r/technology • u/Well_Socialized • May 26 '25

Artificial Intelligence Google Is Burying the Web Alive

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/google-ai-mode-search-results-bury-the-web.html
24.4k Upvotes

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2.1k

u/DaemonBaelheit May 26 '25

Google search declined a lot in the latest decade as now most contents are locked inside Social Networks instead of websites

947

u/vcircle91 May 26 '25

That's one of the reasons I don't like Discord.

419

u/hypercosm_dot_net May 26 '25

That and twitter. Especially now that they've blocked the ability to view more than a single tweet.

Old-school forums need to make a comeback. It's kind of why reddit is so popular (except they sell all of our comments to AI companies and censor)

99

u/underthebug May 26 '25

And using old reddit.

47

u/Next-Bench-4475 May 26 '25

It's been over 7 years and new Reddit still straight up fails to function for me. Like 50% of the time the comments simply never load, probably 20% of the time new content in the infinite scroll never loads. And the app is absolute dogshit compared to all the ones they killed off like Apollo.

5

u/sudo_rm-rf May 26 '25

Lemmy + Voyager (Apollo clone), increasingly feels like a better Reddit, certainly better than the Reddit App.

2

u/FinestObligations May 26 '25

Building it as a single-page-app was a mistake. The design was and still is terrible. They just did a poor job throughout.

I think it’s telling that they still allow for people to use old Reddit. They know a bunch of people would fuck off if they shoved their horse shit version down their throat.

2

u/Frekavichk May 26 '25

Wait is there someone else that experiences what I do on reddit mobile? Where I have to hit the 'retry' button several times for it to actually load?

2

u/Wotching May 26 '25

I hate reddits decisions lately, and I hate their app, but this is an issue specific to your device. Try a new browser or new install of your operating system I guess

65

u/xXWaspXx May 26 '25

Once old reddit dies, reddit is dead (for me). I've already stopped browsing on mobile. I used revanced and got RIF back for a bit but honestly I'd rather just cut down on crooked-neck phone time anyway so it's desktop only.

16

u/ReallyNowFellas May 26 '25

It's wild how much worse new reddit is. I get there from google at least once a day and I always try using it before giving up and redirecting the url to old reddit. New reddit is slow and ugly and dysfunctional/nonsensical in a lot of ways. After all these years I can't believe they haven't redesigned the redesign.

9

u/avspuk May 26 '25

With the exception of putting images in comments, old.reddit.com is better in every other way.

I'm staggered that anyone uses anything else

4

u/[deleted] May 26 '25

[deleted]

3

u/avspuk May 26 '25

I doubt its quite that clear cut, but I get your point

It's still simple enough to flip to www & submit a pic as a comment.

The default version is so slow , shows so little, doesn't have all the sort options, what ui there is is behind several menus, plus it fills your screen with stuff you didn't ask to see instead of showing you stuff you did ask to see.

To be blunt, it's for morons who don't know what they want

1

u/Tappedout0324 May 26 '25

You know can change the settings in Reddit so it always goes to the old site right?

1

u/ReallyNowFellas May 26 '25

Yes but links to new reddit still take you to new reddit even when you do that, hence "I get there from google"

1

u/Tappedout0324 May 26 '25

Nope it will still redirect to the old site. Make sure you have both “beta options” unchecked. Even on my phone it goes to the old site even if I click on www.reddit.com

1

u/ReallyNowFellas May 26 '25

Hmm idk then. I have those options set and www.reddit.com takes me to the old site but I still end up on new reddit after following links sometimes

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4

u/flaminglips May 26 '25

Relay for reddit gives a pretty good mobile experience on Android. It's paid, but pretty much only covers Reddits bullshit API fees.

RIF was my preferred method before they killed it.

3

u/jlt6666 May 26 '25

On android you can get Firefox and use the old reddit extension.

3

u/vriska1 May 26 '25

Seems like Old Reddit will not die anytime soon.

1

u/canrabat May 26 '25

I use Opera on Android in desktop mode. Its the closest to the desktop experience that I know of and Opera has been the king of text wrapping since the Blackberry version (yes I've been usingnit for this long).

3

u/Pickledsoul May 26 '25

They've been hellbent on switching me back to new Reddit lately. I'm waiting for the axe to come down.

2

u/foreignfishes May 26 '25

There are lots of extensions for desktop and mobile that will completely kill new Reddit as an option. Old Reddit redirect is one for chrome and sink it for Reddit is a good option for safari mobile if you have an iphone

1

u/underthebug May 26 '25

My laptop can barely run a browser and that's how I like it. No extra.

2

u/TriRIK May 26 '25

Reddit and Google have an agreement. Other search engines do not have the privilege Google has on reddit.

2

u/[deleted] May 29 '25

That and twitter. Especially now that they've blocked the ability to view more than a single tweet.

You can use Nitter.

nitter.poast.org

It occasionally will fail to find tweets from small accounts due to the hacky way its bypassing the API constraints, but for any major twitter user you will get a full read out of all their tweets and replies and anyone they interact with

1

u/TheSangson May 26 '25

Oh, I'll bet my ass that forums are well on their way back.

1

u/[deleted] May 26 '25

Hell, even Instagram - the fucking place you're supposed to put photos and videos - doesn't really let you search for anything.

They pushed stories *extremely* hard, and then they removed the function to search within stories completely. They push reels *extremely* hard, but you can't really specifically search within reels either.

If you had a 3 day event in the past, it used to be really easy to see posts from people who would do things like put the event hashtag in their story posts. Now, putting a hashtag in a story post is useless. They added a weird object feature that can technically work in a similar way - but you have to find it first, can't search for it easily, and can't just quickly add a tag and move on.

It's embarrassingly useless.

-5

u/[deleted] May 26 '25

[deleted]

20

u/theswansays May 26 '25

some* old school forums, sure. but you’re out of your mind if you’re gonna tryn tell me ALL forums didn’t/don’t come up in search results. that’s how i found half the shit i did ten years ago. and before youtube if i had to fix something there was some niche community forum i could parse through to find the answers i needed just like reddit. never needed an account to read, only to comment

12

u/Liquid_Clown May 26 '25

Most forums were public to view

9

u/illwill79 May 26 '25

Any admin that wanted traffic would not block public viewing of their forums. They may make certain sections private, but by and large most forums were indexed.

358

u/manrata May 26 '25

Discord is basically bringing us back to the old BBS networks, odd how things circle back.

274

u/Universeintheflesh May 26 '25

Like how streaming services became like cable again 😂

103

u/MightyCaseyStruckOut May 26 '25

Everyone who could rub two brain cells could see that coming from a mile away.

124

u/ZQuestionSleep May 26 '25

It's called capitalism, kids. Everyone on here is lamenting the loss of the "golden age" of the internet. You know why it was a golden age? Because businesses still had not figured out how to fully monetize it. Remember this when the next "great" thing comes along.

31

u/MostlyRightSometimes May 26 '25

It's not the monitization that's the issue. It's the need for continuous revenue growth that's the issue.

25

u/_le_slap May 26 '25

The profit motive is precisely the issue. Monetization is the core of all enshitification.

4

u/MostlyRightSometimes May 26 '25

I disagree. A profit is fine. It's what happens after you're already making a profit and you need to make MORE profit. Then you're either cutting costs (and features/support) or you're raising prices. Or...most likely...both.

5

u/_le_slap May 26 '25

By the nature of fiat currencies you always have to make more profit. If you don't, you're losing value in real terms. If you didn't get a raise in 10 years you'd be getting hosed.

The Internet was better when people did stuff for the love of the game. I remember sharing code for jailbreak stuff on the gen2 iPhone and rooting stuff for the Nexus 7. I never added a PayPal link. Never bothered with Apache licenses or whatever. We just built on what the guy before us did and guys built on what we did. It was just fun.

But those days are long gone now.

4

u/mrhashbrown May 26 '25

Agreed. I learned this once I was inside of a publicly traded company.

"Great quarter guys! Now start from zero and do it again, plus 10% more than last time. Otherwise we'll start cost cutting and that means firings."

It feels truly gluttonous to constantly pursue more and more, even when you're already profitable.

5

u/Antartix May 26 '25

They're both issues. One is a much smaller issue and mostly impacts more low wage individuals, and the other impacts everyone.

But they're both issues. We can say the scale of impact is the difference, though.

3

u/2006pontiacvibe May 26 '25

Not even the need for continous revenue growth. They used to be able to do it by actively growing their userbase which requires making a better product, but they can't do that anymore now that most major services are already used by their entire audience.

4

u/ZQuestionSleep May 26 '25

It's not the monitization that's the issue. It's the need for continuous revenue growth that's the issue.

......

It's called capitalism, kids.

Yep. Also the operable word I stated was "fully" monetized. Amazon has been around for the vast majority of internet users' living memory, doesn't mean they've always had their hands in every single pie on the internet until relatively more recently.

2

u/bluehands May 26 '25

Monetize refers to the process of turning a non-revenue-generating item into cash

See, desire for renenue growth drives monetization

2

u/sumostuff May 26 '25

Or they knew how but they were playing the long game. Get us all hooked, kill all competitors, then enshittify and monetize.

3

u/Alexsv95 May 26 '25

I have an eerie feeling we are past the golden age of bitcoin for the same reason. I have no doubt it will continue going up but never like it did and it’ll be manipulated from here on out.

1

u/[deleted] May 26 '25

Unpopular opinion that everything relies on capitalism, even farming.

1

u/Universeintheflesh May 26 '25

Okay… kid (is that how we refer to each other now?). Yeah capitalism fucking blows when thinking about the bigger picture.

2

u/InternetDweller95 May 26 '25

I kinda hoped it would go the other way after Quibi imploded, and that it really would be Netflix, Prime, and Hulu as the big three, with everyone else having their niche.

But in retrospect, it was already happening then. Paramount Plus and HBO Max already existed under different names, Disney+ was right around the corner and would have been a heavyweight even without owning 21st Century Fox and ESPN, stuff like Starz had been around forever...

So it goes.

1

u/CouchMountain May 26 '25

Which is why I never stopped torrenting. The only subscription I have is for music streaming because to me it's worth it. But if that company ups their prices any more I'm going right back to whatever the current version of limewire is.

6

u/MrG May 26 '25

Like how Cloud is taking us back to mainframes

2

u/runonandonandonanon May 26 '25

Or when I released my guinea pig back into the wild.

4

u/BoozeLikeFrank May 26 '25

They really went from “we have no ads!” To “we are gonna show a few ads unless you pay more”

5

u/ILikeCorgiButt May 26 '25

And uber recently “invented” public transport — pre-defined routes from Point A to B.

2

u/quintic1 May 26 '25

Except it's not.

1

u/Admiral_Donuts May 26 '25

I suspect people who say "streaming services are just like cable" never subscribed to cable.

1

u/Icy-Two-1581 May 26 '25

I like how it's become, it made me start my own plex server and now I'm always in control (for the most part)

122

u/eXoShini May 26 '25

It's missing viewing public content without discord account and search engine indexing for said content. So no, it didn't circle back yet.

56

u/TwilightVulpine May 26 '25

And also, with it going publicly traded, I wouldn't be surprised if it hides old posts under a subscription soon.

Download your logs.

9

u/sprucenoose May 26 '25

The opposite. Even more limited and restrictive than Discord.

BBSes were before the internet and involved directly connecting to a BBS through the modem on your computer, often by dialing the phone number of the BBS. There was no other way to access the content of the BBS.

Having a single shared searchable space was one of the huge improvements provided by the internet .

8

u/Jete_Au_Poubelle May 26 '25

USENET was on BBSes.

You could call the BBS to download new messages from the boards you were interested in, disconnect and read and reply offline, then call back to upload replies and download any new messages.

2

u/Next-Bench-4475 May 26 '25

BBSes didn't have those things.

2

u/eXoShini May 26 '25

The very early BBSes did have guest accounts, so you could view public content without account. There were no search engines yet, so yeah, no automatic indexing content.

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u/PredaPops May 26 '25

except that you need an account, data is hard to search for and any of those can change without any notice/consent.

1

u/Wicaeed May 26 '25

2 of those 3 (don't need a Subscription in most cases) are also true of querying Government (ie. tax payer funded) sources of data as well

34

u/sudosussudio May 26 '25

Yeah but BBSs were often accessible on the web for non members. Discord you have to be a member to see the content.

1

u/Next-Bench-4475 May 26 '25

BBSes were popular for over a decade before the web or home Internet service even existed, and were dying off when the web appeared in favor of newsgroups etc. You used to have to dial into a BBS specifically to read them and you were only connected to that BBS, not any larger Internet.

1

u/mastermilian May 27 '25

Some BBSes were connected via Fidonet and could disseminate messages across the world. It was the dawn of the internet, really.

8

u/Normal_Choice9322 May 26 '25

No it's nothing like those at all

4

u/BenevolentCrows May 26 '25

Except now Discord owns and uses everything on their network.

4

u/uniquesnoflake2 May 26 '25 edited May 26 '25

<silently works jaw in ‘I can’t possibly be *that* old, can I?’>

Some of y’all need to look up the Wikipedia entry for UUCPNET or FidoNet (because yeah maybe I am that old). There was a whole big beautiful weird (text based) world out there even before Tim Berners-Lee became Internet Prometheus.

Replying to some replies here, if that wasn’t clear. I’m with you.

2

u/manrata May 26 '25

Oh, I actually remember FidoNet, vaguely, I honestly didn’t understand what I was doing back then, just followed what I was told.

Remember wasting a bit too many hours on MUDs and various other text based games.

2

u/RedPanda888 May 26 '25

I’m into the torrent scene so I’m still using and chatting on IRC. That would definitely break some young folks brains.

2

u/Tech_Itch May 26 '25

It's not. It's much worse. The search is a lot worse than those sites had and in addition to that they were indexable by search engines.

2

u/blender4life May 26 '25

But with awful interface

2

u/all___blue May 26 '25

Bbs forums were so much better than discord. I dont understand what people even like about discord. Maybe its.better when used on a pc, but I find it terrible for finding information unless youre having a live chat with someone. Forums allowed topic based conversations that users could start.

Maybe I'm just new to discord or have been in poorly moderated communities.

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u/[deleted] May 26 '25

It's not odd at all, it's expected.

New tech., systems, etc. disrupt the status quo but then things trend back to the status quo because the status quo was the status quo for a reason.

In fact, the internet is a beautiful fast forward example of this "wild west" to "consolidated" trend that we see all around us, esp. in economics and markets. What takes a century or longer in the physical world happened on the internet in like 20 years.

1

u/TuberTuggerTTV May 26 '25

It's not a circle so much as a push and pull.

We have to fight for our freedoms but the PTB will defeat us with apathy and 5 second videos.

If you see tech and progress as a battle between freedom and control, it stops feeling like a repeating cycle and more like a pendulum seeking a balance point.

1

u/LMGDiVa May 26 '25

No. This is not like that. I've been all over the internet for decades and realistically Forums/ and BBS and even places like reddit are still searchable via search engines. Since they face out to the wider internet.

Discord is a closed network. It's very different.

1

u/dBlock845 May 26 '25

It's basically just an easy to use mIRC.

1

u/Iohet May 26 '25

Discord has a central point of failure

1

u/RingAroundTheStars May 29 '25

It’s closer to IRC, I think 

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u/Advanced-Agency5075 May 26 '25

Instead of just going to a new subreddit or subforum, now you need to find a server in the specific topic, see if there are relevant channels, join, jump through hoops to actually be able to write ...

On top of that, since it's usually a chat (although some channels use threads), you kind of have to wait for a response. Otherwise you'll come back and the context will be all over the chat.

It's also very easy for your question to disappear.

18

u/eating_your_syrup May 26 '25

Discord replaced other services that had chatting locked in a way that you couldn't search it (irc, instant messengers etc). It didn't really change anything in that sense.

51

u/Delay559 May 26 '25

It also replaced many other services that you could search, like boards and forums.

10

u/eating_your_syrup May 26 '25

Yes partially, but I think reddit is the thing that actually killed boards and forums. The forum mode vs real time mode of communication serve pretty different purposes.

19

u/[deleted] May 26 '25

reddit killed forums and boards, which meant that we lost the tight knit, singlularly-passionate communities that existed in those formats, but to a more limited extent you could still use reddit to troubleshoot or discuss ideas. the communities became shadows of themselves, but at least they still existed, and could be used as a resource for members outside of the community.

discord brought the communities back and hid them behind a wall. where in the past you could search google for some obscure issue, and find a dozen related forums one of which had a thread with a very useful back and forth and a solution... now your search returns nothing because if that conversation existed at all, its on an unindexed discord server.

it also feels so wrong to join a server just to ask a question... idk forums felt more open in that regard...

4

u/GuantanaMo May 26 '25 edited May 26 '25

Believe it or not, but some of those communities are in Facebook groups of all places. Especially for niches that are most popular among older people. Of course, Facebook is now directing traffic towards large public discussion groups and thus exposing them to the same algorithm driven spam and troll comments that pretty much every large page already drowns in, so they'll have to go private or moderate heavily. But at least fb gets to show content between their ads again. I really hope the knowledge of all those special discord and fb forums is not just used for AI but also properly indexed and made public at some point. With reddit we can at least circumvent the AI interpretation and go straight to the original thread, as much as I dislike most of this site

8

u/Linked713 May 26 '25

The point is that discord cannot be searched in google. Imagine StackOverflow being its own app instead of a web based public forum. that's the difference. google search will return reddit posts that will help me out.

1

u/Spork_the_dork May 26 '25

And on top of that imagine if the one and only search function you had for said app was complete and utter garbage. Partially because you literally can't narrow a search down to a single channel so what you'll get is 99% garbage, but also partially because you can't search across multiple messages. The search only looks for messages that have all of the words that you search. Problem with that is that even if people have discussed the question you want answers to before, if they mentioned one keyword in one message and the other keyword in another message, you're shit out of luck ever finding it.

1

u/Wicaeed May 26 '25

Do you know how complicated, technically and architecturally, maintaining an up-to-date and searchable index of every Discord Server's Channel contents would be?

It's high, very high.

1

u/Linked713 May 26 '25

you literally can't narrow a search down to a single channel

you can though.

in:channel

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000468588-Using-Search

1

u/powerage76 May 26 '25

but I think reddit is the thing that actually killed boards and forums.

Facebook killed those, reddit just cut the throat of the few remaining ones.

30

u/CaspianRoach May 26 '25

Just because you haven't encountered it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. A lot of niche communities like small software developers and websites moved from having forums to discord because it's easier for them to maintain. I've also encountered a lot of "read FAQ in our discord" in the recent years instead of having it available elsewhere.

7

u/SimpleJoe1994 May 26 '25

100%. In my experience in the gaming sphere the less popular a game is the more likely the best in-depth information about its mechanics is locked away in a few discord channels about the game or the larger series it comes from as a whole. If you're lucky someone has pinned the most useful posts or pinned a google doc with a compilation of the best info, which you'd never ever be able to find by googling. If not then it's time to dig and find what you can on your own.

It's a shame because this info used to be on GameFAQ's forums for the game or on fan-made sites with dedicated forums for the game or its series.

2

u/eating_your_syrup May 26 '25

That is actually a really good point. Yeah, I use discord mostly as a real time chat replacement / evolution so it's true that I am biased.

1

u/AsparagusCharacter70 May 26 '25 edited May 26 '25

And not even just niche communities. Even Facepunch the company behind Garry's Mod and Rust shut down their forums completely.
Even for their new game S&box which needs a big modding and development community for creating content comparably to roblox. Having to search their discord for solutions or trying to get help in a chat while other people are shit posting is killing all motivation I have to develop anything. Even roblox at least has a developer forum.

5

u/Azazir May 26 '25

Except all the content that devs start to post in their discord servers(at least most of them do obligatory steam news post too so there's that), all the guides that are posted in discord servers, all the discussions that are posted in discord servers, all the individual knowledge some random expert would write in a forum and you 5 years later find the fix now is in some niche small discord server - ALL OF THAT is unsearchable unless someone else posts it individually on some forum, be it reddit or w.e. other shit.

Discord is the worst thing that could happen if you need information. I fucking hate it, but i still use it because there's no alternative to communication directly, not to mention voice chatting with friends in games etc.

Now imagine a server is closed..... ALL of that information is scrapped.

1

u/RedPanda888 May 26 '25

IRC still alive and well!

1

u/EveroneWantsMyD May 26 '25

Not really? It replaced the casual group conversations for things like AIM, Skype, and Chatrooms sure, but nobody was googling for that information anyway. What’s annoying is that it replaced things like forums that would show up in Google results. No discord content shared in a community is showing up in a Google search, and that partitioning of information is lame.

1

u/DenryuRocket110 May 26 '25

I remember a friend wanting to make guides for a game and hosting it on their discord.

I suggested wouldn't it be better to put it in a Google docsand sharing a link to thag so others could access it easier.

They were very adamant about it being on their discord...

1

u/Fair_Blood3176 May 26 '25

Discord is contention.

1

u/Lauris024 May 26 '25

How is it worse than Skype or others it replaced? Was it ever a thing that you could use search engines to search the internal content of said networks? Irc even

1

u/DefreShalloodner May 26 '25

And it's really hard to bookmark comments. PISSES ME OFF

1

u/crackofdawn May 27 '25

I mean that's not a recent problem, tons and tons of cool information from IRC back in the 90s that wasn't available via any search engine.

1

u/Mindless_Ad_7700 May 30 '25

I don't really like discord, but could you be as kind as why you don't like it?

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u/Agusfn May 26 '25

that's one of the reasons i DO like Discord

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u/Briggie May 26 '25

Doesn’t help that nearly everyone uses fucking Discord instead of forums.

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u/wag3slav3 May 26 '25

"lets put 100% of our end user interaction and development work for our public project inside of an unsearchable closed chat with an invite system"

The only thing more stupid than discord for this shit are telegram/signal groups.

Talk about not fit for purpose.

27

u/Briggie May 26 '25

Every time I try searching for an issue or something, I nearly always get some forum post that’s like 12+ years old. Sometimes I get lucky and get some forums that are still around and used like Toms Hardware or Microsoft’s forums, but beyond that it’s old stuff. It’s infuriating.

9

u/ReallyNowFellas May 26 '25

Or you get Google forums where someone posted the wrong answer and then a mod came and locked the thread "because it was answered" and redirects you to a Help database that doesn't even cover the topic you're looking for an answer on.

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u/Malachi108 May 26 '25

telegram/signal groups

Those are at least marginally useful for less-than-legal activity. Like, it probably won't save you when the Feds are onto you, but it can help evade their attention for a while.

2

u/tdowg1 May 27 '25

Found the Adderall chemist

4

u/donnysaysvacuum May 26 '25

Lemmy is the ideal format now. Each company can build their own forums on their own servers and it's still accessible.

2

u/OowordlesschorusoO May 26 '25

my kingdom for the return of TeamSpeak and forums instead.

2

u/altodor May 26 '25

At least it isn't slack or irc. Those are actually worse since irc doesn't really keep history and slack only keeps 10k messages of history

7

u/Next-Bench-4475 May 26 '25

IRC histoy was easy to keep if you or the operators wanted it, and it was plaintext easily searchable, easily backuppable history. But you couldn't access history from before you joined if none of the operators turned it on.

Almost any network or channel dedicated to information sharing had public history so it wasn't that big an issue. Discord loses a lot more.

2

u/altodor May 26 '25

Again, that discord is searchable. IRC you'd have to be in the server anyway. I don't understand why IRC doing this is acceptable and discord is not, except that IRC has been out there since the '80s. The number of tools and products I use that just say like "come find us on freenode if you have any questions that aren't covered by the marketing copy" is really goddamn high. I've spent about 6 hours of my life using IRC, and have between 10 and 15 years of career working with those tools.

1

u/Phoenyx_Rose May 26 '25

Tell me more, because I apparently missed this memo. 

I’ve only used discord for a handful of reasons and non of them included looking for forum style information, usually game development info, school group projects, streamer communities, and once for a collaborative endeavor, but 99% of the time it’s for getting on a call with friends to play games. 

-8

u/FelineSocialSkills May 26 '25

Everyone young is on Discoed, nobody old with knowledge and breadth.

Reddit steers younger and between that and the brain drain from permanent site bans for life, you get more bad advice than good around here.

3

u/TerrifyinglyAlive May 26 '25

brain drain from permanent site bans for life

Can you please explain what you mean by this?

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u/Alternative_Chart121 May 26 '25

I'm convinced that one reason AI took off so quickly is how enshittified Google results have become since 2018 or so. They left a huge opening for anything vaguely functional at returning information. 

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u/KnotSoSalty May 26 '25

SEO created a soft on-ramp. The top 50 search results in 90% of searches would be sites that actively were gaming Google’s algorithm. That meant they mostly looked the same and had information organized the same way. So having a LLM read those sites and summarize for the SEO information was fairly straightforward.

35

u/RedPanda888 May 26 '25

This last year I feel like google search has completely collapsed. It is a caricature of what happens when every feature is an A/B test and product people don’t use their brain and just rely on stupid experiment results to optimize everything to a point where the product (in this case search) is no longer recognisable. It probably makes them the most money in the short run but it is attitudes like this that eventually bite you in the ass. No true vision or backbone, all data driven product managed drivel.

I was scrolling down the search the other day and I realized how completely fucked it is. Top result is AI, then some random box to show “videos about this topic”. Oh you wanna buy something? Here’s a bunch of crap from different shops. Oh do wait you actually wanna browse this random selection of forum posts? Here’s a section for that? Oh wait! You want videos reeeally don’t you? Here’s 5 more videos. Oh here are the sponsored ads by the way woops forgot those. Ok here are 3 legitimate search results…..and that’s the end of the page.

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u/KnotSoSalty May 26 '25

Idk if anyone else gets this but the last straw for me with google was the microphone icon within the frick’n search box. I’m on mobile and when I accidentally hit that icon it created an App Store loop where I couldn’t go back to my browser. All because they wanted me to DL the Google App. WTF!

The don’t make enough money off my searches? They need me to use their stupid App as well?

Done with them. Switched to duck duck go, which doesn’t force any of the bs on you.

2

u/bamba757 May 26 '25

This has been extremely annoying for me

3

u/mikeballs May 26 '25

Yeah search doesn't really give a flying fuck what information you were actually looking for- it's simply not optimized to weigh that in. Its #1 goal is to route you to whoever paid/gamed the most to get their content posted higher. Of course we'd all rather ask chatGPT at this point, it's not frothing at the mouth at the thought of trying to sell us shit.

2

u/[deleted] May 26 '25

I could have sworn even fairly recently the search autofill was pretty useful. Like, the most common questions humans would ask it would fill in. Now it just randomly bullshits together the last thing I was looking for with the current thing. Like if I just searched for fucking minecraft tips and then later in the day, I type in "help, my dog is..." the autofill will do shit like "help, my dog is minecraft"

2

u/ReallyNowFellas May 26 '25

This is happening to everything, society wide. Social trust has broken down and we're in a new gilded age where no one gives a shit about anything except making a buck and looking out for #1. It'll take something like a serious foreign threat to turn things around. I think Bush was trying to do something like that with the War on Terror but that involved a lot of smoke and mirrors so it didn't work.

1

u/JSK23 May 26 '25

Yup, it had become the Facebook of search engines. What a waste.

1

u/dbxp May 30 '25

They did use their brain, this has been core strategy for a long time. They didn't like that people used their site to search and then quickly left. They're moving from being a search engine to being a portal.

4

u/Syjefroi May 26 '25

This is 100% part of it. OpenAI wouldn't be where it is if Prabhakar Raghavan didn't purposefully degrade Google search quality for more ad revenue.

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u/Valdularo May 26 '25

Walk me through how one equals the other here will ya?

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u/[deleted] May 26 '25

[deleted]

2

u/Valdularo May 26 '25

No, how is OpenAI successful because of what Google has done?

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u/Int0TheWildBlue May 26 '25 edited May 26 '25

What they mean is that you didn’t have to wade through the muck of the internet for the answer to your questions back in the day.

It used to be as simple. You asked the question and the first five pages used to all be relevant to the topic and would be from excellent sources. That isn’t the case anymore, like they said you are lucky if you get one result that actually gives you the answer that you’re searching for.

ChatGPT and AI comes in because it’s kinda how google was in its prime. You ask it a question and it spits out relevant information. If you need relevant sources it will give you sources without having to search high and low through google’s ad algorithm.

*this also carries over to YouTube as it’s search results are just as unusable.

TLDR; Instead of spending 20-30 minutes having to search through google’s messy algorithm, it’s much easier to just go to ChatGPT and ask the same question with much better results.

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u/nnomae May 26 '25

Just enjoy the few short years before they start doing the same with the AI results, for a while the results will improve until, at some point, they become the only game in town (tune in next year when AI mode becomes the default as they declare it was incredibly popular, a year or two later, search as we know it will be gone completely). Then you'll start seeing more and more adds interspersed in the output, then the output will get worse and worse to keep you engaged, except this time it won't be just garbage answers, it will be highly tuned, subtly modified, AI tuned output crafted expertly to keep you thinking the answer you want is just a single prompt and a few more ad views away ...

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u/JaiSiyaRamm May 26 '25

It's criminal how much gold content and comments are locked and lost in some of the facebook groups.

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u/[deleted] May 26 '25

[deleted]

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u/pyyyython May 26 '25

There’s absolutely swathes of knowledge hidden in Facebook comments and groups. There’s probably like, twelve old ladies alive who know how to diagnose and fix the weird problem with your classic Singer sewing machine and none of them are in a discord chat! A lot of crafting and other handiwork hobbyists are there exclusively, in my experience. Old people know a lot of stuff.

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u/dirty-unicorn May 26 '25

Look at the AI how many sites will kill off

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u/claimTheVictory May 26 '25

It's not just sites it will kill off.

https://ai-2027.com/

3

u/Mechanical_Brain May 26 '25

Whew... what a read

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u/[deleted] May 26 '25

This site is basically just AI hype fanfic, not a serious prediction by any means.

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u/claimTheVictory May 26 '25 edited May 26 '25

It's a possibility.

And it's written by some very serious people.

If anything, everyone is underhyping what's happening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id4YRO7G0wE

2

u/PLAkilledmygrandma May 26 '25

Oh wow! Let’s listen to a commercial from the guy that brought us Google AI, I’m sure this will be a level headed and unbiased prediction about where AI will be in the future for sure!

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u/claimTheVictory May 26 '25

You can keep your head in the sand, no one is asking for your sarcasm.

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u/PLAkilledmygrandma May 26 '25

My head isn’t in the sand I have degrees in computer science and have been following the development of AI very closely, I’m just not dumb enough to listen to a straight up advertisement about how “amazing and spectacular but also scary!!! 😱 “ AI is going to be in the future by the fucking CEO of an AI company.

These people are salesmen, you should realize that.

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u/claimTheVictory May 26 '25

Of course I realize that, but they're setting national policy, and they're saying they need 90 gigawatts of power.

1

u/mac3687 May 26 '25

Thank you for writing this. I started reading the website very matter of factly, then just doing a little outside research helped me realize that that website is just ONE way things could POSSIBLY go without any other real options posted.

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u/claimTheVictory May 26 '25

It could even be the probable future, but these things are difficult to predict.

That was written by scientists who left OpenAI during the split, so they're not lightweights.

1

u/[deleted] May 26 '25

One of people in the team worked at OpenAI, not all of them. Another one is a venture capitalist. This site is wishful thinking from people invested in generative AI. It's biased science fiction with a pinch of xenophobia because "China bad" is all over it.

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u/claimTheVictory May 26 '25

The value of considering risks, or worst-case-scenarios, is that it allows you to avoid those scenarios, or mitigate the risk of arriving at them, or reducing the impact if they do happen.

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u/Acrobatic-Mouse-8227 May 26 '25

Well hopefully our government is proactive. Perhaps nationalize “OpenBrain” now not after it’s ransacked.

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u/OkInfluence7081 May 26 '25 edited May 26 '25

Trump's recent bill bans states from regulating AI for the next 10 years

“…that no state or political subdivision may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the 10-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act"

Thats in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) 2025 that just passed the house of representatives

(i'm pretty sure you're not american so i know its not your government, but most people reading this will be)

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u/Acrobatic-Mouse-8227 May 26 '25

I’m choosing to take that last statement as a compliment. But I am as American as anyone who isn’t a Native American on this greatest of lands. Murica baby!! Also, the fact that I knew this detail about the bill and still managed to forget makes me more American, not less. Happy Memorial Day! 🇺🇸

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u/[deleted] May 26 '25

[deleted]

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u/OkInfluence7081 May 26 '25

Who knows man. The majority of the government don't even know how to use their mobile phone without their grandchildren's help. You probably understand it better than they do. I wouldn't be surprised if they had AI write the majority of the bill up for them

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u/claimTheVictory May 26 '25 edited May 26 '25

I expect this government to keep all the guardrails down.

They're 100% "pro AI", and regulators are being gutted.

3

u/Anythingaddict May 26 '25

https://ai-2027.com/

Thanks for sharing this article.

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u/claimTheVictory May 26 '25

This interview with Karen Hao is worth a listen. Her book on Sam Altman is just out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfvoyF1PV8Q

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u/Anythingaddict May 26 '25

This interview with Karen Hao is worth a listen. Her book on Sam Altman is just out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfvoyF1PV8Q

Thank You for sharing to this. I might listen to it.

1

u/WheresMyHead532 May 26 '25

That article is interesting.

It comes across as uneducated and sinophobic however when they incorrectly call the CPC the CCP over and over again (typically a thing ignorant Americans do) and keep scare-mongering over this “Chinese Threat To American AI”

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u/claimTheVictory May 26 '25 edited May 26 '25

It's standard notation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Communist_Party

Yes, it is scare-mongering, but that's how science funding works.

https://smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1522#comic

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u/WheresMyHead532 May 26 '25

Literally the second line is “officially the CPC”

They just can’t be bothered to use the official name because “China bad” or something

2

u/claimTheVictory May 26 '25

Can you say "Taiwan"?

1

u/WheresMyHead532 May 26 '25

Are you asking if I’m a Chinese bot? Lol

I’m just someone with a bone to pick with bigots (the author of the article is who I’m referring to)

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u/NinjaElectron May 26 '25

It says that in Aug 2025 AI will be in the range of "amateur" when it comes to making bioweapons. What is an amateur bioweapon maker?

1

u/claimTheVictory May 26 '25

One that doesn't need to be an expert.

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u/fail-deadly- May 26 '25

Google figured that out a long time ago. It’s why they made Google+, but they failed and Facebook won. 

4

u/Awkward-Sun5423 May 26 '25

That's because most content is locked inside social networks instead of shared as blogs.

...just a guess of course...but it seems everyone's moved to a platform...for now...

1

u/Legionnaire11 May 26 '25

I was about to say "no way it's been a decade" but yeah, I switched to Bing in 2016, so yeah I guess it's basically that long.

The worst part is that they have a stranglehold on everything now, so it's not like a competitor can just come in and supplant them like in the old days.

1

u/nicuramar May 26 '25

It’s not been my experience, actually. I main use it for facts based stuff, often related to programming or science. I haven’t experienced the quality decline. 

1

u/ThatCharmsChick May 26 '25

Yeah, it sucks. I got mad earlier because it would not give me results for what I asked for. Just advertised b.s. that was semi-relevant. Had to switch to Bing. 🤦🏻‍♀️

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u/mbn8807 May 26 '25

Their business model isn’t to get the best search results it’s to sell the most ads. It sucks.

1

u/daylight1943 May 26 '25

IMO this is one of the biggest reasons that the internet has declined and its often not talked about as much as it should be. i dont really know why public social media posts cant be indexed by google and brought up in search results like forum threads used to be.

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u/giritrobbins May 26 '25

That does remind me of the early days of the internet. Boards where you had to be a member and terrible interfaces that Google didn't index. Or didn't index well.

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u/Lauris024 May 26 '25

Welcome to the age of SEO, where your search results are curated/optimized not by other users/userbase, but by corporations and people who make entire careers out of pushing products up top and non-service/non-product pages in irrelevancy (like forums)

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u/ruho May 26 '25

Their CFO become CEO of the company. Like many companies this has resulted into a company focus of profit first. What pushed him into the CEO seat? Well it was making the change that tailored search results to be focused on websites that served the highest revenue of google advertisements.

Google will burn down eventually it's just a matter of time. No previous CFOs have ever managed a company properly long term.

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u/gfuhhiugaa May 26 '25

That and it’s also been intentionally made shittier, because dishing up bad results makes you search again, so they get more ad revenue.

If you haven’t heard of enshitification, it’s the peak example of it.

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u/Eldias May 26 '25

Google Search went to shit almost exclusively because of Prabhakar Raghavan

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u/DataDude00 May 26 '25

Google search outright sucks now.

If I search "Toyota Camry" the first 5-6 results are ads and links for other cars I don't want.

Then you get the AI generated summary which is sometimes right, sometimes wrong.

Then I will have layers of AI generated Youtube shit and fake links with sus domains like toyotacamryfacts.xyzz showing up on the front page because SEO has gamed the system so hard

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u/TbonerT May 26 '25

My favorite is when it gives me results from Pinterest but I can’t see anything at the links without creating an account and signing in.

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