not in a scientific sense, just to prevent model collapse

- legal factors such as preventing false health claims or similar things, as long as there is legislation against this kind of thing

/s

For models trained on a corpus of groomed data, the "critical thinking" bit is baked into the work of grooming the data and how it is trained. And someone is thinking critically about both so as to make a good model.

Now, every damn thing is called AI no matter where it is getting results from.

Are modern models super handy? Absolutely.

But calling it AI implies a lot more critical thought than is actually happening!

Edit: took the time to write a shorter comment.

To not make this political, let me give you a game example. Right now the dota 2 fandom wiki is abandoned, and it has been vandalized with covert shitposts. One of them was the addition of a 4th attribute called Charisma, which is completely fake. If you ask AI's "What are the main attributes in dota, according to the official wiki", the dumber AI will fall for it, but the smarter AI will know it's wrong, but try hard to hallucinate some sort of valid explanation like claim charisma is from a custom game or a fan suggestion or writing exercise.

Because you said the word >>OFFICIAL<<, they can NEVER straight up just say "The wiki is wrong". They presume authority from a bunch of shitposts.

Recently, it's started answering any search about Kysely with a blob of Finnish. Awesome stuff, guys, great work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word

How do you know that?

Scraping websites is literally what Google does best, stringing together information in the pattern of "some people x, other people y" requires 0 AI and could have been done since forever. I find it implausible that otherwise obviously capable models would be reduced to do something akin to just that.

Let me tell you - it didn’t take 30 years for people to figure out that chainsaws were useful.

People can already use AI mode in google search if they want. "It'll be better later" is a shit reason to kill one product for it.

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.

In this context, if Google is going to give me the recipe without having to scroll through the story, that seems like a win to me.

The ad-revenue driven Internet of web 2.0 is finally dead and I'm not sure I'm all that sad.

It would be nice to find something better than an ad-revenue driven web, but I'm not sure this is it. We'll find out I guess...

Sure they are. I can attest that musicians will gladly publish their music even when no recompense is offered. Surely culinary artists are the same.

This is just disruption.

No. Temporarily it’s good for the consumer. Ultimately it is bad for the consumer, because as prices drop, so to does quality.

Also, at some point even the ad-laden websites will die, and then Googles sources will be extinguished.

I think it's a good tradeoff.

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.

And here I thought denying ad revenue to websites was the morally superior way to navigate the web...

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.

this kills the entire internet vibe of the 90s, early 2k

FTFY: "couple of decades since has become". The vibes of passion-driven 1990s started to be overwhelmed by the din of money right when the Internet has become a major commerce venue, some time in early 2000s.

(It doesn't work for ad-funded writing, but while I have substantial sympathy there this has historically been an unpopular argument on HN)

This also could have been fine, it can bring back authenticity however for this to happen no one should be making money from it. Instead, only megacorps make money and they can just ignore your ideas and generate theirs. They control the distribution and the supply now.

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.

If instead the purpose of your website is to manipulate users for financial gain (for instance by showing media attempting to manipulate their purchasing decisions, after receiving a bribe from a vendor), and the information is just a way to lure users, then maybe this malicious business model will finally be no longer possible.

(Torment Nexus rules apply here)

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.

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.

Not to mention the hallucinations

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.

This depends on implementation. I primarily use Kagi for any LLM stuff. I cites pretty much everything and links out to the source. I regularly use this for search. The normal search results may not have what I need, but a line in the AI results sounds better and I click through to the source to get more context.

I find clicking through to the source is important, as I've often seen the AI get it wrong. The page has what I need on it, but the AI grabbed the wrong thing and got it backward. I'm probably in the minority, I'm guessing most people don't use LLMs like this.

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.

But fine. How about I just...don't respond to those requests at all. I have no obligation to send them data period.

Disclaimer: his website is for hosting malware for "testing" purposes. Testing how well AI can't deal with it.

Google has always crawled your site and been an arse! Now you get to decide whether they are hallucinating!

You can drop pointers on Masto and other socials to your sites - that has not changed.

Do we need something else? ie you drop a link to somewhere else.

Site traffic

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.

this has been done before, quite often, but toward ends morally askew.

I spent 9 years of my life putting hard-earned information on the internet, and now big tech uses it to enrich themselves while putting me out of work. Even my backup plan - software development - is being devalued to hell. It's so damn depressing. We'll get the internet that we deserve.

I think if you look through this thread you’ll see a lot of skepticism of the AI results, and I think that is a fairly broadly held opinion. The obvious way to check the AI answer is to click through to some sources.

I think for Google to stop sending me traffic, it would have to be essentially perfect at AI answers. It will never get there, especially as so many searches are opinion-based like “what is the best mobile phone right now.”

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...

My appeal is just to realize that our implicit assumption that we can't do anything ever at all besides appealing to completely ineffectual individual action is in and of itself a strongly ideological and politically radical position to take.

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.

That sounds like an unalloyed plus. The perverse incentives caused by advertising have been the biggest driver of the web's decline, IMO.

   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.

On the contrary, it will flourish. It’s just that it’ll shift to whatever can trick LLMs into recommending your product.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt...

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”.

Newsletters have been around forever and never taken off like the open web and free blogging have. Slapping a Stripe integration on the backend hasn't led to Substack becoming a sustainable business not propped up by VC cash.

> Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from the University of Chicago.

His hot takes are best ignored, is just convenient click bait for their entire negativity angle.

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.

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.

Agentic AI has its faults, but one thing I've found it to be very good at is surfacing the "unknown unknowns": things I didn't know I should have searched for but that are directly relevant to my problem.

Sometimes that is fine, sometimes it is not

I've got a pretty solid algorithm for checking correctness: I ask the LLM for its sources, I try to find 3-5 independent ones (that are not just copying each others' answers), and if they all agree, that's very likely to be the correct answer. Simple math here: if you have 5 sources and they are each 60% likely to be correct, then an LLM choosing at random from them would have a 60% success rate, while someone checking all 5 of them for agreement would have a 1 - (0.4^5) = 99% chance of being correct. It's a good algorithm for doing other things like verifying scientific papers, too: you look for indendent research groups that have all reproduced the same findings.

I did the same thing with ten-blue-links websearch as well, and hope this would be the habit of anyone else too. (Although I know it wasn't, because I worked on Google websearch 15 years ago, on a project to increase the credibility of search results, and we did cafeteria UX studies about "What makes a credible result?" and everybody said "Because it appears as the top result on Google.")

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.

Type your question in Android/Chrome search bar:

"Is …?"

AI Overview on the search results page:

"No…"

Click through to the AI mode tab/"Dive deeper with AI" CTA:

"Yes…"

Sorry, no, I hate that.

I know that deepseek has links for every chain it makes where you can read the source and it's actually a good thing to check on that.

Even though the result is often coherent and confidently synthesizes information from multiple experiences, it can also hallucinate, suffer from recency bias, or accidentally merge memories from different decades. AFAICT, without access to the underlying telemetry, human responses are 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.

This will remove any results from there for you.

Alternatively, site:news.ycombinator.com would search this website explicitly.

Have you tried explicitly asking for links to primary sources?

I have seen it hallucinate things confidently but that is usually when it has no direct sources to pin down the output.

    <form method="GET" action="/search">
      ...
      
      <center>
        Search the web using Google!
        <br>
        
        <input type="text" name="query" value="" size="40">
        <br>
        
        <select name="num">
          <option value="10" selected>10 results
          <option value="30">30 results
          <option value="100">100 results
        </select>
        <input type="submit" value="Google Search">
        <input type="submit" name="sa" value="I'm feeling lucky">
        <br>
        
        <i>Index contains ~25 million pages (soon to be much bigger)</i>
      </center>
      
      ...
    </form>

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.

Yes, but not because of facts or bias-free sources. It was the equivalent of staring deep at your wrist watch while someone's speaking: a clear signal that you were done with whatever they wanting to talk about.

I kinda like that "let me Google it for you" in Japan was more popular as "Google it loser" (ググレカス), a rare instance where the common phrases was more expressive than it's western counterpart.

just becuase somebody publishes something on a website, does not make it a fact. google has always been good at finding things that look like facts, and their AI iteration is also good at that.

The ad version of the web, where ~60% of people carry the ad burden for everyone, and defacto aligns the service providers with advertisers, is just a guaranteed bad outcome. The only real upside, which frankly people take for granted, is that the ad-web is classless web. Broke or rich you get the same (crappy) services.

I remember those mock web service package flyers from the net neutrality days. Where people made fake marketing material showing website packages you could access with different paid tiers, something reminiscent of the cable TV days.

Back then it was horrifying, but 20 years later, I think I would entertain a subscription to a wide array of web services if it meant they worked for me and not advertisers.

It’s one thing to say we need to pay. It’s another for ISP’s to get 3 pulls at the hose (paid for a connection, paid for what we can browse, paid for who provides the sites) when some of those elements don’t even require more (or at least much) effort or infrastructure on their part. I don’t like the idea of their picking winners and losers. We’ve got enough of that as it is.

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.

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.

https://www.google.com/search?&udm=web&q=hackernews

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.)

Same here. The free version probably gets orders of magnitude less of a compute budget, though, so I am not really surprised.

What I find really surprising though is how many people still have only ever used the free version of any LLM, even those that are heavy users and could easily afford it. It seems like a pretty big and basic product marketing mistake to me to limit capabilities instead of usage time in the free version! How are people supposed to learn what they'd get if they were to pay?

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.

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.

I don't comprehend how the average person gets any useful information out of Google.

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.

Yet.

Surely we all understand that any commercial model is going to inevitably metastasize into this.

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.

The question though: Why is that?

Is your Google search usage down because LLMs are "so much better"? Or because Google actively chose to destroy the quality of their search results to juice advertising revenue, and appears to continue to do so to juice AI adoption?

> and have them provide me links for source data.

And therein lies the answer: You don't care about the LLM, you're just using the LLM as a means to get the good links.

I've barely used Google for over 2 years.

I barely driven myself in a year.

I haven't written code in 6 months.

Debate over, all sides have been expressed.

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.

1. LLM Model providers are starting to charge real costs to users, revealing that AI usage is much more expensive than the subsidized rates we've been seeing for years.

2. Google is now using an LLM to answer every single google search that happens, for which Google bears the entire cost.

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.

the googlebook is a laptop. the search box doesn't really work differently to how it did yesterday. (how it worked ten years ago, yes it's very different. but ai mode is already here). neither of these things are a big deal. the promo videos are for the sake of making promo videos.

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.

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.

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.

Yes, that is what every user ever wanted! A UI that just randomly changes!

Never give the customers what they want give them what makes you money.

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.

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.

The AI confidently told me they were right. Then I checked the sources, and found the only source that agreed with them was their own Reddit comment!!!

Google has become the ouroboros

It was citing my own old comment, here on HN, about that musical moment as evidence that it existed. That was surreal.

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.

Works where archive.ph is blocked

Text-only

   view-source:https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/business/google-seach-bar-ai-gemini.html
   Save as 1.htm

   egrep -o "(\"text\":\"[^\"]+)|(\"textAlign\":\"LEFT\")|(\"url\":\"[^\"]+)|(\"__typename\":\"TextInline\")" 1.htm \
   |sed '/\"url\":\"/{s/??.*//;s/$/\">/;s/.\{7\}/<a href=\"/;};
         /\"__typename\":\"TextInline\"/{s/\"$/<\/a>/;s/.\{24\}//;};
         s/\"textAlign\":\"LEFT\"/<p>/g;/\"text\":\"/s/.\{8\}//' \
   |sed '1s/^/<meta charset=utf-8><meta name=viewport content=width=device-width>/' > 2.htm
   rm 1.htm
   firefox ./2.htm

   ct.captcha-delivery.com
   geo.captcha-delivery.com
   www.nytimes.com
   g1.nyt.com 

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.

This is the end. The fact that they had to say that this is "free of charge" means they are thinking about cost. Both to them now and us in the future. This sucks.

Sometimes I get SO questions from 13 years ago with a version of a library nobody uses anymore. If I search in my native language almost every result is a Reddit thread that was originally in English but was machine translated to Portuguese and Google is fine with that for some reason. Searching for images just gets you AI images.

If you need opinions on "what is the best X" you end up getting some content marketing from a website that offers some online service and probably has an .ai or .io domain.

No matter what you search you get an AI overview wasting space and slowly generating an answer that could be completely made up, just wasting your time in two ways at once.

Most long queries are simply completely ignored by Google. Almost every word ignored in order to show some sort of most popular result. You don't even know if there are no pages on the internet with what you searched for or if Google simply doesn't care to show any website that isn't sufficiently popular. In other words, never personal websites or blogs, only platforms and cloud services' content marketing blogs are allowed to appear in the results.

I've found myself several times asking Claude if there is "research" on a subject or another because I don't want to have to try to wade through the AI overview, sponsored results, SEO spam, reddit, repeated results on the second page, etc. just to find something that ressembles actual relevant information.

There’s not much room to squeeze in when your competitors hold the keys to 15 million top websites.

I find it wild that "at scale" we can bypass anti-bot measures, but just "normal" internet use (i.e Non-Google Browser or VPN) will throw a million captchas at you.

cgnat is pretty bad too.

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.

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/02/07/reinventing-sear...

[1]: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-search/?license=co...

Very few of the smaller search engines actually do their own indexing for exactly this reason.

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.

Human produced content should be separated from sites primarily hosting slop. That seems solvable?

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

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/ .

But Google's description seems more minimal, like easier to get to ai mode, search box can expand intelligently based on input. Is there any clearer description of the magnitude of the change?

How does adsense work when there are no search results?

"The last episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is airing on Thursday, May 21, 2026. Based on your interest in The Late Show with Stephen Colbert you might also like the new Amazon Prime Video series of Last One Laughing, available to stream now"

Does that answer your question?

If google is now actively keeping you away from content, whats the point in creating?

  The final episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert will air on Thursday, May 21, 2026, at 11:35 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.Final Week Broadcast DetailsThe Finale Date: Thursday, May 21, 2026.Air Time: 11:35 p.m. ET/PT.Where to Watch: Broadcasts live on the CBS Television Network and streams live on Paramount+ for Premium subscribers (available on-demand the next day for ad-supported tiers).Finale Guests: CBS is keeping the final episode's lineup completely under wraps, though the preceding days featured major appearances from Jon Stewart, Steven Spielberg, David Byrne, and Bruce Springsteen.Context of the FarewellThe 11th season finale marks the conclusion of Colbert's decade-long run as host, following a controversial cancellation announcement by Paramount Global. While CBS publicly attributes the ending to a financial decision amidst a shifting late-night market, media analysts and former host David Letterman have heavily criticized the move. Many view the cancellation as a corporate effort to avoid friction with the Trump administration during critical regulatory mergers. Following Colbert's departure, CBS will retire The Late Show franchise completely and hand the time slot over to syndicated programming.Watch Stephen Colbert confirm his final broadcast date on Late Night with Seth Meyers:31sStephen Colbert confirms his final show date and reveals ...Late Night with Seth MeyersYouTube• Jan 28, 2026Are you looking for information on how to attend the remaining tapings, or would you like to know more about what Byron Allen show is replacing his time slot?

The post you're responding to is making a satirical comment on the future of LLM responses.

"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.

edit: can't reply deeper and interesting question, I mean we all would love to have ability to search arbitrary strings and regexes through the web corpus, but currently when you type something you get that AI reply instantly for most queries, this makes me still use them, if you forgot some shortcut key or something it has currently unique value in terms of latency (even ignoring the fact that for most users you also use them by default by typing in the address bar)

Did they just devalue their unique search product by pushing it into another category already dominated by other big players?

   Robots will do your chores so you can focus on your work

   Robots will take your work so you can focus on your chores

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!”

(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.)

Why in the world would it specifically do this for site:https://example.org "exact string" queries?! I know what I'm looking for and where it can be found!

It's like redirecting my phone call from ISP support to a librarian because maybe the library contains the answer to a dysfunctional SIM card they've sent me

Is “the goal of Search” really: “to help you ask _anything_ on your mind”?

If “reimagined Search” is “designed to anticipate your intent”,

Would it correctly infer my intent to not utilize an agentic approach? Is there an “off switch”?

As for “Search agents”

“operating in the background 24/7”,

What is the carbon footprint of that? How do I turn it off? How do I ask it to stop phoning home my every keystroke?

These questions are asked partly rhetorically because it’s likely I don’t need a team of “24/7 Search agents” to help me guess the answers…

Historically, I scoffed when someone said “here’s the difference between a google search and asking ChatGPT”, or when people said that ChatGPT would “kill search”, but Google sure seems to be in a hurry to burry the original feature all by themselves.

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.

"Hello, world! Welcome to the classic programming greeting. It is the traditional test message used to introduce beginners to computer science and verify that a language's syntax is properly understood"

Which clearly shows that there will be an avalanche of issues when non-technical people discover the joys of non-deterministic results.

have i been A/B tested into something, or has this been live for months? this doens't seem new.

I believe I speak for everyone working on alternative search engines when I offer a heartfelt thank you to Google for their untiring effort to derail their search product.

It looks like the new experience works backwards - it's more or less a Gemini prompt that they then stuff a "search experience" into.

Obviously the search feed and ads are so integral to Google's business model that they probably can't confidently just step away from it.

I caught myself yesterday starting to ask Claude in my ide what ship did grace and Rocky take back to Rocky's homeworld.

In the past, I excited. It was the first to sign up for all kinds of betas.

I don't know what triggered the my reasoning, but now whenever I see these upcoming announcements I don't think about how it's gonna be better, but how it is objectively gonna be worse. How much harder is it going to be for me to compare things.

How much more do I now need to go and explain people that the output is merely a mathematical average of what's out there, and if it's out there on the internet doesn't make it correct.

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.

I wonder how many of them would switch to a paid model that offered pre-ai-era google search?

Two devices searching something will never bring up the exact same results, in the exact same order.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/technology/google-ai-over...

Remind me what Google is again. Haven't used them for years...

https://www.techradar.com/computing/search-engines/ask-jeeve... / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask.com

Ask Jeeves was dissolved 15 days ago

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.

[1] https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp

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.

[0]: https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search

Nobody said you have to index the entire web.

The web would probably be a lot healthier if we had several small search engines that focused on niches rather than 5 failed search engines that tried to index everything that was ever written and then ended up paying Bing.

I wonder if they will stop using pagerank completely? Has pagerank already transcended the software plane?

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.

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.

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.

the degoogling process will be a long haul but im determined to do it.

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?

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.

The first red flag for me. The +/- of this type of feature are well worth exploring.

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.

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.

Time to switch to old style search engines which still return the 10 blue links, with an AI option.

NO - thanks!

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Did you mean?" + excluded word was a pretty clear indication they stopped caring to provide any meaningful search whatsoever.

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.

[1] : https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch

[2] : https://github.com/asciimoo/hister

At least if we're speaking a more generalist web search it requires dedicated hardware, that's pretty costly. Marginalia's production server cost about $20k back when RAM and SSDs were cheap. It used to run on $5k of PC hardware before, but that was very limiting.

So no data center, but at the same time, not everyone has that sort of cash to throw around.

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).

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.

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.

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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3

F Google!

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 played the video, didnt understand anything and got dizzy. then i tried to scroll but the browser tab froze? wow

good luck getting visits to your site unless you're paying for AI placement

But at least I've experienced the golden age. I feel bad for all the kids who will never know what once was.

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.

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