this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2026
147 points (96.2% liked)
Showerthoughts
43884 readers
324 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Apologies if I'm reading too much into what you've said here, but it reads to me as if you're implying search engines couldn't keep up with the volume of the internet and AI is the logical next progression.
Search engines actually worked pretty amazingly at one point, but then were kneecapped because Google et al were more interested in advertising money than useful search results. Then when they needed an excuse to justify ludicrous spending on AI, they shoehorned AI into web search where it is very much the wrong tool for the job if you want accurate, high relevance results.
It's more like the librarian has taken it upon themself (for some reason) to write a book that is the mathematical average of every other book in the library. Then when any patron comes looking for a specific book, the librarian just hands them this slag instead hoping they won't notice the difference.
Now that said, I 100% agree that running a good "old-style" search engine does still take a huge amount of computing resources, but I'd be surprised if the requirements were anywhere near what is being thrown at training LLMs.
Honestly, best description of LLMs for search I’ve seen so far.
Ah, so you're saying it's more of an enshitification thing that killed the search engines? I can believe that to an extent.
But as the amount of content on the Internet has increased, it's also become more difficult to narrow the queries to get what you're really looking for. The main thing for me with AI is it allows you to refine the search without discarding the context of what you have already tried.
If the content were more organized to begin with, though, I suspect you could drill a bit deeper into the knowledge tree and then apply your conventional (non-AI) search over a more relevant branch?
Let's not forget Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and content farms which were actively corrupting (adding entropy to) search engine results even before LLMs, yay capitalism. They've dialed it to twelve with LLMs.
Heh, I had actually forgotten about that. It seems almost quaint compared to where we're at now.
It's not just increase in content. Search engines don't even do searches based on keywords or logic operators anymore. They run some NLP on the query input and do who knows what to give you results. If we could still make searcher that contain specifically certain terms or exclude others, it would be still possible to navigate into the mess
Google has a financial incentive for you to spend more time on their site. If you are gone in one click, you see less ads. Same problem with dating platforms. The user's interest is in conflict with the platform's.
There are leaks/interviews how their search and ads teams were at a conflict internally, ofc money won.
Does the ad revenue account for people who hardly realize the ads are even there?
If you hardly realize they're even there, you're more likely to click on them since most advertisers pay to be shown on relevant searches, not random ones.
E.g if you run a pet food store, you'll let Google show your store whenever pet related things are searched for. And that's where having a blog comes in handy, you can have it show articles relevant to the search rather than just the store front page.
Search algorithms are meant to work regardless of the amount of content or sorting. Page rank used to be a game changer back then to sort websites by relevance.
AI has no search algorithms. It's about 1000% less efficient, because its algorithms are built for token prediction, not sifting through websites.
So yeah, my money is on enshitification.
It doesn't need to; It just relies on the normal web search to get better data than what it could generate from its training data alone. This wasn't a thing with the early popular LLM interfaces, which is why they were ridiculously bad. They still make plenty of mistakes, but at least now you get a link to what it looked up (so you can facepalm when you see it's way too generic and your question was very specific, so the generated answer is still wrong)
I often get dead links or those that state something completely different from what the LLM says. If we'd just cut out AI as the middleman, oh well. 🥲
AI is very much the right tool for sorting through the high volume of garbage search results looking for nuggets of relevance. Google built it into search because if they didn't, they would be cut out of search other than as an MCP provider. I'm sure they'd rather not spend compute running an AI summary of every single query, but they would be out of business the moment someone else provided that service.
Now is it perfect? Of course not. Verify from sources, but you get to those relevant sources faster and easier with AI doing the sifting because Google search has grown so fucking worthless.
AI isn't better than Google was, but it's better than Google is.
Google is not at fault for search becoming so terrible. Everyone who engaged in SEO is. The internet would have sloppified much sooner if Google and other search engines had not relentlessly pushed back against SEO and continuously modified their algorithms. Lots of people definitely underestimate the extreme negative impact of SEO, and the lengths that search engine operators have to go to to have their service be at least somewhat useful. As soon as you have a search algorithm, people will attempt to manipulate it.