The Death of Search

This essay describes how searching the web is dying, replaced by asking an AI, and what that does to the person who stops searching. Drawing on the author's own daily use of these tools, it argues that the old method, turning a question into keywords and piecing an answer together from a list of links, is being abandoned because an AI answers at once. It separates a criticism of that old method, slow, ambiguous and costly in time, from a worry about what the shift leaves behind: the carelessness of taking a wrong answer as true, the falling value of raw knowledge against judgement, and the loss of a common place from which to check what is true. It reads the market signals, the move from SEO to GEO, and the likely arrival of advertising in AI answers, and it faces the author's own stake, since the tailored world he fears resembles the one his company builds.