Google now offers ‘web’ search — and an AI opt-out button

misk@sopuli.xyz to Technology@lemmy.world – 177 points –
Google now offers ‘web’ search — and an AI opt-out button
theverge.com
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I've been becoming irritated lately with search in other apps being taken over by their flavor of AI. I use the Microsoft Swift keyboard on my phone and it's now trying to inject their AI search results over my Google searches in Firefox and the results take me to Bing.

Then today I was watching a video on Instagram and the screen went off. I lost of the video as the app refreshed when I turned on the screen again. I tried to search for it but now IG search has been turned into a Meta AI search. It offers AI answers instead of the videos I was looking and it seems like it's the only option.

WTF are they messing up search across the platforms? Get off my lawn!

They‘re turning the internet into a mutated form of free TV. You only get to see what they want you to see and there are ads around every corner.

Of course the goal is to make you switch to a mutated form of pay TV. You still only get to see what they want you to see but there‘s a bigger pool of crap now.

To put it bluntly: After they cornered the market, they‘re killing the internet.

a mutated form of free TV.

Fantastic description!

Similarly, Casey Newton described it as "Managed decline", on which I riffed "big tech is moving on from the internet".

But yea, something relatively drastic is happening here. The big-tech end of the internet is no longer the internet we used to have. As you say: Mutated Broadcast TV.