Most of AI usage could be easily (with a little bit of effort) replaced by just searching for the info you need, but those days search results are so poor that asking AI gets so advantageous for the average user (that don’t care / don’t know about privacy and other costs and risks that come with it)
Do you think they did it on purpose?
Did they enshittify web search on purpose? Yes, absolutely. There are internal emails from Google proving this. I don’t have the links handy, but dig back through Ed Zitron’s newsletter and he has a very detailed breakdown (www.wheresyoured.at).
Edit - Found the article in question; https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Did they do it to boost AI? No, it was already happening. They did it to boost ad revenue. The more pages or searches it takes you to find what you’re looking for, the more ads they get to serve. And the more likely it is that you’ll just give up and take the sponsored links.
AI has further worsened the decline by aiding in the production of low grade content that fills up space, squeezing out the useful stuff you actually want. And driving more use of AI tools certainly gives major players like Microsoft and Google a new, additional incentive to destroy the effectiveness of their search engines. But AI was not the original culprit. The decline started years before ChatGPT.
This brings up a point I’ve been thinking about lately. Since they’ve shoved their shitty ai answers at the top which pushes everything else down, they must be losing gobs of money on their own ads now. All in the name of trying to “win the race”. I’d be curious to see how much this has cost them.
If I’m understanding correctly, it’s a deliberate strategy to keep users on google instead of clicking away to other websites. “Zero-click results”. I’m guessing the firsthand ad revenue exceeds any referral bonuses, I don’t know.
They aren’t juicing the AI overviews for ad revenue yet, that will come later.
The ads will be in the “AI Summaries” soon
Yeah, now what happened to metafilter? I never used it, but I understand it disappeared overnight when it just stopped showing up in anyone’s searches.
Just a heads up, the Ed Zitron article you linked is saying address not found.
Works fine for me, so I really don’t know what to tell you.
Oh that is weird… It opens up fine on my phones stock browser, but not Firefox.
Multiple times these days Firefox won’t open links for me I can open in other browsers, very strange. (Desktop)