The future of search isn’t Google — and it’s $10 a month

Testing Kagi, a premium search engine for a broken internet

Is replacing Google worth $10 a month?

Why Google’s New AI-Saturated Search Page Will Be A Disaster

Google didn’t invent full-text search of the Internet – that honor belongs to early pioneers such as WebCrawler, Lycos and AltaVista. But for the last 25 years or so, Google has…

Google Was a Lifeline for Publishers. Now Some Are Thinking of Cutting It Off.

Reddit, Politico and others are weighing how—or even if—they can work with the tech company as AI tools supplant traditional searches.

Google Was a Lifeline for Publishers. Now Some Are Thinking of Cutting It Off.

Reddit, Politico and others are weighing how—or even if—they can work with the tech company as AI tools supplant traditional searches.

The enshittification of online search? Privacy and quality of Google, Bing and Apple in coding advice

Even though currently being challenged by ChatGPT and other large-language models (LLMs), Google Search remains one of the primary means for many individuals to find information on the internet. Interestingly, the way that we retrieve information on the web has hardly changed ever since Google was established in 1998, raising concerns as to Google's dominance in search and lack of competition. If the market for search was sufficiently competitive, then we should probably see a steady increase in search quality over time as well as alternative approaches to the Google's approach to search. However, hardly any research has so far looked at search quality, which is a key facet of a competitive market, especially not over time. In this report, we conducted a relatively large-scale quantitative comparison of search quality of 1,467 search queries relating to coding advice in October 2023. We focus on coding advice because the study of general search quality is difficult, with the aim of learning more about the assessment of search quality and motivating follow-up research into this important topic. We evaluate the search quality of Google Search, Microsoft Bing, and Apple Search, with a special emphasis on Apple Search, a widely used search engine that has never been explored in previous research. For the assessment of search quality, we use two independent metrics of search quality: 1) the number of trackers on the first search result, as a measure of privacy in web search, and 2) the average rank of the first Stack Overflow search result, under the assumption that Stack Overflow gives the best coding advice. Our results suggest that the privacy of search results is higher on Bing than on Google and Apple. Similarly, the quality of coding advice -- as measured by the average rank of Stack Overflow -- was highest on Bing.

Google’s AI search changes upended online publishing

Some publishers are preparing for a future without Google.

Google Search Changed: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of AI Search - Boxcar Marketing

Google Search is not longer about indexing the web, it's about being an AI assistant.

The end of the Googleverse

The last 25 years of Google’s history can be boiled down to a battle against the Google bomb. Is the search engine finally losing to its hijackers?

AI Mode is obviously the future of Google Search

The internet’s biggest search engine is going to be unrecognizable in just a few years.

Cloudflare's Matthew Prince has a plan to get Google and the AI oliigarchs to pay for your content even though many are used to getting it for free. He might have enough leverage to make them.

AI chatbots are blowing up the 30-year economic relationship publishers have had with search engines. Many think this will kill the web if not addressed. Google needs to change first. It's resisting. Cloudflare's Matthew Prince is going to try and make them.

Enough is enough—I dumped Google’s worsening search for Kagi

Enough is enough: I’ve jettisoned Google in favor of a search engine that doesn’t treat me like a product.

Once Unimaginable, Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search

The nuclear option is gaining traction as web traffic collapses and Google refuses to negotiate with content creators

History of Google

Google was officially launched in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to market Google Search, which has become the most used web-based search engine. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students at Stanford University in California, developed a search algorithm first (1996) known as "BackRub", with the help of Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg. The search engine soon proved successful, and the expanding company moved several times, finally settling at Mountain View in 2003. This marked a phase of rapid growth, with the company making its initial public offering in 2004 and quickly becoming one of the world's largest media companies. The company launched Google News in 2002, Gmail in 2004, Google Maps in 2005, Google Chrome in 2008, and the social network known as Google+ in 2011, in addition to many other products. The company set up a charitable offshoot, Google.org, in 2005. In 2015, Google became the main subsidiary of the holding company Alphabet Inc.

Bad news for Google — new survey shows 55% of people are now using AI instead of search engines

More users are turning to AI search for personalized responses

Search has its own bitter lesson

Human incentives to make content findable to your search matter more than technology