Google AI search just made finding things online faster, smoother, and more intelligent. I should be thrilled. Instead, I’m sad, as yet another fun chapter of the web fades away.
Google AI Search Announcement – Another Huge Shift in Discovery
Yesterday afternoon, I sat down to research new sprinklers for my garden.
Forty-five minutes later, I had seventeen browser tabs open, a half-formed opinion about the decline of community forums, and a deep familiarity with a Blogspot page last updated in 2013 by someone who really, really loved restoring radios.
Sprinklers? What sprinklers? I looked up and realized I’d dropped down the search rabbit hole again.
And it sure was fun.
Which made Google’s announcement yesterday land with a particular kind of thud.
What Google AI Search Changes
The short version: Google has rebuilt its search experience around AI, and this time it isn’t a half-measure. The search box now expands as you type long questions in plain language. You can drag in images, videos, files, or open browser tabs and use them as context. The wall between “search results” and “AI chat” has been torn down entirely. Now, it’s one experience.
And for subscribers to the premium tiers, persistent AI agents will monitor the web on your behalf around the clock, pinging you when something relevant changes.
Boosting Efficiency at the Expense of Discovery
Objectively, this is a remarkable piece of engineering. It’s amazing how Google’s search has changed over the years. I still miss old-style search discovery.
Every defense of old-school search I’ve seen frames it as nostalgia, or stubbornness, or an irrational attachment to typing keywords. What gets missed is that the wandering wasn’t annoying to most people. It was just plain fun.
RIP Discovery, Hello Efficiency
When you hit that ‘enter’ key after typing in your question, you braced for impact. Sometimes your answer was at the top. Sometimes you had to hunt through website after website to find what you were after.
But that was the fun of the whole thing. Finding the quirky personal site, the obsessive hobby forum, the essay someone posted in 2007 and forgot about. This is the joy of discovery, the quick little dopamine hit.
Google has once more smoothed that out. Made the net more efficient. And it makes me sad.
An AI that hands you a synthesized answer at the top of the page doesn’t just change how you get information. It changes what information gets made. If the synthesis is good enough that nobody clicks through to the source, the sources lose their reason for existing.
The Old Discovery Search Still Exists!
The good news is that the human-curated web is still out there. You have to know where to look.
Ironically, Google’s new AI search helped me curate the following list.
A few places worth bookmarking:
- Marginalia Search — Built specifically to surface text-heavy personal sites and weird blogs that algorithmic search has quietly buried.
- Neocities — A revival of the personal homepage. People building their own little corners of the web, GeoCities-style.
- Ooh.directory — A hand-maintained index of thousands of independent blogs, organized by actual humans into actual topics.
- Tildes — A non-profit, invite-only forum built deliberately around long-form discussion, without ads or engagement bait.
- Lemmy & Kbin — Decentralized, self-governed communities that exist entirely outside the attention economy.
- Substack Reader — Independent newsletters by people who actually have something to say, written directly for their readers.
My Take: Efficiency Is Good, But I Miss the Fun of Discovery
I don’t think Google’s new search is bad. For a lot of queries like directions, business hours, quick factual lookups, anything where you just need the answer, and you need it now, Google’s changes do make it better.
I’ll use it. So will you, probably. You can see that I used it to help me write this article. It was able to answer the questions I asked it: where can I still find the old-fashioned search engines?
But “better at getting answers” and “better for discovery” are two different things, and I think we’re allowed to hold both thoughts at once. The version of search that made us click through, scroll past, and occasionally fall sideways into someone’s vintage radio restoration blog — that version was doing something for the ecosystem that the new version isn’t.
Maybe I’m wrong about this. Maybe AI summaries will send more targeted traffic to better sources, and everything will be fine. I’m open to that.
In the meantime, I’ve got seventeen tabs to close.
Jeanne Grunert is the founder of Seven Oaks Consulting and an award-winning writer and marketing expert. Her focus on content marketing and SEO combines a lifetime of storytelling experience with marketing expertise. She holds an M.S. in Direct and Interactive Marketing and an M.A. in Writing.