AI is taking over online searches. At the moment, that’s good news - the AI summaries are increasingly reliable and helpful. In the long term, they might be so good that paradoxically, they contribute to the enshittification of the internet. It’s a big, complicated, nuanced AI world. Let’s go through a little history, then talk about Google AI Mode and other advances in AI-driven searches and how they may go right - and wrong. Beginning in the early 2000s, a large part of the global economy began to be organized around Google searches. A Google search would display a list of websites; we...