Recently, I had some ideas I would normally just put up on a blog, in the public domain for anyone to develop on top of. Now, I'm feeling slightly reluctant because an LLM will ingest it, remix it and serve it in response to a query by some unimaginative individual who will either conclude that they are smart, or that LLMs are capable of original thought, or both. And they will have no clue where the idea originated from.

It depends on filed. As documentary photographer it motivates me even more to capture authentic images of life around me. I don't care about remixing, because that is not what makes documentary photography valuable.

Eh, part of what made early-internet so good was exactly that it did allow copying by users; the DRM era was later. But it's a very good example of why not to allow for profit copying, because that absolutely will crowd out the original. Piracy has to exist at the margin. The zero piracy world would also eat its memories because none would leak into archives. Remember Qubi? It wasn't even popular enough for people to pirate.

> why we don’t allow stealing.

With the not-so-minor qualification that the biggest thieves have always gotten away scot-free. AI is just the international whole-internet version of this.

The Internet has been shrinking massively. My earliest experiences with the Internet were discovering the world of hobby OS dev around the turn of the millennium, when I chanced upon someone’s personal website talking about their OS, with source code and screenshots and dedicated forum. My mind was blown. I spent two years finding hundreds of small websites dedicated to the topic, hung out on IRC communities with other teenage OS nerds like me, and of course participated in the nascent osdev.org forum. To note that all of those websites were readily found through Google, and interlinked with their own topic webrings.

Today everything has disappeared or has been conglomerated into siloes, sanitised, focusing on engagement. You have YouTube videos about it (which is more cheap entertainment than actual education), you get some posts here once in a while, there’s Reddit where all intelligent discussion goes to die. IRC is a wasteland of idle bouncers. Then the LLMs arrived to kill what is left.

Who says the Internet is a vibrant place today mistakes flashiness with depth. It’s all empty calories, just makes you hungry for more, never satisfies.

That's 100% correct. Since Google's "helpful content update" Webmasters get massive amounts of "Crawled, not indexed" reports for anything Google considers "more of the same" or "thin content". If you're not an authority on a subject, simply meaning: you already rank for similar content, or if you don't get links from more popular domains, your content is in the abyss.

It's all under the guise of "We're fighting SPAM", but the algorithm (or model) they use is heavily skewed towards intents (actions) and brands (because they 'trust' big names).

And it's not working.

A simple, short informative blog about a tool you used that could be of interest to max. 100 people on this planet is no longer getting ranked, if it gets indexed at all.

Those posts tick all boxes: no incoming links, no authority, thin content.

It changes somewhat between "Google Updates", but it's pretty clear that it's no longer working.

Multiply the 100 people not finding that post by millions of queries and it's now a big problem for Google.

My dad asked me the other day if Google got worse because smaller companies are not paying Google enough money.

He didn't see any difference between ads and content, because all results are now big brands only.

"Helpful content" is such a misnomer. It removes all helpful content in favour of AI overviews and only shows intent-driven, commercial content.

We're watching the end of Google's hegemony for sure.

Kagi

About 15 years ago, I won a phone in a contest. Last week I tried to find information about it, but I couldn't. No AI, nor Google could find anything the contest I won it in. When people say "the internet is forever" that can certainly be true, but it isn't for everything.

They're so horrible that I've started defaulting to their AI summaries. And I hate those summaries. It's just that the regular results are so terrible now, and seemingly getting worse at a noticeable pace.

I used to not worry. I was sure that a competitor would come along and fix search. But the longer that's not happening, the more nervous I'm getting that we'll actually lose search. If a few more years pass in the current state, I'm afraid the majority of people will forget what search was like and default to AI summaries.

I've tried alternatives, including Kagi (not actually relevant because there's no way I'm – directly or indirectly – buying Russian products) and Uruky, but they're not good enough.

(Edit: Added "directly or indirectly" about Kagi to point out that I'm not claiming that Kagi itself is Russian.)

Seems inevitable, doesn’t it? Expecting otherwise would have been hoping that notorious atheist Richard Dawkins somehow spared one specific god. Making websites accessible with history ignoring copyright is sort of what it does. That he would do it with books seems entirely in keeping with the philosophy.

That works now because there are human made sources that the AI can find and summarize for you. But now there are no incentives at all for humans to write anything on the internet and if they do the content will be buried by hallucinated content someone else posted at a larger scale.

I had the similar experience to yours yesterday and it lead nowhere. Funnily enough I was also trying to configure a vpn on a router, google didn't return anything useful (besides a blog post clearly written by AI and with absolutely no information in it). Claude managed to give some interesting pointers, but its suggestions were not working and I also noticed that it started to hallucinate badly about ipv6 and gave me some suggestions that were just plain untrue. Claude Opus is smart, usually when it gets so convinced about something is after researching the internet and not just based on its training data. I wonder where it got so convinced about it. Maybe reading some other hallucinated blog post like the one I stumbled upon?

That only works when there's an abundance of documentation for your specific device. The moment you're on a more recent version of something and have a weird issue, all hope is lots. You get stuck in loops because all LLMs keep recycling old advice that no longer applies. This problem will only get worse and worse as people no longer as questions on public forums, so answers are not publicly available either.

All the information Gemini surfaced was created with human effort and published on the internet with the expectation that humans would visit the website and the creator would get some reward - advertising dollars, bragging rights, popularity, subscribers or whatever else.

If the only visitors to websites are now LLM training bots then what incentive is there to publish anything new? For how long can we continue to rely on pre-2024 non-AI generated content?

Yes. When my kids wonder why I don't hate AI the way they do I tell them it's because I hate Google even more.

To be more precise, I hate the SEO shithole the internet has become, that Google serves up, that Google facilitated, indirectly created.

(I really don't have any tears to shed if there is a death of the Corporate Internet™.)

I've run into major problems with LLMs as I maintain my home Linux systems. If I just copied commands they list, I would have a near 100% failure rate, as most of the information they have has been gleaned from forum posts that are years out of date.

They're a good jumping off point, but I need to delve into the original sources just like I did when I used Google.

its pretty good with logs too. i mostly paste a few pages i suspect hace a problem in them and let it go to town. its almost always correct and is way faster than me

I hate to break it to you, but we are at the start of enshittification circle. Once Gemini has monopoly you will reminisce with joy google search results.

There will be new ways and incentives for content creators to be compensated. Many AI search startups are already talking about this or have created programs that help incentivize content creation.

I've been mostly enjoying Gemini, but it also clearly and definitively told me something i was trying to do was not possible with the library im using, so i wrote a different implementation, an hour later to discover that the library does in fact do precisely what i wanted in exactly the way i wanted with less headache. If I'd just gone right to the documentation instead, it actually would have saved me time.

And I've spent the last few days irritated that everything I ask Gemini is answered with something that's blatantly wrong and I'm not even a subject matter expert. A quick Google search for the same questions gives plenty of results that counter what the LLM gave me.

YMMV.

Believe me they're making money off you one way or the other

You deserve what's coming for you.

I built a simple Claude Code container on my homelab to do the same. I can just SSH in and get tech support when I need it.

AI is on the whole bad but it’s impossible to forget that the ostensibly human-curated Web as presented by modern search engines is bad too. Invasive ads, popups, and worst of all the substantive content has a nine inch frame of SEO filler and a three inch picture (what you were after). And some things are not even high-tech slop stolen. It is just old-school verbatim copied from another website and repackaged with another frame.

But yeah, text remix machines are not a long-term solution to that problem.

Imagine someone making an indie router and sell it too you then the AI not be able to surface their doc

no, no, no. you are supposed to romanticize the hunt for correct information /s

Are you sure the lack of advertising isn't long term feasible? It seems to me that AI models have proven themselves to be something consumers ARE willing to pay a subscription - or even pay per use/token for.

It took you 4 days because you used Gemini. Gemini is the worst AI model I ever used. It is way behind even open models. It looks like Google just reached its AOL moment.

Interesting, I've seen much better results on DDG. Most recently was the search: `site:feeds.bbci.co.uk inurl:rss.xml` which works on DDG but gives zero results on Google. As far as I can tell, Google just decided not to index these.

The problem and what the article is pointing out is that original content is slowly and progressively being replaced by AI content. And since AI gets trained on this content as well it will eventually train itself on previous gen. content that was also AI generated. It is slowly eating the web. Eventually you won't even be able to evade it because it'll be everywhere. Before AI became this expressive I could at least expect someone writing articles, FAQs, blog posts to have some backbone. Now I frequently run into content that obviously was never even checked by a human.

https://noai.duckduckgo.com is a thing fyi

i don’t agree with the google has better results thing. sometimes it does. most of the time it’s just that google has the site i want higher in the ordering than DDG. personally i’m fine scrolling down a little bit more. it’s rare i need to go to google for something that DDG doesn’t have at all in their results, but it does happen.

i do have to go to google for maps/directions/planning travel. a lot that’s annoying.

That was true until a few months ago. Now, it almost never has relevant results, and I've given up on it.

that control (so I can turn it off completely) is why I picked DDG to replace Google, who force feeds us the hallucinations

I've stopped using DDG now because of result quality. I now use a "meta" search backed by EXA, Tavily, and SearXNG in parallel. It can be agentically de-dupped or summarized as needed. Search as we knew it is done, largely because clicking through to evaluate result relevance before diving deeper sucks. Now we have agents that can do that portion and perform multiple searches, building on information in the last batch, to collect good results

Yeah, there are times where DDG has like, literally three results. Yet, I know for an absolute fact, there are hundreds of pages on the web that contain the terms I specified. Web search is becoming utter garbage.

Reddit has already begun the effort to start poising the well - https://www.reddit.com/r/poisonai/

All of that already existed for the purpose of biasing people and now it biases ai for free. A company would have to make an effort to remove or change the bias

I think most everyone already has a curated training library; Web scraping exists but I don't think anyone is still using it as a primary information vector

If I ever curate again it will certainly not be for the public. That led to PageRank which kickstarted this whole dystopian nightmare that Google has been planning since as early as 2003. No thank you.

> There will come a day (and probably soon)

That day has already arrived, it is already happening.

This already exists, there are archives of Reddit or other sites, and Anna's Archive for papers and books.

Isn’t this what the paper-bound encyclopedia companies do, albeit shallowly

> a yearly printed book with verified, accurate information

Seems difficult to produce nowadays as even well researched topics are constantly attacked. Climate change papers as a small example.

In a world, where everything can be stolen it will be hard to produce anything.

I still have hope though. Maybe the Internet will be better. Currently everything has to be monietized. Everything is ad heavy. At the beginning it was not so. People created things out of passion, or boredom. We can returned to that scheme.

I have seen neocities, personal blogs created and maintained in this year. I know I run my own "Internet index" https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

So there's a new Internet Archive, it's just split across 3,000 AI labs.

Meanwhile, ChatGPT correctly diagnosed what was wrong with my plant from a single photo, identified which leaves I should cut, and annotated the picture showing where to cut and what not to touch.

I honestly expected a made-up useless generated image that matched the idea but not the actual thing.

Guess I’m still living in 2024.

> not even Google can afford to devote enough compute to each query to reliably generate quality results

https://www.dw.com/en/german-court-holds-google-liable-for-f...

I was wondering how would Kagi scale/expand if all of a sudden google were to stop serving search altogether (not likely) or alter search such that users look for alternatives.

I'm a long time Kagi user and I haven't used Google search in about a year.

I tried out Google search for a few technical searches recently and it was surprisingly ad and AI free. Not bad at all and much better than I remember from last year.

Then I put in some non-technical searches and it was all ads and AI and basically unusable.

I wouldn't say it's better, but it's certainly on par with Google in their best years. And it's light years better than what Google is now, or using an LLM.

While I dislike Instagram reels and stories, I do feel like there is almost certainly scientific studies on radicalization that would benefit from actual histories of dumb memes. I feel like that about a lot of things, really.

There probably are some important hidden discord groups that would explain the origin of many political positions. Unlike smokey meetings in scummy bars, that exists now and is on a database somewhere.

On the other hand, when modern archaeologists discover "Claudius has a small dick" graffiti on the side of some God-forsaken wall in Pompeii, they're fascinated. The presence of such graffiti adds color and texture to the civilization inhabited by Virgil and Ovid. What's just disposable background noise to us may provide context into how we lived and thought to our far-future descendants.

It can't. People will simply stop clicking links.

That is a nice project -- classifying it based on reliability: human-made, sources, etc. + score.

Maybe a job for an AI to do? :D

I'd quit reading HN long time ago if not for comments like yours, when people call a spade precisely a spade and reignite my smoldering hope for the humankind.

The deal will be great for now, while they lure you in and get you to drop the competition -- then they will raise prices later.

Kagi does have AI too, for what it’s worth. I found it pretty damn good, but I wish I could give them more money. I have a year subscription so I’m stuck without being able to give them *anything* until it’s done.

Indeed.

Not only is search revenue growing, but it is growing at an accelerating rate.

At the same time, operating margins are expanding.

I don't know the name of the logical fallacy where someone personally uses an LLM instead of Google Search and then infers that the search business is dying, without ever reading a financial statement.

Indeed. Money over everything. It is absurd to complain about decreasing quality of a product that makes increasing money for increasingly rich people (thus, by definition, better).

There is probably a lag time before advertisers give up on AdSense.

A lot of corporate ad spend is already planned, and Google can adjust the costs up as much as they like. They hold the lever.

As someone who regularly reads things online, then wants to read them again like 3 years later, Google has been monotonically declining in quality.

Also I realized the other day how hard it is to find song lyrics for anything other than quite mainstream songs.

> But if you are aware of this and aware of the ways in which LLMs are likely to shit the bed, it is quicker to get from request to useful information than it has been with Google search since like 2017.

The point is not about 'quicker' requests but precise requests. It definitely has worsened, though not on a single degree on al levels like the HN hivemind claims, but some aspects are still somewhat precise but others are definitely crap.

i.e. when searching about my neighborhood it still returns better results than bing, yahoo, ddg, yandex and what have you. But they are buried into a load of crap of alleged "relevant" results (those things past the ai stuff) that aren't relevant in any way.

They were planning their day for a specific time to be somewhere. If you're looking at the sun it's to late...