I strongly disagree. Altavista had exactly the same function as google, but with worse results. Both linked to original sources. Early google had a very good idea with pagerank and that payed off.

An llm rephrashing / regurgitating other websites is imo different, because you loose the direct connection to the original source. Even if llms give sources they also directly give you a plausible (but unreliable) answer to your question. They are right often enough that you get lulled in to the false sense of security of not needing to read the original sites. I'd much prefer them to just give a clean list of sources like early google, but then why would you need an llm.

It's a pity that probably the main reason you'll need an llm to find anything on the web is to weed out all the llm-generated low quality garbage.

I don't personally feel surprised at all about this, but I am sad and angry. The open internet has been an incredible resource for billions of people and we're seeing Google actively destroy it for their own profit. That sucks.

The end of search traffic will kill all but the largest sites, and prevent countless new ones from being developed or getting traction. Given how global trends are going I expect the remaining sites to be increasingly monitored and censored/biased. I'm not looking forward to a world where social media means talking to some bots tuned specifically to addict you, and don't know too many people who are. Although big tech executives certainly seem to be in the latter group.

>Objecting to this from the user end seems a bit like complaining the original Google was trying to be too magic when what you wanted was AltaVista. This has been the inevitable direction the whole time.

Did AltaVista get replaced by the owner of the site to justify a giant investment?

You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. That all but ensures Google will face antitrust action in the US if the administration sours on them.

Exactly, why should sites give free bandwidth to the google bots hammering them for nothing in return? Outside of retail, there's no point in allowing google to crawl if you're not getting anything in return.

Also, as a user, I want websites written by real humans. I do not want generic LLM output always has the same boring style. I like human writing, perfectly native English, broken second language English, I don't care. Human writing is unique and makes reading a pleasure.

Of course, even Google the search engine has gotten worse at surfacing interesting websites. First came the SEO spam websites, now the slop websites.

I'm glad that alternatives like Kagi exist.

?? Google search results were in exactly the same format as Altavista results, only they weren’t filled with spammy nonsense.

Now, the spam is back and it’s coming from Google itself.