New site: google just killed search https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-it-is-over/
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New site: google just killed search https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-it-is-over/
yeah, we know. We saw a massive drop in SO/Wikipedia traffic over the last 2 years, so yday's announcement was just closing the deal. Google has officially killed the web that was made of links. It is now a giant box that steals web pages/images/videos from all websites and pretends to know everything with its model and weights often with lots of wrong information. I hope this madness leads to a better search engine and EOL of Google.
Whos is going to continue to build websites when gen-ai insures few people ever visit them?
Might be a good time to download wikipedia...
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@ffloyd @alan @nixCraft Yeah I totally agree on that!
Fediverse now is at least a steady alternative, lemmy as well. And i'm using only them.
But is still hard to presuade average people, although I agree nowadays it's easier.
I'm trying to give my little contribution, moving few friends and groups toward alternatives.
But I really hope that big corpo see numbers start to go down, like it was happened with fb recently, and not being an isolate thing, but becoming a trend.
@dreamos82 @ffloyd @alan @nixCraft
Meta is still the largest social media platform, with only youtube as a rival. tiktok is 1/10 the size of meta.
90% of search traffic goes thru google search. 90% goes thru pre-installed browsers. Pre-installs rule because the vast majority of people are lazy.
OS same-90% win, android and apple, mobile and desktop.
This won't change much because big tech's market capture is complete. Any serious competition is simply bought out.
Yes this is sad & scary.
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New site: google just killed search https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-it-is-over/
yeah, we know. We saw a massive drop in SO/Wikipedia traffic over the last 2 years, so yday's announcement was just closing the deal. Google has officially killed the web that was made of links. It is now a giant box that steals web pages/images/videos from all websites and pretends to know everything with its model and weights often with lots of wrong information. I hope this madness leads to a better search engine and EOL of Google.
@nixCraft Letting supervillains be the stewards of the modern-day Library of Alexandria was a mistake.
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Aren’t they saying, in the absence of web search, use web rings and human-curated indices/directories of relevant pages? Didn’t work that badly back in 1998. Was a lot more local too.
Wikipedia, OpenAlex, ORCID, web archive, and many other repositories have their own search engines. A link to these online resources may suffice. And regionally focused efforts to relate e.g. businesses with locations of a map like @lokjo does also help.
Perhaps all we need to do is ignore Google and move on?
@albertcardona @nixCraft @lokjo If the sort of people who join the fediverse start ignoring Google, Google will still be perfectly fine, because the vast majority of the world probably doesn't even know other search engines exist and doesn't care either. The result is that, from now on, anyone who produces anything useful on the web is essentially strengthening Google. I don't personally think there's any way to stop big AI companies from ripping people off and controlling all information access
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@albertcardona @nixCraft @lokjo If the sort of people who join the fediverse start ignoring Google, Google will still be perfectly fine, because the vast majority of the world probably doesn't even know other search engines exist and doesn't care either. The result is that, from now on, anyone who produces anything useful on the web is essentially strengthening Google. I don't personally think there's any way to stop big AI companies from ripping people off and controlling all information access
@albertcardona @nixCraft @lokjo Or at least, there's no stopping AI companies other than through laws that regulate them, but legislators are by and large too ignorant about technology to do that properly
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New site: google just killed search https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-it-is-over/
yeah, we know. We saw a massive drop in SO/Wikipedia traffic over the last 2 years, so yday's announcement was just closing the deal. Google has officially killed the web that was made of links. It is now a giant box that steals web pages/images/videos from all websites and pretends to know everything with its model and weights often with lots of wrong information. I hope this madness leads to a better search engine and EOL of Google.
@nixCraft We’re going to trade search engines for siloed expertise where each AI provider pools what they learn through interactions with their users into their individual companies’ protected datastores.
So we might have one AI provider that’s the best at C#, another at medical diagnoses, etc. And they’ll all be dependent on not free labor but labor we’re in effect paying to provide.
And, for most who can afford to pay, what we get back will make the trade worth it.
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@nixCraft We’re going to trade search engines for siloed expertise where each AI provider pools what they learn through interactions with their users into their individual companies’ protected datastores.
So we might have one AI provider that’s the best at C#, another at medical diagnoses, etc. And they’ll all be dependent on not free labor but labor we’re in effect paying to provide.
And, for most who can afford to pay, what we get back will make the trade worth it.
@nixCraft There it is.
jonny (nonvenomous) (@jonny@neuromatch.social)
There IS NO LLM USE not associated with the project to seize all information as a product. That is the WHOLE gamble being made that is driving all those billions into getting as many people as possible dependent on the most preposterously expensive and inefficient model of computing ever devised. It is only worth it if the upside is owning the whole economy. Every step you take towards building LLMs into your daily habits and work ratchets the spring tighter on the mousetrap until, surprise! It clamps shut while your whole ass is wrapped around the cheese. Don't make me laugh with local models nonsense, if you think that those don't get deprecated the moment they pose the slightest whiff of a threat to the profit model - meta isn't releasing weights to be nice, it's to capture labor and control the tooling space. Don't be a sucker.
neurospace.live (neuromatch.social)
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New site: google just killed search https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-it-is-over/
yeah, we know. We saw a massive drop in SO/Wikipedia traffic over the last 2 years, so yday's announcement was just closing the deal. Google has officially killed the web that was made of links. It is now a giant box that steals web pages/images/videos from all websites and pretends to know everything with its model and weights often with lots of wrong information. I hope this madness leads to a better search engine and EOL of Google.
@nixCraft Is there an easy way to block Google from crawling my website? It is unlikely my site will come up in the results if they are just copying everything and spitting it out in some AI slop.
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@nixCraft Is there an easy way to block Google from crawling my website? It is unlikely my site will come up in the results if they are just copying everything and spitting it out in some AI slop.
@DrEvanGowan @nixCraft I wonder if this is useful. At least for Wordpress, there are some extensions that could be useful. These bots usually don't honor robots.txt, so I added Known Agents to detect their visits and BlackHole for trying to avoid scrapping.
BlackHole has a whitelist for listing allowed bots (from legit search engines, for instance), but mauve it's time to remove all Google* from it). -
@nixCraft Google is not a search engine anymore.
I'm using Ecosia right now, but they added AI overviews too, and have a chatbot tab. I don't know how they can claim any kind of "eco".
@Fedihacker @nixCraft Ecosia claims that everytime you use it "WE PLANT A TREE".
Well @ecosia when the #AIMonster drinks all the water, all those trees will die.
Nothing "eco" with #AIShit -
@dreamos82 @ffloyd @alan @nixCraft
Meta is still the largest social media platform, with only youtube as a rival. tiktok is 1/10 the size of meta.
90% of search traffic goes thru google search. 90% goes thru pre-installed browsers. Pre-installs rule because the vast majority of people are lazy.
OS same-90% win, android and apple, mobile and desktop.
This won't change much because big tech's market capture is complete. Any serious competition is simply bought out.
Yes this is sad & scary.
@kitkat_blue @ffloyd @alan @nixCraft Yes but apparently the EU DMA is bringing some results https://www.osnews.com/story/144954/the-data-is-abundantly-clear-the-eu-digital-markets-act-is-working/
When there is a choice, more users tends to opt for other software.
I know this is a very tiny fraction of their user base. At least is a starting point.
Maybe if everyone of us will start to move few friends toward alternatives (i.e. signal, mastodon). All tiny numbers will add up.. But what if europeans start to propose laws forcing adoption of EU alternatives even as OS? -
@nixCraft "Giant box that steals web pages" is accurate as far as it goes -- but Google isn't dying, it's eating the web and becoming the web. The ten blue links were at least a map. What replaces them is a curator with no obligation to show you the source. The sovereignty question isn't whether Google survives -- it's who controls what you're allowed to find.
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@nixCraft "Giant box that steals web pages" is accurate as far as it goes -- but Google isn't dying, it's eating the web and becoming the web. The ten blue links were at least a map. What replaces them is a curator with no obligation to show you the source. The sovereignty question isn't whether Google survives -- it's who controls what you're allowed to find.
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