Liberating me from "search clicks" is not a bad thing at all. I suspect many of us though don't even go to <search engine> anyway but ask an LLM directly.
It's fundamentally self-destructive though. In time, the sites which rely on search clicks for revenue will essentially cease to be paid for their work, and in many cases will therefore stop publishing the high-quality material that you're looking for.
I assumed that, after having using LLMs myself increasingly, that LLM's killing search was inevitable anyway. Further I assume that Google recognizes it as well and would rather at least remain somewhat relevant?
Google search, as others have mentioned in this thread, increasingly fails to give me high-quality material anyway. Mostly it's just pages of SEO spam. I prefer that the LLM eat that instead of me (just spit back up the relevant stuff, thankyouverymuch).
Honestly though, increasingly the internet for me is 1) a distraction from doing real work 2) YouTube (see 1) and 3) a wonderful library called archive.org (which, if I could grab a local snapshot would make leaving the internet altogether much, much easier).
By high quality material do you mean the 15 ads per page, ultra SEO optimized, content length extended posts that will give you a mediocre carbonara recipe?
Ad web has never incentivized quality and never will.
Sites rely on ad impressions for revenue. I block ads anyway so either way they aren’t getting money from me.
And if ad supported content ceases to exist, nothing of value will have been lost. I’m not morally opposed to advertising, I find ad supported content not worth reading especially on mobile.
My sense is (call me naive if you like) but if the thing was of value, it would survive (or be reborn in another form) without ads. Donation supported sites (looking at you Wikipedia) or just passion projects would continue.
Before web advertising the entire web was a "free lunch" — if by free lunch you mean individuals putting their sites up; their only compensation being some degree of joy at spreading and sharing their passion.
The early web was eccentric and kind of … "shambly", but I would not be upset if we returned to that.
The “web” has been ad infested since shortly after Netscape was introduced. Are people forgetting about the X11 pop under ads and the “punch the monkey” banner ads.
No, I pay for Apple News, Slate, Stratechery, Downstream+ (podcast), Accidental Tech podcast, etc.
I donate to electoral-vote.com via Patreon. Most of my news comes from podcasts and those ads don’t bother me as much as web ads. I said I wasn’t morally opposed to them.
I don’t use any app that is ad supported without the option to pay for an ad free experience the same with streaming services.
Thanks to AI crawlers the traffic costs will rise and all the sites who were ad free either need additional income, most likely ads, or will shut down.
ChatGPT lists clickable sources in a lot of nontrivial queries. Those sites don’t even need to pay OpenAI for the traffic (yet). If you ask „what’s happening in the world today“, you might get 20 links. How is this worse, exactly?
So either even higher costs and hope that a bug problem of LLMs get solved somehow.
Given how much data they need that will be pretty expensive, I mean really really expensive.
How many people can write good training data and how much per day?
Most of the time when I find a good answer from search it's one of a few things:
- Hobbyist site
- Forum or UGC
- Academic/gov
- Quality news which is often paywalled
Most of that stuff doesn't depend on ad clicks. The things that do depend on ad clicks are usually infuriating slop. I refuse to scroll through three pages of BS to get to the information I want and I really don't care if the slop farmers die off.
Google searches also come up with a lot of false information (well, it's where LLMs get their learnin' from — the Internet).
I'm never asking LLMs anything super critical like, "Do my taxes for me." This morning (as an example) I asked: "Is there talk of banning DJI drones in the U.S.?"
Later: "Difference between the RSE20 and RSS20 models of Yamaha electric guitars?"
And "Is there an Eco-Tank ink-jet suitable for Dye-Sub inks that can print Tabloid?"
1) None of the above are "critical".
2) All would have been a slight pain using Google and generated a lot of ... noise. LLMs eat the noise, do a decent job of giving me the salient points that answer my question.
3) All are easily verifiable if, for example, I decided to make a purchase based on what the LLM told me.
Or put another way, my disappointment in LLMs pales in comparison to my disappointment in search.
Or maybe I am just sick of search engines and want to "stick it to them".
In my view it's a pretty straightforward calculation. Nothing is free, no knowledge is instant. Start off knowing your time investment to learn anything is greater than zero and go from there..
If you do a Google (or other engine) search, you have to invest time pawing through the utter pile of shit that Google ads created on the web. Info that's hidden under reams of unnecessary text, potentially out of date, potentially not true; you'll need to evaluate a list of links and, probably, open multiple of them.
If you do an AI "search", you ask one question and get one answer. But the answer might a hallucination or based on incorrect info.
However, a lot of the time, you might be searching for something you already have an idea of, whether it's how to structure a script or what temperature pork is safe at; you can use your existing knowledge to assess the AI's answer. In that case the AI search is fast.
The rest of the time, you can at least tell the AI to include links to its references, and check those. Or its answer may help you construct a better Google search.
Ultimately search is a trash heap of Google's making, and I have absolute confidence in them also turning AI into a trash heap, but for now it is indeed faster for many purposes.
