Here’s a well-written and well-informed article from the current MIT Technology Review on the demise of search engines as we know them: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/06/1108679/ai-generative-search-internet-breakthroughs/ (albeit with a positive PR spin, since the main interviewee is Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who describes AI Overviews as “one of the most positive changes we’ve done to search in a long, long time,” which as a pull quote is obviously targeted towards boosting Alphabet’s stock price).
My personal pull quote on all this, however, would be:
Zipf’s principle of least effort strikes again!
Keywords In and Out of Context 