Every post about Google for years has been people saying it's terrible and dead.

Kagi gets talked about on here constantly, and it's not even on the list (though I suspect there's a reason?)

Even within Google, about a year ago, everyone was saying that Google was dead because of Perplexity, which is barely a blip.

It's kind of shocking to see DuckDuckGo is only about 1%, with everything you hear and how much you hear it within certain bubbles.

At the least it can be inferred that Google has fundamentally changed their main product to mimic a competitor, which is something you just don’t do if everything’s OK.

This terrifies me. The number of ostensibly smart, curious people who now fill their knowledge gaps with pseudorandom information from LLMs that's accurate just often enough to lower mental guards. I'm not an idiot; I know most people never did the whole "check and corroborate multiple sources" thing. What actually happened in the average case was that a person delegated trust to a few parties who, in their view, aligned with their perspective. Still, that sounds infinitely preferable to "whatever OpenAI/Google/whoever's computer says is probably right". When people steelman using LLMs for knowledge gathering, they like to position it as a first step to break in on a topic, learn what there is to learn, which can then be followed by more specific research that uses actual sources. I posit that the portion of AI users actually following up that way is vanishingly small, smaller even than the portion of people who read multiple news sources and research the credibility of the publications.

I value easy access to information very highly, but it seems like when people vote with their feet, eyes, and wallets that's not what you get. You get fast and easy, but totally unreliable information. The information landscape has never been great, but it seems to only get worse with each paradigm shift. I struggle to even imagine a hypothetical world where reliable information is easy to access. How do you scale that? How do you make it robust to attack or decay? Maybe the closest thing we have now is Wikipedia, is there something there that could be applied more broadly?

I’d be very interested to see the trendline of user-initiated search over time.

https://kagi.com/stats

~56,000 users spread across the entire world isn't going to move the needle when looking at the sort of statistics in the report.