AI means the end of internet search as we've known it
62 comments
·January 7, 2025tjr
waveBidder
Not to belabor a service frequently suggested here, but have you ever tried https://kagi.com/? I find it much more reliable.
alphan0n
This would be an opportune moment to enumerate the problem you had, the solutions in brief that didn’t work, and the one that did.
Some details, even just a link to the chat would be helpful. At the very least, you might help someone experiencing the same issue.
jmyeet
No, it doesn't.
AI has a lot of edge cases and caveats. It can be trivial like not being about to count the Rs in "strawberry". Or it can be more nefarious where it simply makes stuff up (eg some fake precedents in legal opinions). AI is still incapable of explaining its reasoning and dealing with errors.
Yes I know some of these problems like the "Rs in strawberry" problem have been solved but (IMHO) you're going to be dealing with those edge cases forever.
Another issue is response time. Currently, you need to go through several steps: query -> embedding -> LLM -> answer -> back to English. Each of these steps takes time.
But here's the big one: energy. The sheer scale of Google search needs to be put in context of how much energy is consumed and how many queries can be answered per unit energy. With all the steps involved in AI queries, we need orders of magnitude of improvement to compete.
Most searches are fairly simple. They just don't need a large model to answer them. There will absolutely be a place for AI queries and they will continue to get better but displace search? We're not even remotely close to that outcome.
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.
eviks
> 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
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?
drewcoo
The result only needs to be appealing to consumers. If hallucinated nonsense accomplishes that then job done!
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beefnugs
The quiet unsaid trick is that they expect you to pay 5x for the service because you need to feed the result back into other multiple models to double and triple check. Another tech year, another growth scam.
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.
NikkiA
laws are for the little people, not big tech
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.
mempko
AI doesn't connect you to communities like search engines do. Ask AI a question and it gives you an answer, no interaction with other people. Ask a search engine and it may bring up a forum with someone asking a similar question. Then maybe you join the discussion.
AI will bring about a lonelier online world.
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B
That’s another issue they don’t want to talk about in their quest for money. They want to create a read-only single-page curated proxy in front of the web and sell it as an improvement.
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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.
CMCDragonkai
Supply has to meet demand. I want my product featured as the answer to people's problems.
CMCDragonkai
And yea "content" sites are probably going to want to be on their closed platforms. I was more talking about "solution" or "product" sites.
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?
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.
valdiorn
Google Lens has already revolutionized my search. Anything that you can see but is difficult to describe, I now have a tool for searching for.
I use it a lot to track down original sources of videos and photos on Reddit, to check authenticity. I also use it to search for hardware components other manufacturers use, that I'd like to buy. Things like specific switches, knobs, faders, displays etc. (I build audio gadgets). I just highlight the part on the picture and then restrict my search to Alibaba, digikey or mouser. It's GREAT.
Lens is highly underrated.
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.
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.