In Defense of AI Search Engines
- Dr. Snap
- Sep 30
- 4 min read
Since the explosion of LLMs, there has been an emergence of alternatives to the traditional search engine. ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity, Phind, Gemini… to name a few.
All of these do one thing: they cut out the fat. Either because we’re tired of clicking on dead links, or because the modern article writer thinks the best way to explain the fix to a problem is by giving the audience the author’s ancestral lore when we didn’t even ask for it, and will forget as soon as we click off the page.
I don’t care how your great ancestors discovered a thing. I just want the thing. You can be a decent person and put it at the top/bottom of the page to summarize, but that’s almost never the case, because the optimization is for the Google algorithm, not the reader’s convenience.
That, or you see a news article telling us how scientists just discovered something big and bad and dangerous. Well, it must not be too important, given the article is behind a paywall, and requires a subscription to see it.
Truly it’s a mystery why such LLM search engines took off.
AI does all the scouring and sifting through the garbage, and then it summarizes what it finds, including citations. The only downside is you’re having to rely on an LLM to… you know… tell you what it knows, what it has found, and not hallucinate somewhere in the process.
I was inspired to write this because of a short-lived campaign against Perplexity that happened many months back:
Presenting legitimate criticisms against Perplexity’s practices, one cannot ignore the author’s searing distaste for AI scouring their content, mentioning their attempts to stop it multiple times. There is one paragraph at the end that gives me a chuckle.
“Not sure where we go from here. I don't want my posts slurped up by AI companies for free… [Citation: Fuck you, pay me]”
Here’s the thing: you aren't the first to ask for payment.
You know all those blogs that lathered their articles with SEO keywords and advertisement banners to the brim (enough to make your browser crash)? They also wanted payment. So much so they pumped out bullshit 24/7, consequently serving as the primordial soup for LLM technology.
It's because of this “fuck you, pay me” mentality that instead of just clicking on a website to get a recipe, we had to wade through Grandma Ethel's 50-page essay on her life story, complete with sources and citations, with the actual recipe buried somewhere.
Perplexity, as well as the other AI search engines, are the antithesis to a long history of bullshit being posted on the web thanks to that exact mindset: “fuck you, pay me”.
How about this: Fuck you, inform me.
Being informed these days is as important as having food and water. Stupidity is as rampant and deadly as ever. Sorry we skipped over your little blog and all its requirements to get that info, but the ecosystem has changed.
We don't have the time for signing up for accounts, giving you our emails, or subscribing, or dealing with the 500 layers of ads you have waiting for us as soon as we benevolently disable our adblockers for you and descend into the viral ridden jungle.
Say what you have to say or go away.
You want money? Get a job. Being paid to write on the internet is like being paid to walk on a sidewalk. You aren’t the next big thinker.
He who lives in a shit house...
Forbes, for example, after also writing a hit-piece against Perplexity, then proceeded to hit them with a cease-and-desist, accusing them of “stealing text and images in a ‘willful infringement’ of Forbes' copyright rights…”
Forbes also being on my shit list for being one of those sites that only let you view four articles before you must sign up for a monthly subscription.
And just as I was writing this, “Wired” came with their Perplexity slander (I’m not trying to lick a corporation’s boot, I promise) as well. Wired also being on my shitlist for the same reason.
SNAP forbid. We all know text is just so expensive to transfer over networks and drives!
Actually, no, here’s a tip: server costs wouldn’t be so high if you just served text like you’re supposed to – specifically, things that are actually important to say.
Wired has the gall to ask for compensation despite the fact that they clog up their website up with a bunch of “top 20 products” crap. Like a bum asking for money and then using it to buy crack. I guess he who lives in a shit house has no problem slinging shit.
These websites are trying to monetize words as if a paragraph can’t be found on almost every single website out there. Perplexity (and the LLMs that do a job similar to it) are merely practicing restitution. We deserve knowledge for free, and my wallet/privacy/PC doesn’t deserve to be fondled by a simple article.
Yes, as with every LLM-powered search engine: it hallucinates, it spouts bullshit, and it misunderstands context.
On the other hand, so do journalists. On the bright side, at least most LLM search engines won’t tease you with clickbait and hide the answer behind a wall of text or a subscription.
