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The Day of the Search Engine is Dead
Sat Jul 20 2024

I've tried to remain loyal to the 'old ways' when it comes to searching for answers on the internet. I'm pretty skeptical of the AI Revolution - what with being a child of the 80s and watching Terminator and Terminator 2 when I was young enough to believe it could happen.

Actually it is looking like it really could now.

But that's not the point. The point is, Google is in deep trouble as a business. Which makes me wonder where YouTube sits in all this. But that's ponderance. Whilst building this new project (codenamed NextDD) I've spent much time learning a new programming framework called NextJS. And in so doing, I have used ChatGPT and Perplexity.ai quite a lot.

You see, I know enough about Javascript these days to know when something isn't likely to work when it's suggested by ChatGPT. But I might not necessarily know how to do something. That sounds weird... Anyway, if I ask ChatGPT how to do something, I have enough knowledge to have a good idea when it's been on the mushrooms versus when it's given me a good answer.

And in the main, when I've asked for something on this project it's given me really good answers, within a couple of seconds. Searching on Google has taken multiple minutes to get answers - and in some cases has not provided at all.

Perplexity.ai combines both the search capability of Google with the Chat interface of OpenAI.

Google is going to need to do something special to stay relevant. And I'm not sure it knows what to do or how to do it.

[EDIT: Update. I've just spotted GoogleBot trying to fetch various files from the server that haven't been around for at least a decade. If they're wasting crawl budget on stuff that's been giving a 404 error for over 10 years then no wonder they're struggling!]

2 Comments
  • From:
    D'vorahDavida
    On:
    Mon Jul 22 2024
    Even though I have no Javascript... I hear you about the brokenness of Google. I don't use it, but even DuckDuckGo is lame now. (pun intended). I remember back in the 90's, looking for something on the internet felt like searching the Encyclopedia Galactica. There was no preference for businesses or .gov or anything.... it was straight word related. That's how I used to find the most knowledgeable people on any given subject, and that could mean, back then, a hobby historian or a craftsman or collector of PEZ dispensers... you name it. It was MAGICAL. They locked the magician in the Tower of Babel. It's a crime against humanity. And watch out for the AI on shrooms. YIKES! :-)
  • From:
    MissTick
    On:
    Tue Jul 23 2024
    personally, I am sceptical about AI, but the copilot annoyingly pops out of literally everywhere already it feels as if nothing can be trusted on the webs anymore, while some info one can sanity-check, most of the rest you just don't have experience enough to judge competently...do you remember early WiKi days, when all the joy of learning new things has eventually faded away with the realisation that anyone can write anything there and it will look totally legitimate piece of information. I work in Education sector and there is a lot of discussions going on among the lecturers about how to spot a genuine student work based on AI-aided research of the topic among AI-aided authoring suggestions...Personally, yeah, won't trust this one either...once becomes widely used, it'll self-learn and by default, quality of knowledge will degrade based on averaging input...In the world of modern technology offerings, Trust No One...maybe it's just me, being old enough to distrust...