when they aren’t hallucinating, what they’re capable of is still impressive, though it’s a bit like watching a dog walk around on two legs – fun, but not exactly an efficient way to get around.

Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day says AI search is worse than conventional search and could potentially kill the web. AI search feeds on existing blogs, articles and other websites, while removing incentives for people to create those things. In this scenario, generative AI is like a wild animal that kills everything in the food chain that feeds it and then starves to death.

Also, Cory notes that we gave Google a monopoly on search and Google in return was supposed to protect us from search spam, a job at which it is utterly failing. “Google literally has one job: to detect this kind of thing and crush it.”

For what it’s worth, I’ve been using ChatGPT for search, and have also used the Perplexity AI search engines. They’ve been fine for quick hits; I haven’t tried either on deep research.

Google is still good for some things, but I’ve noticed it falling down in two areas: Product reviews (I go to reddit or Wirecutter for those) and how-tos, where Google serves up a half-dozen videos before it gets to the actual instructions I’m looking for.