How Google Search Is Falling Behind

Google is now noticeably worse than AI for many questions

A ruined signpost mostly buried under desert sands which reads the word ‘GOOGLE’. It’s a zoomed out view with a city in the background, in the style of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Midjourney remains illiterate

The point of search is finding, and Google increasingly fails at its core job. I increasingly use AI for questions I used to go to Google for, threatening their very foundation of organizing the world’s information.

For example, I was reading this lovely textbook about how, precisely, we’re fucked, and I had a question. Normally I would type this query into Google, but then I’d get shit like this, which is just more work and doesn’t actually answer my question:

In addition to being more work, these links don’t even answer my question, which is really why does burning 37 kg of gas produce more mass than you started with, how is this even possible?

Meanwhile typing the same query into ChatGPT answers my question immediately:

ChatGPT quickly tells me the answer (carbon bonds with oxygen atoms in the air), walks me through the math, and then corrects my…