Search And Destroy

For decades, search has been the way we interact with the web. Soon, it may be the way we interact without it. Casey Newton: Google’s new AI Mode is a preview of the future of search. “In the near future, the company said, you would ‘let Google do the Googling for you’: trusting the search engine to search the web on your behalf, summarizing its findings, and sparing you the need to visit many websites yourself.
It was an appealing proposition to Google, which would soon begin peppering the product it calls AI overviews with advertisements; and for the search engine’s users, many of whom have already begun to replace their traditional Google searches with queries in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI products.
To the millions of businesses that rely on Google to send them traffic, though, the bargain appeared much worse.”