That article is a strange paean to internet searches, but it doesn't adequately address the background behind the transformation it decries:
(1) Google's search experience has deteriorated so markedly over the past ten years -- in a way that seems to have accelerated over the past five -- that everybody's looking for an alternative. Kagi, for instance, was a hot topic of discussion long before GPT-3 was released to the public.
In truth this is not entirely Google's fault. A lot of blame lies with Discord, other content on unindexable apps, Reddit subsuming internet forums, etc.
The article devotes a sentence to this, but you could write an entire book about it.
(2) Some types of searches are legitimately better-addressed by AI. Maybe not the open-ended and subjective example questions in the article, but those (non-commercial) questions that have well-defined and objective answers, even if they're very obscure, are great fodder for the AIs. I recently asked GPT-4o for the composition of the old Soviet 36СГН steel alloy, and it immediately gave me the correct answer. Google searching to corroborate that answer's validity took more than half an hour and had me going into original sources in Russian.
(1) Google's search experience has deteriorated so markedly over the past ten years -- in a way that seems to have accelerated over the past five -- that everybody's looking for an alternative. Kagi, for instance, was a hot topic of discussion long before GPT-3 was released to the public.
In truth this is not entirely Google's fault. A lot of blame lies with Discord, other content on unindexable apps, Reddit subsuming internet forums, etc.
The article devotes a sentence to this, but you could write an entire book about it.
(2) Some types of searches are legitimately better-addressed by AI. Maybe not the open-ended and subjective example questions in the article, but those (non-commercial) questions that have well-defined and objective answers, even if they're very obscure, are great fodder for the AIs. I recently asked GPT-4o for the composition of the old Soviet 36СГН steel alloy, and it immediately gave me the correct answer. Google searching to corroborate that answer's validity took more than half an hour and had me going into original sources in Russian.
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