Most of AI usage could be easily (with a little bit of effort) replaced by just searching for the info you need, but those days search results are so poor that asking AI gets so advantageous for the average user (that don’t care / don’t know about privacy and other costs and risks that come with it)
Do you think they did it on purpose?
“Not all of Google’s enshittification can be attributed to deliberate sabotage. Much of it is the result of neglect.” –Cory Doctorow on why Google is an absentee landlord
I’ve also heard Doctorow claim that there were internal emails that came to light during one of Google’s antitrust cases that showed internal arguments at google about whether they should deliberately make search worse.
Why?
Because they have no competitor. If you don’t find what you’re looking for after a search, what do you do next?
Another search. Which means you get to see twice the ads. It was a thoughtful procedure done to increase the number of searches that people do and therefore ad revenue.
Yeah he’s outlined exactly how Google enshittified search, following Ed Zitron’s original exposé. Fuck Prabhakar Raghavan.