It's to keep you on Google as long as possible. Google doesn't care about ad impressions off-site. Look at it this way:

You search for something and AI surfaces full answers to you at the top. Now, Google can "alter the deal" in the near-future where "sponsored AI results" come into play and are incorporated into The Answer. THAT is the gold mine. Right now (and forever) it's been about being on the first page of results and now it's about being the first result "above the fold" so people don't even need to scroll. This is going to change to be the "AI answer" so your website / product / service is mixed into the answer. Pay-for-play just like everything else.

This method will rapidly train users to just search, view AI results, then click through those paid results or move onto something else. Those AI incporated impressions will make Google money and the possible click-through from the AI answer will yield more money.

Companies are already working to optimize so AIs will recommend their products and services when people ask things like "I'm going on vacation to the mountains for a week. What gear would you recommend?"

Joke's on them, I've already been working on that for decades. *pats ublock* This baby can bankrupt so many websites and I always hoped it could collapse the ad model completely.

In all seriousness, it's becoming increasingly clear that we're eventually going to have to build a new, free internet out of the wreckage of this one once the corporations are done with it. Technically it's already there, nascent but ever so slowly growing and taking root, hiding in plain sight. Like the so-called dark web of tor, it already exists in parallel to the existing structures of the internet. Call it the deep web, the indie web, nostalgia web, unsearchable web, I've heard countless terms and most of them aren't terribly accurate, but the web doesn't need ads and google search to exist, it never did. It just needs humans, which despite the best efforts of big tech many of us still are, communicating directly with one another and documenting our billions of lifetimes of diverse collective experiences and knowledge.

We are the wealth of information in the internet. Corporations don't own it. We are it.

I want todays content in 2002 search engines.

What kind of revisionist bullshit is this?

Like, it's almost always safe to write off anyone using "normies" but do you think 2002 was like in movies/TV?

"The net" wasn't some secret thing, kids had been using it in school for over a decade.

I can't tell if you weren't born then or already 50 years old...

But wherever you're getting your opinions on 2002 internet, it wasn't first hand

Kagi. Kagi is the answer. Been using it for 3-months and it's absolutely worth the $5 a month.

Kagi. Kagi is the answer. Been using it for 3-months and it's absolutely worth the $5 a month.

As a 50-something, I can see the case for putting the “golden age” of the internet between the birth of Wikipedia in 2001 and Facebook in 2006.

right i stopped using "search" that muddles my answers with LLM so how would they get my clicks, they lost the customer

I'm reading comments on arstechnica and seeing people mad at... what exactly?

The reason I go to web search is to answer my questions. Now it's given to me at once, without need to go anywhere.
Is it sometimes hallucinating? Of course it is, but have you really 100% trusted information on the Internet before anyways? I haven't.

You say that ads driven websites are going to stop receiving money. But have you really liked ads driven websites? The same ones whose main incentive is to keep you on the website as long as possible or, in fact, wasting as much your time as possible to sell it to ad companies? The ones that were really worth visiting already changed their business model.

Any hope this takes SEO out with it, or are we just going to get to a point of PR companies flooding AIs with data to benefit their clients?

The internet was never designed to exist in a capitalist hellscape. It was designed for the free sharing of information by people putting random servers on the network.

I've been wondering how we can build a new underground net that is just the internet of 2002, but with more bandwidth. Somewhere normies can't access easily and with a bad ui so they don't want to.

Kagi is worth it though. Been paying for 3-months and the ability to search, get info, click through quickly is a breath of fresh air. It's what Google USED to be. Plus it downranks pages with excessive trackers, you can prefer or omit websites from results based on personal preference, and it'll even alert you when websites have paywalled answers. The Kagi free trial is all I needed to be convinced.

Is that word 'gone' ? That place was shut down a week ago.

What kind of revisionist bullshit is this?

Like, it's almost always safe to write off anyone using "normies" but do you think 2002 was like in movies/TV?

"The net" wasn't some secret thing, kids had been using it in school for over a decade.

I can't tell if you weren't born then or already 50 years old...

But wherever you're getting your opinions on 2002 internet, it wasn't first hand

I’d expand it a bit further. Maybe 1999 to 2009. While Facebook did exist towards the end there, everyone’s grandmother wasn’t on it yet and they weren’t entirely intrusive and walled gardened. Forums still existed. Search engines still returned good results.
But it was the beginning of what would come. After 2009 it went downhill fast.

Joke's on them, I've already been working on that for decades. *pats ublock* This baby can bankrupt so many websites and I always hoped it could collapse the ad model completely.

In all seriousness, it's becoming increasingly clear that we're eventually going to have to build a new, free internet out of the wreckage of this one once the corporations are done with it. Technically it's already there, nascent but ever so slowly growing and taking root, hiding in plain sight. Like the so-called dark web of tor, it already exists in parallel to the existing structures of the internet. Call it the deep web, the indie web, nostalgia web, unsearchable web, I've heard countless terms and most of them aren't terribly accurate, but the web doesn't need ads and google search to exist, it never did. It just needs humans, which despite the best efforts of big tech many of us still are, communicating directly with one another and documenting our billions of lifetimes of diverse collective experiences and knowledge.

We are the wealth of information in the internet. Corporations don't own it. We are it.

I see your ublock and raise you Pihole.

The internet has always had ads, some of the most obnoxious were those mid to late 90s banner ads with sound. I’ll never forget loading a random page and my speakers screaming: Helllllloooooooooo.