I really don't understand what their endgame is here. AI Search can't be good for their ads business, because by its very nature it bypasses most of the ads. Why would I spend money on Google ads anymore if it doesn't drive traffic to my web site?
There's no such thing as "the nature of AI Search", our current understanding and hope for what it should be is being projected, but as long as there's attention, ads can be there.
The endgame is to increasing the organic look of the results. AI Search makes that possibly even though it is not reliable. Also, Google is probably under immerse pressure to "add AI" into to its products.
AI Everywhere is the new Everyone Can Code.
You noticed how no one talks about code bootcamps? LLM bootcamps will soon be popping all over the interwebz.
I wouldn't doubt that's the goal, though it seems risky. There's a fair chance the LLM could hallucinate details about your product and lead to it falsely advertising. Given Gemini's history recommending people eat glue, among other things, I wouldn't trust it with that responsibility.
I know it's common for everyone to shit on Google here on HN, but I have to say, I do like the AI overviews. They're easy to ignore and sometimes helpful... and I've seen lots of non-tech friends and family using them. I really don't get the vehement hatred the tech / HN community has for this feature (nor do I get the common complaint that "Google search is useless," it works better than all the others for me...)
I think it would get a lot less hate if Google just made it possible to opt-out of them without having to download some third-party browser extension (which is actually what Google's AI summary itself suggests I do when I ask it how to turn itself off!). A small "opt out" link on the top of the AI suggestion would make most of this hate go away, and would make me stop paying for Kagi, if Google cared.
I also find it extra frustrating when AI summaries appear when I search for correctness-critical information, e.g., "what temperature to cook chicken?" or "can I eat old eggs?" --- why force me to scroll past an entire page of AI generated, 1%-chance-of-being-a-literally-lethal-hallucination "summaries" in order to find the CDC's actual recommendation? I don't want to play Russian roulette with my health hoping I don't get a hallucination, instead I just want the authoritative answer. Which Google did an amazing job at until a year ago, and Kagi is doing a pretty great job at now.
For me, it's the fact that content generated by an LLM is fundamentally different than content that comes directly from a search index, but displaying them alongside each other conflates the two. Most people don't know the difference, and place the same level of importance (or maybe even more importance) on AI-generated content. Yes, this content is convenient. However, if the content isn't accurate or correct (which it may or may not be, given that it's just a statistically likely sequence of tokens) then is it actually beneficial as a whole?
The failure cases for them are really bad. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen people "prove" something on social media with a screenshot of a Google AI Overview that's parroting false information it found on the web.
Yes, it will happily regurgitate whatever false information there is on the web. e.g. you see this fake trailer for a Pokemon movie starring Tom Holland [0]. You ask yourself, "is that real?" and you go search "tom holland pokemon" in Google. The AI overview will tell you "Tom Holland has been cast as Ash Ketchum in a live-action adaptation of the Pokémon series. The movie is produced by Warner Bros. and The Pokémon Company." Confirmed! Except it's just spitting back the description it got from that fake trailer.
The downvotes confirm how HN feels but I largely agree with you. I do not find them wrong as often as everyone here claims and it appears most regular users are enjoying the feature at this point.
Can I get back 2000s Google results? Aka no ridiculous filtering outside of spam / malware? I don't know what happened in the last four years but Google and YouTubes search capabilities feel broken, things I used to find I no longer can type the same queries to find. Search has regressed. I find myself just asking Grok for things I typically ask Google. I also use Kagi, but its not quite the scale of someone like Google who used to provide peak results before all this AI craze was even a thing.
Honestly I'd pay money at this point to get back the legacy google search results capability on google.
One of the few things my ex girlfriend has reached out to me about, was to ask if I knew of a way to turn off AI summaries on google.com. I sent her a kagi gift card, but she never redeemed it :^(
I can't say for sure, since I don't work on search or web crawling, but it doesn't seem unlikely that the Google of 2000s would serve nothing but spam on the internet of today.
> I find myself just asking Grok for things I typically ask Google.
Yes, and that's why Google is embracing AI here. "Web Search" doesn't perform as well as it used to, and people are usually looking for answers, not search results.
What I do miss, and I think what you're getting at here, is that there is a certain amount of dark matter in the web today – all the little sites that used to show up on google to fill little niches throughout the internet now feel undiscoverable, even if they are still there. Every results page feels like a list of forbes.com and medium.com news/advertorial/aggregator sites, a couple reddit links, and a couple of forums.
I can't, for example, ask Google for a list of online portfolios of artists who have experience in three.js. It seems like back then, you _could_ do that and get a reasonable list of results.
If I may suggest something crazy: Try Bing for a month. You can turn off most of the crap.
Backstory: I've been a Google user since it was in beta, having moved from AltaVista. A few months ago, I decided I wanted to try something different in an ongoing effort to reduce my Google footprint. Kagi is the obvious alternative, but they don't have the right plan for me — if their no-AI plan offered unlimited searches, I'd be using it. As an experiment, I set Bing as my default search engine, and it's been fine. You can turn off the front page "tabloid" crap, and also Copilot responses on result pages.
High five! Same here! Not many people seem to know what AltaVista is or was. I do use Bing in one browser on my work computer, its okay, still find it much easier to just ask Grok for links to things... I get summaries and exactly what I was looking for.
Yes! That's an important point — I'm also using LLMs for search quite a bit, and in fact that really got the ball rolling in terms of reducing my dependence on Google Search specifically.
You can't. When Google started they relied on keywords and ratings based on # of linkbacks. Then SEO optimization became a thing and people started to add (fake) keywords, and generate (fake) linkbacks.
Then somewhere Google said: you need more content to get higher ranking. Websites started to hire content writers to create extremely light, usually useless posts about problems. I think website owners could get the questions about what people were looking for so they could react to those questions.
Then, that was followed by AI generating those slop pages.
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Anecdotally, I was searching for Jerusalem bugs after having caught on on a hike. First result that popped up was from a pest control stating their bite causes fever. No, they don't, but it's a great way to attract traffic (talking about bugs!) and then scaring people into buying their services. It's extremely difficult to consider what they write to be the authority as they aren't neutral in this transaction.
Then all the AI models themselves started to extract 'answers' from those websites and present them to you as authority.
There are people who upload fake videos to YouTube with the most common 'KB1234567 FIX HERE' to shill their products. (Microsoft isn't helping here with their independent advisors always suggesting dism and sfc).
The websites have no incentive anymore of providing you short-form actual answers. It's gone. You can minimize it by using search engines that don't provide you with AI answers, and learn to spot AI content and move on as fast as possible. If the answer is not in the first paragraph you won't find it.
I have a website that has been receiving traffic from chatgpt.com but the prompts users are entering for my website to appear as a reference / link aren't made available so how much optimization can really be done?
Companies are already talking about that. At least, I've been to a few conferences where SAIO (I forgot what they called it) was mentioned and elaborated upon.
I vaguely remember that it was elaborated upon to build a whole suite of tools that could predict what the chances are - given the content that you have - that you too would rank in the AI overview.
I'm not sure I've ever seen such a wide chasm between what a company thinks its users want and what its users actually want.
Company: Everyone loves the latest versions of our core products!
Everyone: Never has your product quality been so poor. Please reverse the last several years of "progress" — m'k'thanks'bye!
Oh well. DuckDuckGo has served me well for many years now and as long as I switch off all their AI overview nonsense, it's pretty much the same as it ever was (just a bit harder to find real human-grade content amongst the flood of generated SEO spam).
Google's AI mode hasn't rolled out to me yet, but do you know if it will handle political questions? Gemini is notorious for avoiding anything political—even something as simple as asking about the current president—so I'm curious.
Is this why they've started requiring javascript lately? That little bit of annoyance finally pushed me to change default search engines in my "dirty" browser that touches sites I don't trust.
I wonder if the end-goal is AI advertising "nudges" based on some sort of psychometric profile. Who needs ads when you have a mass manipulation machine. Just figure out what drives X product even if you never see it directly.
There are probably pieces of code that are dead but nobody knows they’re dead and the reason they’re dead is not discoverable by static analysis. Like junk DNA, just relics of a bygone past being carried needlessly into the future…
The hard but simple choice is to accept they need to just make gemini the default experience. The ChatGPT-style experience is just categorically better - you can get a straight answer, an answer grounded in search, deep reasoning, deep research, code artifacts, image-generation, memory, agents, etc. They'll continue to bleed users until they offer a competitive experience that doesn't require going to a subdomain or submenu.
