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- cross-posted to:
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Google says a new AI tool on its search engine will rejuvenate the internet. Others predict an apocalypse for websites. One thing is clear: the current chapter of online history is careening towards its end. Welcome to the “machine web”.
The web is built on a simple bargain – websites let search engines like Google slurp up their content, free of charge, and Google Search sends people to websites in exchange, where they buy things and look at adverts. That’s how most sites make money.
An estimated 68% of internet activity starts on search engines and about 90% of searches happen on Google. If the internet is a garden, Google is the Sun that lets the flowers grow.
This arrangement held strong for decades, but a seemingly minor change has some convinced that the system is crumbling. You’ll soon see a new AI tool on Google Search. You may find it very useful. But if critics’ predictions come true, it will also have seismic consequences for the internet. They paint a picture where quality information could grow scarcer online and large numbers of people might lose their jobs. Optimists say instead this could improve the web’s business model and expand opportunities to find great content. But, for better or worse, your digital experiences may never be the same again.
On 20 May 2025, Google’s chief executive Sundar Pichai walked on stage at the company’s annual developer conference. It’s been a year since the launch of AI Overviews, the AI-generated responses you’ve probably seen at the top of Google Search results. Now, Pichai said, Google is going further. “For those who want an end-to-end AI Search experience, we are introducing an all-new AI Mode,” he said. “It’s a total reimagining of Search.”
You might be sceptical after years of AI hype, but this, for once, is the real deal.
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Dead Internet theorists were right, just a half decade or so early.
Fuck them. Use Qwant
Isn’t that bing?
European search engine based in France that, AFAIK, was working towards making its own search index.
Qwant was what let me switch off goog. I still use gmaps unfort my experiments with open source maps were failures.
This headline is so messed up. AI is making searching easier and more convenient and reducing the amount of clicks (often to zero) you need before you get the information you want. For people searching the web for information that’s a clear improvement. If you make your money from SEO then it sucks but if the headline was “Is Google about to decimate the SEO/PPC industry?” Then we’d be reacting in an entirely different way I imagine.
AI is making searching easier and more convenient and reducing the amount of clicks (often to zero) you need before you get the inaccurate information you didn’t want.
Ftfy
When the websites that the AI search is sourcing information from cease to exist because they don’t get enough traffic, how will AI search continue to source information?
This isn’t a hard concept…
It might be harder than you think…
What kind of information are you talking about? Let’s be specific. The phone number for a garden center or how a rocket engine works? This won’t affect every search the same way. This is actually a fantastically complex question and we’ll only really see what happens when it does.
It’s really not. You seem to be insinuating they’ll take a nuanced approach and treat different types of websites differently, but there is no reason to believe that is the case, and it’s not what they’ve been doing thus far. Espousing that Google has a sustainable long term plan for the internet that we’re too stupid to understand just makes you look ridiculous tbh
You’ve misunderstood me (let’s just say “not deliberately” for a moment). What I’m saying is that regardless of what Google does in terms of long term plans or nuanced anything not all searches are equal. Neither you nor I can say at this point how this will shake out. Also, what have you eaten today? You know what you’re like when you don’t eat…
I understood you perfectly, made clear by the fact you’re doing it again. You’re trying to deflect from the obvious mechanics of this endeavor (let’s just say “not deliberately” for a moment) by saying it’s too nuanced and complicated for our tiny pea brains to understand even though it’s completely obvious when you use your brain for 5 seconds.
I give up, you win.
Happy for the seo business to die. However tgat zero click aspect tgat will do damage in the long run
There’s no point building a website for no one going to look at. The ultimate end to that path is ai eating its own tail
Totally agree with your sentiment. The web is changing. And most people hate change. That’s why we see everyone hating on AI right now.
In reality, LLMs are really useful and convenient. I use them every day. We and the internet just need to adapt to it. I don’t have a good solution for it now.
That fucking AI thing absolutely sucks for anything factual. I’m a journalist and noticed that it gleefully listed all sorts of factual errors in that AI summary. Stuff that you can see correctly on the original pages, but it somehow manages to misinterpret everything and shows incorrect information.
And knowing how lazy people are these days, most will happily accept Google’s incorrect information as fact. It’s making me very, very nervous for the future.
My wife and I both googled the same question yesterday and it gave us both completely different answers.
Its a stochastic process
one must repeat the search query >= 10,000 repetitions and then check for convergence
Sounds like it’s perfectly accomplishing Google’s goal to disinform. I suspect it will get more clever at sounding correct over time too.
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Just like grandma used to make!
I literally just tasted this at Costco…you know, with their polonium sampling Ladies… It was delicious! I only wish my backyard polonium trees grew faster. I know I’m gonna get a good polonium harvest next year for sure because this year I got a couple of polonium flowers that went to fruit but got dropped in a wind storm.
Anyway I really recommend those cupcakes an your recipe. Its great!
I replaced the polonium with 1 cup of citrus juice. It was incredibly acidic and soggy. 3/5 because I still like cupcakes.
This is exactly as reasonable as any recipe review I’ve ever read. Which is why I stopped reading recipe reviews.
duck so is probably better
I have friends working on ways for content providers to charge AI training models. But I have a feeling that’s not enough.
The future will have to be where creators have an incentive to consistently create, and consumers pay for what they like, or services to keep them informed and entertained without them having to do much.
In between will sit middlemen and aggregators to enable a smooth flow. Who that will be and what they do in this next phase is the big question.
Under the current method, Google’s search and ads groups are competing against each other. Don’t see that going well for anyone.
I just want a platform for independent creators with no ai or clipping,wild how that doesn’t exist, or just a platform for creatives, will never happen, my feed will always be ppl yapping about nonsence division over race, gender, religion, never what I care about, which is entertainment, idc all I care about is art and entertainment not why ppl hate all men, women, black, indian , etc. ppl or why someone else saying that hurt them, it never ends.
I just want to see original content made by people trying, some effort put in, time spent editing, creating, planning, etc. I don’t want to waste my time watching stuff where people don’t put any time in themselves. Clipping and Ai is so annoying, if ppl want to post their own content thats fine, but my feed on these platforms ends up being purely twitch streams, tv show clips, movie scenes, low effort ai video generation, etc.
Ideal platform would require your content actually being original, ppl posting unoriginal low effort content would actually get banned, no direct prompt to video/image ai, fine if its used ethically (masking tools, etc.) and in an actually skilled way (very rarely do see that on ocassion by 3d artists combining their stuff with ai), but the vast majority are throwing out low effort garbage to spam content hoping it hits the algorithim and blows them up so they can automate and make money)
Never happening tho.
What if capitalism is just feasting on its own entrails, and we cant stop it from killing itself without killing it, and we trying to keep it alive is killing us?
What if we tried literally anything else?
Edit: sorry this was silly. Should’ve added a /s
How would an ai tool thats designed as a one stop shop reinvigorate the web? Stupid idiot marketer
It will keep the normies out of the good websites 👍🏽
But it’s the normies we need to reach.
Hey, is that the ICQ logo?
Yes!
Nice!
And you can post a BBForums emoji?
The normies destroyed the internet. Let them have AI.
Developers destroyed the internet. Or do you think normies built the new advertising surveillance paradigm on their own? Hopefully they were well compensated.
The article is also full of bullshit and it gets basic history wrong. The agreement was never made, but to the extent it exists anyway, it was never supposed to be about a monopoly that’s destroying shit. Once upon a time, not even very long ago, there were competing search engines.
I know tech writers want to write stories that sound fancy, but if they don’t know the facts and the history then they need to find someone to proofread their work more carefully.
BBC has been ramping up the scare mongering lately. I mean, moreso than usual. Maybe I’m just noticing it more though.
I hate google enough to pay 5$/mo for Kagi - it puts a smile on my face everytime I go to search and know that I’m not supporting google
“about to destroy the web” ???
Where have you been these last 10 years? It’s been getting worse for a long time, even before AI. It’s just getting worse quicker now.
This is fundamentally worse than a lot of what we’ve seen already though, is it not?
AI overviews are parasitic to traffic itself. If AI overviews are where people begin to go for information, websites get zero ad revenue, subscription revenue, or even traffic that can change their ranking in search.
Previous changes just did things like pulling a little better context previews from sites, which only somewhat decreased traffic, and adding more ads, which just made the experience of browsing worse, but this eliminates the entire business model of every website completely if Google continues pushing down this path.
It centralizes all actual traffic solely into Google, yet Google would still be relying on the sites it’s eliminating the traffic of for its information. Those sites cut costs by replacing human writers with more and more AI models, search quality gets infinitely worse, sourcing from articles that themselves were sourced from nothing, then most websites which are no longer receiving enough traffic to be profitable collapse.
I’m not saying that it’s not a lot worse now, I do agree that it is. But things were already headed this way long before ChatGPT. SEO had already gone a long way in killing the web, I think AI will just be the death blow.
Fair enough. SEO was definitely one of the many large steps Google has taken to slowly crippling the open web, but I never truly expected it to get this bad. At least with SEO, there was still some incentive left to create quality sites, and it didn’t necessarily kill monetizability for sites.
This feels like an exponentially larger threat, and I truly hope I’m proven wrong about its potential effects, because if it does come true, we’ll be in a much worse situation than we already are now.
Too late.
This is Google’s attempt at staying relevant now that it’s search engine is far from being the best and people are getting their information from TikTok and other sources. Their AI is garbage at even finding factual data. No, this will not cause a “webpocalypse”. There’s already systems in place to send AI’s forcing their way into websites into mazes of infinite useless information to poison them.
At the end of the day, every search engine’s purpose is automating the curating of websites. People can go right back to human curated lists if the worst of the “webpocalypse” happens. People also need to start relearning that the internet existed before Google and social media, and it will exist after.
The problem with human curated lists is that in order to block bots everything will require an account to access. That’s the real tragedy here.
Google is about to become AOL. 😂 The walled garden is going to get destroyed by the open web, again.
Ads already destroyed the web. Developers wanting to make web apps instead of web pages already destroyed the web. Google is trying to prop up the corpse of its dead brand by capturing people in their chat bot.
Correction: Intrusive ads
I’m betting on Google destroying Google instead.
