Very few of the smaller search engines actually do their own indexing for exactly this reason.
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.
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.
Websites may go back to being simply labors of love.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
You can't do something like this with search.
But I still want to also be able to do my normal, old school searching.
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.
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 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.
The real problem here is assuming this takes off what incentives will anyone have to provide the information to feed the beast?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But as noted above, it's very obvious that those associated links are not being used as sources.
I would go so far as to say it's uncommon that you can attribute the statement made the in summary to the provided links, at least for most AI Mode interactions that I have.
That doesn't imply that AI Mode is not useful or even sometimes correct, but saying that its "sourced" is a redefinition of what "sourced" means in most other context.
It might be more fair to say something like "All of Google AI Mode surfaces associated links"
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.
Have you tried explicitly asking for links to primary sources?
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?
Time to switch to old style search engines which still return the 10 blue links, with an AI option.
"Did you mean?" + excluded word was a pretty clear indication they stopped caring to provide any meaningful search whatsoever.
have i been A/B tested into something, or has this been live for months? this doens't seem new.
I caught myself yesterday starting to ask Claude in my ide what ship did grace and Rocky take back to Rocky's homeworld.
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.
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.
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.
(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 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.
But at least I've experienced the golden age. I feel bad for all the kids who will never know what once was.
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.
embedding-shape•33m ago
ivraatiems•29m ago
munk-a•25m ago
If their leadership has an itch they'll scratch it until it's raw.
wslh•18m ago
coldpie•29m ago
munk-a•23m ago
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.
threetonesun•10m ago
Calazon•24m ago
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?