That's impossible unless the web reverted back to 2010, when walled gardens weren't prevalent, making your own blog was common, doable and often done by those without programming experience, forums were alive and well, and people wanted to share things on the web rather than group chats.

It's perfectly possible if they start downranking sites full of ads.

But an ad company will never do that.

There are plenty of blogs, plenty of obvious low quality spam to block, plenty of features to enable allowlist and blocklists. To think for a second that the Google search experience couldn't be made significantly better at the snap of a finger by Google is to live in a fantasy world.

All that means less revenue, that’s a fantasy

Sure, sure, except for this minor issue that the argument I was responding to didn't mention revenue, they talked about the state of the internet. So why again are you responding to my counter with a straw man?

> No one wants these "AI" summaries

Not true, I use them all the time. They have links available for when I want further information, which is not very often.

I never use them. Especially when they can be completely wrong (and the problem is how will you know that it's wrong?): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44142113

you are linking to “AI responses can make a mistake” post???! Google’s top 86 search results are ads :)

Simply untrue. I don't want it back. I use ChatGPT's voice transcribing to do 99% of my searches today.

Google does need to adapt or die

Then what explains people doing millions of web searches on perplexity/chatgpt/claude?

they are losing more and more search to “AI.” my 12-year old never uses Google and couple of times I asked her to “Google it” she literally rolled on the floor laughing and called me a “boomer” :)

I wonder if "boomer" is going to become a generic term for "my parents' generation".

100%

Already has been for a while now. Also just anyone that isn’t hip to the latest trend of the day.