Comment by mapontosevenths
20 hours ago
AI is built with content from the open web, but it has also killed the open web. The death of Adwords is only one symptom of that.
I don't know what comes next, I just know it will be worse.
20 hours ago
AI is built with content from the open web, but it has also killed the open web. The death of Adwords is only one symptom of that.
I don't know what comes next, I just know it will be worse.
No, google search has stopped being useful years before "AI".
Is that why it kept it's market share and usage numbers?
They're paying right and left to be the default search option, aren't they?
Plus to be honest alternatives aren't much better. I use duckduckgo but the results are still a deluge of spam (content mills).
Business momentum goes a long way, especially with Google being near monopoly status in their advertising. If you're flying at 50,000 feet and the engines fall off the plane it may be a long time before you the customer feel the impact. We can only guess Google is in a panic trying to figure out how they'll make their numbers next quarter and looking for something else to enshittify to increase profits in the meantime.
It was still useful to advertisers and publishers.
It wasn't really AI. Fundamentally, building a website the "traditional" way (hosting agreement, apache install, your favorite way to convert data formats that don't hate you into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) was always a learned and quite technical skill; most people weren't doing it for fun, they were doing it because it was the only way to be on the web.
What killed the open web was Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk replacing that whole mess with social media profiles, networking connections, and templated, pre-fabricated organization home pages. When social networks became dominant enough that businesses could use it to get their info out there without having to author a webpage, the balance tipped (at least for business-motivated web content).