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.

“Not all of Google's enshittification can be attributed to deliberate sabotage. Much of it is the result of neglect.” --Cory Doctorow on why Google is an absentee landlord

Google lost the SEO war before AI. SEO spammers now have a tool that creates SEO optimized content in seconds, instead of needing to manually create it.

Yes. This is an open secret.

The Web became harder to search. Or more accurately, it became harder to return the desired results.

For anything not date-sensitive, add "before:2023" to your query. I'm betting your results will be a lot better.

I like to think so.

The entire premise developing agi isn't about a "new scientific breakthrough" as much as it is a way to surveil and profile people.

with web search, you have the option to opt out of cookies, which basically doesn't allow trackers to track you on websites. were not even taking into account adblockers such as UblockOrigin or privacy badger, which has been an ongoing war with big tech.

Anyways, with LLM's, they have control of your prompts, they have access to your account and they can target advertisements or sell your data to the highest bidder.

So, when google announced that search will be depreciated and replaced with their Gemini AGI, that to me was the first real indicator that their intentionally making search shitty to boost usage of their AI.

Its was already bad before ai

Web search was better when there was less metadata (and less sites) to wade through when indexing. Now, there’s sites packed with active media and that active media has data that users sought.

Think of TikTok… it’s only searchable if the hosting site offers APIs. And those APIs are non-standard, it seems.

With ChatGPT websites became more and more AI articles. Even before that everything was just marketing. People would just add redfit infront of their search to get genuine answers.

It's the other way around. First thing that enshittified search was how all people moved to walled off platforms, so whatever they wrote was missing from the search engines. Before that, they'd used to write a public blog post on whether that wifi card was working in their Thinkpad Txy.

Nowadays we're in a war between AI scrapers and the rest of the world. Everyone has Cloudflare, Anubis and 5 other means of protection in front of their website. Of course that generally also locks out the Google and Bing crawler. So search becomes useless. But it's not like it's deliberately done in order to steer people towards AI... It's that AI scrapers have unleashed some war that made people lock out crawlers, which in turn ruined web search.

And a few companies like Reddit are trying to make a profit out of this. They'll lock down and also sell access to crawlers. Not sure if they grant access to Google or if Google has some deal with them.

The answer is yes... AI is a limp dick that needs pumped up. It will always be a limp dick. This is definitly the end of all life on this planet. Now remember to recycle your farts. ♻️

I feel like a lame corporate shill here saying this, but I love using Kagi and not having any ads at all in my search.

LLMs make it infinitely easier to create tons of webpages that look legit, to try to get ad clicks. Search engines aggressively filter out those webpages in hopes of retaining some resemblance of useful search results. All the actual legit blog posts get caught in the crossfire, so you basically can't find them anymore.

That's the explanation that makes most sense to me...

Tenbluelinks.org doesn't make the results better, but it does remove the default AI BS.

Yes.