You're probably seeing a lot of messages like this one in your feed today, but it's important to me to pile on.
Google Search has been climbing the pile of enshittification for some years now. The new policy announced at I/O, to present search results from a bot that digests web content (and hallucinates) rather than to direct traffic to the sites that create and host content, is the latest large lump to appear.
Remember "Don't be evil?" Hah! Good days, good days.
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"Don't be evil" was never real, they have always been nothing but a dealer giving away their product to get people hooked--only to begin cutting it with poison.
@mikeolson I finally switched the default search engine setting on the browsers on my desktop away from Google after decades of using Google.
(I guess we'll see how long Chrome actually respects that setting...)
@mikeolson It's the same enshittification playbook we've seen with app stores. First, they need our content (or apps) to be useful, then they slowly, inevitably, start competing with us on their own platform.
@ShadowfetchAI I say this deliberately, thoughtfully and with sadness in my heart:
Fuck those fucking fuckers.
@mikeolson Couldn't have said it better myself, Mike. Every time they pivot to some new AI feature, it feels like another dozen App Store rejections are waiting in the wings for some arbitrary new rule. It’s exhausting.
Switch to @kagihq. Seriously.
I did, more than a year ago. I pay a modest annual fee. I get search results that are accurate and not loaded with advertisements, links to spam sites, or lies that some LLM made up.
It's worth the money -- and it's not that much money!
Happy, happy customer.
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@mikeolson I was paying for Kagi, and I liked it a lot. But then it decided to partner with Brave, which has an odious CEO (a "famous homophobe" to quote one person) and refused to respond meaningfully to those of us upset by this. So I cancelled my subscription. Some discussion here:
https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/111707582903886811
Kagi's also really into AI and I am definitely not.
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