For a few years now, the news has been full of prognosticators screeching about the dangers of AI. And while some of it is potentially concerning, we all know that the news tends to lean into the catastrophic. So, I’ve been thinking about one aspect of the advent of AI that might actually be great – at least for the time being.
Once upon a time, the web was a level playing field. I remember my delight in being able to use algorithmic search results. In those results, even small webpages sometimes came up before big ones.
Then the commercialization of search started–and never stopped.
Don’t get me wrong, there were some things about the commercialization of search that were great. The theory was that people who were willing to pay to show search results typically had more resources and therefore offered better products or more interesting information. And those who complain about targeted ads have surely forgotten the early days where every ad was for Viagra.
Once Upon a Query
For a while, search engines like Google clearly separated algorithmic and paid search results–whereas some search engines leaned more heavily into paid results without identifying them as paid. And each of us used the search engine that fit our needs best. I was an Altavista fan until it got acquired by Yahoo and mothballed. Altavista was the algorithmic search engine beloved by nerds everywhere.
But eventually, paid search took over the web experience. These days, you can’t even search for information about hotels without getting an entire page of results from aggregators–so much so that the official sites of the hoteliers are actually hard to find. And don’t get me started about trying to file government documents; the actual government sites are buried in a slew of ads by charlatans who want to charge you money to file something that is usually just as easy to file yourself.
For Now, AI is Better
Now, recently, we’ve seen some hue and cry in the press about AI taking over search. Let me remind you that, a few years ago, the same hue and cry was about videos taking over search. All these articles seemed to imply that anything taking over search was a danger, because (reading between the lines) search yielded up purer, more factual, or less brain-rot results. These articles bemoanthat the golden days of search were over, and possibly that Google’s ad-related business model is doomed–though given the Google-hating so common in media, it wasn’t clear why that was supposed to be a cause for alarm.
Recently, OpenAI announced a browser called Atlas. Again, the alarm bells sounded for the death of search.
Then I started thinking, is that really a bad thing? When I ask AI a question, the AI answers based on what it knows. And mostly, it knows facts, not the potential for ad revenue. I also get web links as references in the answer. Those references seem to be more like the old days of search, where information took precedence over advertising.
Here’s an example, I searched for a flight to Samarkand. With Google Search, the entire first page was paid results. It found Turkish Air, which was good, but the first hit was Delta.
Now, Delta and Lufthansa are not the best flight to anywhere, in my experience, but guess what? Delta–the top result–apparently doesn’t even go there.
Meanwhile, Claude gave me a lot of useful information. But even AI is at the mercy of what is on the web, so it pointed me to an aggregator instead of an airline.
And so, exactly who is surprised that AI is replacing search? I mean, AI is helpful, but the problem is that search is broken.
Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop
Now the question is: where will the search ads go? What will be the next business initiative to divert my attention from what I want to see, to what advertisers want me to see? Ads aren’t in AI results yet, because the AI providers are getting paid for using their models. In that sense, Google search is more like the old over-the-airwaves TV model: the service is free, but the ads pay for it. Now, for AI, we seem to be in the equivalent of the early streaming days: pay for the service, but no ads. But we all know what happens next: pay for the service, and see ads, as well.
Meanwhile, let’s enjoy this time, which we might later look back on as a golden age of ad-free AI search results.