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.
But I do agree it will be or already is a paradigm shift. And a painful one.
> 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.
In the future I don't even use Google but my bot does
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from multiple sources, it can also get things wrong by combining information from different eras or just plain outdated advice.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.
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.
For most things I research, there is only secondary sources, reporting on an event, a trend…
Have you tried explicitly asking for links to primary sources?
From the past hundreds of Google searches I've done where I got an AI summary, I'd say the result is actually rarely good. At the very least 80% of the outputs contain critical mistakes, often exactly about the specific thing you're asking.
I have seen it hallucinate things confidently but that is usually when it has no direct sources to pin down the output.
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.
<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>
What a nostalgic classic.
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.
Links
- https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database - Internet places
- https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-feeds - RSS feeds
- https://rumca-js.github.io/search - demo search
- https://rumca-js.github.io/feeds - demo for feeds
- https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-top - top places
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.
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.
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.
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.
"The accepted ideal case for Google is a highly consolidated, walled-garden internet where a small array of corporate media partners provide the trusted facts, while independent websites are forced to shift into closed, subscription-only communities...
Tech analysts and digital economists refer to this transition as the "Siloed Web." Google's ultimate goal is no longer to help users explore the open internet; it is to keep users inside Google’s AI interface by using licensed corporate data as its foundation.
By pivoting to AI Overviews and corporate licensing deals, Google is effectively dismantling its own legacy. They are turning back into the 1995 version of Yahoo—a closed ecosystem that only serves "approved" corporate data, except this time the curation is done by an AI model trained on paid datasets rather than human editors."
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.
Currently, search engines are pretty bad at the second one because people try to use them as the first one
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
My experience is that Google's AI summaries tend to be be very heavily reliant on YouTube videos. If there is a YouTube video on the topic, you can bet that's what the source will be, at least for the topics I have searched lately.
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.
Hate to break it to you, but this has been the backbone of "journalism" for the last decade.
Fishing Twitter for takes to fill the "people are saying" box...
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.
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.
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?
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
There’s not much room to squeeze in when your competitors hold the keys to 15 million top websites.
So if another search engine does arise, it won't find anything useful, because the useful content on the web has been buried under slop, and largely removed. Your best bet today is a curated directory, sorta like the original Yahoo, where you allowlist the web to only real sites, download them, and make them searchable. I think this is actually Kagi's approach. But the open web as we knew and loved it is dead.
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?
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/ .
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.
Many years ago they removed search operators that allowed for exact string matching. At that point I knew it was a circus
Then I noticed Google started limiting the number of results for users who are "logged out"
Then, several years ago, Google disabled public access to the cache
At that point it was pretty clear where this was going
When they started requiring Javascript I began preparing alternatives
There was a user agent string suggested by @superkuh here that avoided the Javascript "requirement" for quite a while
But not too long ago that string stopped working
The good news is the alternatives, all free (no Kagi), are generally working great. There are some gems I would never have found if I kept using Google
There might still be some magic strings out there that can be used to avoid Google's Javascript
But it's not worth the effort anymore
There is still Google News and Google Scholar, no Javascript required, but I am preparing for those to be ruined eventually, too
Back in the day I used scroogle.org. That was a great project while it lasted
I'm thinking of trying the SERPAPI free tier since Google is suing them and they might not be around much longer
Google search is story of diminishing returns
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
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?
Now, the spam is back and it’s coming from Google itself.
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.
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.
x="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/business/google-seach-bar-ai-gemini.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jlA.95yh.ptfBUHf-rBtB&smid=url-share"
x=https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/business/google-seach-bar-ai-gemini.html
links -source "$x" \
|egrep -o "(\"text\":\"[^}]+)|(\"textAlign\":\"LEFT\")|(\"url\":\"[^\"]+)|(\"__typename\":\"TextInline\")" \
|sed '/\"url\":\"/{s/??.*//;s/$/\">/;s/.\{7\}/<a href=\"/;};
/\"__typename\":\"TextInline\"/{s/\"$/<\/a>/;s/.\{24\}//;};
s/\"textAlign\":\"LEFT\"/<p>/g;/\"text\":\"/{s/.\{8\}//;s/\"$//;};
s/\\u002F/\//g;s/\\u0026/\&/g' \
|sed '1s/^/<meta charset=utf-8><meta name=viewport content=width=device-width>/' > 1.htm
links 1.htm
#firefox ./1.htm
# firefox view-source:"$x" and "Save as" can be substituted for links -source- People using the search console see the drop
- Product owners scratch their head
- Investors backing out because not having many visitors
- Small bloggers adding more ads because their revenue is dropping
- Sponsors backing out from their blogs because it's loosing more visitors
- Small web crumbling
- People google what is happening
- Google says 'The "small web"—independent blogs, personal forums, and niche websites—is disappearing due to corporate consolidation, aggressive AI-driven search indexing, and high maintenance costs. These factors have pushed independent creators onto walled-garden social media apps, leaving personal websites to suffer from "link rot".'
You’re welcome.
Now I am afraid I will have to stick to Kagi forever if I want to search the Internet the good old way.
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?
"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.
"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?
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.
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
(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.)
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.
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
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.
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.
Btw, Kagi has an "AI Mode" too, which can be enabled simply by ending your query with a question mark. Then, AI answers your query.
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.
SEO now: let’s try to be crawled by google so that AI can paraphrase us
It's no wonder LLMs are the new search, the user experience is much better and you get an answer that is "good enough".
Now any website that doesn't feel hostile requires you to download an app, log in with an account, or sign up for a subscription. Much like how streaming has had repercussions on traditional cable, AI will have repercussions on how we traditionally expect the web to function.
We've taken the open internet for granted.
have i been A/B tested into something, or has this been live for months? this doens't seem new.
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 caught myself yesterday starting to ask Claude in my ide what ship did grace and Rocky take back to Rocky's homeworld.
It doesn't seem to be secure. If every google link is one step away from a prompt injection and leaking all your data, then they are worse then npm.
I wonder how many days it takes until they roll it back or put that stuff behind some extra clicks.
I prefer the Claw like I prefer Linux and FOSS in general.
Since day one Googs’ vision was to make the Star Trek computer. They’re really there now. But I don’t like their how. This computer serves them, not me. My mind-bicycle must serve me, my thoughts are my own. I hope my resistance is not futile.
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.
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.
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.
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 fondly remember the good old times when the goal was to help you find stuff…
I think we can concede the WWW vision of distributed libertarian publishing has been dead for a long time. LLMs were just the final straw.
We ended up concentrating syndication on a few media companies like Google, Social Media companies.
Look at the profit margins of advertising companies vs producers and you’ll get an idea as to why.
"Did you mean?" + excluded word was a pretty clear indication they stopped caring to provide any meaningful search whatsoever.
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.
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?
If Google Search changes, then Kagi's search will be impacted directly.
* Kagi seems to just scrape and provide a mix of other search engine's results, meaning it's really just a metasearch engine.
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.
https://www.techradar.com/computing/search-engines/ask-jeeve... / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask.com
Ask Jeeves was dissolved 15 days ago
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?
US: The goal has always been about MONEY
I wonder how many of them would switch to a paid model that offered pre-ai-era google search?
No, it was to search. Search within resources that are external to Google. Like index in library.
(stating the obvious). Starting article like this - that is with attempt to rewrite history - is very sad.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/technology/google-ai-over...
No. The goal of search is to find websites that match the text of the search term you put in. When they started to think they were "answering questions" is when google search started to become useless.
On a more serious note, the on demand UI chrome could actually be cool UX, curious to try that out.
I see no change to look and feel so far, has this rolled out to anyone yet?
the degoogling process will be a long haul but im determined to do it.
I wonder if they will stop using pagerank completely? Has pagerank already transcended the software plane?
The first red flag for me. The +/- of this type of feature are well worth exploring.
Two devices searching something will never bring up the exact same results, in the exact same order.
Time to switch to old style search engines which still return the 10 blue links, with an AI option.
Robots will do your chores so you can focus on your work
Robots will take your work so you can focus on your choresGmail 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.
"The goal of Search has always been simple: to help you ask anything on your mind — from quick facts to the deep, complex or hyper-specific questions that can be hard to articulate."
Really? My aim has always been to find a place off google that has the information that I'm looking for.
If the purpose of google search is no longer aligned with what I want from the product... then maybe that tells me all I need to know.
If you want a search engine... it sounds like that's not what Google is any more.
NO - thanks!
...a high search volume tells me that maybe users aren't able to find what they're actually looking for, thereby needing more searches.
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.
Privacy first, opt-in AI, total control over site blocking, zero ads.
You're the customer, not the product.
Remind me what Google is again. Haven't used them for years...
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.
when i planted seeds,
when are they expected to germinate
when do i need to water
when will I get to harvest
Watering would be based on weather conditions
Did i misunderstand the concept?
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.
Searching for some keywords, returned only 2 or 3 websites, the rest were just ads, AI summaries, related busineses and whatnot, after 4-5 searches I gave up.
I then asked ChatGPT: "what's that software name that does X", and it gave me a list, and that software was the first one.
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.
Kagi search results are very mediocre. Comparable to what DDG, Startpage and others provide for free. Even though their search results are quite unimpressive the subscription is quite expensive and comes with extra fluff like AI tools that needlessly inflate the price. Kagi sends a small part of their profits to russia by paying for yandex index. They provide support via Discord thus it's safe to say that they endorse Discord even after recent controversies.
You're IT people, right? Take matters into your own hands and self host a SearXNG instance. Share it with family and friends to make yourself and everyone else harder to track and profile. Mooch off Google's infrastructure and don't give them anything in return. Fuck them.
Edit: Seconds after submitting already downvoted without any reply. Tell me Kagi is not running bots on HN.
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.
I also don't remember ever seeing anything being force-fed as much as LLMs, why?
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.
Q: What is the best summoner 0 button build for d4 s13 necro
A: Something went wrong and an AI response wasn't generated.
Amazing product. Really frontier search experience. Thanks Google!
For me AI is a technology not a product but there is nothing else anymore
But they do AI chat already anyway so, maybe it's fine
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).
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!
But at least I've experienced the golden age. I feel bad for all the kids who will never know what once was.
[1]: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-search/?license=fr...
[2]: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-search/?license=co...
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.
F Google!
i played the video, didnt understand anything and got dizzy. then i tried to scroll but the browser tab froze? wow
... and an opportunity to try freeing yourself from Google influence more generally, by finding alternatives to their other services, like email, maps etc.
good luck getting visits to your site unless you're paying for AI placement
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