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Comment by biohcacker84 | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed an uptick of new search engines.

Likely because of the enshitification of google.

But what is most on my mind, is how the enshitification of google might have affected the global economy.....

Allow me to try and explain. Market efficiency is deeply tied to market information. And early google was fantastic at providing accurate and valuable information. It's hard to put into words, and I am not aware of any studies, but it felt like it sped up and/or made the whole economy more efficient.

And today it feels like that has been lost. And I wonder if there could ever be formal accounting to detect how much peak google contributed to.... not so much GDP, but how the economy functions. And compare to today.

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I honestly think this is as much the enshittification of google as it is the enshittification of the web. Early google was great in large part because the early web had a much better signal to noise ratio.

Going on for well over a decade we've been putting far more slop on the web than useful content. It really adds up over time.

I also feel this is largely why the GPTs have been so successful. They're if nothing else a lot less annoying than the web search experience has become.

I agree, though I think Google and all the adtech companies share a lot of the blame for the structure of the modern web.

The result is current web search returns static output from smaller models in the form of affiliate marketing listicles. Using a larger LLM directly on your query is simply better. There is a semantic/vector search happening with them such that there might be relevant terms or concepts even in a false answer. That's a step forward towards real information at least. That doesn't happen with the listicles.

> I honestly think this is as much the enshittification of google as it is the enshittification of the web. Early google was great in large part because the early web had a much better signal to noise ratio.

Hi again! Lots of respect for your work.

This thing I considered for a while but I am now certain that it cannot be the whole explanation.

Why? Because for me Kagi has consistently outperformed Google to the point where it feels like having Google 2009 back, just with some extra improvements: It finds the things I ask for and prioritise in a good way so I rarely have to look for page 2 or anything.

And DDG also enshittifies from its glory days of being an ethical alternative, where their AI prefers to e.g. explain a commercial service in their Assist section at the top, and not the common dictionary term.

For clarity, we have not changed anything with regards to our vision and there is currently no commercial intent infused into Assist, which can also be turned off. That said, I'd love to follow up on this example -- which query in particular?

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