> But I would really prefer if Search just worked the way it did in the first place.

Which is one thing technologists often screw up: They misinterpret how people react to change; and they misinterpret how people really use their products.

Google Search used to be (and still is) a way to find places on the internet. As much as I like AI in searches, I agree; when I want to find the thing, I don't want AI getting in the way.

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xnx 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> when I want to find the thing, I don't want AI getting in the way.

This is the reverse of my desires. Most pages on the current web contain a few useful nuggets buried in a shit sandwich of overly verbose text and aggressive advertising. AI extraction and summarization distills the mess to concentrate the useful bits.

	▲	beej71 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I want the small web back. I want more people to produce quality ad-free content for the love of doing so and the desire to make the world a better place. And then I want a classic search engine to find stuff; one that heavily downranks content with ads.

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aiiotnoodle an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Their inability to adapt to fix the problems caused by AI and SEO have caused the product to fall apart and users went somewhere else. I do think however their decision to make search tedious for users by moving the correct answer deep into the page (or at least favouring pages that did that) was a brilliant play for advertising but has killed a lot of their core use, making it easier to leave.

	▲	hibikir 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Making a product worse for consumers and better for the provider by dropping quality is everywhere even in physical world companies. It's not even just a matter of h to e product, but support. Two decades ago, Home Depot had a push to save on labor at the store that led to having nobody there that understood what they were selling, or could help anyone with any project. Lowes ate them alive for a while, and it took them years to regain enough expertise to just not lose in the market straight up. We also see this happening to restaurants all the time. The issue with someone like Google, or Microsoft, is that they have a larger moat in many products, so the amount of degradation that internal actors will be happy to push in search for profit is much deeper.

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cwmoore a minute ago | parent | prev [-]

"Siri, please spell out those URLs for me?”