Raw LLM Responses

Don’t bring the AI costs into this. In 2019 Google released a memo stating that they were purposely degrading search functionality because the search was so good they weren’t selling peak ads. The meme of going to page 2 on Google was turned into a marketing pitch to executives. Google began killing search in 2020, years before AI came out. When Gemini was released they quickly learned they were selling more ads. This is by design. Not a reaction to cost. It predates the chatbot era. As people have pointed out they are translating your search query into language for their LLM to interpret (a great LLM that some people find helpful some time, but also shits the bed). This negates quotes and boolean expressions we’ve used for decades. Their goal as a company is to increase ad sales not traffic or even functionality. It’s not like people are going to start Binging things. This is enshitification. Their goal isn’t functioning. It’s making money. And this goes back to the memo that said they can sell more ads if users are navigating to page 3 and 4 and also if the first page was mostly sponsored links.