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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this is impressively brutal. I don't know anything about search or ranking these days, but the way insist on putting an AI summary at the top of every page definitely is good evidence for the theory that Google doesn't give a damn about the people doing all the actual work that makes a search engine valuable.

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They must be planning on milking what value can be had from the web to which they used to be the entryway, and clash with OpenAI, MS and Apple over AI trained on curated datasets, to layer some semblance of a business model over it. And I say milking because the relationship to websites is now parasitic for the most part.

I started using Google search like ChatGPT, for asking questions and reading the AI responses. In many simple cases, it suffices.

As an actual search engine, Google search is still not bad, but now one of the many, without a large edge it used to have; I try it when DDG does not bring results I want, or I query DDG when Google does not bring results I want.

If you are doing this, I suggest giving the Perplexity app a try. It's very fast, convenient, and accurate. It was Perplexity, and not ChatGPT that reduced my Google usage.

I'm not really sure what option Google has. It's do or die.

they could fix google search instead

Google has always been a middleman between information producers and information consumers, taking slices of attention and converting that into money. If they kill off the information producers, they're dead anyhow.

Same for Amazon reviews.

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