It's hard to get past the beginning of this article and take it at all seriously. The quote someone who missed a sunset because they asked google and supposedly got the wrong time... but they didn't think to look at the sun or lack thereof to check? Also when I put "when does the sun set today" I get a single exact figure at the top of my results, not from AI, which is honestly the best kind of result – an exact correct answer.

From a user perspective, Google search is the most useful it has been in years, though that doesn't feel entirely like intentional improvement, just a lucky side effect of the move to "AI mode".

And yes, if you take what the AI tells you at face value it could be wrong. But if you are aware of this and aware of the ways in which LLMs are likely to shit the bed, it is quicker to get from request to useful information than it has been with Google search since like 2017.

And also, yes, the old balance of Google driving clicks to sites that will then generate revenue off more Google Ads being shown after you click through to them creating a virtuous cycle is completely busted, and that sucks. It does not impact me directly but it certainly seems like unless a better system is devised that it is one of a few ways in which AI is likely to stall out its own training funnel.

I occasionally use Google Search when DuckDuckGo fails to give me relevant. Almost always, Google has better results.

Though I can find its AI answers annoying aggressive. I'll look up like two search terms and the AI will bullshit multiple paragraphs out of despite having zero context of what I am looking for.

DuckDuckGo seems to have detection of whether it should give an AI answer. And it allows you to have more granular control of when you want to get an AI answer. And is overall less distracting than Google's.

I spent the last three days (off and on) using Gemini to configure my edge router 4 with my iOS devices on a vpn and it's been awesome. In the past I'd do a google search and read a few sources of documentation, do another google search and read another set of documentation. Now, Gemini aggregates multiple pages together so all of the work of reading source docs from multiple locations is now n a single step.

Oh, I should mention though. There was no advertising at all. They didn't make any money off me. It was 100% Gemini which I recognize as not long-term feasible.

It would be beneficial for the author to look at the revenue for Google Search. Revenue is still growing.

Kagi search today is better than Google search ever was.

And it’s clear that Google’s Ad model ultimately created a priority inversion. The advertisers became the customer.

I am so glad Kagi came along with a business model that is actually working.

I feel like collecting, curating, and protecting high quality corpuses of "truth" is going to become increasingly important for high quality AI.

There will come a day (and probably soon) when "training on the public internet" (Reddit, etc) will taint your model with metric tons of corporate contamination, political poison, and other adversarial content intentionally crafted to bias AIs for various reasons (corporate gain, geopolitical information warfare, etc). Basically the AI-equivalent of SEO.

[2011] The Atlantic - Why Google Won't Survive the Facebook Threat.

I’ll add this article to the list of incorrect predictions lol

There's too much going on in this article and while I think some of the points are valid, others go too far.

A lot of the "cultural record" the author refers to is just digital junk. Random digital content that very few people care about, if we're being honest. Trying to hoard every bit of digital information ever produced is not the same thing as preserving "culture".

Case in point:

> Even the increasing use of ephemeral formats like Instagram Stories and WhatsApp status updates means that large portions of cultural, social, and political communication are never conserved in the first place. As a society, we can probably survive bad search results and come up with another way to schedule a sunset make-out session. But we can’t aspire to sovereignty if we can’t retain and retrieve our collective memory.

For most of human history, nobody was trying to "conserve" every cultural, social or political communication ever produced, and I fail to see how Instagram Stories and WhatsApp status updates, many of which aren't even truly broadcast publicly for all to see, are part of some imaginary "collective memory."

If you find a web page, see an Instagram Story or receive a message that's important to you, save it or take a screenshot. But let's not pretend all these things belong in a global Digital Civilizational Archives.

The most frustrating part of all of this is the underlying premise that the internet is, has been, or could ever be a credible cultural record is deeply stupid. Or maybe more charitably it's both historically and technically illiterate. It has always taken continuous unwavering effort on some person's part to keep any given piece of content online. And while managing a simple hosting account and updating domain registration periodically doesn't take a tremendous amount of effort 20 years is a long time to expect anyone to maintain enthusiasm. The internet has always been a frothy, ever changing blend of the odd nugget of truth drifting in a sea of unadulterated bullshit. Treating this, or worse what comes from statistically averaging it, as a source of capital T truth is totally unhinged. From whence did this mythology of online truth spring?

Funny as I just cancelled my Kagi sub to get the Gemini ai pro sub. The deal was too good to pass up