Google has planted a flag in the ground, declaring AI the future and ushering in what is best characterized as a disinterest in investing in traditional web search. It’s strange to see a company shift to become yet another platform seeking to trap users and scrape whatever they can from the web along the way.
Looking for something on the web? Type into that same box — here’s a wall of text, it was made by magic. Is it right? Who knows? Who cares when you can’t use the service we’ve replaced with an LLM to check?
The New Yorker had a compelling piece on the return of home pages:
Now digital-distribution infrastructure is crumbling, having become both ineffective for publishers and alienating for u…
Google has planted a flag in the ground, declaring AI the future and ushering in what is best characterized as a disinterest in investing in traditional web search. It’s strange to see a company shift to become yet another platform seeking to trap users and scrape whatever they can from the web along the way.
Looking for something on the web? Type into that same box — here’s a wall of text, it was made by magic. Is it right? Who knows? Who cares when you can’t use the service we’ve replaced with an LLM to check?
The New Yorker had a compelling piece on the return of home pages:
Now digital-distribution infrastructure is crumbling, having become both ineffective for publishers and alienating for users. Social networks, already lackluster sources for news, are overwhelmed by misinformation and content generated by artificial intelligence. A.I.-driven search threatens to upend how articles get traffic from Google.
We’re going to shift from typing into an address bar to search back to typing in an actual address because we can’t trust the results of our query.
With, well, an apology (I’m not sure he’s owed one?) I don’t want music that incorporates AI elements anymore than I want to guess at whether my search’s textual response is trustworthy.
I don’t want recipes concocted by something that can’t eat or taste and I don’t want travel plans from something that, well, can’t travel.1 I want answers from someone with expertise, not a model that’s chewed on enough said answers without benefiting or crediting their creators.
Folks weren’t excited about Google trawling their mail to personalize ads and yet they’re expected to trust an LLM rifling through those messages to build them a spreadsheet? Cool.
If search giants aren’t interested in, well, search, I suppose it’s time to look elsewhere for answers online. Share sources you trust, curate sources of information on what’s important to you and dive back into specific URLs over general queries.
Yes yes I know there’s magic and it’ll all work out, just feed it more text. ↩