I spent the last three days (off and on) using Gemini to configure my edge router 4 with my iOS devices on a vpn and it's been awesome. In the past I'd do a google search and read a few sources of documentation, do another google search and read another set of documentation. Now, Gemini aggregates multiple pages together so all of the work of reading source docs from multiple locations is now n a single step.
Oh, I should mention though. There was no advertising at all. They didn't make any money off me. It was 100% Gemini which I recognize as not long-term feasible.
All the information Gemini surfaced was created with human effort and published on the internet with the expectation that humans would visit the website and the creator would get some reward - advertising dollars, bragging rights, popularity, subscribers or whatever else.
If the only visitors to websites are now LLM training bots then what incentive is there to publish anything new? For how long can we continue to rely on pre-2024 non-AI generated content?
It took you 4 days because you used Gemini. Gemini is the worst AI model I ever used. It is way behind even open models. It looks like Google just reached its AOL moment.
Gemini isn't great as a model, googles search and ability to cite textbooks down to the paragraph make it better than every other model for human in the loop tasks.
I end up using the gemini api for with search enabled for the cases that I don't have access to good grounding data even in agentic tasks.
Are you sure the lack of advertising isn't long term feasible? It seems to me that AI models have proven themselves to be something consumers ARE willing to pay a subscription - or even pay per use/token for.
its pretty good with logs too. i mostly paste a few pages i suspect hace a problem in them and let it go to town. its almost always correct and is way faster than me
And I've spent the last few days irritated that everything I ask Gemini is answered with something that's blatantly wrong and I'm not even a subject matter expert. A quick Google search for the same questions gives plenty of results that counter what the LLM gave me.
I occasionally use Google Search when DuckDuckGo fails to give me relevant. Almost always, Google has better results.
Though I can find its AI answers annoying aggressive. I'll look up like two search terms and the AI will bullshit multiple paragraphs out of despite having zero context of what I am looking for.
DuckDuckGo seems to have detection of whether it should give an AI answer. And it allows you to have more granular control of when you want to get an AI answer. And is overall less distracting than Google's.
Interesting, I've seen much better results on DDG. Most recently was the search: `site:feeds.bbci.co.uk inurl:rss.xml` which works on DDG but gives zero results on Google. As far as I can tell, Google just decided not to index these.
I feel like collecting, curating, and protecting high quality corpuses of "truth" is going to become increasingly important for high quality AI.
There will come a day (and probably soon) when "training on the public internet" (Reddit, etc) will taint your model with metric tons of corporate contamination, political poison, and other adversarial content intentionally crafted to bias AIs for various reasons (corporate gain, geopolitical information warfare, etc). Basically the AI-equivalent of SEO.
I think most everyone already has a curated training library; Web scraping exists but I don't think anyone is still using it as a primary information vector
All of that already existed for the purpose of biasing people and now it biases ai for free. A company would have to make an effort to remove or change the bias
I see only one simple solution (though we should discuss the more complex ones): if Google directly answers a search query, then it must be held accountable for it, for better or for worse, and therefore assume all the benefits and (legal) liabilities that this entails
There's too much going on in this article and while I think some of the points are valid, others go too far.
A lot of the "cultural record" the author refers to is just digital junk. Random digital content that very few people care about, if we're being honest. Trying to hoard every bit of digital information ever produced is not the same thing as preserving "culture".
Case in point:
> Even the increasing use of ephemeral formats like Instagram Stories and WhatsApp status updates means that large portions of cultural, social, and political communication are never conserved in the first place. As a society, we can probably survive bad search results and come up with another way to schedule a sunset make-out session. But we can’t aspire to sovereignty if we can’t retain and retrieve our collective memory.
For most of human history, nobody was trying to "conserve" every cultural, social or political communication ever produced, and I fail to see how Instagram Stories and WhatsApp status updates, many of which aren't even truly broadcast publicly for all to see, are part of some imaginary "collective memory."
If you find a web page, see an Instagram Story or receive a message that's important to you, save it or take a screenshot. But let's not pretend all these things belong in a global Digital Civilizational Archives.
While I dislike Instagram reels and stories, I do feel like there is almost certainly scientific studies on radicalization that would benefit from actual histories of dumb memes. I feel like that about a lot of things, really.
There probably are some important hidden discord groups that would explain the origin of many political positions. Unlike smokey meetings in scummy bars, that exists now and is on a database somewhere.
On the other hand, when modern archaeologists discover "Claudius has a small dick" graffiti on the side of some God-forsaken wall in Pompeii, they're fascinated. The presence of such graffiti adds color and texture to the civilization inhabited by Virgil and Ovid. What's just disposable background noise to us may provide context into how we lived and thought to our far-future descendants.
Kagi does have AI too, for what it’s worth. I found it pretty damn good, but I wish I could give them more money. I have a year subscription so I’m stuck without being able to give them *anything* until it’s done.
That is an option for sure, but a very disappointing one. And it comes with a meaningful danger of ending up with 2 subscriptions: one yearly and one monthly. They really, really need to finish their “pay as you go” system. I don’t know why it’s not done yet and there’s been no word about it to my knowledge.
I'm a long time Kagi user and I haven't used Google search in about a year.
I tried out Google search for a few technical searches recently and it was surprisingly ad and AI free. Not bad at all and much better than I remember from last year.
Then I put in some non-technical searches and it was all ads and AI and basically unusable.
I was wondering how would Kagi scale/expand if all of a sudden google were to stop serving search altogether (not likely) or alter search such that users look for alternatives.
I wouldn't say it's better, but it's certainly on par with Google in their best years. And it's light years better than what Google is now, or using an LLM.
What’s come next for me has been much better. I use ChatGPT cranked to Pro with “extended” thinking to one-shot whatever I would’ve spent time looking into with Google. It’ll plan the whole sunset bike ride or promposal or whatever from TFA.
From a user perspective, Google search is the most useful it has been in years, though that doesn't feel entirely like intentional improvement, just a lucky side effect of the move to "AI mode".
And yes, if you take what the AI tells you at face value it could be wrong. But if you are aware of this and aware of the ways in which LLMs are likely to shit the bed, it is quicker to get from request to useful information than it has been with Google search since like 2017.
And also, yes, the old balance of Google driving clicks to sites that will then generate revenue off more Google Ads being shown after you click through to them creating a virtuous cycle is completely busted, and that sucks. It does not impact me directly but it certainly seems like unless a better system is devised that it is one of a few ways in which AI is likely to stall out its own training funnel.
> But if you are aware of this and aware of the ways in which LLMs are likely to shit the bed, it is quicker to get from request to useful information than it has been with Google search since like 2017.
The point is not about 'quicker' requests but precise requests. It definitely has worsened, though not on a single degree on al levels like the HN hivemind claims, but some aspects are still somewhat precise but others are definitely crap.
i.e. when searching about my neighborhood it still returns better results than bing, yahoo, ddg, yandex and what have you. But they are buried into a load of crap of alleged "relevant" results (those things past the ai stuff) that aren't relevant in any way.
Yandex is the only search engine left which still feels like the "old" web. It feels like you're actually getting a best effort search, and not just the results that someone paid to put in front of you.
> As someone who regularly reads things online, then wants to read them again like 3 years later, Google has been monotonically declining in quality.
I generally agree, but I think AI mode actually improved things somewhat compared to how things were just prior to it existing.
And I'm not saying what we have now is better than Golden Age Google, but things were just getting worse and worse for almost a decade. AI didn't fix the decade worth of decline, but it is the first thing I've seen from Google that at least partially reversed it for my own usage.
I think they make things worse, because they very very often present straight inaccurate information.
Just the other day I was trying to find out "What american tree species have the deepest roots". And all the AI responses were giving me back generic lists of big trees and claiming that roots going 20ft deep were the deepest. I know for a fact the mesquite trees behind my house can easily grow roots > 100 ft deep.
If I had clicked on the articles with generic lists of big trees, I would have realized they were all low quality clickbait sources and moved on. But the AI presentation makes you think that the information comes well-researched.
Indeed. Money over everything. It is absurd to complain about decreasing quality of a product that makes increasing money for increasingly rich people (thus, by definition, better).
Not only is search revenue growing, but it is growing at an accelerating rate.
At the same time, operating margins are expanding.
I don't know the name of the logical fallacy where someone personally uses an LLM instead of Google Search and then infers that the search business is dying, without ever reading a financial statement.
The most frustrating part of all of this is the underlying premise that the internet is, has been, or could ever be a credible cultural record is deeply stupid. Or maybe more charitably it's both historically and technically illiterate. It has always taken continuous unwavering effort on some person's part to keep any given piece of content online. And while managing a simple hosting account and updating domain registration periodically doesn't take a tremendous amount of effort 20 years is a long time to expect anyone to maintain enthusiasm. The internet has always been a frothy, ever changing blend of the odd nugget of truth drifting in a sea of unadulterated bullshit. Treating this, or worse what comes from statistically averaging it, as a source of capital T truth is totally unhinged. From whence did this mythology of online truth spring?
It's hard to get past the beginning of this article and take it at all seriously. The quote someone who missed a sunset because they asked google and supposedly got the wrong time... but they didn't think to look at the sun or lack thereof to check? Also when I put "when does the sun set today" I get a single exact figure at the top of my results, not from AI, which is honestly the best kind of result – an exact correct answer.
That's fine, but arguing that Google should give accurate times based on where you are is ... crazy?
In the pre-LLM days it was cool that Google did weather, unit conversions, sports results, etc. But that's not even close to their value proposition. Even 5 years ago if someone told me they had planned a photograph and got it wrong because Google gave them the wrong time for sunset, I would have called them a moron for relying on Google! There are sites and apps dedicated to this. Use one of them!
I spent the last three days (off and on) using Gemini to configure my edge router 4 with my iOS devices on a vpn and it's been awesome. In the past I'd do a google search and read a few sources of documentation, do another google search and read another set of documentation. Now, Gemini aggregates multiple pages together so all of the work of reading source docs from multiple locations is now n a single step.
Oh, I should mention though. There was no advertising at all. They didn't make any money off me. It was 100% Gemini which I recognize as not long-term feasible.
All the information Gemini surfaced was created with human effort and published on the internet with the expectation that humans would visit the website and the creator would get some reward - advertising dollars, bragging rights, popularity, subscribers or whatever else.
If the only visitors to websites are now LLM training bots then what incentive is there to publish anything new? For how long can we continue to rely on pre-2024 non-AI generated content?
It took you 4 days because you used Gemini. Gemini is the worst AI model I ever used. It is way behind even open models. It looks like Google just reached its AOL moment.
Gemini isn't great as a model, googles search and ability to cite textbooks down to the paragraph make it better than every other model for human in the loop tasks.
I end up using the gemini api for with search enabled for the cases that I don't have access to good grounding data even in agentic tasks.
Are you sure the lack of advertising isn't long term feasible? It seems to me that AI models have proven themselves to be something consumers ARE willing to pay a subscription - or even pay per use/token for.
Are they profiting from these subscriptions yet?
its pretty good with logs too. i mostly paste a few pages i suspect hace a problem in them and let it go to town. its almost always correct and is way faster than me
And I've spent the last few days irritated that everything I ask Gemini is answered with something that's blatantly wrong and I'm not even a subject matter expert. A quick Google search for the same questions gives plenty of results that counter what the LLM gave me.
YMMV.
I built a simple Claude Code container on my homelab to do the same. I can just SSH in and get tech support when I need it.
no, no, no. you are supposed to romanticize the hunt for correct information /s
I occasionally use Google Search when DuckDuckGo fails to give me relevant. Almost always, Google has better results.
Though I can find its AI answers annoying aggressive. I'll look up like two search terms and the AI will bullshit multiple paragraphs out of despite having zero context of what I am looking for.
DuckDuckGo seems to have detection of whether it should give an AI answer. And it allows you to have more granular control of when you want to get an AI answer. And is overall less distracting than Google's.
Interesting, I've seen much better results on DDG. Most recently was the search: `site:feeds.bbci.co.uk inurl:rss.xml` which works on DDG but gives zero results on Google. As far as I can tell, Google just decided not to index these.
I feel like collecting, curating, and protecting high quality corpuses of "truth" is going to become increasingly important for high quality AI.
There will come a day (and probably soon) when "training on the public internet" (Reddit, etc) will taint your model with metric tons of corporate contamination, political poison, and other adversarial content intentionally crafted to bias AIs for various reasons (corporate gain, geopolitical information warfare, etc). Basically the AI-equivalent of SEO.
I think most everyone already has a curated training library; Web scraping exists but I don't think anyone is still using it as a primary information vector
Otherwise they'd be slurping in their own slop
All of that already existed for the purpose of biasing people and now it biases ai for free. A company would have to make an effort to remove or change the bias
Gemini's highest tier of plan has the utility of Google search circa 2010. I'm paying $400 for the privilege.
I see only one simple solution (though we should discuss the more complex ones): if Google directly answers a search query, then it must be held accountable for it, for better or for worse, and therefore assume all the benefits and (legal) liabilities that this entails
There's too much going on in this article and while I think some of the points are valid, others go too far.
A lot of the "cultural record" the author refers to is just digital junk. Random digital content that very few people care about, if we're being honest. Trying to hoard every bit of digital information ever produced is not the same thing as preserving "culture".
Case in point:
> Even the increasing use of ephemeral formats like Instagram Stories and WhatsApp status updates means that large portions of cultural, social, and political communication are never conserved in the first place. As a society, we can probably survive bad search results and come up with another way to schedule a sunset make-out session. But we can’t aspire to sovereignty if we can’t retain and retrieve our collective memory.
For most of human history, nobody was trying to "conserve" every cultural, social or political communication ever produced, and I fail to see how Instagram Stories and WhatsApp status updates, many of which aren't even truly broadcast publicly for all to see, are part of some imaginary "collective memory."
If you find a web page, see an Instagram Story or receive a message that's important to you, save it or take a screenshot. But let's not pretend all these things belong in a global Digital Civilizational Archives.
While I dislike Instagram reels and stories, I do feel like there is almost certainly scientific studies on radicalization that would benefit from actual histories of dumb memes. I feel like that about a lot of things, really.
There probably are some important hidden discord groups that would explain the origin of many political positions. Unlike smokey meetings in scummy bars, that exists now and is on a database somewhere.
On the other hand, when modern archaeologists discover "Claudius has a small dick" graffiti on the side of some God-forsaken wall in Pompeii, they're fascinated. The presence of such graffiti adds color and texture to the civilization inhabited by Virgil and Ovid. What's just disposable background noise to us may provide context into how we lived and thought to our far-future descendants.
Funny as I just cancelled my Kagi sub to get the Gemini ai pro sub. The deal was too good to pass up
Kagi does have AI too, for what it’s worth. I found it pretty damn good, but I wish I could give them more money. I have a year subscription so I’m stuck without being able to give them *anything* until it’s done.
Sign up for another account?
That is an option for sure, but a very disappointing one. And it comes with a meaningful danger of ending up with 2 subscriptions: one yearly and one monthly. They really, really need to finish their “pay as you go” system. I don’t know why it’s not done yet and there’s been no word about it to my knowledge.
Kagi search today is better than Google search ever was.
And it’s clear that Google’s Ad model ultimately created a priority inversion. The advertisers became the customer.
I am so glad Kagi came along with a business model that is actually working.
I'm a long time Kagi user and I haven't used Google search in about a year.
I tried out Google search for a few technical searches recently and it was surprisingly ad and AI free. Not bad at all and much better than I remember from last year.
Then I put in some non-technical searches and it was all ads and AI and basically unusable.
I was wondering how would Kagi scale/expand if all of a sudden google were to stop serving search altogether (not likely) or alter search such that users look for alternatives.
I wouldn't say it's better, but it's certainly on par with Google in their best years. And it's light years better than what Google is now, or using an LLM.
What’s come next for me has been much better. I use ChatGPT cranked to Pro with “extended” thinking to one-shot whatever I would’ve spent time looking into with Google. It’ll plan the whole sunset bike ride or promposal or whatever from TFA.
[2011] The Atlantic - Why Google Won't Survive the Facebook Threat.
I’ll add this article to the list of incorrect predictions lol
From a user perspective, Google search is the most useful it has been in years, though that doesn't feel entirely like intentional improvement, just a lucky side effect of the move to "AI mode".
And yes, if you take what the AI tells you at face value it could be wrong. But if you are aware of this and aware of the ways in which LLMs are likely to shit the bed, it is quicker to get from request to useful information than it has been with Google search since like 2017.
And also, yes, the old balance of Google driving clicks to sites that will then generate revenue off more Google Ads being shown after you click through to them creating a virtuous cycle is completely busted, and that sucks. It does not impact me directly but it certainly seems like unless a better system is devised that it is one of a few ways in which AI is likely to stall out its own training funnel.
> But if you are aware of this and aware of the ways in which LLMs are likely to shit the bed, it is quicker to get from request to useful information than it has been with Google search since like 2017.
The point is not about 'quicker' requests but precise requests. It definitely has worsened, though not on a single degree on al levels like the HN hivemind claims, but some aspects are still somewhat precise but others are definitely crap.
i.e. when searching about my neighborhood it still returns better results than bing, yahoo, ddg, yandex and what have you. But they are buried into a load of crap of alleged "relevant" results (those things past the ai stuff) that aren't relevant in any way.
Yandex is the only search engine left which still feels like the "old" web. It feels like you're actually getting a best effort search, and not just the results that someone paid to put in front of you.
As someone who regularly reads things online, then wants to read them again like 3 years later, Google has been monotonically declining in quality.
Also I realized the other day how hard it is to find song lyrics for anything other than quite mainstream songs.
It used to be I could always find the quote I wanted from a book. Nowadays I need to keep my own copies...
> As someone who regularly reads things online, then wants to read them again like 3 years later, Google has been monotonically declining in quality.
I generally agree, but I think AI mode actually improved things somewhat compared to how things were just prior to it existing.
And I'm not saying what we have now is better than Golden Age Google, but things were just getting worse and worse for almost a decade. AI didn't fix the decade worth of decline, but it is the first thing I've seen from Google that at least partially reversed it for my own usage.
I think they make things worse, because they very very often present straight inaccurate information.
Just the other day I was trying to find out "What american tree species have the deepest roots". And all the AI responses were giving me back generic lists of big trees and claiming that roots going 20ft deep were the deepest. I know for a fact the mesquite trees behind my house can easily grow roots > 100 ft deep.
If I had clicked on the articles with generic lists of big trees, I would have realized they were all low quality clickbait sources and moved on. But the AI presentation makes you think that the information comes well-researched.
It would be beneficial for the author to look at the revenue for Google Search. Revenue is still growing.
Indeed. Money over everything. It is absurd to complain about decreasing quality of a product that makes increasing money for increasingly rich people (thus, by definition, better).
Indeed.
Not only is search revenue growing, but it is growing at an accelerating rate.
At the same time, operating margins are expanding.
I don't know the name of the logical fallacy where someone personally uses an LLM instead of Google Search and then infers that the search business is dying, without ever reading a financial statement.
There is probably a lag time before advertisers give up on AdSense.
A lot of corporate ad spend is already planned, and Google can adjust the costs up as much as they like. They hold the lever.
If search engine competitors were really eating Google's lunch then ad impressions would go down.
The most frustrating part of all of this is the underlying premise that the internet is, has been, or could ever be a credible cultural record is deeply stupid. Or maybe more charitably it's both historically and technically illiterate. It has always taken continuous unwavering effort on some person's part to keep any given piece of content online. And while managing a simple hosting account and updating domain registration periodically doesn't take a tremendous amount of effort 20 years is a long time to expect anyone to maintain enthusiasm. The internet has always been a frothy, ever changing blend of the odd nugget of truth drifting in a sea of unadulterated bullshit. Treating this, or worse what comes from statistically averaging it, as a source of capital T truth is totally unhinged. From whence did this mythology of online truth spring?
It's hard to get past the beginning of this article and take it at all seriously. The quote someone who missed a sunset because they asked google and supposedly got the wrong time... but they didn't think to look at the sun or lack thereof to check? Also when I put "when does the sun set today" I get a single exact figure at the top of my results, not from AI, which is honestly the best kind of result – an exact correct answer.
They were planning their day for a specific time to be somewhere. If you're looking at the sun it's to late...
That's fine, but arguing that Google should give accurate times based on where you are is ... crazy?
In the pre-LLM days it was cool that Google did weather, unit conversions, sports results, etc. But that's not even close to their value proposition. Even 5 years ago if someone told me they had planned a photograph and got it wrong because Google gave them the wrong time for sunset, I would have called them a moron for relying on Google! There are sites and apps dedicated to this. Use one of them!