But seriously, I really hope some od the alternative search engines don’t follow this because I really hate the idea of results being so opaque. I want to do the final sorting and thinking myself, I don’t want AI to do it.
NicolasCageFan492 on
We really had a good thing going before algorithms.
bitskewer on
How are they paying for this? Seems like they’re cannibalizing their ad referral business while providing zero-cost AI services. Surely this isn’t sustainable?
PortiaLynnTurlet on
Perhaps ironically, one of the reasons people use LLMs is to make up for how bad web search has become. I’d guess at least 10% of LLM queries would be equally well served by a search engine without spam or SEO-type manipulation.
Edit: And for „double irony“ the ways people filter web text to build high quality training datasets are similar to how a search engine would filter out junk. So some of the types of work that would have diminished LLM use are happening but instead to foster LLM use.
Jamizon1 on
No thank you. I switched to an alternative awhile ago. Never going back.
Fuck Alphabet
Fuck AI
YoSoyPinkBoy on
Duckduckgo for the win
rjksn on
Great… I will keep using DuckDuckGo.
Separate-Spot-8910 on
Techcrunch won’t let me view it with adblocker…too bad for me I guess.
russian_cyborg on
Anyone tried Google images lately? It used to be good. Now I search for memes and it returns 10 unrelated images that are all politically censored
tuna_safe_dolphin on
When you just want a simple fact or specific link this is gonna be annoying AF
Far-Actuator4439 on
Okay so they’re replacing it with something people actively hate that’s wildly inaccurate and introduces inherent bias. Sick, I’ve always wanted a search engine that can actively lie to me.
VosGezaus on
With the advancing technology I wonder how smooth our brains are gonna be 40 years down the line.
We’re literally loosing skill of doing anything at all. Soon people will loose the skill of searching using a search engine.
CrisEXE__ on
“You could send an alert to track market movements in a particular sector with very specific parameters”
Hahahahhahaa who the fuck is this for?
Derperderpington on
Kagi search is the best
EntertainmentMean611 on
Google has been absolute shit for search for years. Let it i die. Nobody will be using it going forward no matter what they bolt onto that hot garbage.
willieb3 on
The problem is that google is scraping websites and bypassing ad revenue that should go to websites. I used to want google to reach my website, but now there is legitimately nothing in it for me so I am actively blocking Google’s bots.
Roughbeggar on
Sooooo I’ve seen people complain about DuckDuckGo… I’ve never tried it, but is that going to be the next best option for just having a functional search engine?
Not surprised that this was there goal search results have steadily gotten more and more tailored and annoying for years….
But completely removing google search? That feature has become the mainstay tool for browsing online. Seems incredibly tone deaf, and risky. I’d wager most users will be super frustrated not having a simple way to browse results. Even more so than that though, this will really piss off their advertising partners, and that’s been one of google’s biggest sources of revenue.
Hurley002 on
Google search as I knew it has been over for quite some time but, in fairness, it is definitely exponentially worse now.
jmonschke on
The „enshitification“ of Google search is not an accident. It was an intentional decision made within Google, because when you find what you are looking for on the first page, they can’t serve you as many ads.
QuickQuirk on
I first thought „Don’t these companies understand that they’ll destroy the very content providing websites that they rely on“
Then when they continued in this path, I realised that they DO understand. And it’s deliberate.
Google wants to control you, google does not want other websites to exist.
ajs2294 on
If I wanted an LLM I’d use an LLM.
lordtema on
Google Search was effectively killed the moment Prabhakar Raghavan was allowed to being his quest of enshittification in the name of profit.
I have exclusively used Kagi for 2 years now, it`s not free but it`s well worth the money.
bucketman1986 on
*Sigh* Everyone, back to Altavisa!
Steamrolled777 on
So few searches seem to even relate to what I’m searching for, and just looks like marketing/promotion.
Also, I don’t remember ever getting 0 results for a search back in the day, there was always something – it’s like the algorithm broke.
waitingOnMyletter on
Almost like doing your own research will actually become impossible. If the article is to be believed, by this summer you will Jo longer have the power to decide which pieces of information are used. Google used to just provide pages of options with the ranked distances. But I had the power to decide which sources of information I wanted to read.
Now, a subject summary will be curated for me, from the agent’s decided upon truth worthy sources of information. Disguised as “decreased time searching and more time acting”. We have now democratized the actual access to the sources of information.
I should be allowed to opt-in or out of this function. I don’t like this as a forced adoption model.
Due-Aioli-6641 on
*“links will become an after thought“*
And so the websites that generate that content that the AI search uses, what a time to be alive, we saw the birth of internet, now we’ll see its death.
Blando-Cartesian on
Thus killing incentives for anyone to produce web content. No income from showing adds on your site next to your content since no human eyes will ever see them. Not even prestige as an author since AIs just plagiarize your content without attribution.
Well played google. Great choice to stagnate humankind’s creative and intellectual output indefinitely to 2020s.
blah_blah_blah on
If it actually produced correct answers, nobody would bat an eye, but there have been plenty of times where it produced utter nonsense. And other times where it just says “You’re right!…” in an obnoxiously obsequious fashion and I hadn’t even asked a question nor was it telling me the right thing. If Google honestly trusted this, they wouldn’t even provide any web result links. Companies just love to piss all over their products, but what else is new.
Saintbaba on
I was talking to my friend who works at google and she was basically flabbergasted as to why the company is making this pivot.
She argued that it’s stupid in the short term because the google search department makes all its money off of advertising revenue, and google AI summaries neatly sidestep all the ads you would have seen, so they’re basically taking money out of their own pocket.
But also, from a long term perspective, google search – even its AI summary version – depends on having webpages to scrape, and the more google and other search engines give repackaged versions of the information that shunts people away from going to the websites themselves, the more it disincentivizes people from making websites in the first place. My friend figured this is leading to a doom spiral where more and more content will just be AI slop because anyone who was passionate about creating meaningful content will eventually give up when they stop getting hits on their sites.
My friend said she thinks about looking for a new job… often.
90sStyleBingles on
„So advanced“ yet it still can’t find what i’m looking for.
NerdDaniel on
Good because it has sucked for more than 15 years now.
It used to actually search for what you were looking for and nothing else. Now it’s just a bunch of crap that it thinks you might be interested in buying.
Ahhhh__Ian_c on
Ahh more of the “agents increase your efficiency”.
Agentic AI can piss off, I don’t need help trying to Google random things to prove that Legolas only says one line to Frodo in the theatrical release of LOTR!
Linkums on
But clickbait is still alive and well, apparently.
RebelStrategist on
No thanks, Google. I don’t need an AI babysitter “interpreting” my searches into sanitized corporate-approved answers nobody asked for.
Search engines used to help people find websites. Wild idea, I know. Now Google seems personally offended if users leave the search page at all. Why explore the internet when you can get an AI-generated sludge paragraph and 14 sponsored results instead?
And naturally it’s all branded as “improving the user experience,” because apparently typing keywords and clicking links became too difficult for humanity to handle without Google saving us from independent thought.
Meanwhile search quality keeps getting worse: SEO garbage farms everywhere, forums buried, hallucinated AI summaries, and actual useful websites shoved behind whatever makes Google the most money that week.
At this point Google doesn’t feel like a search engine anymore. It feels like a corporate content filter made by people who force features nobody wanted into products they’ll abandon in two years anyway.
trunksshinohara on
Oh I’ve stopped using it all together. It’s sucked for years. Ai answers were the nail in the coffin. It only gives wrong results now.
West-Worth-9359 on
Bring back directories.
Mr_Rekshun on
It feels like we just took another step closer to Dead Internet Theory becoming reality.
ilulillirillion on
Between AI and a less free Internet, we are exiting a time when „all knowledge is available if you look for it“ into a new era where, more and more, corporate and state funded AI will control which information we can access, as well as interpreting that data for us (you may think you are smart enough to not be influenced by AI, but, even if that’s true, each generation of children raised in this paradigm should be expected to be less able to do so).
It’s almost endearing now when an AI refuses to acknowledge or discuss a subject, because we can just get the information directly and easily and go „haha look the AI is censored the AI is dumb“ but we are sprinting towards AI straight up replacing those verification methods. How do we fact-check the LLM when we have less and less access to reasonable ways to do so?
It’s good to remember that we don’t control these large AI models. We can assume, for now, that they aren’t trained with any specific psyop or disinformative purposes, but, even if that is true, how long do you expect it to stay true?
That’s a pretty bleak way to look at the trends but also one that I think is obvious to everyone and which seems very inline with what our „ruling class“ seemingly wants.
HeroinBob831 on
If duckduckgo, ecosia, or startpage isn’t your default search engine by this point this is your message to set them.
feldoneq2wire on
The Internet was a mistake.
pfemme2 on
Nobody asked for this. And google has sucked for years and years now.
FungusBalls on
And this is why I use DuckDuckGo.
jcstrat on
Well shit. I survived before the internet, looks like I might get to do it again.
captainmagictrousers on
„Google is also introducing… interactive features into the search experience. This means people will spend even less time clicking the traditional blue links that Google Search used to return.“
So, at what point do website owners just block Google? If we’re the ones doing all the work producing the answers that their plagiarism bot spits out, what good are they to us? Why should anyone do Google’s work for them for free?
Technical-Fly-6835 on
It was over the day it decided to show sponsored content as top search results.
drje_aL on
>This shift means that “searching the web” will increasingly be performed by AI agents rather than humans. Instead, people will focus more on acting on the information those agents provide instead of manually clicking links.
i most certainly will the fuck not.
speeddemon266 on
Fuck that noise. Stop shoving your shitty AI down our throats.
Dracasethaen on
Might be the time to point out: anyone willing to put together a new metacrawler to search the actual Internet again, rather than Google’s advertisement island; it might do better than you think.
If I knew how to code better I’d already be doing it.
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48 Kommentare
Thanks, I hate it.
But seriously, I really hope some od the alternative search engines don’t follow this because I really hate the idea of results being so opaque. I want to do the final sorting and thinking myself, I don’t want AI to do it.
We really had a good thing going before algorithms.
How are they paying for this? Seems like they’re cannibalizing their ad referral business while providing zero-cost AI services. Surely this isn’t sustainable?
Perhaps ironically, one of the reasons people use LLMs is to make up for how bad web search has become. I’d guess at least 10% of LLM queries would be equally well served by a search engine without spam or SEO-type manipulation.
Edit: And for „double irony“ the ways people filter web text to build high quality training datasets are similar to how a search engine would filter out junk. So some of the types of work that would have diminished LLM use are happening but instead to foster LLM use.
No thank you. I switched to an alternative awhile ago. Never going back.
Fuck Alphabet
Fuck AI
Duckduckgo for the win
Great… I will keep using DuckDuckGo.
Techcrunch won’t let me view it with adblocker…too bad for me I guess.
Anyone tried Google images lately? It used to be good. Now I search for memes and it returns 10 unrelated images that are all politically censored
When you just want a simple fact or specific link this is gonna be annoying AF
Okay so they’re replacing it with something people actively hate that’s wildly inaccurate and introduces inherent bias. Sick, I’ve always wanted a search engine that can actively lie to me.
With the advancing technology I wonder how smooth our brains are gonna be 40 years down the line.
We’re literally loosing skill of doing anything at all. Soon people will loose the skill of searching using a search engine.
“You could send an alert to track market movements in a particular sector with very specific parameters”
Hahahahhahaa who the fuck is this for?
Kagi search is the best
Google has been absolute shit for search for years. Let it i die. Nobody will be using it going forward no matter what they bolt onto that hot garbage.
The problem is that google is scraping websites and bypassing ad revenue that should go to websites. I used to want google to reach my website, but now there is legitimately nothing in it for me so I am actively blocking Google’s bots.
Sooooo I’ve seen people complain about DuckDuckGo… I’ve never tried it, but is that going to be the next best option for just having a functional search engine?
Not surprised that this was there goal search results have steadily gotten more and more tailored and annoying for years….
But completely removing google search? That feature has become the mainstay tool for browsing online. Seems incredibly tone deaf, and risky. I’d wager most users will be super frustrated not having a simple way to browse results. Even more so than that though, this will really piss off their advertising partners, and that’s been one of google’s biggest sources of revenue.
Google search as I knew it has been over for quite some time but, in fairness, it is definitely exponentially worse now.
The „enshitification“ of Google search is not an accident. It was an intentional decision made within Google, because when you find what you are looking for on the first page, they can’t serve you as many ads.
I first thought „Don’t these companies understand that they’ll destroy the very content providing websites that they rely on“
Then when they continued in this path, I realised that they DO understand. And it’s deliberate.
Google wants to control you, google does not want other websites to exist.
If I wanted an LLM I’d use an LLM.
Google Search was effectively killed the moment Prabhakar Raghavan was allowed to being his quest of enshittification in the name of profit.
I have exclusively used Kagi for 2 years now, it`s not free but it`s well worth the money.
*Sigh* Everyone, back to Altavisa!
So few searches seem to even relate to what I’m searching for, and just looks like marketing/promotion.
Also, I don’t remember ever getting 0 results for a search back in the day, there was always something – it’s like the algorithm broke.
Almost like doing your own research will actually become impossible. If the article is to be believed, by this summer you will Jo longer have the power to decide which pieces of information are used. Google used to just provide pages of options with the ranked distances. But I had the power to decide which sources of information I wanted to read.
Now, a subject summary will be curated for me, from the agent’s decided upon truth worthy sources of information. Disguised as “decreased time searching and more time acting”. We have now democratized the actual access to the sources of information.
I should be allowed to opt-in or out of this function. I don’t like this as a forced adoption model.
*“links will become an after thought“*
And so the websites that generate that content that the AI search uses, what a time to be alive, we saw the birth of internet, now we’ll see its death.
Thus killing incentives for anyone to produce web content. No income from showing adds on your site next to your content since no human eyes will ever see them. Not even prestige as an author since AIs just plagiarize your content without attribution.
Well played google. Great choice to stagnate humankind’s creative and intellectual output indefinitely to 2020s.
If it actually produced correct answers, nobody would bat an eye, but there have been plenty of times where it produced utter nonsense. And other times where it just says “You’re right!…” in an obnoxiously obsequious fashion and I hadn’t even asked a question nor was it telling me the right thing. If Google honestly trusted this, they wouldn’t even provide any web result links. Companies just love to piss all over their products, but what else is new.
I was talking to my friend who works at google and she was basically flabbergasted as to why the company is making this pivot.
She argued that it’s stupid in the short term because the google search department makes all its money off of advertising revenue, and google AI summaries neatly sidestep all the ads you would have seen, so they’re basically taking money out of their own pocket.
But also, from a long term perspective, google search – even its AI summary version – depends on having webpages to scrape, and the more google and other search engines give repackaged versions of the information that shunts people away from going to the websites themselves, the more it disincentivizes people from making websites in the first place. My friend figured this is leading to a doom spiral where more and more content will just be AI slop because anyone who was passionate about creating meaningful content will eventually give up when they stop getting hits on their sites.
My friend said she thinks about looking for a new job… often.
„So advanced“ yet it still can’t find what i’m looking for.
Good because it has sucked for more than 15 years now.
It used to actually search for what you were looking for and nothing else. Now it’s just a bunch of crap that it thinks you might be interested in buying.
Ahh more of the “agents increase your efficiency”.
Agentic AI can piss off, I don’t need help trying to Google random things to prove that Legolas only says one line to Frodo in the theatrical release of LOTR!
But clickbait is still alive and well, apparently.
No thanks, Google. I don’t need an AI babysitter “interpreting” my searches into sanitized corporate-approved answers nobody asked for.
Search engines used to help people find websites. Wild idea, I know. Now Google seems personally offended if users leave the search page at all. Why explore the internet when you can get an AI-generated sludge paragraph and 14 sponsored results instead?
And naturally it’s all branded as “improving the user experience,” because apparently typing keywords and clicking links became too difficult for humanity to handle without Google saving us from independent thought.
Meanwhile search quality keeps getting worse: SEO garbage farms everywhere, forums buried, hallucinated AI summaries, and actual useful websites shoved behind whatever makes Google the most money that week.
At this point Google doesn’t feel like a search engine anymore. It feels like a corporate content filter made by people who force features nobody wanted into products they’ll abandon in two years anyway.
Oh I’ve stopped using it all together. It’s sucked for years. Ai answers were the nail in the coffin. It only gives wrong results now.
Bring back directories.
It feels like we just took another step closer to Dead Internet Theory becoming reality.
Between AI and a less free Internet, we are exiting a time when „all knowledge is available if you look for it“ into a new era where, more and more, corporate and state funded AI will control which information we can access, as well as interpreting that data for us (you may think you are smart enough to not be influenced by AI, but, even if that’s true, each generation of children raised in this paradigm should be expected to be less able to do so).
It’s almost endearing now when an AI refuses to acknowledge or discuss a subject, because we can just get the information directly and easily and go „haha look the AI is censored the AI is dumb“ but we are sprinting towards AI straight up replacing those verification methods. How do we fact-check the LLM when we have less and less access to reasonable ways to do so?
It’s good to remember that we don’t control these large AI models. We can assume, for now, that they aren’t trained with any specific psyop or disinformative purposes, but, even if that is true, how long do you expect it to stay true?
That’s a pretty bleak way to look at the trends but also one that I think is obvious to everyone and which seems very inline with what our „ruling class“ seemingly wants.
If duckduckgo, ecosia, or startpage isn’t your default search engine by this point this is your message to set them.
The Internet was a mistake.
Nobody asked for this. And google has sucked for years and years now.
And this is why I use DuckDuckGo.
Well shit. I survived before the internet, looks like I might get to do it again.
„Google is also introducing… interactive features into the search experience. This means people will spend even less time clicking the traditional blue links that Google Search used to return.“
So, at what point do website owners just block Google? If we’re the ones doing all the work producing the answers that their plagiarism bot spits out, what good are they to us? Why should anyone do Google’s work for them for free?
It was over the day it decided to show sponsored content as top search results.
>This shift means that “searching the web” will increasingly be performed by AI agents rather than humans. Instead, people will focus more on acting on the information those agents provide instead of manually clicking links.
i most certainly will the fuck not.
Fuck that noise. Stop shoving your shitty AI down our throats.
Might be the time to point out: anyone willing to put together a new metacrawler to search the actual Internet again, rather than Google’s advertisement island; it might do better than you think.
If I knew how to code better I’d already be doing it.