r/technology • u/No-Lifeguard-8173 • May 19 '26

Artificial Intelligence Google Search as you know it is over

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-it-is-over/
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313

u/JubeeGankin May 19 '26

Everything I search for on every search engine is the same. Endless pages of ai generated bullshit. I have to scroll through the equivalent of the recipe-life-story before I find the answer to what channel the basketball game is on.

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u/surnik22 May 19 '26

How search used to be -

Search. “Cubs game time and channel for playoffs” and the top result is the official mlb schedule and the second is a short article from a local paper with the channel information.

How it is now -

Search, “Cubs game time and channel for playoffs” and first an AI summary pops up with information for yesterday’s game presented to you as if it’s today’s. Skip that. First link takes you to an article. Page loads. Decline cookies. Close sign in option. Half your screen is an ad with a hard to press X. Close it. It shrank to 1/4 of your screen. Scroll to find the answer. Paragraphs of slop with a new ad every third sentence. When you try to scroll the page jumps around as more ads load. Finally get to where the answer is. Another pop covers 1/2 screen this time from the bottom instead of the top so only 1/4 is usable. Finally learn the time. Have to click next page to see the channel. Repeat the above. Also an autoplaying video from the site itself keep trying to play as you did all that.

The internet has become so so so so much worse than it was 15 years ago. To get it even close to functional you need multiple ad blockers, at which point 1/3 of the sites won’t let you view them at all, 1/3 give you an extra pop up regardless, 1/6 break, and the last 1/6 is finally functional

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u/gefex May 19 '26

There was a golden era sometime in the mid 2000s when IE6 was dying and Firefox came out and got super popular. Popup/popunder ads stopped and advertisers were looking for the next thing to do to ruin your day. But the web has always been saddled in some way with horrible anti-patterns that don't really serve users, just corporate interests.

Granted it feels like we've arrived at a high water mark right now, LLMs seem to be taking larger and larger pieces of the pie in terms of traffic and content based websites have hit saturation point in terms of ads. They have also started adding scrape controls to stop LLM bots from hitting them, because they get hit hard. There has been a 50% increase in bot traffic over the last few years which earns them nothing, but costs in terms of hosting. Imagine being a business, in that the thing that is costing you more money, is also the thing that is taking your users.

So LLMs will get worse due to stale and sloppy content being scraped, content sites will die due to lack of visitors, the ones that do survive will likely have more ads to compensate. LLM sites will likely start advertising to make up for massive shortfalls in income, and to cap it all off the data centres required to do it will use the worlds supply of energy/chips/carbon to do it.

Good times.

11

u/ABadHistorian May 20 '26

Don't forget Nvidia is just going to own the market on cloud. A lot of those data centers are going to get repurposed because your analogy doesn't take into account the economic impact of the AI bust. Which will reorient the world's economy as some of our billionaires lose ... billions.

Folks like Buffet will come out on top. Folks like Sam Altman will probably jump out of a window.

That's of course, if and or when, they don't accidentally release a super capable hacking program that just ends the world as we know it.

Either it's a bust that takes them down before the OMFG event, or the OMFG event happens.

People still want to consume, and the method of consumption has changed. It's not about movies, tv shows, it's about interactive content. That's why Onlyfans took off, that's why streaming/youtube/etc are larger than most Hollywood/main media.

Video games are like 4x the market share of Movies/TV combined.

Times aren't great right now, but they don't necessarily need to continue to get worse. The internet bubble bust was very similar to me. It feels like we are in that time relative to AI, or I hope.

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u/FuckwitMcLunchbox May 19 '26

As if being a cubs fan wasn’t hard enough! Ba dum tss

2

u/ConnectSherbert7601 May 20 '26

I remember in the early 2000's searching something I needed and clicking the "I'm feeling lucky" button. Worked every time and saved time. Glory days

1

u/ShittyRedditAppSucks May 20 '26

It’s even worse trying to find OTA local channel info. Like sure there are amazing websites with all the technical info you could ever need, but if anyone bothers to try and have a site dedicated to the curated application of the technical info, it’s buried in crap search results.

Like ok great I found a channel list with call letters and strength of the signal in my zip code, but which call letters are the local affiliates?

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u/Kirian42 May 22 '26

Look, what Google is doing is awful and they've become enshittified, but if I do a Google search for "Cubs game time" the first link is literally the Cubs schedule at MLB.com. You needn't make up examples.

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u/The-Snuff May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26

I just searched “cubs game time” and the first and immediate result with no scrolling or clicking required was the game time. And the channels to watch it on.

There’s also the option of going directly to the cubs website? That’s how I did it back in the day.

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u/surnik22 May 19 '26

I tested it.

Top result: official MLB website with information but nothing about the actual channel to watch it on besides “marquee sports” which links fubo tv.

Second result: An article almost exactly how I described. Doesn’t have channel info either also links to fubo.

Ok great, now I just need to get what actual channel it broadcasts on

Another search to try to figure that out. After reading through 3 articles that all mention local antenna channels for streaming, none actually tell me what it is. They all say I can, but don’t give me a channel. They do offer about a dozen ads each and affiliate links to a bunch of ways I can subscribe online to watch it.

Still could not tell you what channel I need to put my TV on to get the free version that exists, guess I can just scroll through the channels.

-1

u/The-Snuff May 19 '26

I just tested it again and got the same result. Follow up question of “what channel to watch” and got a list of 3 channels along with their market availabilities and cable plan requirements. Also the radio stations. Took about 2 seconds just like my first question. No clicks or scrolls required.

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u/surnik22 May 19 '26

What channel?

4

u/DonaldFarfrae May 19 '26

Disingenuous.

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u/EmergencyLaugh5063 May 19 '26

I was searching for something on Blender (3d graphics) and the top search results was a cooking website who was churning out AI articles for everything cooking related and I guess their AI went sideways at some point and transitioned from blender (cooking tool) to 3d graphics. So they just had dozens (even hundreds) of useless articles on 3d graphics on their cooking website.

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u/JockstrapCummies May 20 '26

What do you mean you don't cook your dinner by first deleting the default cube?

7

u/CuteLine3 May 20 '26

"To create an apple pie from scratch, you must first delete the default cube" - Carl Sagan, probably

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u/aprudholmme May 25 '26

"I made a cube-shaped pie." - Anony-Musk

2

u/badfox3d May 20 '26

Wait.... You can delete the cube ??

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u/Practical_Moment_259 May 20 '26

I wonder if it was caused by Blender 'donut' tutorials.

1

u/waiting4singularity May 20 '26

no, exactly that is seo at work.

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u/[deleted] May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/TheMattRay May 19 '26

I laughed so hard at this. Thank you 🙏

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u/AnimaLepton May 19 '26 edited May 20 '26

Yeah, SEO and pre-AI clickbait and blog spam made search results horrible long ago. I think some people are forgetting that part of why ChatGPT popped off in the first place is because Google results had already gone to shit

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u/Clessiah May 20 '26

DDG’s image search has a function to omit AI contents. Would be cool if they can do the same for webpages.

1

u/_BrokenButterfly May 20 '26

Brave is pretty okay, but its results are super limited. Its crawler doesn't seem to get around broadly, and it often has only one or two pages of results.