Posted by giuliomagnifico 23 hours ago
For the time being, AI seems to be doing a much better job in most cases, so as we say: So long Google!
Mind you much of the existence of Google has been this kind of unstable arms race, from the early days of the ad-free home page to introducing pagerank as the first attempt against linkspam SEO.
Isn't the environmental impact 10 to 100 times what we were used to?
The quality of Google has dropped precipitously. Their AI answers are often a horrible misunderstanding of my query, and the SERPs are filled with ads, preferred content providers and sites that have successfully spammed their way to victory despite having no content on the item I'm searching for (fandom has a billion skeleton sites that just hoover up traffic).
LLMs are often wrong, but they feel like they understand. The UX of not having to fight your way to this stop is dramatically more pleasant.
It's hard to see how Google got so bad at this. Perhaps it's a deliberate enshittification to push people at Gemini but it's been sagging so long now I think it's just their trajectory.
I think you answered your own question - the economic incentives are all aligned to make the experience bad for the user, mediocre for the advertiser (who doesn't have a choice at the moment), and great for Google, at least in the short term.
Unfortunately for Google, the other AI companies hoovered up the Internet too, so Google's hard-to-reproduce scale is no longer the moat it used to be.
And unfortunately for us, the economic incentives to inject pervasive ads into LLM outputs are irresistible, so enshittification is guaranteed once search engines are abandoned.
studies published between 2022 and 2025 that examined the use of GenAI in relation to students
173 records (studies) were included in the review