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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve been using Kagi for about a year now and I genuinely get worried that there are no alternatives if it goes out of business. The results are extremely good, especially in the last 4 months. I like their opt in AI summary as well, just add a question mark at the end.
I pay for a lot of things that are free from google/big tech, I’m happy to watch the advertisement driven web implode on itself so we can go back to the idea of a consumer paying a company for a quality product, monetizing peoples attention has been a huge detriment to society.
I had tried Kagi a few years ago but it didn't stick. Tried it again now and it feels like a breath of fresh air, which is probably less of a statement about Kagi's advancements and more a statement of what Google has become.
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.
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.
The mayor of Panama city, Mayer Mizrachi, almost exclusively only posts city updates as Instagram stories on his personal account. Many other politicians worldwide do the same. Many neighbor groups worldwide do the same. Many Town Halls and businesses worldwide do the same and that's because stories are actually seen by your followers unlike Instagram posts most of the time. People like to see a curated feed of the people they follow and stories are exactly that.
I think that's the kind of cultural record the author refers to. The average person has no way to post a screenshot let alone have it indexed by a search engine.
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?
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
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.
After publishers successfully sued the Internet Archive over its digital lending program, calling it unauthorized copying
No. The court specifically determined that the Internet Archive was guilty of unauthorized copying. It was not simply an unfounded or unproven allegation. The Authors Guild, the National Writers Union, the European Writers Council, and the Society of Authors in the UK all came out against the Internet Archive, and supported the suit.
Each new restriction limits the archive’s ability to act as a comprehensive backstop.
This self-inflicted damage to the wayback machine is the real tragedy of this entire affair. When IA was asked to stop CDL - many times - founder Brewster Kahle continued. The National Writers Union tried to open a dialogue as early as 2010 but was ignored:
The Internet Archive says it would rather talk with writers individually than talk to the NWU or other writers’ organizations. But requests by NWU members to talk to or meet with the Internet Archive have been ignored or rebuffed.
When the requests to abandon CDL turned into demands, Kahle dug in his heels. When the inevitable lawsuits followed, and IA lost, he insisted that he was still in the right and plowed ahead with appeals. And here we are today.
The article touches on something that I've been thinking about with regards to Google's AI strategy; the automatically-generated AI search summaries are not great. They very frequently confidently misinterpret what the user is searching for and generate half a page of useless information that pushes actual results down the page, and they are occasionally hilariously incorrect, with hallucinated facts.
This is probably a difficult-to-solve problem; given that they generate billions of these a day, not even Google can afford to devote enough compute to each query to reliably generate quality results. You can see this by selecting the "AI mode" from the search interface after getting the mediocre summary - the results are much better and generally perfectly usable. Though even that is probably a special minimal-compute version of the lowest tier of Gemini, it's still maybe an order of magnitude more capable than whatever generates the search summaries.
The bigger problem is that these search summaries are the default and by far the most common interaction that the general public has with "AI", and because this experience sucks, they just assume that all LLMs are similarly stupid and mostly useless. In non-technical spaces I frequently see the argument that "AI" is not useful for anything, all it generates is garbage hallucinations, and almost invariably they cite some actual terrible experience with the Google AI search summary. I would argue that the strategy of adding LLM summaries to every search is the worst of both worlds - it makes classic search worse while poisoning users against the idea of actual LLM-assisted search.
Gemini has been a hilarious companion to my while I fixed the balance shaft chain guides in my old Mitsubishi triton (mighty max for US readers).
First it told me I could just remove said balance shaft chain as an emergency repair. Sorry Gemini, it also drives the oil pump.
Then it told me I could remove the water contaminated oil caused by removing the timing case by filling the crankcase with hot, soapy water and running the engine. Lord no.
Then it gave the wrong instructions for putting new gears on the balance shafts which meant the chain guides didn’t align with the chain. I’ll do it my way thanks Gemini.
The rest of the mistakes are too trivial to recount and sure it’s a pretty obscure subject but if I trusted it with a topic I’m not familiar with there is a huge potential for damage if you blindly follow it’s overconfidence. I miss normal searching.
we built extremely powerful plausible bullshit machines targeted toward and trained on an electorate and population that has historically bad education and reading levels, built on top of an already fraught and fragile web which was also built off predatory basically unregulated behavior with a shaky relationship with “truth” and are surprised people have no idea what’s going on?
This was the whole point of it all and why the people in power have bet the farm on it.
> While the web has always been organized around intermediaries that shape what survives online and who sees it,
This statement, from the sixth paragraph of the article, is something that I would have liked to see addressed more in the article. The article implies that this is something that must always be true, or cannot be changed, and simply focuses on how we could have better/better funded/better protected intermediaries (AKA gatekeepers), and doesn't discuss the possibility of an internet (or part of the internet) without gatekeepers (and doesn't ask if it has ever existed/does exist/should exist)
Funny, I was just thinking this morning that Google searches are absolutely horrible these days. It's like it has amnesia, a lot of recent history seems to be just gone. Especially on non US specific sites too.
I noticed that, on Google after a while, news are moved to like the 5th page of results or even further back. They are also gone from the news tab. Like news are de ranked after 1 or 2 weeks so like you have to know the name of the article or the month it was published to find it again
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 6.9 ms ] threadAnd 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.
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.
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.
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 pay for a lot of things that are free from google/big tech, I’m happy to watch the advertisement driven web implode on itself so we can go back to the idea of a consumer paying a company for a quality product, monetizing peoples attention has been a huge detriment to society.
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’ll add this article to the list of incorrect predictions lol
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.
I think that's the kind of cultural record the author refers to. The average person has no way to post a screenshot let alone have it indexed by a search engine.
This clickbaity headline format cannot die fast enough
No. The court specifically determined that the Internet Archive was guilty of unauthorized copying. It was not simply an unfounded or unproven allegation. The Authors Guild, the National Writers Union, the European Writers Council, and the Society of Authors in the UK all came out against the Internet Archive, and supported the suit.
Each new restriction limits the archive’s ability to act as a comprehensive backstop.
This self-inflicted damage to the wayback machine is the real tragedy of this entire affair. When IA was asked to stop CDL - many times - founder Brewster Kahle continued. The National Writers Union tried to open a dialogue as early as 2010 but was ignored:
The Internet Archive says it would rather talk with writers individually than talk to the NWU or other writers’ organizations. But requests by NWU members to talk to or meet with the Internet Archive have been ignored or rebuffed.
https://nwu.org/nwu-denounces-cdl/
When the requests to abandon CDL turned into demands, Kahle dug in his heels. When the inevitable lawsuits followed, and IA lost, he insisted that he was still in the right and plowed ahead with appeals. And here we are today.
This is probably a difficult-to-solve problem; given that they generate billions of these a day, not even Google can afford to devote enough compute to each query to reliably generate quality results. You can see this by selecting the "AI mode" from the search interface after getting the mediocre summary - the results are much better and generally perfectly usable. Though even that is probably a special minimal-compute version of the lowest tier of Gemini, it's still maybe an order of magnitude more capable than whatever generates the search summaries.
The bigger problem is that these search summaries are the default and by far the most common interaction that the general public has with "AI", and because this experience sucks, they just assume that all LLMs are similarly stupid and mostly useless. In non-technical spaces I frequently see the argument that "AI" is not useful for anything, all it generates is garbage hallucinations, and almost invariably they cite some actual terrible experience with the Google AI search summary. I would argue that the strategy of adding LLM summaries to every search is the worst of both worlds - it makes classic search worse while poisoning users against the idea of actual LLM-assisted search.
First it told me I could just remove said balance shaft chain as an emergency repair. Sorry Gemini, it also drives the oil pump.
Then it told me I could remove the water contaminated oil caused by removing the timing case by filling the crankcase with hot, soapy water and running the engine. Lord no.
Then it gave the wrong instructions for putting new gears on the balance shafts which meant the chain guides didn’t align with the chain. I’ll do it my way thanks Gemini.
The rest of the mistakes are too trivial to recount and sure it’s a pretty obscure subject but if I trusted it with a topic I’m not familiar with there is a huge potential for damage if you blindly follow it’s overconfidence. I miss normal searching.
This was the whole point of it all and why the people in power have bet the farm on it.
This statement, from the sixth paragraph of the article, is something that I would have liked to see addressed more in the article. The article implies that this is something that must always be true, or cannot be changed, and simply focuses on how we could have better/better funded/better protected intermediaries (AKA gatekeepers), and doesn't discuss the possibility of an internet (or part of the internet) without gatekeepers (and doesn't ask if it has ever existed/does exist/should exist)