I don’t know that people I know would be willing to switch because of those rough edges.

If something is summarised, people (actively excluding the neurospicy crowd here ) will not check unless you force them too. This is established fact. See news. See education. See politics. See science.

If people do not check, they do not actively engage. They build no knowledge about subjects.

They are left with opinions based on the (dis)information presented to them.

Anyway, no good will come from any of this. But you wouldn’t know it from looking it up on Google or seeing the news. And that’s exactly my point.

I currently like how, for example, Lumo does it. It provides all sources used for information so that you can check it freely.

If searching doesn't become easier, the primary sources of information will become the channels that are the TikToks of this world.

I'm not convinced what the lesser evil is.

On a more practical note:

Anybody have a list of ranges and user agents I can use to ban Google from ever again indexing my website(s)?

Are their “agentic search assistants” coming from the same places and with the same user agents?

This shift means that “searching the web” will increasingly be performed by AI agents rather than humans. Instead, people will focus more on acting on the information those agents provide instead of manually clicking links. [My emphasis].

That they frame it as “clicking links” instead of processing information to create your own understanding and worldview, is a very smart and carefully constructed rhetorical trick.

Why spend your energy “clicking links”, which sounds like a useless and boring task, instead of working with the information they want to give you, within a context they control, exposed only to their ads and storylines, that you are then promised you can “act on”.

Like you have any grasp left on what you are acting on…

This whole thing is a worse kind of thought-control than whatever Orwell, Bradbury and Huxley ever came up with. Combined.

Edited a typo.

For anyone that wants to turn it off
https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/381948916/how-to-shut-down-and-delete-the-ai-mode-from-google?hl=en

It will be wrong on purpose.

The vast majority of third party search providers just use the google or bing index. I see a not so distant future where they stop selling access to the index. Killing off those other search engines over night.

However there are ample search engines that are more privacy focussed and (mostly) sans AI: startpage.com, search.brave.com and the already mentioned DuckDuckGo.

At first I read "shit" instead of "shift" and it made sense all the same.