AI means the end of internet search as we've known it
50 comments
·January 7, 2025eviks
wkirby
Exactly. Replacing search with chatbots removes any opportunity to apply the media literacy I’ve spent decades learning. It gives every source the same sheen of correctness, making all information it gives essentially worthless.
voisin
It only does this if you don’t ask it to supply sources and double check where you aren’t confident. It allows you to cut through 99% of the bullshit within search results and double check where necessary. Perhaps it is a new type of media literacy but I don’t think it is too far off.
fatbird
The idea that I might have to research the validity of a search result is very offputting. There was a time when I trusted Google to give me the most relevant result, filtering out the linkfarms and spam results. I don't see how AI gets us back to that trusting state.
arcanemachiner
If you're not willing to ignore reality and saturate your life with confabulated nonsense, then I don't think you're ready for the future.
econ
Why is this written like the MIT reader hears about the technology for the first time? On other websites this would be more appealing.
Edit: Are we reading a generated article?
tjr
I was just trying to solve a configuration problem in Xcode today. I started with a web search, and found lots of proposes solutions, but nothing that worked for me. I asked ChatGPT, which regurgitated the same ideas I found on the web, plus a few more that also didn't work.
Finally I tried something undocumented on a hunch, and it kind of worked, and I shared my progress with a (human) colleague, who had the insight to take what I had done and finished a real solution.
Anecdotally, in mice, etc., etc.
waveBidder
Not to belabor a service frequently suggested here, but have you ever tried https://kagi.com/? I find it much more reliable.
WD-42
Ad blockers are going to need to become really advanced once chat bots start outputting sponsored answers or other injecting product recommendations into their usual output.
Brybry
Wouldn't this be against a lot of consumer protection/advertising laws?
It's not like Google marks sponsored search results because they want to. They do it because they legally have to.
And if the LLM agent conforms to the law and clearly marks the output that is sponsored content then it should be trivial for ad blockers to filter it.
blackoil
Oh you know the solution. Ad Blocker with AI
101008
_Hey GPT, rewrite the following text removing all references to products or any ads. Keep the rest of the text verbatim._
add-sub-mul-div
The same product recommendation text could have come from a sincere human source, a biased human source, a hallucination, or a sponsorship. An ad blocker won't be able to tell the difference.
scubadude
AI responses need a source (lol, I know) or they just can't be trusted. It's that simple. Unless you believe everything you read on the Internet!
They obviously are a step of evolution beyond search in capability.
null
CMCDragonkai
I wrote about this a while back (https://matrix.ai/learn/blog/content-commoditization-and-tru...) arguing that SEO will transition to LLMO eventually. We won't bother optimising for search engine rankings, but instead for answers on LLMs.
chii
> won't bother optimising for search engine rankings, but instead for answers on LLMs.
the incentive for SEO is to drive click thrus.
What, if any, are the incentives for sites to optimize LLMs' answer? Would that not make click thru rates go down instead? I would actually imagine that the site would try to make their content anti-LLM, such that an LLM cannot sufficiently cover the content in their summary, and the user must end up visiting the site itself to verify.
fatbird
The opposite, I imagine: if before, SEO was gaming page rank, then the new SEO will be gaming the LLMs to promote your site as a best result. It's still SEO'ed crap for clickthrus, it's just a different mode of noise diluting the signal.
6LLvveMx2koXfwn
does that mean we can transition back to the useful search of 20 years ago!?
6LLvveMx2koXfwn
gazumped!
SoftTalker
Will that make search results useful again?
error404x
I still prefer using search engines, but if I don't get an actual answer, I use LLMs with internet search. It is sometimes helpful for me, though most of the time, I get similar results as a normal search engine.
Some AI search companies [0] are even planning to add ads to their results, possibly on their free plans, which could make it harder for ad blockers to filter them out.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/12/perplexity-brings-ads-to-i...
MattDaEskimo
It's ironic considering how dependent LLMs are for search engines.
I doubt they're "ending", rather they will need to be re-born for RAG purposes.
knadh
I wrote about something tangential a few months ago; the need to have curation-based alternate forms of discovery on the WWW.
low_tech_punk
Despite fewer clicks, copyright fights, and sometimes iffy answers, AI could unlock new ways to summon all the world’s knowledge.
getnormality
Complain about Google all you want, I prefer its link-supported AI summaries over Perplexity's mystery meat hallucinations with no links to human-written content.
eGQjxkKF6fif
I actually enjoy it. I still search with DDG, but Claude gives me direct answers without sifting through stackoverflow, or links upon links on how to do things on websites for their website functionality like e-bay or how to use things.
> The way AI can put together a well-reasoned answer to just about any kind of question, drawing on real-time data from across the web, just offers a better experience.
No? This experience is only better if the result isn't hallucinated nonsense, which the article acknowledged before, but then just ignored in the overconfident claim that nonsense is the future