Google ponders making AI search a premium option Google is reportedly considering tweaks to its search engine, including making some AI features subscription-only - an ad-free search experience is seemingly not on the cards. The Financial Times has reported that Google is debating internally whether to shift some AI-powered search features to premium subscriptions, which a …
The free is already crap. I find I'm using Google less and less these days, and it's not because of the insidious data fetishism. I think peak Google Search was maybe 2010ish? It's been steadily downhill for the last decade, for sure (and it seems painfully easy to game by those shitty sites that try to redirect you to the less salubrious parts of the internet, and might even have succeeded if my blocking didn't tell it to piss off).
Icon (industrial hazard) because shit with added AI...is still shit.
I have been unreasonably irked today on multiple occasions, by Google's habit of randomly ignoring words I put in my search term.
"Searching for A B C, click here to search with C" - yes you moronic search engine, that would be WHY I included "C" in my query... grrrrr...
So, yeah. With you on this. Google, like everything else, has become enshittified.
Adverts I can tolerate as long as they're clearly marked and unobtrusive.
What I don't agree with is the behind the scenes tracking, profiling, and endless data fetishism "because the technology allows it to be done". Fuck that noise, don't subscribe, just walk away. They're not the only search engine around, and I'm sure before long the contemporaries will also have bolt-on AI...
It's entirely possible that demand will rise if they start charging. Years ago when I was on the board of a non-profit, someone claimed that charging a small amount for a service that we could provide for free gave it credibility in potential users' eyes, and they'd be more likely to use it. That seemed to be subsequently borne out by experience.
In essence, charging money for something can be a form of value signaling to the market. It's sort of the small-scale version of a Veblen good.
That does seem to be a psychological thing where we're at least trained to think that there's always a nasty catch when we get "something for nothing". Yet people still sign up in droves for "free" services where they're the product not the customer. That dissonance really disturbs me because it's there, but I don't understand it in the least.
Shrug. They're poor now. They're still faster in most cases than going to the library and grubbing through the Reference section.
Not that I oppose the latter option, mind you — I largely agree with Krakauer about competitive cognitive artifacts, and with Carr about acquired stupidity. And I have several shelves of reference books behind me that I frequently consult, and a lot more in softcopy. But there's an occasion for real research, and an occasion for "just remind me of something I already know".
Of course, for the latter, regular keyword search is far superior to conversational interaction with an LLM. Agrawala did a good ACM presentation on why conversation is a lousy UI. Chatting with machines is not a good way to get work done, and significantly misunderstands why and how humans use natural language. (I agree with Davidson and Rorty on how natural language works.)
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