Mastodawn

New site: google just killed search https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-it-is-over/

yeah, we know. We saw a massive drop in SO/Wikipedia traffic over the last 2 years, so yday's announcement was just closing the deal. Google has officially killed the web that was made of links. It is now a giant box that steals web pages/images/videos from all websites and pretends to know everything with its model and weights often with lots of wrong information. I hope this madness leads to a better search engine and EOL of Google.

Google Search as you know it is over | TechCrunch

Google is transforming Search from a list of links into an AI-powered experience filled with conversational answers, autonomous agents, and interactive interfaces — a shift that could further reduce traffic to publishers across the web.

TechCrunch

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isbm 5d ago

@nixCraft I think you're mixing up two things: AI search hurting traffic economics for the open web — real concern.

The old search already became miserable years ago because of SEO sludge, content farms and keyword voodoo.

LLMs understanding intent instead of forcing users to guess magic keywords is actually a huge UX improvement.

The challenge is preserving incentives for open knowledge, not preserving "10 blue links + SEO warfare" forever.

So let's agree to disagree. 😘

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Ariaflame 5d ago

@isbm @nixCraft They don't understand intent. They're not intelligent. They don't know what you want. They just have statistical models that predict what the average person might want. Whether it is what you want is irrelevant.

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isbm

@ariaflame @nixCraft correct. LLM is just that: a huge index of cr@p. So to use it as a search engine is actually a good and correct thing. The other problem is that they (providers, Google in this case) will basically use it to enforce paid content and promote products. This will entshittify this much faster. But from the pure technology perspective it is actually a correct move.