This is a good thing.

The future is curation and cultivation. We've been living in an age of information abundance and markets haven't adapted. The age of "crawl every website, index everything, and let people search it" is coming to an end. There is just too much content and too much of it is low quality. With or without AI.

This abundance problem isn't just a WWW problem. Movies, TV, music, podcasts, short form content, food, widgets, wibbles and wobbles all suffer from abundance these days. We are quickly exiting the age of supply chain driven scarcity and getting a marketplace flooded with options. Capitalism has delivered on basically everything it's promised with some asterisks and, if we don't give into consumerism, we want for little and have everything we need at our fingertips.

I've personally opened up my pocket book to curation services. I know brands that I trust. I know services that reliably surface quality content. I suspect the next few decades are going to trend towards services that separate noise from signal - and I suspect AI is going to be a big part of that.

Honestly, I've almost stopped Googling and have had personal success just relying on ChatGPT. It's pretty much taught me 3D animation and Blender to Unity workflows. Every time I wanted to know a Blender keyboard shortcut or what some Blender property was, or how to do something in Blender, the forums and documentation is so sparse and outdated. I felt ChatGPT got me a lot closer much faster. Especially when it tells you how to learn concepts you didn't even know existed.

Google results in the meanwhile have just become a pile of SEO-optimized fluff, and it's hard to engineer the search query around that besides sticking "reddit" on the end of it.

If I'm Microsoft, while I have Bing Search, I don't need it as much as Google needs Google Search as I have tons of other revenue streams.

Hurting Google by speeding the proliferation of this is going to be really interesting to watch.