What scares me about this new AI mode thingy is that every answer sounds like a systematic literature review, but only for the results. For example, if I look for users feedback about a specific product, it says "People think that..., but also that...; It's important to notice that some people ..." where with 'people' it means just a random comment on a random website just because it thought it was a good contribution to the results. Sounds like it's giving a ground truth from "multiple" data, when instead it's just aggregating almost random stuff. In the context of a systematic review, the feature that I would love the most is augmenting my initial query, so that I can just get more results that I could find interesting. I am 100% sure they thought about this, but ignored it for the most profitable option.
What scares me is the rampant inaccuracy. In my experience, the AI responses are wrong about 65% of the time. I just did a search today about an error talking about a disconnected link between apps, and Google AI result summary told me that the error was related to my pulling a USB drive too quickly in windows. The ONLY word similar to my query and that AI response was the word "disconnect". Everything else was clearly about the SaaS apps.
I have people coming to me, asking me questions, then telling my Google told them something else, so now I have to waste time convincing them that it's wrong. Over the past 2 years AI has done nothing for me but complicate my work life.
And of course, this could be because the model is crap, but it could be because they want me to keep refining my query over and over for more ad views. Either way, it's a terrible experience.
Yeah the Google AI results are more dangerous than ChatGPT, not only because it uses a smaller model but because Google's knowledge graph used to deliver very accurate and authoritative information but now that's been replaced by a stochastic system in the same place, so people are used to trusting it.
I think we’re getting what we deserve by snarkily telling people to Google stuff instead of answering accurately. Google results have never ever been pure accuracy
To be fair - for all of those years Google has been serving up some atrocious results - remember when googling health symptoms got you rabies or pregnancy.
There's even the meme where people ask if the code was the result of a stack overflow question, or answer
It seems to me one needs to consider the complexity of the question they are asking before searching it.
To stick with your post, consider people asking medical or financial questions. For a wide variety of reasons, many of such questions don't have an answer. In such cases, AI is still going to take a crack at it. AI shouldn't be blamed for "bullshit answers" to such questions.
Before using AI, I think people should stop and ask themselves, "Is there really a single answer to this question? Is AI the right choice?"
The problem is Google's AI results get even simple factual questions wrong all the time.
Earlier today, I searched "pixel 10 wifi 7" because I was confused that GSMArena showed my Pixel 8 supports Wifi 7, but the Pixel 10 only Wifi 6. Gemini confidently claimed that the Pixel 10 does support Wifi 7 -- but that's not true at all. Only the Pixel 10 _Pro_ supports it, as I discovered when actually reading the non-AI search results.
I had a similar thing when I was gooling a few days ago, I can't remember exactly but it was like "why does [product] not support [feature]" and the AI summary was confidently wrong, saying "The product does support [feature]", which knew was completely incorrect, and I did find a Reddit discussion or something in the actual results with discussions that were actually about what I was looking for!
It's really depressing how bad things are getting...
It’s hilariously persistent in this, esp. for anything even slightly divergent from the beaten path. Discount everything the AI box says about emacs to zero.
Admittedly I’m unsure if it was Google or DuckDuckGo. I switch between both. I quickly asked the in search AI for a UTC time conversion like a lazy fool and it got it off by almost a day wrong.
I avoid any asking any agent a fact-based (especially math) request. It's a great compression algorithm and a great language generator, and I guess the intersection of those two things is "an answer". Calculation doesn't intersect.
My google search for 'pixel 10 wifi 7' immediately shows the right answer. (10 Pro and 10 Pro XL support it but, but base Pixel 10 only supports Wifi 6E).
Though the inconsistency of results between users is definitely another frustrating thing.
Because LLMs aren't sentient, they don't draw on facts, and they don't have nuance. The answer given is similar to answers you might expect to see for similar questions.
It's really amazing we can make machines do that, and it's really depressing that we think a stochastic bullshit machine is going to give us something we can rely on.
Or… the default LLM Google uses for search has been quantized to s**. Ask a proper Thinking model, with browsing enabled, and odds of a correct answer are much higher. There’s been substantial improvement in AI in even the last year.
Ask a human a question like this, and they also have a chance of getting it wrong, even when confident.
> Ask a human a question like this, and they also have a chance of getting it wrong, even when confident.
We google something specifically because the humans within reach don't know. The goal of searching is, well, to search pages - we're trying to find a site when we use google search.
The goal when using an LLM is generally different; we want an answer, not a site.
I think that it feels a little wasteful to go to Google search to ask a question like this, only for the AI that's giving you an answer instead of page results to perform its own web search to get you the response.
Also, I asked a thinking model with browsing enabled and got this:
> The Google Pixel 10 is expected to support Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be), based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 / Tensor G5 chipset it will likely use, which includes an integrated Wi-Fi 7 modem. Specific finalized specs aren't confirmed until Google's official announcement.
(Model GLM-5-Turbo - two months old - using Kilo Code in the "Ask" profile; in its thinking token churn it reasoned that it should keep the response brief and direct. Perhaps not the best suite of model+harness for this task, but it's what I had to hand that's not quantized to shit, is a thinking model, and has a web search tool available to it.)
Why would a human know specs for a random phone off the top of their head? The human response is either "I don't know" or "let me look that up", not a hallucination.
They are this wrong about everything, but you don't usually notice it when using it to look for things you aren't an expert in. The default stance really does need to be "do not trust, verify" at all times.
They can still be useful, e.g. they're significantly better at finding "I want a thing that does x but not y and it must be blue, or maybe two things that can be glued together to do that" than classic search. But they'll routinely miss extremely obvious answers because the related search it ran didn't find it, or completely screw up what something can actually do. Checking more pages of results by hand or asking humans who know even a little about those fields is still wildly more useful... but they're absolutely slaughtering the sites where people do that, by stealing all the real traffic and sending DDoS-level automated requests.
I’d make assumptions about how the cheapest and fastest possible flash model optimized for being extra cheap and extra fast would get something wrong based on its limited context (which can be very incomplete summaries of search results)
I often have the expensive models give relatively simple inaccurate answers, even when they cite sources that directly contradict them. The error rate is lower, but you can’t have confidence with llm answers.
It somehow seems to interpret whatever sources it's grepping as the exact opposite of what those sources say fairly often. I've lost track of how many times I've clicked on the sources it cites, and every single one is in agreement, but the AI claims the opposite.
In watching the demo, I didn't come away with the impression that they were removing search results. Yes, they are pushing AI hard, but users can still opt to use Google in the more traditional way. Unless I misunderstood the demo, it's definitely possible to choose.
An interesting aspect of this is the decrease in quality feedback on th organic links. If most people never get down to the actual links there is very little to tell which ones were good or if they had any relevance.
There is also that less incentive to properly maintain the search algorithms to fight SEO and spam.
For all intents and purpose, organic search results have been given a death sentence and are just waiting for the last moment.
> one needs to consider the complexity of the question they are asking before searching...consider people asking medical or financial questions...many of such questions don't have an answer. In such cases, AI is still going to take a crack at it. AI shouldn't be blamed for "bullshit answers"...people should stop and ask themselves, "Is there really a single answer to this question?
It's a bold position to say that it's the users fault for being lied to by Google. There isn't a "single answer" to most questions. It's still Google's job to provide answers that are accurate and reflect the best information available on complicated topics. That's what they're trying to sell us anyway. When google's AI can't live up to the hype "You shouldn't be asking AI such difficult questions" is not a great response, especially when people are just trying to get web search results and AI is suddenly interrupting with an opinion nobody asked for.
It's nice that Google's AI summary always lists its sources. It's less nice that those sources more often than not do not corroborate the summary. It often seems to be a few random links thrown in there for good measure.
I have no idea why this is, but it is impossible that these links are primary sources of the data, if such things even exists at all. In which case, why list them?
It is certainly seems possible that the actual sources of the data is the output of some other LLM.
What scares me is the massive incentivization to manipulate the results.
With AI ads you get all the power from big data aggregation, the trust/framing of an authoritative voice, and cheap personalization that specifically optimizes for what convinces you. It's too powerful. Even if it only works a small percentage of the time we're interacting with these things so frequently that a small percent is a large number. They're already feeding user profiles into these machines and there's explicit talk about having the LLMs optimize ad campaigns. It's already dystopian if it's ads to get you to spend your money, but people seem to dismiss that. Do we not care that this is also being used in the same way to convince you to believe certain things? To join certain political organizations?
Yeah, these things help me write more lines of code faster (if we include all the lines from our design docs) but I don't like the idea of pointing a supercomputer at my brain and someone else using it to try to manipulate me. That's not a game I'll win. It's not a game you'll win either.
The built-in Search AI is fucking braindead and people constantly come up to me "Google said xyz" and I just have to turn around and say "I do not care what the Google Search AI said".
Whatever it says is a waste of time 99% of the time. Although people believe it, or consider it worthwhile majority of the time because its so simple to use. It's always there, always instant and appears at the very top.
I would much rather people shove a question into a locally running Qwen model and tell me what it said rather than use the nonsense search model. I hate it.
Depends on what you ask. It's pretty easy to get wrong information.
e.g. search for "how do you make money with options"
Google's AI says
"When you buy a Call, you are betting the stock price will go up. When you buy a Put, you are betting it will go down."
Wrong right off the bat, because it ingested a whole bunch of get-rich-quick bull on the internet. The correct version is that if you buy a call you are betting the stock price will go up more than the market expects it to.
I tried this search. It gave a write up about buying and selling options, noting that the price of the stock had to move significantly, not just go up or down. It also talked about vertical spreads and iron condors. It touches on delta, theta, and volatility and their impacts, as well as leverage risk and potential uncapped risk.
While I agree that AI gets things wrong a lot, and someone should read significantly more before getting into actually trading options, this does give a decent overview to give a layperson an idea of what they are, and some key terms on what to look for if they want to dive deeper. That said, with this info alone, there are some sharp edges that would leave the person open to unnecessary risk if they went on this information alone.
They probably update these answers offline. I tried "how do you profit from options" and got:
> Call Options: You buy these when you believe a stock's price will go up. If the stock rises past your strike price, the option's value increases, allowing you to sell it for a profit or exercise it to buy the stock at a discount.
> Put Options: You buy these when you believe a stock's price will go down. If the stock falls below your strike price, you profit.
Which leaves me wondering if changing the search textually busts some cache that they update using a slower/smarter model.
And this is yet another problem, it's stochastic. And often it's self-contradicting even within the same response. What else do you expect from a language model which essentially predicts tokens.
It's wild to me that someone looking for advice on how to do any kind of stock trading would be looking for a once sentence answer.
I hope it at least has real citations to actual websites like, I dunno, fidelity or some other reasonably competent authority that can explain all the details?
It's an answer that's too short for an expert to find useful, and useless to a layperson unless all they want to do is reply to a post on twitter.
I've never searched for a financial question where I did not want to know all the weird details because why would I search for it unless I was considering doing it? Seems like someone who doesn't care about the answer is going to be more an edge case than I am.
Those looking for a one sentence answer will be the quickest to invest. When people talk about the harms of AI, this is the kind of thing that comes to mind first for me.
It is, in fact, categorically wrong, and misleads beginners to make bad decisions. Robinhood is notably bad for promoting this kind of gambling behavior on its platforms; they also state the same misinformation (that you buy a call if you think something is going to go up, when it is in fact a bet that it is going to go up more than a certain amount in a certain period of time).
People shoot themselves in the foot because they think NVDA is going to go up after earnings, buy call options, and then even though the stock goes up they lose money because they did not understand IV crush.
People looking for one-sentence explanations should really not be playing with options. In finance you should understand what you're buying thoroughly. If you just want to bet that "NVDA goes up", you should just buy NVDA stock; that is the trade that accurately captures that bet.
This is the problem with teaching and learning. Everything is wrong to some extent. I used to be this way but I don't have a better approach.
Newtonian physics is actually wrong, the founding of any country will be wrong, biology is wrong, nutrition is wrong… what can we even teach? what should we teach in this lens? serious question.
The serious answer is in the non-AI-summarized world, you can choose whose information to read and trust.
If you want to learn about finance, you can learn about it from people who actually know what they're talking about. You can choose to listen to Jim Simons or Warren Buffet or whoever actually knows a thing or two instead of the rando dude you met at the bar. The AI summaries, on the other hand, ingested a lot of internet garbage.
I picked finance as an example because anecdotally, most of the information on the internet by pure token volume is wrong. The Youtubers drawing lines on charts want your attention because they make money from page views; the financial advisors want your annual fees; the brokerages want you to gamble and get your commisions or PFOF (in the case of zero-commision brokers); the market makers and HFTs want your spreads; Reddit users want to show off their lucky, statistically insignificant profit charts for karma points. None of the above have an intention to give you good information.
Honestly Google's AI answer is about as right if not more right then your answer.
You can easily make money buying a call without the stock price moving a single cent (IV increases). Funny enough the stock can even go down and with a large enough IV increase you still make money.
It hallucinates greatly about many things when I ask about C++ things. Things that you can easily find the right answer in cppreference or by just inspecting headers in your own IDE.
If you think ai is getting answers wrong at anything close to the frequency quoted then it calls into question your usage and ability to use ai in general.
Yup, I was looking up a pair of IEMS vs another pair of IEMs. It said option A is overall better, when really it was just reciting a single person's opinion. I've been aware it will summarize only a single source and present it as an aggregation of many opinions, but it stood out to me how matter-of-fact it was that the one was definitely better than the other. I simply wanted to find forum discussions on people's thought and wasn't influenced by this AI blurb, but I think seeing an answer at the very top state so matter-of-factly that one is definitely better and present it as though everyone thinks that will definitely influence a lot of people. It makes me wonder how "gameable" this will become...
> It makes me wonder how "gameable" this will become...
You better make sure your ad spend is high enough that your product's matter-of-fact result will be positive. That's a nice product you have there. It'd be a real shame if nobody knew about it.
The iem sub has a post with some recommendations at various price points. I’d probably start there, not sure your budget and I don’t know have the most experience with the super cheap ones: https://reddit.com/r/iems/comments/1la65kr/top_5_iems_in_eve...
I also encourage finding the right tips. Tips are cheap and finding proper fitting ones is important.
Not gp but I really like the sound of my GK Kuntens and 7Hz Zero2s. Both have a rather V-shaped sound signature, some like it and some don't. Though unfortunately the Zero2s feel a bit uncomfortable in my ears when using them for longer
Most of the ones that are over 50 can last a lot of time and have good enough sounds. But the most important stuff are the tips and the cable. Make sure the former fits (just buy a pack) and the latter is thick and braided. Some cheapo ones send every rubbing amplified to your ears.
I was only intending to use the traditional search engine, the AI was incidental. If I want an AI answer, I will go to it separately. This is better in my mind as optimal queries for each are different.
The issue is, Google has mixed the two in a way that promotes the AI response as primary. This has resulted in dubious answers being presented as “official” summaries (to the lay person).
At the very least, one would expect it to be a little smarter—perhaps by automatically doing things like you suggested—instead of basing things off a single source, as it seems to enjoy doing.
Indeed - just earlier this week I read Google AI summarize a query about testosterone, citing 3 sources. The first citation was a link to a NIH study (or of similar repute). Ok great. The second? Two spam (and explicit) websites existing solely to sell penis enlargement pills.
What was worrying is only some of the claims were supported by the linked study, and most of the response content was drawn from the spam sites.
This problem is not limited to Google, it's the core value of mass-marketed LLMs, or isn't it?
Without "random comments", Google wouldn't have anything to say about "does an air purifier help my asthma, if yes: which one?" or "find the problem with this Hibernate annotation".
They also don't make much effort to exclude sloppy sites, to the contrary, they made way more efforts against SEO spam in the time when Google was a search engine, not trying to be an AI "oracle".
I think their end game is that the only metrics relevant for ranking sources are:
- agreeability (works well as a proxy for correctness with many questions!)
- originality, but not in a scientific sense, just to prevent model collapse
- legal factors such as preventing false health claims or similar things, as long as there is legislation against this kind of thing
I’ve noticed this too. A single result can determine the answer it gives. And removing the content from its context makes it harder to assess. Suddenly it’s “Gemini said …” rather than “some guy in the YouTube comments said”.
I ran into one that kept referencing "people", but then I found that it was a single Reddit thread from a couple of years ago about a relatively small and obscure foreign city with 2 replies.
The scary bit is the use of the term AI. The "I" implies critical thinking.
For models trained on a corpus of groomed data, the "critical thinking" bit is baked into the work of grooming the data and how it is trained. And someone is thinking critically about both so as to make a good model.
Now, every damn thing is called AI no matter where it is getting results from.
Are modern models super handy? Absolutely.
But calling it AI implies a lot more critical thought than is actually happening!
I love asking AI about blatantly wrong opinions but by people it thinks must be an authority.
To not make this political, let me give you a game example. Right now the dota 2 fandom wiki is abandoned, and it has been vandalized with covert shitposts. One of them was the addition of a 4th attribute called Charisma, which is completely fake. If you ask AI's "What are the main attributes in dota, according to the official wiki", the dumber AI will fall for it, but the smarter AI will know it's wrong, but try hard to hallucinate some sort of valid explanation like claim charisma is from a custom game or a fan suggestion or writing exercise.
Because you said the word >>OFFICIAL<<, they can NEVER straight up just say "The wiki is wrong". They presume authority from a bunch of shitposts.
The problem of AI eating and regurgitating its own slop is only going to get worse with time. The best datasets are behind us. Future models are going to have to depend on a lot of human intervention.
What scares me are the basic usability fails it still has. Search for a few foreign language words and it will come back with paragraphs upon paragraphs of AI output in that foreign language despite me telling Google in 15 different ways that I don't speak it, nor anything else on the Google page being in that language. How are all their products always made by and for the most narrow minded people on this planet.
Funnily enough, I have the exact opposite problem, where Google likes to give me results in the configured main language even when I do queries in another and actually want results in the other language.
I’ve found it quite unsettling to be served foreign language videos on YouTube automatically dubbed over by Google into English. Just mixed in with the search results.
> "People think that..., but also that...; It's important to notice that some people ..." where with 'people' it means just a random comment on a random website
Well, you'll be happy to know that most of American media is exactly the same way: 2 people on twitter will generate a "Americans find Widget X is bad"
> when instead it's just aggregating almost random stuff
How do you know that?
Scraping websites is literally what Google does best, stringing together information in the pattern of "some people x, other people y" requires 0 AI and could have been done since forever. I find it implausible that otherwise obviously capable models would be reduced to do something akin to just that.
Oh who cares. We are barely scratching the surface of AI. You all make it sound like it’s been around for 30 years and it sucks. It will only get better. Got to stop throwing up imaginary walls like nothing will improve.
As a counterexample, I've been seeing more "safety rejections" from Claude. Unlike search, being unable to ask _anything_ about botulinum, or details about the recent Copy Fail vulnerability (without giving my fingerprints to Anthropic to become a "verified security researcher") we're only just beginning to see the ways LLM can be used to distort information and its availability.
So you started with ‘highly doubtful’ as a comment, got given lots of examples and instead of assimilating that info you closed your eyes put your fingers in yours ears and said “oh who cares?’ - you’re on team AI regardless eh? That’s fucking weird mate.
Na. Wasn’t given any good examples. People just whining about the same stuff because “oh no I got information that’s former in the same structure that I can tell it’s AI and it makes me feel bad”
I'm old enough to remember when "Google" was something that ended conversations. People — myself included — would literally say "Google it," the facts would be located, and that was that. Now that Google wants to be the conversation, I'm worried there will no longer be a bias-free source of information for the masses.
This is all new, so I may be a bit hyperbolic, but the reason OpenAI introducing ads bothers me is the implicit (or even explicit) bias that can be smuggled into a chat in ways that simply aren't possible when you're just clicking through to an external source. There are all kinds of implications to Google no longer being that source of truth, even by default. Maybe this has quietly been the case for a long time, but this feels like the final move — pushing their ad bias (i.e., whoever paid the most) into a conversational system, where dark patterns are far easier to implement and much harder to detect.
One answer to this might be domain-specific agents — narrower, accountable, ideally something you (or your community) actually run. But even then it all falls back on trust: you being a good-faith actor, and others trusting that you are one. Which is to say, we're back to the same problem, just at a smaller scale.
With sponsored links and aggressive SEO, “Google it” has been falling apart as a source of facts for a long time.
There is an incredible gap in the search literacy between different users of Google. Some will accept what they find in the top links, no matter how dubious the source.
Yes, but not because of facts or bias-free sources. It was the equivalent of staring deep at your wrist watch while someone's speaking: a clear signal that you were done with whatever they wanting to talk about.
I kinda like that "let me Google it for you" in Japan was more popular as "Google it loser" (ググレカス), a rare instance where the common phrases was more expressive than it's western counterpart.
and even if it was, when a search engine takes you to another website, that site is also not bias free.
just becuase somebody publishes something on a website, does not make it a fact. google has always been good at finding things that look like facts, and their AI iteration is also good at that.
I agree with the sentiment, but native ads i.e. blogs, reviews, articles, etc. that do their best to hide that they’re a sponsored product review have been around for a long time. Admittedly, LLMs WILL make it even more difficult to discern the difference.
My takeaway is that the internet would be a dramatically cooler place today if people were just willing to pay for stuff.
The ad version of the web, where ~60% of people carry the ad burden for everyone, and defacto aligns the service providers with advertisers, is just a guaranteed bad outcome. The only real upside, which frankly people take for granted, is that the ad-web is classless web. Broke or rich you get the same (crappy) services.
I remember those mock web service package flyers from the net neutrality days. Where people made fake marketing material showing website packages you could access with different paid tiers, something reminiscent of the cable TV days.
Back then it was horrifying, but 20 years later, I think I would entertain a subscription to a wide array of web services if it meant they worked for me and not advertisers.
My other main issue with the no-net neutrality world is that it also means websites would have to pay ISP’s or be artificially throttled. That’s a huge problem.
It’s one thing to say we need to pay. It’s another for ISP’s to get 3 pulls at the hose (paid for a connection, paid for what we can browse, paid for who provides the sites) when some of those elements don’t even require more (or at least much) effort or infrastructure on their part. I don’t like the idea of their picking winners and losers. We’ve got enough of that as it is.
>I'm worried there will no longer be a bias-free source of information for the masses.
There was never anything bias-free about google search. It "ranks" information based on all sorts of qualities. At our most generous we can call it somewhat of a "consensus" check. Historically it was a tool for quickly getting you in the vicinity of an answer that most would consider correct.
Remember "google bombing"? Hell SEO alone invalidates any assertion that google search is a valid source of truth and that's be going on for a long time.
I think this is the second time in a week (the first being the "Googlebook") that Google's promotional announcement video showcasing UI is so full of special effects, dramatic pan/zooms, and woosh sounds, that I have no idea how the final-end product actually looks or works.
It looks like an output of one of those AI video editors that some (often vibecoded) startups use for their product launch videos. Just drop some assets in, and it spams witty taglines with dramatic transition effects.
in both cases, the reality is that nothing has changed all that much.
the googlebook is a laptop. the search box doesn't really work differently to how it did yesterday. (how it worked ten years ago, yes it's very different. but ai mode is already here). neither of these things are a big deal. the promo videos are for the sake of making promo videos.
I had an interesting one yesterday. Someone responded to me on Reddit with very official sounding words to make their argument. I was still dubious and googled a few of the concepts they threw out there.
The AI confidently told me they were right. Then I checked the sources, and found the only source that agreed with them was their own Reddit comment!!!
I can also relate here, seeking a product review on Sony wh1000x_, Google wrote a nice seeming summary, but scrolling down to some Reddit discussions, stumbled upon a single comment that was very nearly verbatim what the “AI Summary” said, only the ai summary phrased the summary as if it were a sentiment aggregated over many users’ experience.
i.e.”users say…”
Reddit is heavily filled with bots at this point, feels like every question is made to then promote their product or service using multiple bot accounts.
I've found this several times as well. I googled something to dispute a comment in reddit, and google "confirmed" it as accurate, citing what the person said in that exact reddit comment.
A few days ago I went looking for something music-related that I've been trying to find for a long time. Google's AI response confirmed it existed and described it almost exactly as I've described it in the past. It was then that I noticed the source.
It was citing my own old comment, here on HN, about that musical moment as evidence that it existed. That was surreal.
I get that they have to make changes to the google search box because so many people are just using ChatGPT/Cluade to answer questions instead of google.
However, I specifically use Google (or DDG) when the LLMs are failing me. When I want "research something on my own" because the LLM is giving me garbage, or untrustworthy information. If Google completely replaces their search box my Google usage will go down even further.
I don't plan to use Google's LLM when Cluade is just better. Now that Google's search features are gone (or going away) I no longer have any reason to turn to them at all
Agreed, but I think that might be our tech bubble. My non-tech family still just types searches in the URL bar of their browser first, and I'm sure others just have google as their browser homepage. I assume that's actually a pretty common use-case for most non-tech users.
With answers “someone on the internet wrote”, I miss knowing definitely that there’s no good or authoritative answer to my query on the internet. With those “people as clueless as you said…” answers it takes lot more time to understand that.
I don't care. Aside from a single dormant GMail account I keep solely for "parental tech support", I de-Googled 5 years ago and strongly encourage everyone to do likewise.
It's not clear to me from this announcement. The articles make it sound like all searches now go to ai mode and no more blue links.
But Google's description seems more minimal, like easier to get to ai mode, search box can expand intelligently based on input. Is there any clearer description of the magnitude of the change?
It was only a matter of time. Watching how less technical people behave in the LLM era, I've noticed that most people no longer say "Google something", instead, they say "ask ChatGPT" or "ask chat". Many technical people have also stopped using Google for a lot of search queries and now just let an LLM find the answer.
So how does google now make money when it is just providing us with direct answers from ai, instead of showing us both paid for search results and directing us to sites which host targetted ads?
How does adsense work when there are no search results?
I expect a flavor of affiliate marketing where you can never trust if the LLM is giving you the best recommendations or the most highly bidded recommendations
"The last episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is airing on Thursday, May 21, 2026. Based on your interest in The Late Show with Stephen Colbert you might also like the new Amazon Prime Video series of Last One Laughing, available to stream now"
You're missing the point. What incentive will websites have to create that content in the first place if you never visit? This was the contract with google adrev and website owners -- google would direct traffic to your site and hopefully they click around.
If google is now actively keeping you away from content, whats the point in creating?
Huh? These are my results when I put that prompt in:
The final episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert will air on Thursday, May 21, 2026, at 11:35 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.Final Week Broadcast DetailsThe Finale Date: Thursday, May 21, 2026.Air Time: 11:35 p.m. ET/PT.Where to Watch: Broadcasts live on the CBS Television Network and streams live on Paramount+ for Premium subscribers (available on-demand the next day for ad-supported tiers).Finale Guests: CBS is keeping the final episode's lineup completely under wraps, though the preceding days featured major appearances from Jon Stewart, Steven Spielberg, David Byrne, and Bruce Springsteen.Context of the FarewellThe 11th season finale marks the conclusion of Colbert's decade-long run as host, following a controversial cancellation announcement by Paramount Global. While CBS publicly attributes the ending to a financial decision amidst a shifting late-night market, media analysts and former host David Letterman have heavily criticized the move. Many view the cancellation as a corporate effort to avoid friction with the Trump administration during critical regulatory mergers. Following Colbert's departure, CBS will retire The Late Show franchise completely and hand the time slot over to syndicated programming.Watch Stephen Colbert confirm his final broadcast date on Late Night with Seth Meyers:31sStephen Colbert confirms his final show date and reveals ...Late Night with Seth MeyersYouTube• Jan 28, 2026Are you looking for information on how to attend the remaining tapings, or would you like to know more about what Byron Allen show is replacing his time slot?
But how is this sold to the customer? With adsense it is quantifiable, you set your max per click, per conversion etc, and can clearly see which you won and lost against competitors.
This becomes very murky when paying for 'ai to like your product' vs 'ai to really like your product'.
Same per click, it obviously includes links when looking for products, but impression could also be counted and arguably especially if present in the first few sentences it is a valuable impression.
But then the separation of ads from content is lost so it becomes useless as product search, so maybe it isn't that trivial indeed. But it's not like even 10% of users is gonna find some other "search" engine and switch.
edit: can't reply deeper and interesting question, I mean we all would love to have ability to search arbitrary strings and regexes through the web corpus, but currently when you type something you get that AI reply instantly for most queries, this makes me still use them, if you forgot some shortcut key or something it has currently unique value in terms of latency (even ignoring the fact that for most users you also use them by default by typing in the address bar)
I think also they have the issue that now the google search box is just an ai prompt, what differentiates it from any other ai prompt like gpt or claude?
Did they just devalue their unique search product by pushing it into another category already dominated by other big players?
This might just do irreversible damage to my parents' generation. They already trust the AI overview with all of the thinking and synthesizing after making a search, and this will only make it worse.
Same, came to google after DDG failed to locate a string that I suspect would occur (error message on Factorio forums). Google then gives me some LLM hallucinations about what the error might indicate, also when you specifically don't click the "use AI mode" button (that the search button automatically turns into) but the "search" button. You don't get any search results whatsoever. After it started wasting energy on hallucinations, you're allowed to click "all", meaning "web search, please" (should be obvious to anyone)
Why in the world would it specifically do this for site:https://example.org "exact string" queries?! I know what I'm looking for and where it can be found!
It's like redirecting my phone call from ISP support to a librarian because maybe the library contains the answer to a dysfunctional SIM card they've sent me
It seems they have been A/B testing killing search operators (like "site:" or "inurl:") for a while. They randomly stop working and switching to private mode, or the other way around, makes them work again.
Is “the goal of Search” really: “to help you ask _anything_ on your mind”?
If “reimagined Search” is “designed to anticipate your intent”,
Would it correctly infer my intent to not utilize an agentic approach? Is there an “off switch”?
As for “Search agents”
“operating in the background 24/7”,
What is the carbon footprint of that? How do I turn it off? How do I ask it to stop phoning home my every keystroke?
These questions are asked partly rhetorically because it’s likely I don’t need a team of “24/7 Search agents” to help me guess the answers…
Historically, I scoffed when someone said “here’s the difference between a google search and asking ChatGPT”, or when people said that ChatGPT would “kill search”, but Google sure seems to be in a hurry to burry the original feature all by themselves.
People saying ChatGPT will kill search, really mean LLMs generally will kill old school web searches that just return links. Google is doing this because they agree with the sentiment and are just becoming ChatGPT.
"Hello, world! Welcome to the classic programming greeting. It is the traditional test message used to introduce beginners to computer science and verify that a language's syntax is properly understood"
Which clearly shows that there will be an avalanche of issues when non-technical people discover the joys of non-deterministic results.
Google search box has basically become an AI aggregator that doesn't give anything back to those websites it scraps data from, and it'll result in the death of the internet as we came to know it
At this point, google might as well stop showing website links in search results. with AI Overviews, barely anyone’s clicking through it anymore
Sometimes I hear lies and slander about big tech pulling up ladders and misusing their advantage to cement monopolies, but just look at this!
I believe I speak for everyone working on alternative search engines when I offer a heartfelt thank you to Google for their untiring effort to derail their search product.
Up to now, the Gemini results they display are often worse and less accurate than the same question asked in Gemini. I'm guessing SEO has so thoroughly cooked Google's search results that they are actually holding back Gemini as a brand.
It looks like the new experience works backwards - it's more or less a Gemini prompt that they then stuff a "search experience" into.
Obviously the search feed and ads are so integral to Google's business model that they probably can't confidently just step away from it.
Google search itself is becoming useless. It tends to promote social media results even when scarcely relevant, and just can't find things like part numbers that even baidu can find on English language pages. The AI then summarises social media posts.
Google search results have been the worst part of every LLM I’ve used. I imagine the LLM specifically designed to use Google search is going to be the worst LLM.
In the last 10 (maybe longer) years I've noticed I've changed how I am approaching these changes.
In the past, I excited. It was the first to sign up for all kinds of betas.
I don't know what triggered the my reasoning, but now whenever I see these upcoming announcements I don't think about how it's gonna be better, but how it is objectively gonna be worse. How much harder is it going to be for me to compare things.
How much more do I now need to go and explain people that the output is merely a mathematical average of what's out there, and if it's out there on the internet doesn't make it correct.
>And I think we can throw out all the complaints of the past few years about how Google quality is lowering and it is hard to find anything on the site anymore, for those were the salad years.
>At least back in the day when sites copied answers from Stackoverflow or Lyrics from RapGenius and put them in their own site with scammy pitches to pay for the content you were going to get the correct answer in the end, but now you need a factology degree to figure out if something is bullshit or not.
A lot of people in these comments have strong opinions about the performance of a service they use frequently, for which they pay zero dollars, and is run by a public company with a fiduciary duty to provide ROI to its investors.
I wonder how many of them would switch to a paid model that offered pre-ai-era google search?
Why replace something deterministic with something non-deterministic? I can no longer tell someone "just google it" because I don't actually know what will come up...
I know a lot of regular people who hate this, but Kagi can be a hard sell for regular people. What are y’all’s recommendations for free search engines at the moment? I used to rec DDG, but I feel like their results are much worse than Kagi’s at present
Happy Kagi user - what 'sold' me (albeit already working in the space) was the adage of "if you're not paying, then you're the product" - having my results being manipulated to be constantly advertised to was something I was prepared to pay a token amount to avoid.
They already did the capex. Might as well use it, it's not like it was being utilized otherwise. Must be awkward to see your $10B datacenter sitting at 10% utilization.
So you can code in search now and create apps. No clue how that in depth works out. For them, the dream could be that everybody has their custom apps hosted by google.
It doesn't seem to be secure. If every google link is one step away from a prompt injection and leaking all your data, then they are worse then npm.
I wonder how many days it takes until they roll it back or put that stuff behind some extra clicks.
This is to Open Claw what Google home is to Home Assistant.
I prefer the Claw like I prefer Linux and FOSS in general.
Since day one Googs’ vision was to make the Star Trek computer. They’re really there now. But I don’t like their how. This computer serves them, not me. My mind-bicycle must serve me, my thoughts are my own. I hope my resistance is not futile.
I've been using google search, and all other products, less and less. i find a mixture of perplexity and chatgpt perform much better and find higher quality results faster.
the degoogling process will be a long haul but im determined to do it.
The “magic” of the SERP is that it makes the organics product and the ads product reinforce each other: People come for the organics and don't have to pay. That brings eyeballs, which advertisers pay for.
If Google no longer sends users to websites for free on organics, the world will have to figure out some mechanism whereby Google pays site owners for putting the information on the web in the first place. Where will that money come from?
If it's ads, the AI experience is a “lies engine” where advertisers get to pick which lies the AI tells. Not sure what kinds of people would show up for that experience. Probably the same kind who watch home shopping TV. I would venture to guess that there will be a ceiling in the advertising value of that property. Or the AI interacts with people in good faith. But then, if I'm an advertiser, how do I get my lies into the world? “We will tell your lie, only if it's a truth” doesn't work because, as an advertiser, I understand that the truth about me already gets spoken, and I don't need to pay a dime for that.
You can run an argument that people can tell ads from organics on the current SERP, and you can calibrate how much of each there should be. But you can't really “calibrate” the amount and level of the lying in the AI to where it's just enough so that people will show up, but not so much that there's no value for advertisers. You can't have little boxes either, where the AI is like “having told you the truth, I want you to also pay attention to this lie that someone paid me to tell you: …”
Is Google really saying: “Hey, we're the lion's share of the advertising market right now. But, because we kind of like these newfangled AI things, we're going to just vacate that spot to whoever. Instead, we will turn ourselves into a pre-product-market-fit company. Maybe at some point over the next 10 years, we're going to be able to tell you how we might actually monetize ourselves. Stay toooooned.”
The reason why AI is a better experience than the web right now, is because we have pre-enshittification AI and post-enshittification web. What will the whole thing look like, after enshittification is through with AI?
The inability to do a proper search with “-x” x being a word you want excluded from the results but I can being able to have a convo about summary results is just mindblowing. I miss proper search. What’s everyone using for alternatives?
I've found Google AI Search to be good for really topical searches. And its conversational ability has noticeably improved over the last year. I can now have a (short) conversation where I reference past messages.
Google is making the pivot. And they’ve got such a strong strategic position. Full-stack integration. They will survive and thrive in this new era. Search seems safe. Yet, other products are still vulnerable to encroachment.
I use Google daily, and yet I can't remember the last time I used their search box - all of my searching has been done through the browser URL bar for a long, long time. I wonder if similar changes are being applied to the Chrome URL bar?
Lots of people talking about Google being strictly worse than a number of search engines (bing, duck, etc) not been my experience. Brave default search is awful. Duck was terrible last I used it. Google still great for me, but I have a decent amount of "privacy controls" implemented (DNS, vpn, browser extensions) and i basically dork most searches--average search looks more like a find invocation than English. In this last regard especially, Google is peerless, imo
Been a while since I looked around though. Is there an engine that supports all the operators that Google does and that provides results of better or equivalent quality?
barf but it at least opens up the playing field for new startups that want to provide good old index search and try to beat them where they left off when search still worked 8 years ago before they hired the yahoo POS execs that enshitified the service.
the thing that bothers me is I don't usually want this mode. When I search, I am not looking for what google thinks, I am looking for what other sources think.
How does a media company stay in business when there is no one visiting the site, and people are only getting the quality information from Google?
Advertising on the media site (assuming digital media, no physical media) is going to disappear because people probably won't be clicking through to read the source material that the Google AI answer relied on. No traffic, no advertisers, no money to produce the original journalism. That's going to impact the Google results eventually as these media outlets shut down to be replaced with...AI slop, maybe?
Is the subscriber model the answer? It could work for a niche subject or a single journalist with a following, and it wouldn't be sucked into Google results, either, if it was effectively gated/paywalled.
Thankfully ublock origin blocks a ton of those useless AI slop spam, but Google nerfed its search engine already years before. They showed that they don't care about it anymore, yet alone about users. Something fundamentally changed at Google and it is not good. It is time for the world to retire Google. We don't want or need an adCompany nor an AI slop company.
How does this work for Google? I read it costs them $0.001 to perform a search. No matter how efficient their inference chips are, the new cost basis has to be 10X or more. And the zero click Internet not only kills ad supported content sites, it also kills Google SERP ad revenues.
I have to imagine that eventually ads will be integrated in, or they will change the layout so the ads are side by side with the AI and the SERP results underneath.
I just want a relevant website ... no I don't want to use your agent. Just give me search results that are interesting to read, no AI slop, which teach me something new ... no I don't want to buy if I don't show this intent. Just serve the public interest and not your own financial interests.
Thank you.
I wish they could remove the AI overview crap that's dysfunctional and kills the very spirit of a search engine's premise. You're not supposed to steal links from sites Google. That's a fucking dark pattern.
For years already google has had integrations and more 'intelligent' responses for things like weather, shopping, answers to queries etc. This hardly changes any of that (most of the 'features' are inside AI Mode). For 'regular' uses this changes nothing. Avoid AI Mode most of the time. Double-check most automated overview options. And still not using any kind of chat interface when searching for sites, things, images, whatever. Hardly changes anything. And Google is still the destination for all lookups. With little to no reason to go looking for a different service especially not from any other AI-related firm.
Bring me Google before the instant search nonsense where I could go into rabbit holes 100+ pages deep.
Now it can't find anything interesting. As a search is basically useless and it's more like Home pages used to be (that you would very much build yourself in a html editor and place your most often visited sites).
Anyways, I find that my $10/mo subscription to Kagi has been well worth not having to deal with Google's BS. (And they do offer AI if you want but they don't push it on you.)
I'm pretty sure I had something very similar A/Bed at me by Bing the other day.
You know what I really miss? Being able to type a literal string in quotes and get pages that had that actual string on them. That's what I really miss.
I haven't used google search as my default search engine in YEARS. DDG is good enough for 99% of my searches. Same with Google Chrome. Stop giving evil companies your traffic and attention.
This is great news. I remember Altavista, Yahoo and similar ones, they pioneered this type of home-page-is-all-you-need UI which is the perfect compromise of what product people at Google have come up with and what users want, at least according to their tests.
This means that, in a couple years, we might see a competitor that offers you quick, almost instant web search, with a minimal UI, possibly an algorithm that somehow surfaces the most relevant results based on how all websites point to each other naturally (like, a site that is referred to by 20 others should be above one with zero references).
huh, one downside of being an all-in Firefox and Kagi user, meaning I have everywhere firfox as default browser with kagi account configured, all laptops, tablets, phones, means I am now out of touch and never noticed.
Makes me sad. I recall the beginnings of Google, so hopeful so new.
Now they are a money printing corporate. I am sure there are still people there doing new and exciting things, but the Grey Suits have taken the reigns
They could have used AI to make that awesome simple sparse home page better. Fought off the SEO optimiser that made search so dire in the recent past
But no. They are doubling down on bling and crap. SEO is good for business.
If you'd like to switch from Google, I'll take the opportunity to let you know about Uruky [1], an ad-free and privacy-focused search engine, that's focused on a simpler experience than Kagi (no AI). Kind of like "old school" search. My wife and I launched it earlier this year, and it's been going really well so far.
Id you'd like to try it for free for a couple of days, reach out with your randomly-assigned account number and we'll top it up for you.
It’s diverged quite a bit from the original:
https://web.archive.org/web/19981111183552/http://google.sta...When did they change the "query" to q?
Saving bytes on the wire?
I guess maybe after the thousandth time they had to type it out.
What scares me about this new AI mode thingy is that every answer sounds like a systematic literature review, but only for the results. For example, if I look for users feedback about a specific product, it says "People think that..., but also that...; It's important to notice that some people ..." where with 'people' it means just a random comment on a random website just because it thought it was a good contribution to the results. Sounds like it's giving a ground truth from "multiple" data, when instead it's just aggregating almost random stuff. In the context of a systematic review, the feature that I would love the most is augmenting my initial query, so that I can just get more results that I could find interesting. I am 100% sure they thought about this, but ignored it for the most profitable option.
> What scares me about this new AI mode thingy
What scares me is the rampant inaccuracy. In my experience, the AI responses are wrong about 65% of the time. I just did a search today about an error talking about a disconnected link between apps, and Google AI result summary told me that the error was related to my pulling a USB drive too quickly in windows. The ONLY word similar to my query and that AI response was the word "disconnect". Everything else was clearly about the SaaS apps.
I have people coming to me, asking me questions, then telling my Google told them something else, so now I have to waste time convincing them that it's wrong. Over the past 2 years AI has done nothing for me but complicate my work life.
And of course, this could be because the model is crap, but it could be because they want me to keep refining my query over and over for more ad views. Either way, it's a terrible experience.
Yep. For years we've been telling people to 'just fucking google it', and now when they do they're getting bullshit AI answers.
Worst thing is, some of these bullshit answers will be medical, some of them financial, it seems pretty certain people are being harmed.
Yeah the Google AI results are more dangerous than ChatGPT, not only because it uses a smaller model but because Google's knowledge graph used to deliver very accurate and authoritative information but now that's been replaced by a stochastic system in the same place, so people are used to trusting it.
I think we’re getting what we deserve by snarkily telling people to Google stuff instead of answering accurately. Google results have never ever been pure accuracy
To be fair - for all of those years Google has been serving up some atrocious results - remember when googling health symptoms got you rabies or pregnancy.
There's even the meme where people ask if the code was the result of a stack overflow question, or answer
It seems to me one needs to consider the complexity of the question they are asking before searching it.
To stick with your post, consider people asking medical or financial questions. For a wide variety of reasons, many of such questions don't have an answer. In such cases, AI is still going to take a crack at it. AI shouldn't be blamed for "bullshit answers" to such questions.
Before using AI, I think people should stop and ask themselves, "Is there really a single answer to this question? Is AI the right choice?"
The problem is Google's AI results get even simple factual questions wrong all the time.
Earlier today, I searched "pixel 10 wifi 7" because I was confused that GSMArena showed my Pixel 8 supports Wifi 7, but the Pixel 10 only Wifi 6. Gemini confidently claimed that the Pixel 10 does support Wifi 7 -- but that's not true at all. Only the Pixel 10 _Pro_ supports it, as I discovered when actually reading the non-AI search results.
And this is a question about a Google product!
I had a similar thing when I was gooling a few days ago, I can't remember exactly but it was like "why does [product] not support [feature]" and the AI summary was confidently wrong, saying "The product does support [feature]", which knew was completely incorrect, and I did find a Reddit discussion or something in the actual results with discussions that were actually about what I was looking for!
It's really depressing how bad things are getting...
It’s hilariously persistent in this, esp. for anything even slightly divergent from the beaten path. Discount everything the AI box says about emacs to zero.
Admittedly I’m unsure if it was Google or DuckDuckGo. I switch between both. I quickly asked the in search AI for a UTC time conversion like a lazy fool and it got it off by almost a day wrong.
I avoid any asking any agent a fact-based (especially math) request. It's a great compression algorithm and a great language generator, and I guess the intersection of those two things is "an answer". Calculation doesn't intersect.
My google search for 'pixel 10 wifi 7' immediately shows the right answer. (10 Pro and 10 Pro XL support it but, but base Pixel 10 only supports Wifi 6E).
Though the inconsistency of results between users is definitely another frustrating thing.
Ok, fair. Hard to understand why it would get that wrong.
Because LLMs aren't sentient, they don't draw on facts, and they don't have nuance. The answer given is similar to answers you might expect to see for similar questions.
It's really amazing we can make machines do that, and it's really depressing that we think a stochastic bullshit machine is going to give us something we can rely on.
Or… the default LLM Google uses for search has been quantized to s**. Ask a proper Thinking model, with browsing enabled, and odds of a correct answer are much higher. There’s been substantial improvement in AI in even the last year.
Ask a human a question like this, and they also have a chance of getting it wrong, even when confident.
> Ask a human a question like this, and they also have a chance of getting it wrong, even when confident.
We google something specifically because the humans within reach don't know. The goal of searching is, well, to search pages - we're trying to find a site when we use google search.
The goal when using an LLM is generally different; we want an answer, not a site.
I think that it feels a little wasteful to go to Google search to ask a question like this, only for the AI that's giving you an answer instead of page results to perform its own web search to get you the response.
Also, I asked a thinking model with browsing enabled and got this:
> The Google Pixel 10 is expected to support Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be), based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 / Tensor G5 chipset it will likely use, which includes an integrated Wi-Fi 7 modem. Specific finalized specs aren't confirmed until Google's official announcement.
(Model GLM-5-Turbo - two months old - using Kilo Code in the "Ask" profile; in its thinking token churn it reasoned that it should keep the response brief and direct. Perhaps not the best suite of model+harness for this task, but it's what I had to hand that's not quantized to shit, is a thinking model, and has a web search tool available to it.)
> Ask a human a question like this
Why would a human know specs for a random phone off the top of their head? The human response is either "I don't know" or "let me look that up", not a hallucination.
*so long as an accurate answer exists on the internet
Claude is OK at saying when it can’t find good information, but it’s still 50/50 on citing a source that has nothing to do with its claim.
They are this wrong about everything, but you don't usually notice it when using it to look for things you aren't an expert in. The default stance really does need to be "do not trust, verify" at all times.
They can still be useful, e.g. they're significantly better at finding "I want a thing that does x but not y and it must be blue, or maybe two things that can be glued together to do that" than classic search. But they'll routinely miss extremely obvious answers because the related search it ran didn't find it, or completely screw up what something can actually do. Checking more pages of results by hand or asking humans who know even a little about those fields is still wildly more useful... but they're absolutely slaughtering the sites where people do that, by stealing all the real traffic and sending DDoS-level automated requests.
I’d make assumptions about how the cheapest and fastest possible flash model optimized for being extra cheap and extra fast would get something wrong based on its limited context (which can be very incomplete summaries of search results)
I often have the expensive models give relatively simple inaccurate answers, even when they cite sources that directly contradict them. The error rate is lower, but you can’t have confidence with llm answers.
It somehow seems to interpret whatever sources it's grepping as the exact opposite of what those sources say fairly often. I've lost track of how many times I've clicked on the sources it cites, and every single one is in agreement, but the AI claims the opposite.
Did you just agree to a stranger's counterpoint on the internet? This post should be in a museum somewhere
The simple answer is that these systems are very bad at telling the truth reliably.
When the default "search" results are AI, it's difficult, if not impossible, to "choose", since Google is pushing the AI so hard.
In watching the demo, I didn't come away with the impression that they were removing search results. Yes, they are pushing AI hard, but users can still opt to use Google in the more traditional way. Unless I misunderstood the demo, it's definitely possible to choose.
"possible to choose" doesn't get us much.
An interesting aspect of this is the decrease in quality feedback on th organic links. If most people never get down to the actual links there is very little to tell which ones were good or if they had any relevance.
There is also that less incentive to properly maintain the search algorithms to fight SEO and spam.
For all intents and purpose, organic search results have been given a death sentence and are just waiting for the last moment.
Organic search dying was my first reaction too. But, who knows...this wouldn't be the first time I've heard that.
They are showing billions of people a big bold answer at the top of all their pages.
What a wildly irresponsible company
Go to Google right now and search anything. What is the very first thing you see?
I asked it “how can I tell if a spray paint can is empty?” And it told me that the paint can would no longer rattle.
> one needs to consider the complexity of the question they are asking before searching...consider people asking medical or financial questions...many of such questions don't have an answer. In such cases, AI is still going to take a crack at it. AI shouldn't be blamed for "bullshit answers"...people should stop and ask themselves, "Is there really a single answer to this question?
It's a bold position to say that it's the users fault for being lied to by Google. There isn't a "single answer" to most questions. It's still Google's job to provide answers that are accurate and reflect the best information available on complicated topics. That's what they're trying to sell us anyway. When google's AI can't live up to the hype "You shouldn't be asking AI such difficult questions" is not a great response, especially when people are just trying to get web search results and AI is suddenly interrupting with an opinion nobody asked for.
In past, people can trust Google. Now we should teach children don't trust "search result" from Google.
It's nice that Google's AI summary always lists its sources. It's less nice that those sources more often than not do not corroborate the summary. It often seems to be a few random links thrown in there for good measure.
I have no idea why this is, but it is impossible that these links are primary sources of the data, if such things even exists at all. In which case, why list them?
It is certainly seems possible that the actual sources of the data is the output of some other LLM.
I’ll bet they intentionally obfuscate so people can’t find the actual sources of info used for the answers
Reminds me of this gem:
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fn...
Straight of of x-files s02e03
With AI ads you get all the power from big data aggregation, the trust/framing of an authoritative voice, and cheap personalization that specifically optimizes for what convinces you. It's too powerful. Even if it only works a small percentage of the time we're interacting with these things so frequently that a small percent is a large number. They're already feeding user profiles into these machines and there's explicit talk about having the LLMs optimize ad campaigns. It's already dystopian if it's ads to get you to spend your money, but people seem to dismiss that. Do we not care that this is also being used in the same way to convince you to believe certain things? To join certain political organizations?
Yeah, these things help me write more lines of code faster (if we include all the lines from our design docs) but I don't like the idea of pointing a supercomputer at my brain and someone else using it to try to manipulate me. That's not a game I'll win. It's not a game you'll win either.
The built-in Search AI is fucking braindead and people constantly come up to me "Google said xyz" and I just have to turn around and say "I do not care what the Google Search AI said".
Whatever it says is a waste of time 99% of the time. Although people believe it, or consider it worthwhile majority of the time because its so simple to use. It's always there, always instant and appears at the very top.
I would much rather people shove a question into a locally running Qwen model and tell me what it said rather than use the nonsense search model. I hate it.
/rant over.
accuracy hasn't been their priority for a while now - they just want people to click on ads
Free AI's are dumb. Extremely dumb. The Google AI result is dumb on purpose -- being smart requires more compute.
Google has been around for a quarter of a century. People are still incredibly dumb and will believe whatever they like.
Can you share the query?
> the AI responses are wrong about 65% of the time
Highly doubtful.
Depends on what you ask. It's pretty easy to get wrong information.
e.g. search for "how do you make money with options"
Google's AI says
"When you buy a Call, you are betting the stock price will go up. When you buy a Put, you are betting it will go down."
Wrong right off the bat, because it ingested a whole bunch of get-rich-quick bull on the internet. The correct version is that if you buy a call you are betting the stock price will go up more than the market expects it to.
I tried this search. It gave a write up about buying and selling options, noting that the price of the stock had to move significantly, not just go up or down. It also talked about vertical spreads and iron condors. It touches on delta, theta, and volatility and their impacts, as well as leverage risk and potential uncapped risk.
While I agree that AI gets things wrong a lot, and someone should read significantly more before getting into actually trading options, this does give a decent overview to give a layperson an idea of what they are, and some key terms on what to look for if they want to dive deeper. That said, with this info alone, there are some sharp edges that would leave the person open to unnecessary risk if they went on this information alone.
They probably update these answers offline. I tried "how do you profit from options" and got:
> Call Options: You buy these when you believe a stock's price will go up. If the stock rises past your strike price, the option's value increases, allowing you to sell it for a profit or exercise it to buy the stock at a discount.
> Put Options: You buy these when you believe a stock's price will go down. If the stock falls below your strike price, you profit.
Which leaves me wondering if changing the search textually busts some cache that they update using a slower/smarter model.
And this is yet another problem, it's stochastic. And often it's self-contradicting even within the same response. What else do you expect from a language model which essentially predicts tokens.
Is that really categorically wrong, or is it a correct-enough explanation for laypeople looking for a one-sentence answer?
It's wild to me that someone looking for advice on how to do any kind of stock trading would be looking for a once sentence answer.
I hope it at least has real citations to actual websites like, I dunno, fidelity or some other reasonably competent authority that can explain all the details?
It's an answer that's too short for an expert to find useful, and useless to a layperson unless all they want to do is reply to a post on twitter.
I've never searched for a financial question where I did not want to know all the weird details because why would I search for it unless I was considering doing it? Seems like someone who doesn't care about the answer is going to be more an edge case than I am.
Those looking for a one sentence answer will be the quickest to invest. When people talk about the harms of AI, this is the kind of thing that comes to mind first for me.
It is, in fact, categorically wrong, and misleads beginners to make bad decisions. Robinhood is notably bad for promoting this kind of gambling behavior on its platforms; they also state the same misinformation (that you buy a call if you think something is going to go up, when it is in fact a bet that it is going to go up more than a certain amount in a certain period of time).
People shoot themselves in the foot because they think NVDA is going to go up after earnings, buy call options, and then even though the stock goes up they lose money because they did not understand IV crush.
People looking for one-sentence explanations should really not be playing with options. In finance you should understand what you're buying thoroughly. If you just want to bet that "NVDA goes up", you should just buy NVDA stock; that is the trade that accurately captures that bet.
In fact, more then what the call seller expects, not the market.
This is the problem with teaching and learning. Everything is wrong to some extent. I used to be this way but I don't have a better approach.
Newtonian physics is actually wrong, the founding of any country will be wrong, biology is wrong, nutrition is wrong… what can we even teach? what should we teach in this lens? serious question.
The serious answer is in the non-AI-summarized world, you can choose whose information to read and trust.
If you want to learn about finance, you can learn about it from people who actually know what they're talking about. You can choose to listen to Jim Simons or Warren Buffet or whoever actually knows a thing or two instead of the rando dude you met at the bar. The AI summaries, on the other hand, ingested a lot of internet garbage.
I picked finance as an example because anecdotally, most of the information on the internet by pure token volume is wrong. The Youtubers drawing lines on charts want your attention because they make money from page views; the financial advisors want your annual fees; the brokerages want you to gamble and get your commisions or PFOF (in the case of zero-commision brokers); the market makers and HFTs want your spreads; Reddit users want to show off their lucky, statistically insignificant profit charts for karma points. None of the above have an intention to give you good information.
Honestly Google's AI answer is about as right if not more right then your answer.
You can easily make money buying a call without the stock price moving a single cent (IV increases). Funny enough the stock can even go down and with a large enough IV increase you still make money.
It hallucinates greatly about many things when I ask about C++ things. Things that you can easily find the right answer in cppreference or by just inspecting headers in your own IDE.
Yeah it’s not 2023 anymore. So no it’s not hallucinating like you think it is.
95% closer to your expectations?
What, you think it's actually higher too?
If you think ai is getting answers wrong at anything close to the frequency quoted then it calls into question your usage and ability to use ai in general.
That has the be the most hacker news way of saying "skill issue," I have seen to date.
Yup, I was looking up a pair of IEMS vs another pair of IEMs. It said option A is overall better, when really it was just reciting a single person's opinion. I've been aware it will summarize only a single source and present it as an aggregation of many opinions, but it stood out to me how matter-of-fact it was that the one was definitely better than the other. I simply wanted to find forum discussions on people's thought and wasn't influenced by this AI blurb, but I think seeing an answer at the very top state so matter-of-factly that one is definitely better and present it as though everyone thinks that will definitely influence a lot of people. It makes me wonder how "gameable" this will become...
> It makes me wonder how "gameable" this will become...
You better make sure your ad spend is high enough that your product's matter-of-fact result will be positive. That's a nice product you have there. It'd be a real shame if nobody knew about it.
Since the best resource is personal recommendations, got any entry level cheap IEM recommendations?
Primarily to avoid even more headphone dent, not an audiophile
The iem sub has a post with some recommendations at various price points. I’d probably start there, not sure your budget and I don’t know have the most experience with the super cheap ones: https://reddit.com/r/iems/comments/1la65kr/top_5_iems_in_eve...
I also encourage finding the right tips. Tips are cheap and finding proper fitting ones is important.
Not gp but I really like the sound of my GK Kuntens and 7Hz Zero2s. Both have a rather V-shaped sound signature, some like it and some don't. Though unfortunately the Zero2s feel a bit uncomfortable in my ears when using them for longer
Most of the ones that are over 50 can last a lot of time and have good enough sounds. But the most important stuff are the tips and the cable. Make sure the former fits (just buy a pack) and the latter is thick and braided. Some cheapo ones send every rubbing amplified to your ears.
> I simply wanted to find forum discussions on people's thought
Why didn’t you tell the robot that, as your query?
I searched something like “top pro vs tea pro se reddit” so I kind of did.
“Kind of”, indeed.
> Please provide 1-5 forum discussions or social media comment threads discussing or comparing x and y.
Well, that’s how I would ask an AI. I wasn’t asking an AI though, I was googling it
Google is “an AI”,
and has been for some time!,
was my point ^.^
I was only intending to use the traditional search engine, the AI was incidental. If I want an AI answer, I will go to it separately. This is better in my mind as optimal queries for each are different.
The issue is, Google has mixed the two in a way that promotes the AI response as primary. This has resulted in dubious answers being presented as “official” summaries (to the lay person).
At the very least, one would expect it to be a little smarter—perhaps by automatically doing things like you suggested—instead of basing things off a single source, as it seems to enjoy doing.
... And some of us would rather have old google
Indeed - just earlier this week I read Google AI summarize a query about testosterone, citing 3 sources. The first citation was a link to a NIH study (or of similar repute). Ok great. The second? Two spam (and explicit) websites existing solely to sell penis enlargement pills.
What was worrying is only some of the claims were supported by the linked study, and most of the response content was drawn from the spam sites.
This problem is not limited to Google, it's the core value of mass-marketed LLMs, or isn't it?
Without "random comments", Google wouldn't have anything to say about "does an air purifier help my asthma, if yes: which one?" or "find the problem with this Hibernate annotation".
They also don't make much effort to exclude sloppy sites, to the contrary, they made way more efforts against SEO spam in the time when Google was a search engine, not trying to be an AI "oracle".
I think their end game is that the only metrics relevant for ranking sources are:
- agreeability (works well as a proxy for correctness with many questions!)
- originality, but not in a scientific sense, just to prevent model collapse
- legal factors such as preventing false health claims or similar things, as long as there is legislation against this kind of thing
I’ve noticed this too. A single result can determine the answer it gives. And removing the content from its context makes it harder to assess. Suddenly it’s “Gemini said …” rather than “some guy in the YouTube comments said”.
And half the time, the sources turn out to be sarcastic jokes on reddit.
So the bots are not recognizing the sarcasm font?
Lucky we all added /s so the bots have an easier time understanding it
Yes. "We all" add it. Every time.
/s
I ran into one that kept referencing "people", but then I found that it was a single Reddit thread from a couple of years ago about a relatively small and obscure foreign city with 2 replies.
AI is the new “many people are saying”.
The scary bit is the use of the term AI. The "I" implies critical thinking.
For models trained on a corpus of groomed data, the "critical thinking" bit is baked into the work of grooming the data and how it is trained. And someone is thinking critically about both so as to make a good model.
Now, every damn thing is called AI no matter where it is getting results from.
Are modern models super handy? Absolutely.
But calling it AI implies a lot more critical thought than is actually happening!
Edit: took the time to write a shorter comment.
I love asking AI about blatantly wrong opinions but by people it thinks must be an authority.
To not make this political, let me give you a game example. Right now the dota 2 fandom wiki is abandoned, and it has been vandalized with covert shitposts. One of them was the addition of a 4th attribute called Charisma, which is completely fake. If you ask AI's "What are the main attributes in dota, according to the official wiki", the dumber AI will fall for it, but the smarter AI will know it's wrong, but try hard to hallucinate some sort of valid explanation like claim charisma is from a custom game or a fan suggestion or writing exercise.
Because you said the word >>OFFICIAL<<, they can NEVER straight up just say "The wiki is wrong". They presume authority from a bunch of shitposts.
Wait until you realize half of the sources already are LLM generated diarrhea
The problem of AI eating and regurgitating its own slop is only going to get worse with time. The best datasets are behind us. Future models are going to have to depend on a lot of human intervention.
The open web will die off, and the AI companies will pay people to create private datasets and books that are known to not be slop.
I tend to frame questions to google from a programmer point of view - I'm carefully specific. I seem to get good results that way.
What's old is new again lol
altavista is back baby
What scares me are the basic usability fails it still has. Search for a few foreign language words and it will come back with paragraphs upon paragraphs of AI output in that foreign language despite me telling Google in 15 different ways that I don't speak it, nor anything else on the Google page being in that language. How are all their products always made by and for the most narrow minded people on this planet.
Funnily enough, I have the exact opposite problem, where Google likes to give me results in the configured main language even when I do queries in another and actually want results in the other language.
I’ve found it quite unsettling to be served foreign language videos on YouTube automatically dubbed over by Google into English. Just mixed in with the search results.
Kysely is the name of a typescript query builder and also Finnish for "query".
Recently, it's started answering any search about Kysely with a blob of Finnish. Awesome stuff, guys, great work.
Kyselý is also a Czech word for sour. So you've also got that to look forward to.
> "People think that..., but also that...; It's important to notice that some people ..." where with 'people' it means just a random comment on a random website
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
>where with 'people' it means just a random comment on a random website just because it thought it was a good contribution to the results.
Hate to break it to you, but this has been the backbone of "journalism" for the last decade.
Fishing Twitter for takes to fill the "people are saying" box...
Well, you'll be happy to know that most of American media is exactly the same way: 2 people on twitter will generate a "Americans find Widget X is bad"
> when instead it's just aggregating almost random stuff
How do you know that?
Scraping websites is literally what Google does best, stringing together information in the pattern of "some people x, other people y" requires 0 AI and could have been done since forever. I find it implausible that otherwise obviously capable models would be reduced to do something akin to just that.
Oh who cares. We are barely scratching the surface of AI. You all make it sound like it’s been around for 30 years and it sucks. It will only get better. Got to stop throwing up imaginary walls like nothing will improve.
As a counterexample, I've been seeing more "safety rejections" from Claude. Unlike search, being unable to ask _anything_ about botulinum, or details about the recent Copy Fail vulnerability (without giving my fingerprints to Anthropic to become a "verified security researcher") we're only just beginning to see the ways LLM can be used to distort information and its availability.
My grandfather was one of the first people in Canada to own a commercially available chainsaw.
Let me tell you - it didn’t take 30 years for people to figure out that chainsaws were useful.
That's fine if we aren't destroying existing products to replace them with AI.
People can already use AI mode in google search if they want. "It'll be better later" is a shit reason to kill one product for it.
No. It is already good enough. But complaining that wording is so generic is hilarious. It just shows how little people on HN understand ai at all.
So you started with ‘highly doubtful’ as a comment, got given lots of examples and instead of assimilating that info you closed your eyes put your fingers in yours ears and said “oh who cares?’ - you’re on team AI regardless eh? That’s fucking weird mate.
Na. Wasn’t given any good examples. People just whining about the same stuff because “oh no I got information that’s former in the same structure that I can tell it’s AI and it makes me feel bad”
I'm old enough to remember when "Google" was something that ended conversations. People — myself included — would literally say "Google it," the facts would be located, and that was that. Now that Google wants to be the conversation, I'm worried there will no longer be a bias-free source of information for the masses.
This is all new, so I may be a bit hyperbolic, but the reason OpenAI introducing ads bothers me is the implicit (or even explicit) bias that can be smuggled into a chat in ways that simply aren't possible when you're just clicking through to an external source. There are all kinds of implications to Google no longer being that source of truth, even by default. Maybe this has quietly been the case for a long time, but this feels like the final move — pushing their ad bias (i.e., whoever paid the most) into a conversational system, where dark patterns are far easier to implement and much harder to detect.
One answer to this might be domain-specific agents — narrower, accountable, ideally something you (or your community) actually run. But even then it all falls back on trust: you being a good-faith actor, and others trusting that you are one. Which is to say, we're back to the same problem, just at a smaller scale.
With sponsored links and aggressive SEO, “Google it” has been falling apart as a source of facts for a long time.
There is an incredible gap in the search literacy between different users of Google. Some will accept what they find in the top links, no matter how dubious the source.
> Google" was something that ended conversations.
Yes, but not because of facts or bias-free sources. It was the equivalent of staring deep at your wrist watch while someone's speaking: a clear signal that you were done with whatever they wanting to talk about.
I kinda like that "let me Google it for you" in Japan was more popular as "Google it loser" (ググレカス), a rare instance where the common phrases was more expressive than it's western counterpart.
Google is not bias-free, and has not been for a long time.
and even if it was, when a search engine takes you to another website, that site is also not bias free.
just becuase somebody publishes something on a website, does not make it a fact. google has always been good at finding things that look like facts, and their AI iteration is also good at that.
Never has been. No source or tool is. It’s a noble dream that can’t be achieved
never, actually - any ranking algorithm is inherently biased because it ranks
I agree with the sentiment, but native ads i.e. blogs, reviews, articles, etc. that do their best to hide that they’re a sponsored product review have been around for a long time. Admittedly, LLMs WILL make it even more difficult to discern the difference.
My takeaway is that the internet would be a dramatically cooler place today if people were just willing to pay for stuff.
The ad version of the web, where ~60% of people carry the ad burden for everyone, and defacto aligns the service providers with advertisers, is just a guaranteed bad outcome. The only real upside, which frankly people take for granted, is that the ad-web is classless web. Broke or rich you get the same (crappy) services.
I remember those mock web service package flyers from the net neutrality days. Where people made fake marketing material showing website packages you could access with different paid tiers, something reminiscent of the cable TV days.
Back then it was horrifying, but 20 years later, I think I would entertain a subscription to a wide array of web services if it meant they worked for me and not advertisers.
My other main issue with the no-net neutrality world is that it also means websites would have to pay ISP’s or be artificially throttled. That’s a huge problem.
It’s one thing to say we need to pay. It’s another for ISP’s to get 3 pulls at the hose (paid for a connection, paid for what we can browse, paid for who provides the sites) when some of those elements don’t even require more (or at least much) effort or infrastructure on their part. I don’t like the idea of their picking winners and losers. We’ve got enough of that as it is.
>I'm worried there will no longer be a bias-free source of information for the masses.
There was never anything bias-free about google search. It "ranks" information based on all sorts of qualities. At our most generous we can call it somewhat of a "consensus" check. Historically it was a tool for quickly getting you in the vicinity of an answer that most would consider correct.
Remember "google bombing"? Hell SEO alone invalidates any assertion that google search is a valid source of truth and that's be going on for a long time.
The death of Google search referrals?
I think this is the second time in a week (the first being the "Googlebook") that Google's promotional announcement video showcasing UI is so full of special effects, dramatic pan/zooms, and woosh sounds, that I have no idea how the final-end product actually looks or works.
It looks like an output of one of those AI video editors that some (often vibecoded) startups use for their product launch videos. Just drop some assets in, and it spams witty taglines with dramatic transition effects.
in both cases, the reality is that nothing has changed all that much.
the googlebook is a laptop. the search box doesn't really work differently to how it did yesterday. (how it worked ten years ago, yes it's very different. but ai mode is already here). neither of these things are a big deal. the promo videos are for the sake of making promo videos.
I watched this video too, and like the google book one, I have no idea who this product is for
I had to stop it because it was making me dizzy trying to focus on what was shown
I had an interesting one yesterday. Someone responded to me on Reddit with very official sounding words to make their argument. I was still dubious and googled a few of the concepts they threw out there.
The AI confidently told me they were right. Then I checked the sources, and found the only source that agreed with them was their own Reddit comment!!!
I can also relate here, seeking a product review on Sony wh1000x_, Google wrote a nice seeming summary, but scrolling down to some Reddit discussions, stumbled upon a single comment that was very nearly verbatim what the “AI Summary” said, only the ai summary phrased the summary as if it were a sentiment aggregated over many users’ experience. i.e.”users say…”
Reddit is heavily filled with bots at this point, feels like every question is made to then promote their product or service using multiple bot accounts.
I've found this several times as well. I googled something to dispute a comment in reddit, and google "confirmed" it as accurate, citing what the person said in that exact reddit comment.
Google has become the ouroboros
A few days ago I went looking for something music-related that I've been trying to find for a long time. Google's AI response confirmed it existed and described it almost exactly as I've described it in the past. It was then that I noticed the source.
It was citing my own old comment, here on HN, about that musical moment as evidence that it existed. That was surreal.
But they already have an AI mode tab… What is the innovation here, making it default instead of search?
Alternative to archive.ph and "unlocked article" tracking code
Works where archive.ph is blocked
Text-only
Something like NB. Javascript and CSS interpreters are needed only for Datadome CAPTCHA. The following DNS data is required No other DNS data is requiredI get that they have to make changes to the google search box because so many people are just using ChatGPT/Cluade to answer questions instead of google.
However, I specifically use Google (or DDG) when the LLMs are failing me. When I want "research something on my own" because the LLM is giving me garbage, or untrustworthy information. If Google completely replaces their search box my Google usage will go down even further.
I don't plan to use Google's LLM when Cluade is just better. Now that Google's search features are gone (or going away) I no longer have any reason to turn to them at all
Agreed, but I think that might be our tech bubble. My non-tech family still just types searches in the URL bar of their browser first, and I'm sure others just have google as their browser homepage. I assume that's actually a pretty common use-case for most non-tech users.
With answers “someone on the internet wrote”, I miss knowing definitely that there’s no good or authoritative answer to my query on the internet. With those “people as clueless as you said…” answers it takes lot more time to understand that.
I don't care. Aside from a single dormant GMail account I keep solely for "parental tech support", I de-Googled 5 years ago and strongly encourage everyone to do likewise.
Google stopped being a customer-focused company after their 2nd major revision to GOffice and the PM shake-up in search from Raghavan https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ .
I've been using Kagi for a couple of years now. Haven't missed Google once.
It's not clear to me from this announcement. The articles make it sound like all searches now go to ai mode and no more blue links.
But Google's description seems more minimal, like easier to get to ai mode, search box can expand intelligently based on input. Is there any clearer description of the magnitude of the change?
I wonder how many tokens this is gonna cost Google.
It was only a matter of time. Watching how less technical people behave in the LLM era, I've noticed that most people no longer say "Google something", instead, they say "ask ChatGPT" or "ask chat". Many technical people have also stopped using Google for a lot of search queries and now just let an LLM find the answer.
So how does google now make money when it is just providing us with direct answers from ai, instead of showing us both paid for search results and directing us to sites which host targetted ads?
How does adsense work when there are no search results?
I expect a flavor of affiliate marketing where you can never trust if the LLM is giving you the best recommendations or the most highly bidded recommendations
"Since we're on the topic of DIY car repairs, did you know Autozone carries a wide variety blorpity slop?"
"When is Stephen Colberts last show?"
"The last episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is airing on Thursday, May 21, 2026. Based on your interest in The Late Show with Stephen Colbert you might also like the new Amazon Prime Video series of Last One Laughing, available to stream now"
Does that answer your question?
You're missing the point. What incentive will websites have to create that content in the first place if you never visit? This was the contract with google adrev and website owners -- google would direct traffic to your site and hopefully they click around.
If google is now actively keeping you away from content, whats the point in creating?
Huh? These are my results when I put that prompt in:
>Huh?
The post you're responding to is making a satirical comment on the future of LLM responses.
Obviously if you pay, the AI will really like your product.
"Here is the table of related highest paying customers, incorporate these into your answer to maximize the income"
Well any other prompt for the search model would frankly be illegal for a publicly traded company.
But how is this sold to the customer? With adsense it is quantifiable, you set your max per click, per conversion etc, and can clearly see which you won and lost against competitors.
This becomes very murky when paying for 'ai to like your product' vs 'ai to really like your product'.
Same per click, it obviously includes links when looking for products, but impression could also be counted and arguably especially if present in the first few sentences it is a valuable impression.
But then the separation of ads from content is lost so it becomes useless as product search, so maybe it isn't that trivial indeed. But it's not like even 10% of users is gonna find some other "search" engine and switch.
edit: can't reply deeper and interesting question, I mean we all would love to have ability to search arbitrary strings and regexes through the web corpus, but currently when you type something you get that AI reply instantly for most queries, this makes me still use them, if you forgot some shortcut key or something it has currently unique value in terms of latency (even ignoring the fact that for most users you also use them by default by typing in the address bar)
I think also they have the issue that now the google search box is just an ai prompt, what differentiates it from any other ai prompt like gpt or claude?
Did they just devalue their unique search product by pushing it into another category already dominated by other big players?
"Don't talk about goblins unless they make for a good segue to this conversation's sponsor, Nestle."
This might just do irreversible damage to my parents' generation. They already trust the AI overview with all of the thinking and synthesizing after making a search, and this will only make it worse.
AI in the 1950s
AI in 2026I've noticed this since yesterday when i tried to do a site:url search, it gave me an AI chatbox and answer
Same, came to google after DDG failed to locate a string that I suspect would occur (error message on Factorio forums). Google then gives me some LLM hallucinations about what the error might indicate, also when you specifically don't click the "use AI mode" button (that the search button automatically turns into) but the "search" button. You don't get any search results whatsoever. After it started wasting energy on hallucinations, you're allowed to click "all", meaning "web search, please" (should be obvious to anyone)
Why in the world would it specifically do this for site:https://example.org "exact string" queries?! I know what I'm looking for and where it can be found!
It's like redirecting my phone call from ISP support to a librarian because maybe the library contains the answer to a dysfunctional SIM card they've sent me
It seems they have been A/B testing killing search operators (like "site:" or "inurl:") for a while. They randomly stop working and switching to private mode, or the other way around, makes them work again.
This still works for me: https://www.google.com/search?udm=web&tbs=li:1&q=site:reddit...
So many questions:
Is “the goal of Search” really: “to help you ask _anything_ on your mind”?
If “reimagined Search” is “designed to anticipate your intent”,
Would it correctly infer my intent to not utilize an agentic approach? Is there an “off switch”?
As for “Search agents”
“operating in the background 24/7”,
What is the carbon footprint of that? How do I turn it off? How do I ask it to stop phoning home my every keystroke?
These questions are asked partly rhetorically because it’s likely I don’t need a team of “24/7 Search agents” to help me guess the answers…
Historically, I scoffed when someone said “here’s the difference between a google search and asking ChatGPT”, or when people said that ChatGPT would “kill search”, but Google sure seems to be in a hurry to burry the original feature all by themselves.
People saying ChatGPT will kill search, really mean LLMs generally will kill old school web searches that just return links. Google is doing this because they agree with the sentiment and are just becoming ChatGPT.
tried it out:
Search: "Hello world"
> AI Overview
> Hello! Wordle is the viral word-guessing game where you get 6 tries to uncover a mystery target word, using color-coded hints to guide your guesses.
I got:
"Hello, world! Welcome to the classic programming greeting. It is the traditional test message used to introduce beginners to computer science and verify that a language's syntax is properly understood"
Which clearly shows that there will be an avalanche of issues when non-technical people discover the joys of non-deterministic results.
Also their universal shopping cart seems to be quite a change too https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/shopping...
Google search box has basically become an AI aggregator that doesn't give anything back to those websites it scraps data from, and it'll result in the death of the internet as we came to know it At this point, google might as well stop showing website links in search results. with AI Overviews, barely anyone’s clicking through it anymore
AI search.. they should at least put that behind a "I'm feeling unlucky" button
Lesson: slowly mean yourself off Google producrs
Sometimes I hear lies and slander about big tech pulling up ladders and misusing their advantage to cement monopolies, but just look at this!
I believe I speak for everyone working on alternative search engines when I offer a heartfelt thank you to Google for their untiring effort to derail their search product.
I think I'll be getting a Kagi subscription.
Up to now, the Gemini results they display are often worse and less accurate than the same question asked in Gemini. I'm guessing SEO has so thoroughly cooked Google's search results that they are actually holding back Gemini as a brand.
It looks like the new experience works backwards - it's more or less a Gemini prompt that they then stuff a "search experience" into.
Obviously the search feed and ads are so integral to Google's business model that they probably can't confidently just step away from it.
Google search itself is becoming useless. It tends to promote social media results even when scarcely relevant, and just can't find things like part numbers that even baidu can find on English language pages. The AI then summarises social media posts.
Google search results have been the worst part of every LLM I’ve used. I imagine the LLM specifically designed to use Google search is going to be the worst LLM.
In the last 10 (maybe longer) years I've noticed I've changed how I am approaching these changes.
In the past, I excited. It was the first to sign up for all kinds of betas.
I don't know what triggered the my reasoning, but now whenever I see these upcoming announcements I don't think about how it's gonna be better, but how it is objectively gonna be worse. How much harder is it going to be for me to compare things.
How much more do I now need to go and explain people that the output is merely a mathematical average of what's out there, and if it's out there on the internet doesn't make it correct.
Hmm, perhaps should switch fields and become a factologist
https://medium.com/luminasticity/artificial-stupidity-and-th...
>And I think we can throw out all the complaints of the past few years about how Google quality is lowering and it is hard to find anything on the site anymore, for those were the salad years.
>At least back in the day when sites copied answers from Stackoverflow or Lyrics from RapGenius and put them in their own site with scammy pitches to pay for the content you were going to get the correct answer in the end, but now you need a factology degree to figure out if something is bullshit or not.
A lot of people in these comments have strong opinions about the performance of a service they use frequently, for which they pay zero dollars, and is run by a public company with a fiduciary duty to provide ROI to its investors.
I wonder how many of them would switch to a paid model that offered pre-ai-era google search?
Why replace something deterministic with something non-deterministic? I can no longer tell someone "just google it" because I don't actually know what will come up...
Google Search hasn't been deterministic in well over a decade.
Two devices searching something will never bring up the exact same results, in the exact same order.
NYT found 10% of answers are wrong
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/technology/google-ai-over...
Ask Joogle or Ask Geeves?
https://www.techradar.com/computing/search-engines/ask-jeeve... / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask.com
Ask Jeeves was dissolved 15 days ago
Google???
Remind me what Google is again. Haven't used them for years...
I know a lot of regular people who hate this, but Kagi can be a hard sell for regular people. What are y’all’s recommendations for free search engines at the moment? I used to rec DDG, but I feel like their results are much worse than Kagi’s at present
Our results have continually improved, and would be happy to take your feedback (email is in my profile) if you give it another try.
Thanks, I will do that
Happy Kagi user - what 'sold' me (albeit already working in the space) was the adage of "if you're not paying, then you're the product" - having my results being manipulated to be constantly advertised to was something I was prepared to pay a token amount to avoid.
To change anything on the home page of google, amazon, etc, must be a hair-raising experience for the people making those changes.
Just the cost alone of adding this much LLM to google homepage ...
They already did the capex. Might as well use it, it's not like it was being utilized otherwise. Must be awkward to see your $10B datacenter sitting at 10% utilization.
The last product i thought google would kill, that isn't ads, the true end of an era with an underwhelming bang.
I wonder if they will stop using pagerank completely? Has pagerank already transcended the software plane?
So you can code in search now and create apps. No clue how that in depth works out. For them, the dream could be that everybody has their custom apps hosted by google.
It doesn't seem to be secure. If every google link is one step away from a prompt injection and leaking all your data, then they are worse then npm.
I wonder how many days it takes until they roll it back or put that stuff behind some extra clicks.
Thank god for Kagi. It literally saved search for me, although I mostly use kagi.com/assistant these days.
This is to Open Claw what Google home is to Home Assistant.
I prefer the Claw like I prefer Linux and FOSS in general.
Since day one Googs’ vision was to make the Star Trek computer. They’re really there now. But I don’t like their how. This computer serves them, not me. My mind-bicycle must serve me, my thoughts are my own. I hope my resistance is not futile.
I've been using google search, and all other products, less and less. i find a mixture of perplexity and chatgpt perform much better and find higher quality results faster.
the degoogling process will be a long haul but im determined to do it.
The “magic” of the SERP is that it makes the organics product and the ads product reinforce each other: People come for the organics and don't have to pay. That brings eyeballs, which advertisers pay for.
If Google no longer sends users to websites for free on organics, the world will have to figure out some mechanism whereby Google pays site owners for putting the information on the web in the first place. Where will that money come from?
If it's ads, the AI experience is a “lies engine” where advertisers get to pick which lies the AI tells. Not sure what kinds of people would show up for that experience. Probably the same kind who watch home shopping TV. I would venture to guess that there will be a ceiling in the advertising value of that property. Or the AI interacts with people in good faith. But then, if I'm an advertiser, how do I get my lies into the world? “We will tell your lie, only if it's a truth” doesn't work because, as an advertiser, I understand that the truth about me already gets spoken, and I don't need to pay a dime for that.
You can run an argument that people can tell ads from organics on the current SERP, and you can calibrate how much of each there should be. But you can't really “calibrate” the amount and level of the lying in the AI to where it's just enough so that people will show up, but not so much that there's no value for advertisers. You can't have little boxes either, where the AI is like “having told you the truth, I want you to also pay attention to this lie that someone paid me to tell you: …”
Is Google really saying: “Hey, we're the lion's share of the advertising market right now. But, because we kind of like these newfangled AI things, we're going to just vacate that spot to whoever. Instead, we will turn ourselves into a pre-product-market-fit company. Maybe at some point over the next 10 years, we're going to be able to tell you how we might actually monetize ourselves. Stay toooooned.”
The reason why AI is a better experience than the web right now, is because we have pre-enshittification AI and post-enshittification web. What will the whole thing look like, after enshittification is through with AI?
The spend difference for this must be enormous. I wonder how they justify it financially. I guess they don’t have to.
> Designed to anticipate your intent, it also helps you formulate your question with AI-powered suggestions that go beyond autocomplete.
The first red flag for me. The +/- of this type of feature are well worth exploring.
I think I've had this on duckduckgo for several months
The inability to do a proper search with “-x” x being a word you want excluded from the results but I can being able to have a convo about summary results is just mindblowing. I miss proper search. What’s everyone using for alternatives?
Kagi supports this
I started switching to DDG on some devices, this will motivate me to finish the transition ! Thanks
I've found Google AI Search to be good for really topical searches. And its conversational ability has noticeably improved over the last year. I can now have a (short) conversation where I reference past messages.
Google is making the pivot. And they’ve got such a strong strategic position. Full-stack integration. They will survive and thrive in this new era. Search seems safe. Yet, other products are still vulnerable to encroachment.
I use Google daily, and yet I can't remember the last time I used their search box - all of my searching has been done through the browser URL bar for a long, long time. I wonder if similar changes are being applied to the Chrome URL bar?
Search doesn’t work well anymore anyway. Half of what used to be searchable has either been consolidated or is gated.
Gmail search doesn’t work well either. It simply doesn’t find things. Almost as if they have stopped indexing and repurposed resources towards LLMs.
And whatever there is left to index and search has been completely overrun with slop.
Search is over. Internet as we knew it is over. Something new has emerged in its place, and we are still calling the new thing the old thing.
The unnecessary mention of Antigravity in there gives me Microsoft Copilot vibes.
First signs of the death of google.
Scrolling down this article presented me with pop-up dialogues twice. Annoying.
Lots of people talking about Google being strictly worse than a number of search engines (bing, duck, etc) not been my experience. Brave default search is awful. Duck was terrible last I used it. Google still great for me, but I have a decent amount of "privacy controls" implemented (DNS, vpn, browser extensions) and i basically dork most searches--average search looks more like a find invocation than English. In this last regard especially, Google is peerless, imo Been a while since I looked around though. Is there an engine that supports all the operators that Google does and that provides results of better or equivalent quality?
I kind of like it for dumb one off questions I dont want to burn my real tokens on...
barf but it at least opens up the playing field for new startups that want to provide good old index search and try to beat them where they left off when search still worked 8 years ago before they hired the yahoo POS execs that enshitified the service.
> . And for select categories like home repair, beauty or pet care, you can ask Google to call businesses on your behalf
NO - thanks!
Surely, the motivation here is a mega influx of training data.
How is Google going to make money off this?
There are a number of "hide AI overviews from google" browser extensions. Use them.
Today is the day the old internet died. RIP.
You can search, understand and hallucinate - do anything. All you have to do is ASK.com
How much longer can the internet survive if we just stop sending traffic to websites?
the thing that bothers me is I don't usually want this mode. When I search, I am not looking for what google thinks, I am looking for what other sources think.
This ruined my experience using chrome on my phone. Done with it.
I wonder if the song they used for the video is also AI-generated. It's pretty catchy.
Dude it's Depeche Mode
It was sarcasm. They are using song from 1980's to advertise their AI-everything 2020's dystopia.
Hopefully they don’t kill tbs=li:1, or I’ll get pretty angry.
Feels a bit like New Coke
I miss having a good search engine. Even before AI.
Where are the PageRanks of yesteryear?
How does a media company stay in business when there is no one visiting the site, and people are only getting the quality information from Google?
Advertising on the media site (assuming digital media, no physical media) is going to disappear because people probably won't be clicking through to read the source material that the Google AI answer relied on. No traffic, no advertisers, no money to produce the original journalism. That's going to impact the Google results eventually as these media outlets shut down to be replaced with...AI slop, maybe?
Is the subscriber model the answer? It could work for a niche subject or a single journalist with a following, and it wouldn't be sucked into Google results, either, if it was effectively gated/paywalled.
As long as udm=14 still works I'm fine on a personal level. It's still bullshit that they're going to push it as the default
God, this is just as awful as Microsoft trying to push copilot into everything, trash.
Thankfully ublock origin blocks a ton of those useless AI slop spam, but Google nerfed its search engine already years before. They showed that they don't care about it anymore, yet alone about users. Something fundamentally changed at Google and it is not good. It is time for the world to retire Google. We don't want or need an adCompany nor an AI slop company.
How does this work for Google? I read it costs them $0.001 to perform a search. No matter how efficient their inference chips are, the new cost basis has to be 10X or more. And the zero click Internet not only kills ad supported content sites, it also kills Google SERP ad revenues.
I have to imagine that eventually ads will be integrated in, or they will change the layout so the ads are side by side with the AI and the SERP results underneath.
but i dont know who visits google.com anymore
Effectively every internet user, multiple times a day.
The shark has fully cleared it’s jump.
I just want a relevant website ... no I don't want to use your agent. Just give me search results that are interesting to read, no AI slop, which teach me something new ... no I don't want to buy if I don't show this intent. Just serve the public interest and not your own financial interests. Thank you.
I wish they could remove the AI overview crap that's dysfunctional and kills the very spirit of a search engine's premise. You're not supposed to steal links from sites Google. That's a fucking dark pattern.
I suppose it would not be in line with their business plans to make google search actually search again.
what a weird surface to put LLMs
For years already google has had integrations and more 'intelligent' responses for things like weather, shopping, answers to queries etc. This hardly changes any of that (most of the 'features' are inside AI Mode). For 'regular' uses this changes nothing. Avoid AI Mode most of the time. Double-check most automated overview options. And still not using any kind of chat interface when searching for sites, things, images, whatever. Hardly changes anything. And Google is still the destination for all lookups. With little to no reason to go looking for a different service especially not from any other AI-related firm.
Kagi is a great alternate.
Privacy first, opt-in AI, total control over site blocking, zero ads.
You're the customer, not the product.
Bring me Google before the instant search nonsense where I could go into rabbit holes 100+ pages deep.
Now it can't find anything interesting. As a search is basically useless and it's more like Home pages used to be (that you would very much build yourself in a html editor and place your most often visited sites).
Anyways, I find that my $10/mo subscription to Kagi has been well worth not having to deal with Google's BS. (And they do offer AI if you want but they don't push it on you.)
I'm pretty sure I had something very similar A/Bed at me by Bing the other day.
You know what I really miss? Being able to type a literal string in quotes and get pages that had that actual string on them. That's what I really miss.
I haven't used google search as my default search engine in YEARS. DDG is good enough for 99% of my searches. Same with Google Chrome. Stop giving evil companies your traffic and attention.
This is great news. I remember Altavista, Yahoo and similar ones, they pioneered this type of home-page-is-all-you-need UI which is the perfect compromise of what product people at Google have come up with and what users want, at least according to their tests.
This means that, in a couple years, we might see a competitor that offers you quick, almost instant web search, with a minimal UI, possibly an algorithm that somehow surfaces the most relevant results based on how all websites point to each other naturally (like, a site that is referred to by 20 others should be above one with zero references).
I look forward to it!
Glad I switched to Kagi
huh, one downside of being an all-in Firefox and Kagi user, meaning I have everywhere firfox as default browser with kagi account configured, all laptops, tablets, phones, means I am now out of touch and never noticed.
duckduckgo.com
F Google!
Makes me sad. I recall the beginnings of Google, so hopeful so new.
Now they are a money printing corporate. I am sure there are still people there doing new and exciting things, but the Grey Suits have taken the reigns
They could have used AI to make that awesome simple sparse home page better. Fought off the SEO optimiser that made search so dire in the recent past
But no. They are doubling down on bling and crap. SEO is good for business.
"Do the right thing". Not even close
Makes me so sad.
damn this is some real slop. not expected from google.
i played the video, didnt understand anything and got dizzy. then i tried to scroll but the browser tab froze? wow
of course; ever since ChatGPT first launched it was clear this is what Google would do to its search
good luck getting visits to your site unless you're paying for AI placement
I genuinely feel like I could have a breakdown over this.
I’m so fucking tired. I don’t want it. I didn’t want it. I didn’t need it. And now here we are, once again, shoving it fast and hard in my face.
Thanks, Google.
If you'd like to switch from Google, I'll take the opportunity to let you know about Uruky [1], an ad-free and privacy-focused search engine, that's focused on a simpler experience than Kagi (no AI). Kind of like "old school" search. My wife and I launched it earlier this year, and it's been going really well so far.
Id you'd like to try it for free for a couple of days, reach out with your randomly-assigned account number and we'll top it up for you.
[1]: https://uruky.com