Why pay for a search engine

I hope Kagi succeeds. But personally, I think the web is dead. And no search engine can save it.

SEO spam has been strangling the web for years. Now, genAI SEO spam has escalated that onto inhuman levels. To make matters worse, no one wants to post to the open web anymore because their posts are just going to drown in that sea of spam and only genai's data stealing bots will read them. As the amount of spam posted to the web increases, the amount of worthwhile content posted decreases. Eventually, nothing of value will be posted. (like facebook?)

You can lay the blame for the web's death squarely at Google's feet for allowing SEO to hijack search in the first place (or maybe the government is to blame for not breaking up Google's ad/search empire fast enough). Either way, the big companies all know the end is here and are gambling on genai to replace search. Already, places of knowledge are closing their borders and charging fees for genai to access.

We have entered the internet's dark age.

Fun aside: I think it's hilarious and fitting that Google's genai model sucks. And I hope they lose the genai wars (just out of spite, not because I think any other genai is worth a shit).

> I think the web is dead

The web cannot 'die'. Everything and everyone moves online.

Point one: A return to pre-internet days is not likely.

Point two: Walled gardens had their peak moment. The dangers of everybody relying on them for our entire online existence are more than apparent to anybody with a firing neuron (and despite appearances, our species is not entirely inane).

Ergo. The only path is forward, a more sane, less monopolized web. Build it and they will come.

The web is very much dead as a matter of fact. I don't think a search engine has he ability to filter out all the LLM garbage that's flooding the internet. Just look at stackoverflow and github. Ever since chatgpt was released, the contributions skyrocketed and the quality dropped off the face of the earth and into a dark oblivion.