Great stuff from Cory Doctorow, as always:
I’ve been using Kagi, and I like it so far. The more I use it, the more there are things I like. If Kagi builds its excellent search results mostly from Google’s index (because Google is the biggest search index), it means Google can make its search results as good as they used to be, or even better:
Why wouldn’t Google just make its search results better? Rather than building a LLM for the sole purpose of sorting through the garbage Google is either paid or tricked into serving up, why not just stop serving up garbage? We know that’s possible, because other search engines serve really good results by paying for access to Google’s back-end and then filtering the results
…but they won’t:
Making search worse is good for Google. Reducing search quality increases the number of queries, and thus ads, that each user must make to find their answers
and:
If Google can make things worse for searchers without losing their business, it can make more money for itself.
I am not opposed to AI-generated search. I’m opposed to the big tech that runs it. Microsoft’s Copilot sucks (which is maybe why they force it down your throat by default if you use Edge or Bing), and I’m pretty sure Google’s AI search will be the same.