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Comment by tensor | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I find it impossible to stomach continuing with ad-based models. I want zero ads in my life. Also, with newer AI the old search model is done for. Search will shift, should shift, to AI agents doing the search along with reading through various pages before giving accurate summaries with links. In that model users won't be exposed to ads as many searches won't even require them going to the end pages.

Thus, there needs to be new models for how things work, both for end websites but also for search, models not based on ads.

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I agree with you about ads.

But I couldn't disagree more about search. AI search is a lot like asking your friend. Your friend who relies on their memory and refuses to look things up online. Searching with AI requires too much brain power because you have to verify everything it gives you.

Of course, that's becoming the case with ads embedded in the search results, too. Kinda bleak, really.

Personally, I just don't trust anyone to summarize content for me. Call it my own weird quirks and biases, but I'm maybe 50/50 on conforming to populist sentiment, and if it's a story I even mildly care about I don't want to take that coin flip. I'll just take the time to at least skim the article, then read the abstract of any acedemic sources it points to.

The new generation of AI search will likely use traditional indexes or RAG followed by the AI reading the results to do higher level filtering. If you look at how search gpt, kagi experts, or the hugging face llm search works I think that will be the direction.

Possibly even personalized agents could do this locally. You'll have to verify exactly as much as you do currently with old-style search, but ideally with much higher quality results and ranking, and no ads. For simpler things likely the answer will be directly trust worthy.

The AI agent will subtly serve you ads. OpenAI calls it “publishing partnerships”:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40310228 “Leaked deck reveals how OpenAI is pitching publisher partnerships” 303 points by rntn 88 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 281 comments

I would be surprised if paying for the AI agent would stop it from also taking money from advertisers, just like buying a copy of Microsoft Windows doesn’t stop meaningless ads showing in the start menu etc.

The Kagi AI agent does not. And a locally running one will not. Like it or not for those willing to pay the ads are going away.

> Personally, I find it impossible to stomach continuing with ad-based models.

Ditto, but I also feel the same way about subscription models.

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