As intended.

First they're going to collapse the ad model by eliminating most clicks.

Then they're going to put all of the information they've been scraping from the now-bankrupt websites behind paywalls.

Search results are shit now.

Our only hope is this opens the door to some competitor, who'll provide actually useful search results. I know that would be very expensive to start.

Google pushed out competitors using partnerships only they could afford, then intentionally made search worse so people would see more ads.

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

Cloudflare makes me not want to use your site too

But they are making up for the lack of real visits by increasing their scrapping

For the longest time I didn't understand why people were saying Google search had gone to shit. Worked for me! Now it cancerous.

I can search for a YouTube video I know well, nada unless I go directly to YT. Google can't even find shit in their own space!

It'll be bing or something. The internet is too big nowadays for a small group to keep up. There's just too much new information streaming in.

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.

Brave search has its own index and it works for me. Pretty good way out of big tech for web search.

Some websites now are really shit. Won't load unless you allow JavaScript from 15 different domains, cookie consent, terrible privacy etc.

If I want to know things like what 10 kmpl in mpg, I often use DDG snippets.

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.

12ft.io would like a word. Makes the internet usable again.

I've been liking kagi. Sucks you have to pay.

Enshittify search to the point of it being nearly useless. Then introduce a little bot to find it for you. Predictable.

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

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.