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).

> Eventually, nothing of value will be posted. (like facebook?)

I'm in a couple of dozen groups on Facebook and they produce interesting and thoughtful content every day.

Of course I wish they were on the open web, but don't blame the network.

The open web as a concept doesn’t really make sense anymore, at least for written content.

Since by definition it will need to be open to the majority of the world’s population, regardless of writing skill, but the bottom half of writers are already indistinguishable from cutting edge LLM output.

And no one can install some sort of worldwide identity verification system, or it wouldn’t be ‘open’ anymore.

Are you talking about the quality of the prose or about the content of writing? An LLM can only act on information that has been put into it by people, while a real person can create new and important information – even a person with low literal or oratory skills.

Both.

How do you differentiate between say 20 real people with low skills and LLM output lightly edited by a high skilled individual?

If I could differentiate between it, then what the real person wrote or said would still have a separate value, even if the prose was bad.

Consider a normal criminal court case. Most witnesses don't know how to express themselves well neither in the written nor spoken word. Their testimony still holds value and gives important information.

But you can’t differentiate it… unless you have some method that you can share?

Of course we can separate fact from fiction if we need: By checking up things ourselves. There is only 1 reality and only 1 truth.

Why wouldn’t the fake output mimic real human output after some light editing?

And it’s not like a live video call, where a few seconds delay would be noticeable.

There would still be a real human being, just as smart as you, behind the LLM, but pretending to be say 20 different lower skilled people.

Yes it would mimic real human output. That's why we have to verify if the subject matter is important. Knowing who to trust or not is not easy, if we have to be sure we have to do some work.

I still don’t get how this helps you differentiate between them… or do you mean to assume both are genuine human outputs regardless, if the information proves to be genuinely true?

If the information proves to be true, what does it matter?