Enshittifying Search With AI
The Engine
This isn't a story about Google, or Bing, or Duck Duck Go. They've got their own problems with AI1. Those are stories for another time.
No. This is a story about a search engine called Meilisearch2 and the dangers of adding AI where it doesn't belong.
How It Started
Meilisearch is a free, open-source3 search engine. You can download and use it without a price tag. It's badass. I've used it as the backbone of my Grimoire4 for years.
There's a movie search demo on the Meilisearch home page. Results feel instant. That wouldn't matter if the results sucked. They don't. They're spot on.
Here's a screenshot of a search I did for "star wars". Eight results in 6ms5. That's 0.006 seconds for those of us who don't generally think in milliseconds.
My Grimoire has 11,000+ notes. I get the same instant, accurate results as the demo.
How It's Going
Did you notice that little toggle switch beside the search bar? The one labeled, "Boost my search with AI." It's switched off when you first visit the page. Flipping it on provides an instant example of what enshittification6 looks like.
Well, not instant.
Things slow down when AI enters the mix. They slow down a lot.
We still get eight results. But, it took longer to get them. The time went from 6ms to 805ms.
Or, 0.006 seconds to 0.805 seconds.
That's a ~13,000% increase.
Thirteen thousand.
Jesus.
Computers bug out sometimes. I figured that had to have been what happened. Something locked up and things took way longer than normal, right?
Nope. After several attempts the average was ~650ms. The fasted was ~450ms. Way better than 805ms, but still a ~7,400% increase.
It Gets Worse
Slowing your product down by several thousand percent is pretty terrible. Know what's worse? Breaking it completely. I got this several times when the AI feature was on:
"Nothing found with that title".
The search engine equivalent to shitting the bed.
One might expect getting zero results would be quicker than getting eight. Not so in the world of AI. It took 3077ms. Compare that to our original 6ms, non-AI search and we get a ~51,000% increase. For literally nothing.
(The non-AI search never failed, btw)
That's Not All, Folks
We're not done yet.
I wanted to find Rogue One7.
I turned the AI off typed "rogue" in the search box:
The first two titles matched the search term exactly (i.e. the single word "Rogue"). Good ol' Rogue One slid into the third slot behind them.
Perfect.
Then, I turned on the AI:
I've never actually banged my head on the desk from frustration. Came pretty close here.
- The result count dropped from eight to two.
- Rouge One is one of the titles that disappeared.
- So did the two "Rogue" movies whose titles' were literally the same single word as the search term.
Oh, yeah. Almost forgot. The time jumped ~22,500% from 4ms to 904ms.
If It Ain't Broke, Fix It 'til It Is
These results are staggeringly bad. They're what I'd expect from someone who'd never built a search engine. Who'd never done an ounce of research that would have led them to the known, proven techniques for returning quality results.
You know. The very techniques Meilisearch already had in place.
Enshittification Defined
Enshittification is a relatively new word. Coined in 2022 by Cory Doctorow8, it's shorthand for a pattern of decline in businesses that goes like this:
-
Companies make quality products and platforms that are good for their customers. They fulfill a need, bring happines, or benefit individual folks in some other way.
People start using the company's offerings and everyone benefits.
- The company shifts priorities. Instead of focuing on improving the lives of individuals, they focus on improving the bottom line of businesses they work with. A process that generally involves abusing the individual customers.
-
The company pivots again to focus soley on themselves. Abusing not only thier customers, but also their business partners. All efforts focused on their own profit margin.
After that, they die.
Entering Stage Two
Integrating AI into everything possible is the current fashion. There may be times when it makes sense. This isn't one of them. Charging money to add AI features that benefit their business partners at the expense of the service they provide is a clear jump into the second state of enshittification9.
Meilisearch is demonstrably worse with AI on. With luck, that'll be enough to keep the original functionality in place even as they enshittify. If not, it'll be time to find another way to search.
-a
Endnotes
The screenshots and numbers for this post were recorded in April 2025. It's now Sept. 2025. Some things have gotten better.
Specifically, searching for "Rouge" with AI on now includes "Rouge One: A Star Wars Story", but it still takes ~1,500ms.
There's also a bunch of moral problems with AI. Environmental impact, stealing the work of others, privacy violations, burning out smaller sites with scraping traffic, etc... Those are worth acknowledging even though I don't get into them here.
Footnotes
In tech terms, we'd describe the number of times the AI search result summaries are wrong as "non-trivial".
Once great. Still great. Mostly. But, wow am I nervous about their future.
My Grimoire is my personal Book of Magic. Some might call it a notes app. That sounds too mundane for my liking. Especially because I can write programs that run inside it. Just like casting spells.
The home page demo appears to be limited to eight results. For example, searching for "The" returned the same number. Totally makes sense for the demo but means we aren't necessarily seeing all the possible results when there's more than eight.
You can probably get the gist of what enshittification means just by the word itself. More details in the Enshittification Defined section.
Fantastic flick. Check it out if you haven't seen it.
To be fair, there may be use cases where the AI search results are helpful and worth the extra time and money.
They have this page if you want to see their pitch for it.