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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

I’m an AI skeptic. I think a lot of these pronouncements about how AI is going to revolutionize the workplace and/or society itself are made by snake oil salesmen who are looking out for their own profits. And yet. I think skepticism can go too far.

One area I really do think AI is going to take over is web search. Primarily because web search these days is so shitty but that’s besides the point. AI is absolutely going to be a core feature used by the users of web browsers, and a web browser is the core of what Mozilla offers. They absolutely should be present in this space. And I hope, even though it’s an immense challenge, they might be able to offer an alternative to the aforementioned snake oil salesmen.

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>Primarily because web search these days is so shitty but that’s besides the point.

Obviously there are a lot of reasons for this. But I think one of the most important reasons is that there is so few organic interesting content destinations anymore.

Sure there are some neat shopify stores, news sites, and a few dedicated souls keeping up blogs. But so much of the casual browsing that the web once was has been obliterated by the move to social media.

And what hasn't moved is now a mess of AI generated fluff or link farms.

I used to think Google made search worse to increase ad revenue. And maybe it's tangentially related. But the stuff I used to search for and find and get inspiration from has moved to walled gardens. Reddit is one of the few remaining open web destinations left.

AI can't solve that problem.

> there is so few organic interesting content destinations anymore.

Are there really?

Or are they out there, just impossible to find, because search is fully captured by ad-related interests, and they're not running ads?

And if it were the latter, how would you even know if you weren't already aware of these little islands of organic discussion?

What's the use case of an ai chat built into the browser instead of just going to a web page that has it? I would think ai browser integration should be about automating it or something instead

I'm an AI Moderate, with much more sensible opinions - you can tell, I used a sensible-sounding name for myself! - and it's clear that the moderate position is to set it on fire. The only reason it seems useful for search is because AI vendor Google deliberately made their search worse to increase time on the search page. It's not actually in any way a use case for "AI".

Web Search isn't shitty. Google and Bing have become shitty. I use Kagi and it is exactly the seamless experience you are talking about.

I use Kagi as well. Search is still shit because so many of the underlying pages are ad riddled shit. We might not be using Google but so much of the web still targets it.

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