Is Google about to destroy the web?
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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.
Dead Internet theorists were right, just a half decade or so early.
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But it’s the normies we need to reach.
Hey, is that the ICQ logo?
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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
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What’s wrong with Google? AI answers are pretty convenient.
Even if you want AI answers, you can use DuckDuckGo. They have an AI assistant too, and even it does better than Google's at not hallucinating as much.
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"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.
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What do you imagine 'destroying the web' looks like if not killing off huge swaths of websites that relied on traffic/ads to sustain themselves? Do you imagine a man has to bleed all the way out before we can say he's going to die, or is it sufficient to look at the severity of the wound to critical systems in his body and determine that he is probably going to die?
Not to mention the fact that the remaining sites that can still hold on, but would just have to cut costs, will just start using language models like Google's to generate content on their website, which will only worsen the quality of Google's own answers over time, which will then generate even worse articles, etc etc.
It doesn't just create a monetization death spiral, it also makes it harder and harder for answers to be sourced reliably, making Google's own service worse while all the sites hanging on rely on their worse service to exist.
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What’s the best alternative, in your opinion? I’ve tried Bing and DuckDuckGo, but both showed me worse results for my particular searches.
I just want classic Google Search back, before everything got turned to shit. But I fear that doesn’t really exist since there’s such an economic incentive behind how search engines rank and show results.
I've been using a combination of brave and ddg. Work with the filtering
I was an SEO for 20+. Years. Google is dying as far as search relevancy. It's trying to transition to a new paradigm that prioritizes payment surrounding data than ads. Much more money in the data angle, and ads as we know them will be dying soon, replaced with more insipid product placements.
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I've been using a combination of brave and ddg. Work with the filtering
I was an SEO for 20+. Years. Google is dying as far as search relevancy. It's trying to transition to a new paradigm that prioritizes payment surrounding data than ads. Much more money in the data angle, and ads as we know them will be dying soon, replaced with more insipid product placements.
I’ll check out Brave, it’s been mentioned a few times.
I don’t mind companies making a dime, but now it’s really devolved in bad results that are profit-driven.
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My wife and I both googled the same question yesterday and it gave us both completely different answers.
Its a stochastic process
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Not to mention the fact that the remaining sites that can still hold on, but would just have to cut costs, will just start using language models like Google's to generate content on their website, which will only worsen the quality of Google's own answers over time, which will then generate even worse articles, etc etc.
It doesn't just create a monetization death spiral, it also makes it harder and harder for answers to be sourced reliably, making Google's own service worse while all the sites hanging on rely on their worse service to exist.
Or paywalling literally everything so there's basically no easily-accessible content on the web anymore. But yeah I've been adding 'reddit' to most of my searches for years so I can get answers from actual people instead of full-page articles filled with AI-generated bullshit I don't care about, so that's a fair point.
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I remember it when good websites didn't have any business model at all because there weren't anyone busy with inventing it, all people involved spent their effort on making the website valuable.
The business models were in TV and radio outside of the web.
I'm not old, I'm 29.
I'm 52, I remember when websites were little more than 'Oh I guess we have to have an internet presence, so here's a website that's nothing more than an ad for our TV show, book, movie, etc.'
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Hey, is that the ICQ logo?
Yes!
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Even if you want AI answers, you can use DuckDuckGo. They have an AI assistant too, and even it does better than Google's at not hallucinating as much.
Braves is better imo. As far as a.i answers.
I wish libre and it's search would evolve a bit. That's a solid browser
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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.
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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Even if you want AI answers, you can use DuckDuckGo. They have an AI assistant too, and even it does better than Google's at not hallucinating as much.
Their shopping sites fucking blows though. Unless your want 100 results all from the same website.
Local finding of goods is still one of the only things I use google for at this point.
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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.
Here is your cupcake recipe:
Ingredients:
- 1 cup of water
- 1 cup of flour
- 1 American Freedom Edition Tariffed Egg
- 12 oz of polonium
- Mix ingredients
- Place in oven at 1000° C
- Close all windows and disable any smoke or carbon monoxide alarms
- Leave the oven door open, place one (1) bottle of butane inside
- Enjoy!
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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.
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Here is your cupcake recipe:
Ingredients:
- 1 cup of water
- 1 cup of flour
- 1 American Freedom Edition Tariffed Egg
- 12 oz of polonium
- Mix ingredients
- Place in oven at 1000° C
- Close all windows and disable any smoke or carbon monoxide alarms
- Leave the oven door open, place one (1) bottle of butane inside
- Enjoy!
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!
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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.
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.
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Got a machine web
It’s better than the rest
Green to Red
Machine web
I understood that reference.
