Sam Hawken, writer-guy

AI search is good.

I want to find an article from a couple of years ago about how AI will change internet searches. I found its premise fascinating, and it’s only come closer to reality with each passing development in the AI field.

The article said the internet would restructure itself to be read by AI assistants instead of being the pile of garbage links it is now. Anyone who’s tried to search for an answer to anything lately sees how useless probably 99% of the results are. But AI-assisted search cuts through the SEO madness and renders a result synthesized from the available useful information. No more combining Reddit threads or ancient help forums to find your answer.

Because people will increasingly skip digging through the trash heap, information must be organized for AI to read. That means sites won’t generally be for humans anymore but for AI assistants to direct their humans to. It’s another kind of SEO, but hopefully, one that won’t collapse into uselessness quite so quickly.

I love AI-assisted search. Anything to keep me from sorting through the tripe to get the stuff I want is a godsend. Please give me a concise, informative summary any day over links with fragments of helpful things spread over a half-dozen sites.

Does this further erode the human factor on the internet? Sure. Maybe. But given what a dumpster fire the internet is, is that such a bad thing?