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I’m sure I’m an outlier, but ChatGPT has cut my Google searches in half, no question. I no longer search for “answers”: definitions, explanations, code examples, recipes, or household tips… all of those were SEOed to hell.

It’s not because of how good AI is (it struggles) but rather how bad search had become. No one from the search provider to the website you land on wants you to have easy access to an answer because there’s no profit motive.

With paid AI services, providing better answers faster IS the profit model. I think something like Claude + Kagi (paid search) would be killer combo.

I’ve actually been kind of nervous about seeing more & more free AI services because that compute is expensive & I’d hate to see the market dynamics that ruined search happen all over again. I want to pay for services with my $ rather than my attention & my data.

5 comments

Claude 3 + Kagi is the exact combo I use. Claude has been my go to since discovering it didn't have the same level of curation / censorship models like ChatGPT and Gemini have.

I picked up Kagi the day they released their $10/mo plan and I don't see myself dropping it unless their quality degrades or price increases substantially. The search result I want is typically in the first few results, while Google was just ads the first few results, SEO spam, and then MAYBE the result I want near the end of the page.

Kagi users with the Ultimate plan can access most of the major LLMs via the !chat bang too (OpenAI, Gemini, Claude, and Mistral). Regular plans have access to the cheaper models only. Then there’s the FastGPT that runs when the search query contains a question mark

Really makes it easy to use when it’s all accessed from the address bar.

Providing better answers faster was the original advantage that Google had over the likes of Lycos, Yahoo, AltaVista, etc.

We're in the "early Google" days of AI when it's actually a nicer, better experience at least for some queries. When they figure out how to monitize it, it will become the same ad-optimized spam cesspool that we have with traditional search and web pages today.

I hate how right I think you are. The optimist in me thinks consumers have more tolerance to pay for AI tools vs search & media.

> With paid AI services, providing better answers faster IS the profit model

I hope this is the case, but aren’t today’s paid services all heavily subsidized by investment dollars, and brand new, and being used to find traction and validate MVPs? I suspect today’s prices and today’s business model isn’t sustainable.

What hope is there that AI won’t end up being much better and more clever at inserting ads in between captive audiences and the things they’re looking for than Google currently is? I get the feeling advertisers are salivating over all the new possible ways AI can sell things, way more than us consumers are excited about having search without ads…

I wish everyone wanted to pay for services with money rather than attention, but that’s a small minority of people for any given service, and we are totally hooked on a whole lot of free stuff. Ad-driven business models haven’t been declining, they’ve been growing, we seem to be stuck with them for the time being.

There is a certain type of search query I no longer use Google for, but I think that is probably the least common type of query Google handles. Directory searches, weather, sports scores, news, showtimes and shopping make up the bulk of Google searches, and AI chat seems to offer no to negative benefit for these types of searches. Maybe once there is reliable AI agents that will change, but the data seems to show AI is not eating into Google search market share.

Came here to write the same thing. Real search queries have gone down about a half for me. I also largely agree on the reason. Hallucinations happen, but a specific question + answer gets me still faster where I want to be. SEO and StackOverflow karma optimisations have basically made the usefulness of my typical search results go down in the last 5 years or so. Besides, many Google search "features" feel like useless patronisation. For instance, if I search for a thing that is likely on wikipedia, with the english title, Google now shows me the corresponding german wikipedia page first. Its just that I dont need the translated stuff to be able to understand it, and, even more important, english wikipedia articles are usually a little more detailed. Thats why I searched for the english title in the first place damn it, Google. But yeah, I get why you do this. Its just, that I am not the audience you are trying to make happy... So, since there is now an alternative, you basically lost me. I guess the big picture is, they actually dont care about experts leaving. Because, you know, we are a minority.