Google has finally outlived its usefulness. After a solid decade of watching it depreciate to the point of uselessness, it’s finally time to google “Google Replacement.” Google Search, as we know it, is dead. At the Google I/O conference today, per TechCrunch, the once-unquestionable search engine, Google, announced that it was replacing its famed “ten blue links” with, [sigh], “AI-powered interactive experiences” and “information agents” that will offer up an unreliable, plagiarized, and/or potentially hallucinated batch of results in the form of a chat window. (This was in addition to claiming that “AGI is now on the horizon” and “we are in the foothills of the Singularity.”) Yup, amid suffering an acute case of AI psychosis, Google threw it all away to be ChatGPT. The ad for it uses Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough,” though New Order’s “Age Of Consent” probably would’ve been more appropriate.
The reason for the change makes sense from the company’s perspective, especially considering how hard they’ve worked to make Search irrelevant. This new system builds on Google’s AI mode, and, in particular, the AI Overviews that are killing websites like the one you’re reading. According to TechCrunch, more than 2.5 billion monthly users seek help via AI overviews as opposed to the 1 billion users using conventional search. Why is that? Is it because the information is more trustworthy? Or could it be because that’s the first thing users see? Or is it because Google has been pushing non-advertisement blue links further and further down the page in favor of summaries that pull from websites without their consent for the last decade?
Google has allowed Search to deteriorate for years, positioning shareholder value over quality products. It began with the company attempting to grow search usage by changing the colors of advertised search results, making ads look more like actual results. Clicking the wrong link sends more ad dollars back to big G, while sending users back to Google in search of the correct answer. This was an effort toward keeping Google users on Google rather than the websites they hope to visit. Since then, Google has continued to get worse and worse, focusing more on Summaries of websites and later AI Summaries that simply treat information found elsewhere as its own, while leaving the sites that bend over backwards for the tech behemoth in the digital dust. This brings us to today, when a chatbot is the easy solution to the “keeping people on Google longer” problem.
All of this is “free” for now, with pro plans for those people who can’t stop testing the limits of their AI girlfriend. (Plans start at $100 a month—marked down from $250 a month because it was so popular!). But hey, at least you can take solace in the fact that every conversation with Google’s AI goes toward poisoning a small town. For those looking for a Google replacement, DuckDuckGo offers easy-to-use off switches for its AI features. There’s also a handy website to get the AI junk out of Google. Use it before Google notices it cutting into its bottom line.
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