The death knell of digital search

bookofjoe

https://archive.ph/6dZS9

apercu

I remember in around 2011 realizing that ~85% of the first page of Google search results was ads. I haven’t used Google search much in the last 5 years, mostly due to this but also because of how they rewarded blog spam.

gwbas1c

> But I would really prefer if Search just worked the way it did in the first place. Which is one thing technologists often screw up: They misinterpret how people react to change; and they misinterpret how people really use their products. Google Search used to be (and still is) a way to find places on the internet. As much as I like AI in searches, I agree; when I want to find the thing, I don't want AI getting in the way.

CodingJeebus

"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket" - Eric Hoffer I've been playing the Ocarina of Time remake and whenever I get stuck trying to get a certain item or progress on a quest, I'll fire up Claude voice chat and ask it for guidance, and it regularly gets confused and gives me wrong answers (somewhere around ~30% of the time). Given how long these models have been out and that it's a highly constrained game world from almost 30 years ago which is documented top to bottom, I struggle to understand how Claude is still so bad at straightforward questions with straightforward answers. This was a solved problem (albeit with a less modern UX) in the legacy internet and it doesn't actually feel like getting the right answer is necessarily easier.

austinthetaco

I havent made the leap yet, but it's pushing me closer and closer to a paid service like kagi. The thought of paying a subscription for search is abhorrent but it might be the only option for sanity.

weirdish

The thing about it is before Google killed search from a Product standpoint, they were killing search from a policy standpoint by rewarding SEO hackers and other junk behavior. It's been over 10 years now that most content returned from a google search is gigantic catch-all pages with sections like: "What time is the football game on tonight? People often ask what time the football game is on tonight, and to find out what time the football game is on tonight. Tonight the football game is on at a time when the football game is on tonight". People started to use LLMs for search because they actually return the desired content in a form the user wants to read. I unfortunately actually like AI mode because of this even if i recognize relying on AI summaries for search has its problems.

watwut

I think that primary thing that wont survive is people writing stuff for public - exactly what was found on blogs, web pages, when institutions and companies gave out. Since no one will find that, you might as well write for yourself. And if you are wroting for just yourself, you will keep it for yourself or just wont bother.

beej71

> Not to be left behind, Reddit is introducing [...] A.I.-generated short-form videos based on its content. Is this truly a value-add? Like will Reddit make more money doing this? If so, I weep for the future.

cobertos

AI web search is really only as good as the index it is relying on. Maybe it can generate stuff without needing to search but... Just hope that the index quality does not get further deprioritized... It might make sense to make a public indexes if corporations aren't interested in maintaining them...

1potato

Google brought this situation on themselves by making their product worse in order to pump up ad revenue. Many of their users were already looking for an excuse to jump ship. I would have done the same myself, but my clients aren’t exactly looking for help ranking on Kagi, and I need to be where their customers are.

vectordust

https://kagi.com have been a paying user for years, very happy with the service.

GamerUncle

https://archive.ph/6dZS9

jdauriemma

Related: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

schaefer

It feels pretty duplicitous that the staff technology writer for The New Yorker is publishing their work behind a paywall, but doesn't see the value in paying for great search results (via kagi).

altcognito

LLMs (and people by extension) need powerful search tools more than ever. The internet is going to close up as content becomes increasingly valuable. The free ride ended a while ago with paywalls everywhere, but even social networks have raised shields.

thakoppno

Paywalls contributed to this too. Maybe it’s covered in the article? This reader will never know. In the past, these institutions held a lot of sway with me, but now none aside from the frustration of the paywall.

cadamsdotcom

Google gives away so much value for free. Google Maps for example. Free, and great. Now they're giving away their market position ;) halting all the things inside Google that led to good products. Thanks Google! We haven't seen it manifest yet because alternatives need to emerge to jump to. But Google is rolling over right as it gets easier for a small hungry team to build an amazing thing. Here comes a new era of great and useful stuff for us all. It'll take a moment. Monopolies don't crumble overnight. If you believe this is how it should go, then wherever you can, do your part. Help alternatives get so good that they stop being the "alternative".

Modified3019

I’ve been using Kagi search for a while, and had no real complaints, as the search does what I’ve always expected it to do. For a while I completely ignored Kagi assistant because why the fuck would I want a slower and verbose version of a search that already worked fine? In the past few months though, I’ve been heavily using the assistant set to use deepseek to assist with putting together a Minecraft 26.2 mod pack. It’s saved me so much time and frustration it’s unreal. Turns out there are certain things that are complex enough that regular search really isn’t all that great for. For example, I can now do things like ask if there’s a mod that allows torch placement from the hotbar while holding something else, via middle click, compatible with Minecraft Java 26.2 neoforge, as the one I previously used is stuck on 1.21.1. And instead of spending 2-3 hours trying a bunch of keywords and combing through poorly named and documented mods, I can quickly get fairly reasonable confirmation that this doesn’t exist, along with some alternatives. I can also hand it a GitHub source and asking it what needs to get changed to update a mod to newer versions, giving me an idea if doing so will get within my extremely limited coding capability. A real game changer is basically asking it for a tutorial, like what’s involved with fixing a model from an outdated resource pack for a recent version and having it work with Fresh Animations. This would previously have required many days of painful and frustrating searching. I can also ask it for basic scripts, rather than spending time hoping to find something someone else already made. Such as taking ratings from my navidrome database, and writing them into tags in the related songs. Just the other day I asked it for a violentmonkey script that can take a Reddit comment with a video, and give me a url that yt-dlp can handle as is without having to dig through a bunch of nonsense manually. I would have never have had the expertise or time to learn to implement these things myself. Of course, one must keep in mind that the knowledge the llm has has a time cutoff, but I’m frankly have so much of a better time than before. I can now see myself using the next update of Claude to generate mods (the current version does not have much knowledge of Minecraft 26.2) with features I want. While I’m reasonably competent technically, actual coding is beyond me, and is far beyond my free time to learn. While AI doesn’t replace my use of classic search wholesale, it does take a set of problems I was trying to poorly solve with classic search, and actually gives me what I want.

1vuio0pswjnm7

"The largest tech companies are investing so much capital in A.I. infrastructure chips, data centers, intensively trained models that they must make the bet pay off, one way or another." It sounds like it's working at least with respect to this author He seems to have no alternaative but to keep feeding training data to a chatbot/agent I am still using traditional search, done from the command line in textmode No browser, no Javascript, no cookies There's even way to still get "10+ blue links" from Google, it's "hiding" in plain sight, unchanged since the mid 90's, though I expect this will be shut off eventually "But I would really prefer if Search just worked the way it did in the first place." It's possible but the user might have to stop using Google, Anthropic (Google is an investor), Spear Street Technology, Inc., and so on I think this author like so many other "tech" journalists will go whichever way the wind blows, whilst making futile complaints into the ether "I find myself using A.I. to fight against aggressive A.I." Here is what one security researcher said about "Instinct" https://www.businessinsider.com/former-meta-security-chief-a...

armchairhacker

Very often I want to see official documentation, a specific website I remember keywords from, and specific source…so much that I’m still using search far more than LLMs. I can ask an LLM to give me the link, even write a custom prompt that lets me type a search query…but why? Moreover, LLMs still use search under the hood, do they not? So search won’t die. It can be bundled in the LLM subscription, or its own subscription like Kagi for the minority using local models.