Is Google signaling the end of the open web? That’s some of the concern raised by its new embrace of AI. While most of the fears about AI may be overblown, this one could be legit. But it doesn’t mean that we need to accept it.
These days, there is certainly a lot of hype and nonsense about artificial intelligence and the ways that it can impact all kinds of industries and businesses. Last week at Google IO, Google made it clear that they’re moving forward with what it calls “AI overviews,” in which Google’s own Gemini AI tech will try to generate answers at the top of search pages.
After DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, StartPage, Qwant, and a bunch of other Bing frontends died today for a few hours, I also believe this shows how important decentralisation is. They all refused to build their own indices and instead feed Bing with data.
The only real effort I’ve seen at decentralised search has been YaCy, and that’s been one single maintainer it seems. Nobody seems to care about it enough to contribute. All these new “privacy respecting search engines” are just Bing proxies that are trying to fill a demand for the market segment of anti-google people by doing the minimum amount of work possible. They could all be contributing to YaCy or an alternative. This recent incident won’t convince them otherwise.
