That's going to be the philosophical question of our times: do LLMs generate slop out of nowhere or does it simply amplify the slop machinery that was already there?
To me, a lot of problems with "building a search engine" don't seem to be problems with "building a search engine," they seem to be problems with "building a Google."
Nobody said a search engine needs to have fresh data, for example. Nor has anybody said a search engine needs to index the entire web. Yet these are two things every search engine tries to do, and then they usually fail to compare with Google.
To put it in another way, the reason why TikTok succeeded against Youtube is exactly because TikTok wasn't trying to be a Youtube.
I don't think TikTok "succeeded" compared to Youtube? TikTok succeeded in popularizing short-form video, but I'd argue that's a different product. YouTube is still king for longform video.
While there might be arguments for building a different product (and LLM-based search like Perplexity is trying it), there appears to be enough demand for a "good Google" that Kagi is trying to address.
If the product is long-form video then sure... but if the product is user attention? Film camera companies still make the best film cameras, but is the product film cameras or is it taking photos?
I'll say that a search engine needs to have fresh data. When I search for a phrase from a reddit thread I saw earlier, I want that exact thread to be in the results.
When I search for a brand new restaurant, I want to see a map entry for that restaurant and a link to a newspaper article, ad, or facebook post announcing the opening of that restaurant (though I probably won't click on the third).
not to mention that people mostly need wikipedia, the news, navigating the infuriating world of websites of big service providers (gov sites, or try to find anything on Microsoft's dark corner of the web), porn and brainrot
but it's awfully hard to make traction on a business that provides this.
My prediction is that in 5 years I'll try to drag an image from Chrome into Nemo, my file manager, and it still won't work.
I also predict that Mint still won't ship with a font manager.
That the workspaces tasklet still won't support dragging and dropping tasks into it to move them between workspaces.
That there still won't be a multi-step wizard for creating launchers on the desktop.
That there still won't be a proper shortcut format on Linux and people will be forced to still use symlinks, which are a terrible experience for folder shortcuts. And that file managers still won't support creating hard links.
That some applications still will have 1 pixel of padding at the top that prevents me from clicking the close button by moving my mouse to the top-right corner.
That Nemo still won't tell you that you need to make an appimage executable to run it.
That DE's still won't tell you that you need to install and configure flatseal to make some flatpaks actually work.
That you'll still be able to change your account password without changing the keyring password and then forgetting your old password and losing your keyring.
And that the Linux community will still be telling themselves that the real reason nobody uses Linux is because some lootbox game needs a kernel level anti-cheat, or because the latest gamer keyboard with rainbow-colored LEDs doesn't have a Linux driver, or that the average person just absolutely needs features that only photoshop/microsoft office have.
My hypothesis is that this has to do with the whitening of the UI.
Personally I love Windows XP because it's so colorful. The taskbar is blue. The start button is green. The window frame is blue, the close button is red. The sidebars are tinted yellow. Even icons like CD-roms aren't greyscale, but tinted purple instead.
Since then, people started removing color from everything. Colorful icons became monochrome, perhaps only so it could be easily switched from "light mode" to "dark mode" by switching their colors from black to white and vice-versa. Everything is now harder to see.
On Linux, most attempts to mimic retro GUIs fail because they can't tint different parts internal of a window of different colors, such as tinting only the sidebar a shade of yellow. This is rather ironic given that GTK's CSS theoretically could allow this. But in practice there is no stable public "API" for the classses used inside an application to allow users to re-style them easily with CSS. Even if I could do .sidebar { color: #ff0; }, I don't know the class name that my file manager used for its sidebar, for example, so I can't really do that.
In my opinion this the main reason modern UI's feel so bland and lifeless.
i have never thought about the fact that prior to win8(?) that windows explorer had different shades for everything. I have thought about the default windows 95/98 themes, as i have painted my bedrooms for 25 years the exact shade of one specific part of the "computer properties" window in win98, "extreme gloss". at night, it's pitch black and during the day, the high-gloss makes it very lively and bright. I can't imagine having some other color for a room i sleep in (the ceiling is white, i'm not a barbarian).
