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162 points lr0 | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.016s | source
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depingus ◴[] No.41834664[source]
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).

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RavlaAlvar ◴[] No.41834885[source]
Let say government nationalise google search or force to make it a non profit 15 years ago. How would that prevent SEO from happening? Isn’t SEO an inevitable outcome of website trying compete for attention? How would anyone prevent it from happening?
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1. bryanrasmussen ◴[] No.41835620[source]
>Isn’t SEO an inevitable outcome of website trying compete for attention?

different Search engines with different rules and so forth would lessen the benefit of the O part, because it seems unlikely you could efficiently optimize for every particular algorithm and ruleset.

Perhaps SEO is an inevitable outcome of one big dominant search engine and also made worse by that search engine not really giving a shit about making its search work that well for years and years but only about how many ads they could push at people and how much they could charge for those ads.

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2. RavlaAlvar ◴[] No.41837268[source]
I agree with your assessment that maybe this is an inevitable outcome of one big dominant search engine.

But I would argue one big search engine is unavoidable since no one would want to use the second best search engine.

Google search didn’t come the best because the other service like mail map and YouTube. So breaking up Google does nothing to stop google search from being the monopoly it is today.

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3. stvltvs ◴[] No.41837453[source]
If different search engines optimized for different niches, there would be an user base for "second best" search engines. For example, nothing beats Bing for porn search.