Nilay Patel has been talking about "Google Zero" - the moment when Google effectively stops sending any traffic to other sites - for a few years now: https://www.theverge.com/24167865/google-zero-search-crash-h...

I don't trust facts from LLMs. When I am searching for something, I usually want to find primary sources. As soon as a number is involved, I do my best to not even look at the AI output.

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from multiple sources, it can also get things wrong by combining information from different eras or just plain outdated advice.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.

It’s diverged quite a bit from the original:

    <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>

https://web.archive.org/web/19981111183552/http://google.sta...

What scares me about this new AI mode thingy is that every answer sounds like a systematic literature review, but only for the results. For example, if I look for users feedback about a specific product, it says "People think that..., but also that...; It's important to notice that some people ..." where with 'people' it means just a random comment on a random website just because it thought it was a good contribution to the results. Sounds like it's giving a ground truth from "multiple" data, when instead it's just aggregating almost random stuff. In the context of a systematic review, the feature that I would love the most is augmenting my initial query, so that I can just get more results that I could find interesting. I am 100% sure they thought about this, but ignored it for the most profitable option.

I'm old enough to remember when "Google" was something that ended conversations. People — myself included — would literally say "Google it," the facts would be located, and that was that. Now that Google wants to be the conversation, I'm worried there will no longer be a bias-free source of information for the masses.

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.

I understand why they are doing this. My Google search usage is easily down 50%+. I doubt I am unique here.

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 think this is the second time in a week (the first being the "Googlebook") that Google's promotional announcement video showcasing UI is so full of special effects, dramatic pan/zooms, and woosh sounds, that I have no idea how the final-end product actually looks or works.

Basically people who want to search, will now not be able to, they'll be forced into a UI they might have consciously avoided, otherwise they'd be using their chatbot in the first place. Seems like a strange UX decision, rather than recommending "Hey maybe you want to try our chatbot", they just force the user into a chat straight up.

I had an interesting one yesterday. Someone responded to me on Reddit with very official sounding words to make their argument. I was still dubious and googled a few of the concepts they threw out there.

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!!!

But they already have an AI mode tab… What is the innovation here, making it default instead of search?

The hardest decision a company, especially in tech, can make is to disrupt an immensely successul business of their own before their competitors can. Apple killed their biggest cash cow, the iPod, to push a smartphone. Netflix killed its entire business of DVD rentals in favor of streaming. Microsoft stopped selling software in boxes and pivoted to SaaS. Similar to all of these the business of typing words in a search box and getting 10 blue links was dead the moment ChatGPT got popular.

Objecting to this from the user end seems a bit like complaining the original Google was trying to be too magic when what you wanted was AltaVista. This has been the inevitable direction the whole time.

The real problem here is assuming this takes off what incentives will anyone have to provide the information to feed the beast?

Does the math math on this to be "free" for a long period of time? Ads can only pay for so much and AI can really suck down the money.

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.

Kind of Google to create a market opening for its competitors like this. I hope Kagi, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are taking notes.

Alternative to archive.ph and "unlocked article" tracking code

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

Something like

   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

NB. Javascript and CSS interpreters are needed only for Datadome CAPTCHA. The following DNS data is required

   ct.captcha-delivery.com
   geo.captcha-delivery.com
   www.nytimes.com
   g1.nyt.com 

No other DNS data is required

I've been using Kagi for a couple of years now. Haven't missed Google once.

I get that they have to make changes to the google search box because so many people are just using ChatGPT/Cluade to answer questions instead of google.

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

With answers “someone on the internet wrote”, I miss knowing definitely that there’s no good or authoritative answer to my query on the internet. With those “people as clueless as you said…” answers it takes lot more time to understand that.

I wonder how many tokens this is gonna cost Google.

I don't care. Aside from a single dormant GMail account I keep solely for "parental tech support", I de-Googled 5 years ago and strongly encourage everyone to do likewise.

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/ .

It's not clear to me from this announcement. The articles make it sound like all searches now go to ai mode and no more blue links.

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?

This might just do irreversible damage to my parents' generation. They already trust the AI overview with all of the thinking and synthesizing after making a search, and this will only make it worse.

It was only a matter of time. Watching how less technical people behave in the LLM era, I've noticed that most people no longer say "Google something", instead, they say "ask ChatGPT" or "ask chat". Many technical people have also stopped using Google for a lot of search queries and now just let an LLM find the answer.

So how does google now make money when it is just providing us with direct answers from ai, instead of showing us both paid for search results and directing us to sites which host targetted ads?

How does adsense work when there are no search results?

Lesson: slowly mean yourself off Google producrs

So to make this profitable they need ads revenue from it, right? Imagine for a moment the ways AI can manipulate responses and conversations for marketers, because I guarantee the marketers have already thought about it.

AI in the 1950s

   Robots will do your chores so you can focus on your work

AI in 2026

   Robots will take your work so you can focus on your chores

Often, if you visit a few of the top PageRank-ish search hits for a query, you can find where the "AI" answer was mostly plagiarized from...

(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've noticed this since yesterday when i tried to do a site:url search, it gave me an AI chatbox and answer

One good thing about the (current iteration of) AI era is it’s getting people used to paying directly for data. Yeah, of course i’d prefer information to be totally free. But if that isn’t possible, paying directly is far superior to paying for it via ad exposure.

So many questions:

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.

tried it out:

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.

Also their universal shopping cart seems to be quite a change too https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/shopping...

>Google’s AI Overviews will also allow users to ask follow-up questions in AI Mode, beginning Tuesday, the company noted.

have i been A/B tested into something, or has this been live for months? this doens't seem new.

Google search box has basically become an AI aggregator that doesn't give anything back to those websites it scraps data from, and it'll result in the death of the internet as we came to know it At this point, google might as well stop showing website links in search results. with AI Overviews, barely anyone’s clicking through it anymore

AI search.. they should at least put that behind a "I'm feeling unlucky" button

Sometimes I hear lies and slander about big tech pulling up ladders and misusing their advantage to cement monopolies, but just look at this!

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.

I think I'll be getting a Kagi subscription.

Its becoming like a parasite killing its host

Up to now, the Gemini results they display are often worse and less accurate than the same question asked in Gemini. I'm guessing SEO has so thoroughly cooked Google's search results that they are actually holding back Gemini as a brand.

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.

Google search itself is becoming useless. It tends to promote social media results even when scarcely relevant, and just can't find things like part numbers that even baidu can find on English language pages. The AI then summarises social media posts.

I no longer use Google search for simple coding questions, even though it uses a bunch of Claude tokens to ask, for example, what's the null-safe operator in JavaScript vs ruby because it sends half my project with the question, I'll still just ask in my ide rather than a google search.

I caught myself yesterday starting to ask Claude in my ide what ship did grace and Rocky take back to Rocky's homeworld.

Google search results have been the worst part of every LLM I’ve used. I imagine the LLM specifically designed to use Google search is going to be the worst LLM.

In the last 10 (maybe longer) years I've noticed I've changed how I am approaching these changes.

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.

Hmm, perhaps should switch fields and become a factologist

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.

A lot of people in these comments have strong opinions about the performance of a service they use frequently, for which they pay zero dollars, and is run by a public company with a fiduciary duty to provide ROI to its investors.

I wonder how many of them would switch to a paid model that offered pre-ai-era google search?

Why replace something deterministic with something non-deterministic? I can no longer tell someone "just google it" because I don't actually know what will come up...

I understand the consternation here about this change. And I've noticed recently getting frustrated because I'm looking for a search list but the UI throws me into AI mode first. But the think is I use traditional search so much less now that those annoyances are the exception. I can't say whether they are making a mistake, but they've got to have extensive data, and I'm going to bet that an overwhelming amount of people don't click through to the search results anymore for most quick queries. They probably really don't have a choice if they are going to effectively keep ChatGPT at bay. Of course, all this is terrible for the internet. That headline should have been: The Internet as you know it is over.

NYT found 10% of answers are wrong

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/technology/google-ai-over...

Ask Joogle or Ask Geeves?

https://www.techradar.com/computing/search-engines/ask-jeeve... / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask.com

Ask Jeeves was dissolved 15 days ago

I haven't used Google search for years. It's almost totally irrelevant at this point and existing on pure inertia.

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.

Google???

Remind me what Google is again. Haven't used them for years...

Time to pay for Kagi everyone!

I know a lot of regular people who hate this, but Kagi can be a hard sell for regular people. What are y’all’s recommendations for free search engines at the moment? I used to rec DDG, but I feel like their results are much worse than Kagi’s at present

To change anything on the home page of google, amazon, etc, must be a hair-raising experience for the people making those changes.

The last product i thought google would kill, that isn't ads, the true end of an era with an underwhelming bang.

I wonder if they will stop using pagerank completely? Has pagerank already transcended the software plane?

So you can code in search now and create apps. No clue how that in depth works out. For them, the dream could be that everybody has their custom apps hosted by google.

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.

Thank god for Kagi. It literally saved search for me, although I mostly use kagi.com/assistant these days.

Every organization eventually is taken over by the people who operate within it effectively, to the detriment of the people who operate outside and provide the actual public value. Google’s making a terrible, though understandable, mistake. They think people go to Google to see what Google wants to show them. This is like the people who run the airport imagining that travelers are popping by to see the decorations.

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.

This is to Open Claw what Google home is to Home Assistant.

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.

I've been using google search, and all other products, less and less. i find a mixture of perplexity and chatgpt perform much better and find higher quality results faster.

the degoogling process will be a long haul but im determined to do it.

I imagine that they have made this decision based on the search queries people use, and now have the compute to make better sense of them.

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.

The “magic” of the SERP is that it makes the organics product and the ads product reinforce each other: People come for the organics and don't have to pay. That brings eyeballs, which advertisers pay for.

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?

I think I've had this on duckduckgo for several months

The spend difference for this must be enormous. I wonder how they justify it financially. I guess they don’t have to.

Google search has been over for a few years already.

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.

> Designed to anticipate your intent, it also helps you formulate your question with AI-powered suggestions that go beyond autocomplete.

The first red flag for me. The +/- of this type of feature are well worth exploring.

I started switching to DDG on some devices, this will motivate me to finish the transition ! Thanks

The inability to do a proper search with “-x” x being a word you want excluded from the results but I can being able to have a convo about summary results is just mindblowing. I miss proper search. What’s everyone using for alternatives?

Web search won't make shareholders happy.

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.

I've found Google AI Search to be good for really topical searches. And its conversational ability has noticeably improved over the last year. I can now have a (short) conversation where I reference past messages.

Google is making the pivot. And they’ve got such a strong strategic position. Full-stack integration. They will survive and thrive in this new era. Search seems safe. Yet, other products are still vulnerable to encroachment.

I use Google daily, and yet I can't remember the last time I used their search box - all of my searching has been done through the browser URL bar for a long, long time. I wonder if similar changes are being applied to the Chrome URL bar?

Search doesn’t work well anymore anyway. Half of what used to be searchable has either been consolidated or is gated.

Gmail 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 unnecessary mention of Antigravity in there gives me Microsoft Copilot vibes.

First signs of the death of google.

Internet search should remain internet search. If I want to use AI, it should be an option, not a replacement of internet search.

Time to switch to old style search engines which still return the 10 blue links, with an AI option.

barf but it at least opens up the playing field for new startups that want to provide good old index search and try to beat them where they left off when search still worked 8 years ago before they hired the yahoo POS execs that enshitified the service.

Scrolling down this article presented me with pop-up dialogues twice. Annoying.

Lots of people talking about Google being strictly worse than a number of search engines (bing, duck, etc) not been my experience. Brave default search is awful. Duck was terrible last I used it. Google still great for me, but I have a decent amount of "privacy controls" implemented (DNS, vpn, browser extensions) and i basically dork most searches--average search looks more like a find invocation than English. In this last regard especially, Google is peerless, imo Been a while since I looked around though. Is there an engine that supports all the operators that Google does and that provides results of better or equivalent quality?

Cool. I hope this blows up in their face and is reverted in a few months. I don't need my phone book index to suddenly not be an index and force me to use a call center instead.

I kind of like it for dumb one off questions I dont want to burn my real tokens on...

Surely, the motivation here is a mega influx of training data.

> . And for select categories like home repair, beauty or pet care, you can ask Google to call businesses on your behalf

NO - thanks!

How is Google going to make money off this?

There are a number of "hide AI overviews from google" browser extensions. Use them.

Today is the day the old internet died. RIP.

Even Yandex from Russia is a better search engine. But I am yet to come across a truly powerful, fair and accurate search engine.

I did not start using Google because the results were better.

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.

You can search, understand and hallucinate - do anything. All you have to do is ASK.com

How much longer can the internet survive if we just stop sending traffic to websites?

So good SEO will require prompt injection now?

the thing that bothers me is I don't usually want this mode. When I search, I am not looking for what google thinks, I am looking for what other sources think.

This ruined my experience using chrome on my phone. Done with it.

I wonder if the song they used for the video is also AI-generated. It's pretty catchy.

Hopefully they don’t kill tbs=li:1, or I’ll get pretty angry.

On the upside, perhaps the LLM will understand the intent of search operators now.

Feels a bit like New Coke

I miss having a good search engine. Even before AI.

Finally google search result ridden with ads and useless results will be replaced by chatbot answers also ridden with ads, unnecessary commenatry from the bot and ads.

Initially I thought AI would would crush google search, but starting to think the opposite. Think they have survived the transition.

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 think perplexity implements the same. Ive been using it as a default search for a month and actually still find myself explicitly using Google instead.

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.

Where are the PageRanks of yesteryear?

Google thinks they can do what Microsoft failed at.

How does a media company stay in business when there is no one visiting the site, and people are only getting the quality information from Google?

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.

As long as udm=14 still works I'm fine on a personal level. It's still bullshit that they're going to push it as the default

Thankfully ublock origin blocks a ton of those useless AI slop spam, but Google nerfed its search engine already years before. They showed that they don't care about it anymore, yet alone about users. Something fundamentally changed at Google and it is not good. It is time for the world to retire Google. We don't want or need an adCompany nor an AI slop company.

God, this is just as awful as Microsoft trying to push copilot into everything, trash.

How does this work for Google? I read it costs them $0.001 to perform a search. No matter how efficient their inference chips are, the new cost basis has to be 10X or more. And the zero click Internet not only kills ad supported content sites, it also kills Google SERP ad revenues.

Google has become exclusively an advertising company long time ago, it's stopped being a search engine since years.

"Did you mean?" + excluded word was a pretty clear indication they stopped caring to provide any meaningful search whatsoever.

Google search has been dead for years.

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.

It's been over for years. I switched to Kagi during the pandemic and haven't looked back.

There is a lot at stake for Google - that search box has firehosed cash non stop into the company money bin for decades.

It's been over for years. Google scares companies into bidding against each other just to be seen. It's a complete farce & a racket. It's the pay to play web.

but i dont know who visits google.com anymore

The shark has fully cleared it’s jump.

I just want a relevant website ... no I don't want to use your agent. Just give me search results that are interesting to read, no AI slop, which teach me something new ... no I don't want to buy if I don't show this intent. Just serve the public interest and not your own financial interests. Thank you.

That's why Kagi is the only subscription I don't actively think about cancelling. For the love of god, keep me away from Google and all of THAT. If Kagi goes down the same path, I'll selfhost something or just return to monkey and use link indexes and the favorites list + the native search of websites.

I wish they could remove the AI overview crap that's dysfunctional and kills the very spirit of a search engine's premise. You're not supposed to steal links from sites Google. That's a fucking dark pattern.

I suppose it would not be in line with their business plans to make google search actually search again.

what a weird surface to put LLMs

For years already google has had integrations and more 'intelligent' responses for things like weather, shopping, answers to queries etc. This hardly changes any of that (most of the 'features' are inside AI Mode). For 'regular' uses this changes nothing. Avoid AI Mode most of the time. Double-check most automated overview options. And still not using any kind of chat interface when searching for sites, things, images, whatever. Hardly changes anything. And Google is still the destination for all lookups. With little to no reason to go looking for a different service especially not from any other AI-related firm.

I haven't missed it since switching to Kagi.

Kagi is a great alternate.

Privacy first, opt-in AI, total control over site blocking, zero ads.

You're the customer, not the product.

Bring me Google before the instant search nonsense where I could go into rabbit holes 100+ pages deep.

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).

Anyways, I find that my $10/mo subscription to Kagi has been well worth not having to deal with Google's BS. (And they do offer AI if you want but they don't push it on you.)

I'm pretty sure I had something very similar A/Bed at me by Bing the other day.

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 haven't used google search as my default search engine in YEARS. DDG is good enough for 99% of my searches. Same with Google Chrome. Stop giving evil companies your traffic and attention.

This is great news. I remember Altavista, Yahoo and similar ones, they pioneered this type of home-page-is-all-you-need UI which is the perfect compromise of what product people at Google have come up with and what users want, at least according to their tests.

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!

Has the web been a meaningful experience since 2016? Before LLMs you might have visited 5 websites daily (besides utilities like banking / shopping /bills). Google concentrated on a handful of garbage-tier regime publishers with spammy ads. There were some holdouts like stack exchange and Wikipedia (at least attempting to produce quality content).

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.

While I can certainly see this upsetting some people, I'm not sure if this is necessarily "bad".

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?

Glad I switched to Kagi

huh, one downside of being an all-in Firefox and Kagi user, meaning I have everywhere firfox as default browser with kagi account configured, all laptops, tablets, phones, means I am now out of touch and never noticed.

duckduckgo.com

F Google!

Makes me sad. I recall the beginnings of Google, so hopeful so new.

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.

damn this is some real slop. not expected from google.

i played the video, didnt understand anything and got dizzy. then i tried to scroll but the browser tab froze? wow

Slop as a Service (SaaS)...

I think this will be one of those things that the hacker news crowd lambasts and calls a mistake but will either be neutral or seen as a positive to your average user.

of course; ever since ChatGPT first launched it was clear this is what Google would do to its search

good luck getting visits to your site unless you're paying for AI placement

The entire internet as I knew it is over. Everything trips Cloudflare and capcha's because of tech bros and their AI crusade.

But at least I've experienced the golden age. I feel bad for all the kids who will never know what once was.

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I genuinely feel like I could have a breakdown over this.

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.

If you'd like to switch from Google, I'll take the opportunity to let you know about Uruky [1], an ad-free and privacy-focused search engine, that's focused on a simpler experience than Kagi (no AI). Kind of like "old school" search. My wife and I launched it earlier this year, and it's been going really well so far.

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