AI means the end of internet search as we've known it

Finally I tried something undocumented on a hunch, and it kind of worked, and I shared my progress with a (human) colleague, who had the insight to take what I had done and finished a real solution.

Anecdotally, in mice, etc., etc.

AI has a lot of edge cases and caveats. It can be trivial like not being about to count the Rs in "strawberry". Or it can be more nefarious where it simply makes stuff up (eg some fake precedents in legal opinions). AI is still incapable of explaining its reasoning and dealing with errors.

Yes I know some of these problems like the "Rs in strawberry" problem have been solved but (IMHO) you're going to be dealing with those edge cases forever.

Another issue is response time. Currently, you need to go through several steps: query -> embedding -> LLM -> answer -> back to English. Each of these steps takes time.

But here's the big one: energy. The sheer scale of Google search needs to be put in context of how much energy is consumed and how many queries can be answered per unit energy. With all the steps involved in AI queries, we need orders of magnitude of improvement to compete.

Most searches are fairly simple. They just don't need a large model to answer them. There will absolutely be a place for AI queries and they will continue to get better but displace search? We're not even remotely close to that outcome.

They obviously are a step of evolution beyond search in capability.

No? This experience is only better if the result isn't hallucinated nonsense, which the article acknowledged before, but then just ignored in the overconfident claim that nonsense is the future

AI will bring about a lonelier online world.

I doubt they're "ending", rather they will need to be re-born for RAG purposes.

https://nadh.in/blog/decentralised-open-indexes/

I use it a lot to track down original sources of videos and photos on Reddit, to check authenticity. I also use it to search for hardware components other manufacturers use, that I'd like to buy. Things like specific switches, knobs, faders, displays etc. (I build audio gadgets). I just highlight the part on the picture and then restrict my search to Alibaba, digikey or mouser. It's GREAT.

Lens is highly underrated.

  Despite fewer clicks, copyright fights, and sometimes iffy answers, AI could unlock new ways to summon all the world’s knowledge.

I'm not as familiar with ollama so I don't know if the same approach would work.

Some AI search companies [0] are even planning to add ads to their results, possibly on their free plans, which could make it harder for ad blockers to filter them out.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/12/perplexity-brings-ads-to-i...

I'm super curious to see how this ("the end of internet search as we know it") plays out with non-techy users. I strongly suspect that Google is "search" to many non-techy users the way that Internet Explorer was "the internet" to that same group.

Which I suppose leads to an obvious answer: device defaults will absolutely dictate what ends up being the go-to.

No thanks. Google may suck but at least it and similar platforms can lead me to random interesting links like Reddit and forum threads where actual humans give their human input on X or Y regardless of its nature.

LLMs seem to have a pretty fundamental problem: they can't learn beyond their training data.

Also, can you really say Google isn't AI? Pretty sure there's a whole expert system lurking in there...

Alta Vista didn't do anything at all like that.

Article like this keep proving me wrong.

Welcome to the next version of Google's mission to index all the world's knowledge and make money by serving ads against it, I guess, in this brave new world there doesn't need to even be the tiniest chance of a single cent getting to the person who wrote up the story.