AI means the end of internet search as we've known it

I was just trying to solve a configuration problem in Xcode today. I started with a web search, and found lots of proposes solutions, but nothing that worked for me. I asked ChatGPT, which regurgitated the same ideas I found on the web, plus a few more that also didn't work.

Finally I tried something undocumented on a hunch, and it kind of worked, and I shared my progress with a (human) colleague, who had the insight to take what I had done and finished a real solution.

Anecdotally, in mice, etc., etc.

No, it doesn't.

AI has a lot of edge cases and caveats. It can be trivial like not being about to count the Rs in "strawberry". Or it can be more nefarious where it simply makes stuff up (eg some fake precedents in legal opinions). AI is still incapable of explaining its reasoning and dealing with errors.

Yes I know some of these problems like the "Rs in strawberry" problem have been solved but (IMHO) you're going to be dealing with those edge cases forever.

Another issue is response time. Currently, you need to go through several steps: query -> embedding -> LLM -> answer -> back to English. Each of these steps takes time.

But here's the big one: energy. The sheer scale of Google search needs to be put in context of how much energy is consumed and how many queries can be answered per unit energy. With all the steps involved in AI queries, we need orders of magnitude of improvement to compete.

Most searches are fairly simple. They just don't need a large model to answer them. There will absolutely be a place for AI queries and they will continue to get better but displace search? We're not even remotely close to that outcome.

AI responses need a source (lol, I know) or they just can't be trusted. It's that simple. Unless you believe everything you read on the Internet!

They obviously are a step of evolution beyond search in capability.

> The way AI can put together a well-reasoned answer to just about any kind of question, drawing on real-time data from across the web, just offers a better experience.

No? This experience is only better if the result isn't hallucinated nonsense, which the article acknowledged before, but then just ignored in the overconfident claim that nonsense is the future

Ad blockers are going to need to become really advanced once chat bots start outputting sponsored answers or other injecting product recommendations into their usual output.

AI doesn't connect you to communities like search engines do. Ask AI a question and it gives you an answer, no interaction with other people. Ask a search engine and it may bring up a forum with someone asking a similar question. Then maybe you join the discussion.

AI will bring about a lonelier online world.

I wrote about this a while back (https://matrix.ai/learn/blog/content-commoditization-and-tru...) arguing that SEO will transition to LLMO eventually. We won't bother optimising for search engine rankings, but instead for answers on LLMs.

It's ironic considering how dependent LLMs are for search engines.

I doubt they're "ending", rather they will need to be re-born for RAG purposes.

I wrote about something tangential a few months ago; the need to have curation-based alternate forms of discovery on the WWW.

https://nadh.in/blog/decentralised-open-indexes/

Google Lens has already revolutionized my search. Anything that you can see but is difficult to describe, I now have a tool for searching for.

I use it a lot to track down original sources of videos and photos on Reddit, to check authenticity. I also use it to search for hardware components other manufacturers use, that I'd like to buy. Things like specific switches, knobs, faders, displays etc. (I build audio gadgets). I just highlight the part on the picture and then restrict my search to Alibaba, digikey or mouser. It's GREAT.

Lens is highly underrated.

I actually enjoy it. I still search with DDG, but Claude gives me direct answers without sifting through stackoverflow, or links upon links on how to do things on websites for their website functionality like e-bay or how to use things.

  Despite fewer clicks, copyright fights, and sometimes iffy answers, AI could unlock new ways to summon all the world’s knowledge.

I treat Copilot as glorified Bing search and nothing more. I try very hard not to pattern-match and let an output trigger my built-in human empathy and just have a question I want to answer, following the citations. I don't want to end up anthropomorphizing a lawnmower sometime down the line, even if the lawnmower can interject "please", "thank you" and "let me know if you need anything else" enough times to sound convincing.

I'm not as familiar with ollama so I don't know if the same approach would work.

I still prefer using search engines, but if I don't get an actual answer, I use LLMs with internet search. It is sometimes helpful for me, though most of the time, I get similar results as a normal search engine.

Some AI search companies [0] are even planning to add ads to their results, possibly on their free plans, which could make it harder for ad blockers to filter them out.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/12/perplexity-brings-ads-to-i...

On one hand, I hardly touch a search engine any more. On the other, it's still a fairly common occurrence that I can give someone out in the world their ChatGPT experience.

I'm super curious to see how this ("the end of internet search as we know it") plays out with non-techy users. I strongly suspect that Google is "search" to many non-techy users the way that Internet Explorer was "the internet" to that same group.

Which I suppose leads to an obvious answer: device defaults will absolutely dictate what ends up being the go-to.

Complain about Google all you want, I prefer its link-supported AI summaries over Perplexity's mystery meat hallucinations with no links to human-written content.

Really? As shitty as Google can be these days, I and many others should prefer using a heavily redacted, controlled, essentially censored AI filter that gives me its results as a summary of what it got from the content that search engines often use anyhow, but with the possibility for random hallucinations right in the summary, and simply refusing to answer certain questions on what some corporate PR drones deemed "controversial" subject matter?

No thanks. Google may suck but at least it and similar platforms can lead me to random interesting links like Reddit and forum threads where actual humans give their human input on X or Y regardless of its nature.

I just asked ChatGPT where I can find an open restaurant near me, it told me to use Google Maps.

LLMs seem to have a pretty fundamental problem: they can't learn beyond their training data.

Also, can you really say Google isn't AI? Pretty sure there's a whole expert system lurking in there...

AI more likely begins the age of preemptive personalized search . . . a search tailored to people that happens before they even ask for it. Because that's best for consumers. And advertisers.

Alta Vista didn't do anything at all like that.

Yikes, this writer has made an article that harkens back to 2022.

The only consequence of AI that I made a prediction on was that the value of editing would increase. That people will stop accepting rambling articles and publications will stop publishing spam, whether that be complete nonsense using academic words or rearranging standard but uninteresting material.

Article like this keep proving me wrong.

On that day, it pushed me a story about a new drone company from Eric Schmidt. I recognized the story. Forbes had reported it exclusively, earlier in the week, but it had been locked behind a paywall. The image on Perplexity’s story looked identical to one from Forbes. The language and structure were quite similar. It was effectively the same story, but freely available to anyone on the internet. I texted a friend who had edited the original story to ask if Forbes had a deal with the startup to republish its content. But there was no deal. He was shocked and furious and, well, perplexed. He wasn’t alone. Forbes, the New York Times, and Condé Nast have now all sent the company cease-and-desist orders. News Corp is suing for damages.

Welcome to the next version of Google's mission to index all the world's knowledge and make money by serving ads against it, I guess, in this brave new world there doesn't need to even be the tiniest chance of a single cent getting to the person who wrote up the story.

The AI response that Google puts at the top of search results now sounds confident but is sometimes just flat out wrong. I can’t trust it at all.