2026-09-22 14:29 UTC
Ditching Google is good, but not for AI.
LLMs and their precursors were always how search engines compiled and ranked their search results. Google has been using some form of AI to build up its base of information for decades.
The absurd turn of the last decade was Google C-level pivot from engagement through useful results to engagement through bad results that force you to click around on the site longer. “How do we get more ad interaction?” became the question that dominated the development of their technology.
That’s what enahittified their website. Not “AI”.
Replies (1)
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@dreugeworst@lemmy.ml 2026-09-23 04:58
given that by LLMs, people generally refer to the transformer architecture, it definitely wasn’t how google always did search. they famously started out by using pagerank. now, back then this was definitely seen as AI, but what gets called ai by the general public has changed over the last couple of decades. now people use it almost exclusively to refer to deep learning models or even just llms. so yes, in a strict sense google has always used ai for search. but when the general public says AI now, they usually mean llms specifically and using that to replace actually going to the source websites is new