Instead of displaying links, Arc Search's “Browse for Me” feature reads the first handful of pages and summarizes them into a single, custom-built, Arc-formatted web page using large language models from OpenAI and others. Critics say that's a problem.
I see the advent of AI browsers much like ad blockers; the web has become increasingly user-hostile and users are pushing back. Advertising was never sustainable, and that has only become more apparent over the past decade. This is a long-overdue comeuppance. The cost of the advertising economy is extraordinary and cannot be measured in mere dollars.
I miss the internet from the 90s, when sites were information-dense and operated mostly as a public service by enthusiasts, usually for free. Of course, that was not sustainable as the Internet became more popular, because the cost of serving a thousand people was, like, couch-cushion money, but the cost of serving billions of people…well, I don’t have millions of couch cushions to plunder.
But also, the cost of web site operation today is artificially high, largely because of advertising and the incentives that an ad-driven market creates. What was once a few KB of text is now many MB of ads, scripts, layouts, and graphics, or even GB of videos, all for the sake of manipulating users into viewing more ads. Commercial sites do not compete on the quality of information; they compete over ad impressions. This was not borne out of need, but out of economic incentives that are misaligned with the needs of society, individuals, and, yes, even content producers.
This isn’t new, of course. I remember the same conversations back in the 90s and early 2000s. First with Sherlock, then later with Google.