This blog is part of my 38 before 38 series. I write a blog for every single day for the 38 days leading up to my 38th Birthday.
I have written again and again(and again)* about the dire state of web search. Unless you are in China, that means Google. Back in 2021, I wrote in Search is Dead:
My hypothesis is that this is by design. I am a cynical person by nature and I think Google broke organic search because devaluing organic results would make paid results less useless by comparison. And when you spend more time on Google, you are more likely to click on an ad. This may sound like a conspiracy theory, but there is a storied history of technology companies making their products less effective for financial gain. And as goes google, so goes Bing. I know Bing is a joke is the mainstream zeitgeist, but it is pretty much indistinguishable from Google.
To summarize my previous posts; Google’s business goals has resulted in pushing the organic search results “below the fold”. They prefer you see their own summaries and ads over “real” results.
Even if you bother scrolling down and clicking the top result, it would be useless. Most results pages are full of spammy sites hawking affiliate links.
My last post on the subject March 28 2022. There has been a big development since then.
Talking to ghosts
OpenAI launched ChatGPT, as a tech demo for their Large language Mode GPT3, in late 2022. We have sufficient evidence to suggest that they never expected it to be a commercial product at the time.
It became a surprising hit. AI became mainstream. People were using it for many purposes. Coders were using it as an aid for their job. Job aspirants were optimizing their CVs and cover letters. Unscrupulous students were using it to cheat.
Google was worried. It finally had a challenger as the de facto knowledge portal of the web. They even had founder Sergey Brin back to write code. They were taking it seriously.
Looking for Phantoms
It seemed google was right to worry. The startup Perplexity AI was already offering web search services using GPT-3.5 as a backend. Microsoft integrated it into Bing, and later rebranded it into Copilot. Since then Perplexity has given other LLMs as backends. And OpenAI has launched their own search product, ChatGPT search.
Google has not been sleeping. They launched their own LLM chat product Gemini, with the unique feature of allowing 2 million words(well, “tokens”) as input. They also added “AI overviews”, a LLM based summary, on top of the excerpts. Pushing organic results down even further.
But did that improve the user experience?
Chasing Spectres
No. It did not.
Nothing has changed, the AI overviews are about as helpful as the excerpts. Perplexity just summarizes the top results that are the same as google most of the time. Same for bing/copilot. The summaries themselves are prone to misinformation, because LLMs make stuff up all the time. Actually finding useful, relevant information is a lot more difficult.
What AI summaries are doing is killing the incentive to create on the web. Most businesses on the web are supported by ads running on you website. But no one would go to your site if Google or Bing just gives the user a summary of your words, and even your videos.
Suppose you do produce a high-quality work for the web. And suppose you somehow manage to reach the top organic result on a search result page. Google, OpenAI, et al would just copy your content and regurgitate it in a copyright safe manner via their fancy lingual regression analysis machine. Why would you ever work on anything for the web?
Six pixels under
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
—Cory Doctorow, Tiktok’s enshittification
Google has been in this enshittification spiral for a decade now. They have become rentier slum lord of the web, with no real competition. They own all the land, and we are just peasants. ChatGPT and its contemporaries like Claude seem to be challenging their supremacy. Not by developing the “real estate”. But by burning all the houses, and salting the earth.
*You can read them all here