We've yet to see how enshittification will work it's magic on AI's. Maybe you're too young to remember AltaVista. Their search was OK'ish, and Google was slightly better - but AltaVista was the incumbent. It should have counted for something, but it was wiped out overnight. What killed AltaVista was them promoting paid search results without telling you. Ham fisted enshittification in other words.
Google resisted it for a while. But slowly ads crept to the top, and then became near indistinguishable from search results. Worse, SEO triggered by their ad business undermined their search, and they famously didn't fix that because the ad business is their cash cow. It is an indirect form enshittification, probably not even a deliberate move, but enshittification nonetheless. Enshittification is killing Google search.
Right now AI's look wonderful. The free ones as you say often replace search. But we are in the early phases. They are all surviving on VC money. That can't continue. Enshittification will hit the free ones, and when it does it seems like it will damage them far more than search. You can work around promoted search results by just looking at more results. How can you work around a hallucinating AI that's been paid to lie to you?
Oh absolutely - and I‘m not too young to remember AltaVista at all. Eventually everything new on the internet turns to shit. But that doesn‘t change what I wrote: Right now, ChatGPT is gold. It‘s the Windows 3.0 with Google being OS/2. Does that put a better age on me? ;-)
Google resisted it for a while. But slowly ads crept to the top, and then became near indistinguishable from search results. Worse, SEO triggered by their ad business undermined their search, and they famously didn't fix that because the ad business is their cash cow. It is an indirect form enshittification, probably not even a deliberate move, but enshittification nonetheless. Enshittification is killing Google search.
Right now AI's look wonderful. The free ones as you say often replace search. But we are in the early phases. They are all surviving on VC money. That can't continue. Enshittification will hit the free ones, and when it does it seems like it will damage them far more than search. You can work around promoted search results by just looking at more results. How can you work around a hallucinating AI that's been paid to lie to you?