[ben30]

The early days of Google were magical, with its ability to answer our questions instantly and without distractions. It's a shame that now, ads and SEO strategies have taken over and made the search process more cumbersome. It feels OpenAI's public chat bot has the potential to bring back that simple, distraction-free experience of finding information. However this simplicity feels in conflict with how Google as an advertising company makes it's money.

[user3939382]

> bring back that simple, distraction-free experience of finding information

This is what I got with Kagi which is why I switched to it. I'm pretty hard to please and always have nits so it's rare I'd cheerlead for a brand but the product is great. If anything my fear is that it'll be like everything else that was good at first: pressure to grow skyrockets the price, or they succumb to the pressure to mine/sell data, ads, etc. Time will tell.

[acdha]

That last part is key: search didn’t just happen to get worse, chasing ad revenue made it that way. Once Google started allowed ethically dubious SEO like Quora’s search cloaking it marked the end of the era where search quality was the main focus.

It’s very easy to imagine tools like ChatGPT following a similar arc, only harder to discern if it’s not legally required to mark when advice is sponsored.