Comment by m463
5 days ago
I wonder if web searches used to be pretty productive, then declined as sponsored results and SEO degraded things.
Nowadays an ai assist with a web search usually eliminates the search altogether and gives you a clear answer right away.
for example, "how much does a ford f-150 cost" will give you something ballpark in a second, compared to annoying "research" to find the answer shrouded in corporate obfuscation.
The turning point was around when google stopped honoring Boolean ops and quotation marks
The killer app for AI might just be unenshittifying search for a couple of years.
Then SEO will catch up and we'll have spam again, but now we'll be paying by the token for it. Probably right around the time hallucination drops off enough to have made this viable.
I kind of want to become Amish sometimes.
reminds me of two things:
- the anthropic superbowl dig at chatgpt ads
"Anthropic's Super Bowl ad humorously criticized OpenAI's decision to introduce ads to ChatGPT, featuring a scenario where a man seeking advice is interrupted by an unexpected advertisement." - ddg search assist
- amish hackers: https://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-hackers-a/
Too much money in ads, and search is just a huge cash pipeline straight towards it. No way we can have non-ad-infested llm search out in the wild from any major vendor in upcoming future. Google-fu just becomes llm-google-fu, while sometimes it goes off rails and then apologizes in that typical super annoying way (and screws up something else).
Maybe smaller ones can somehow provide almost comparable but ad-free service, heck even mildly worse but genuine results would win many people over, this one included.
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AI automates spam generation so more than likely all hope is lost for the human driven web.
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There's always this: https://kagi.com/
When did this happen? I do exact searches on Google almost every day and it seems to honor the quotation marks just fine for me.
2012-2014 ish. I had a job which often involved searching for specific part numbers, and at some point during that job quotes stopped giving me exact results. They’d give me something close but incorrect. Like “ABC123” would show me “ABC456”. The real part numbers in question were much longer, in the range of 20-30 chars, so sometimes it was hard to notice that the search had ignored my quotes at first.
They might have fixed it in more recent years, but to me that was when the tide started shifting in the mentality behind google search as a product/service
At least 2022, if not earlier.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30130535
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I tried to search right now "Xoodoo".
Google gave me more than 2 pages of results, while Bing gave me only 1 page.
After that, both Google and Bing provided countless pages full of results about Hoodoo, Voodoo, Zoodoo and the like.
The impossibility of making exact searches is what annoys me most in modern search engines.
I might make a typo sometimes, but I would prefer to correct myself when that happens, instead of the search engine always assuming that I am a moron that cannot type, thus offering every time "helpful" corrections.
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The turning point for me was when they changed the + sign first the "" because of their Google+ thing.
Allegedly the 'clear' answer is much easier to manipulate than gaming PageRank ever was:
https://x.com/thomasgermain/status/2024165514155536746
Don't think that is a fair point, the manipulation was done on a topic of which there are hardly any other sources (hot dog eating competition winner). If you want to manipulate what an AI tells you is the F-150 street price, you will complete with hundreds of sources. The AI will unlikely pick yours.
The marketing game is already moving to game LLMs. Somehow you have to get what you want to have into the training data or the context window.
Currently it is probably just mostly quantity that does the trick w.r.t. training data. So e.g. spam the Internet with "product comparisons" featuring your product as the winner.
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I used to be able to google a question like that and get an accurate answer within the top 3 results nearly every time about 20 years ago. Then it got worse and worse and became pretty much completely useless about 10 years ago.
Now AI will give me a confident answer that is outright wrong 20% of the time or kind of right but not really 30% of the time. So now I ask something using an AI chatbot and carefully word it so as to have it not get off topic and focus on what I actually want to know, wait 30 seconds for its long ass answer to finish, skim it for the relevant parts, then google the answer and try to see where the AI sourced its answer from and determine whether it misinterpreted/mixed up results or it's accurate. What used to be a 10 second google search is now a 2-3 minute exercise.
I can see very much how people say AI has somehow led to productivity losses. It's shit like this, and it floods the internet and makes real info harder to find, making this cycle worse and worse and take more and more time for basic stuff.
Same experience here. I have fond memories of “google code”, a search engine for code databases which was exceptionally good for finding literal quotes.
The more mainstream a subject is, the lower the incidence of hallucinations. With google search, the mantra “I can’t be the first with this problem/question” almost always proves to be right.
I’m in the process of restoring a piece of vintage electronics and everytime I ask gemini (fast or thinking) for help I’m getting sent down an irrelevant rabbit hole. It’s taking info from service manuals of other equipment with a similar product number, misinterpreting diagrams, getting electrical workings wrong.
These things aren’t AI. AI can extract certainty from uncertain data. LLMs take data and turn it into garbage.
Web scraping for LLMs has almost completely ruined the search experience. In the past I could search for simple questions, and quickly get an answer without even having to click through to the links.
This was horrible for web traffic, but the utility level was off the charts. It was possible to get accurate results in milliseconds. It was faster than using an LLM.
Now sites put almost no info in the search result headers, to get people to click through. I think this will work on some users, but most will start using LLMs as search by default.
Search engines have gotten so bad that I almost feel forced to try running SearXNG or some other search engine locally. Its a pain to set up, but degooglefication is always worth it.
Is SearXNG a nice experience? I need something that specifically excludes AI slop affiliate marketing listicles.
I don't know if content other than that exists out there any more. Still, I'd rather have no answer than a "top ten $item" list just describing the first page of Amazon results.
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Now Google has an AI answer at the top with links to sources. This streamlines the process.
My mother lost her phone so I asked her to search for "find my iphone" on Google.
The result started with 3 "sponsored links" which threw her down the rabbit hole.
This used to be easy.
I was just thinking exactly the same. Basic web search has become so horrible that AI is being used as its replacement.
I found it a sad condemnation of how far the tech industry has fallen into enshittification and is failing to provide tools that are actually useful.
We always had the technology to do things better, it's the money making part that has made things worse technologically speaking. In this same way, I don't see how AI will resolve the problem - our productivity was never the goal, and that won't change any time soon.
> Basic web search has become so horrible
It is not horrible, it reached the point of absolute excellence. Not for you, the user - but for making money for the creator. Remember, no one paid for web search, so you are the product. If you are the provider of the web search engine, the point of having web search is not deliver the best search result to the user, but maximize the amount of money you can make from the sum of the world population. And google did very good in maximizing their profits, without users turning away from them.
And it'll happen again when AI models start resorting to ads once again.
Yup. Any LLM recommendation for a product or service should be viewed with suspicion (no different than web search results or asking a commission-based human their opinion). Sponsored placements. Affiliate links. Etc.
Or when asking an LLM for a comparison matrix or pros and cons between choices ... beware paid placements or sponsors. Bias could be a result of available training data (forgivable?) or due to paid prioritization (or de-prioritizing of competitors!)
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I don't think that will ever happen. All you need is a trivial browser extension with a locally run, very primite LLM, that takes the output of the commercial LLM, and removes all advertisement. And adBlocker AI, so to speak.
Yes, there will be people not using adblockers just as there are people today. But no adblocker ever was able to remove SEO spam from googles website, all they did was hiding obvious adds. They didn't improve the search experience.
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Their tools are very useful. To their customers. Not to their users.
It didn't decline because of this. It declined because of a general decade long trend of websites becoming paywalled and hidden behind a login. The best and most useful data is often inaccessible to crawlers.
In the 2000s, everything was open because of the ad driven model. Then ad blockers, mobile subscription model, and the dominance of a few apps such as Instagram and Youtube sucking up all the ad revenue made having an open web unsustainable.
How many Hacker News style open forums are left? Most open forums are dead because discussions happen on login platforms like Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, X, Discord, etc. The only reason HN is alive is because HN doesn't make need to make money. It's an ad for Y Combinator.
SEO only became an issue when all there is for crawlers is SEO content instead of true genuine content.
> The best and most useful data is often inaccessible to crawlers.
Interesting point.
> ost open forums are dead because discussions happen on login platforms like Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, X, Discord, etc
Ironically isn't one of the reasons some of those platforms started to use logins was so they could track users and better sell their information to ad people?
Obviously now there are other reasons as well - regulation, age verification etc.
Does this suggest that the AI/ad platforms need to tweak their economic model to share more of the revenue with content creators?
You can still use Reddit without logging in. In fact it's completely unlike Discord. Lots of Reddit discussions still show up in web search results.
Reddit does not expose all comments and posts to crawlers.
I seem to remember very few ads on the early web. Most sites I frequented were run by volunteers who paid out of their own pockets for webspace.
What year? 90s?
I remember ads everywhere in 2000s.
> I wonder if web searches used to be pretty productive, then declined as sponsored results and SEO degraded things.
Used to be.
> Nowadays an ai assist with a web search usually eliminates the search altogether and gives you a clear answer right away.
Now.