Generative LLMs make it really obvious because they produce stylistically strong text that looks like a smart human wrote it. But maybe there’s a bigger moral here in the “Search uses AI under the hood, so…” argument and the fact that having search cut off is apparently a big crisis.

It turns out we’ve been offloading the cognitive work of organizing information to these ML based services for a long time! Is that… bad? Maybe? I mean google search had been going downhill for a long time as they lost the fight against SEO spammers, and the fact that there are not very many good alternatives has been really annoying.

My suspicion is that they basically know they’ve lost the fight against SEO spammers. This generative AI stuff is their path forward. There isn’t some static ground they can stand on to continue offering the service that people liked. We were all standing on a cliff over the sea being eroded by waves, and Google is giving up on building the scaffolding that held it together.

I dunno. It is annoying, but we don’t really have a right to ask them to pour resources into a dead-end product. And I can see why they wouldn’t want the next generation to get their impression of Google based on that dying product. But, the outcome seems to be a real PR mess for them. Part of that is how they’ve handled it, but part of that is probably just that events aren’t working out in their favor.