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Learn as you search (and browse) using generative AI
- barbariangrunge 3y agoThis sort of thing is why Canadian media wanted a cut of big tech profits. Imagine how harmful this is to websites that need to grow audiences, particularly news websites
- gsatic 3y agoMost news websites have a ton of duplicated content. That info overload is dying to be minimized. And news orgs are going to keep coming under assault cause they perform a similar function to search engine robots by surfacing new info. As soon as some one copies that info, the value of the info is 0. There is already data saying most content created is never consumed by anyone just cause of how much copying and duplication happens.
- andsoitis 3y agoWhat is a good example of a Canadian news organization website that is not overwhelmingly populated by headlines and stories that are: - clickbait - hyperbolic - gossip - propaganda - unoriginal - unimportant
- bostonwalker 3y agoGreat question. Going to assume you mean English language and share my own findings: - CBC: Propagandic, unoriginal, unimportant - Global News: Clickbait, gossip, unoriginal, unimportant - Toronto Star: Hyperbolic, propagandic - The Globe and Mail: Unoriginal, unimportant - The National Post / Postmedia network: Hyperbolic, propagandic - CTV News: Clickbait, gossip, unoriginal, unimportant Anything I missed? I have found the best strategy is to take the sum of multiple sources to get a slightly less awful whole.
- mcpackieh 3y agoAs if people needed even more encouragement to be too lazy to read? Awful feature, this is bad for society.
- jeffbee 3y agoSeems popular enough that all I am getting out of it is "Can't generate key points right now".
- mmastrac 3y agoI assume this is all done server-side, with Google feeding your interests and investigations into your personal profile. I really wish this could be done on-device. I don't want Google slurping up even more data about web users. I use FF mainly on desktop and mobile, and there's probably a great opportunity for Mozilla to build an offline, privacy-first summarization model.
- hgsgm 3y agoYes, what Mozilla needs to do remove more support from browser development and debugging, to fracture their efforts even further, to continue the line of successes that began with Persona and continued with Firefox OS.
- ttul 3y agoI’m wildly speculating, but it seems that projects like llama.cpp are bringing SOTA models closer to the desktop. It’s only a matter of time before browsers embed a small LLM for various purposes, providing access to this local model via a JavaScript API that allows clients like Gmail to perform tasks on data locally. Apple would be strongly incentivized to do this, given their value proposition of user privacy.
- fidotron 3y agoI think the fact Google curiously ignored all the security problems raised by the WebGPU API suggests they are closer to trying to offload the GPU inference part of this to end users than people think. Build as much of the model as you can in the cloud, run inference locally and push results back is probably the cost optimal way to run this stuff at scale.
- DoingIsLearning 3y agoKagi has been doing this already for quite a while, well before google (see Kagi Universal Summarizer) with no info linked to your profile [0] [0] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/faqs.html#i-have-privacy-concerns-over-linking-my-search-queries-with-my-credit-card-why-should-i-trust-you https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/faqs.html#i-have-... For the record I am a happy user, not affiliated.
- eastbound 3y agoGoogle searched has encouraged long pages for SEO. Now Google sells us the idea that Google can help you reduce the useless words on the internet. Maybe de-index receipes talking about how this soup was my grandma’s preferred soup. It’s not so hard, you still have the full power on search engines, Google! For at least 2 more full months! Do it! You are the problem, Google.
- gumballindie 3y agoThey are too busy turning their browser and search experience into crap. For instance what's with search results in gmail and google drive? I literaly search for a file by name, doesn't find it, I search by extension ... it finds it? Then there's chrome - right click on selected text to search on google, instead of opening at tab it opens a crammed side bar? Has google gone insane?
- cj 3y agoI've noticed gmail search has gotten significantly worse. Maybe my inbox corpus is becoming too large or google may be dedicating less server resources to search, but the frequency of failed inbox searches has significantly increased over the past year. (Failed as in I try to search for an email I know exists, but can't find it) Looks like my inbox is at 250,000 emails. Wonder if search degrades with inbox size. (Same with drive?)
- gumballindie 3y agoFrom my experience with corporates this is poor product management. I think these are not bugs but rather poor design choices made by people that have no clue other than how to tick boxes of "inovation" delivered. Whether features make sense or not the product manager's KPIs will look good.
- writeslowly 3y agoThe second item is "Better understand coding information in AI overviews". Is there really such a big demand for this from the average google user, or is it just something that's easy to do with these language models?
- cowsup 3y agoAt the risk of sounding like an old man — heck, I guess I am — is this innovation ethical for humanity's future? A one-click "tl;dr" button for the web? There are studies saying overall human attention span is shrinking. Anecdotally, I know people in their 20s who use TikTok daily, and they're no longer able to watch a movie without losing focus. Squeezing all aspects of our digital life, including learning new skills or reading the news, into a bite-sized "summary," is not going to lead to a better-informed and more productive society.
- rchaud 3y ago> Anecdotally, I know people in their 20s who use TikTok daily, and they're no longer able to watch a movie without losing focus. I'm almost 40 and haven't been able to do this since the smartphone arrived; it's not Tiktok, it's just that the phone is right there, and movies are slow-paced (arty thrillers) or monotonous (lengthy CGI fight scenes).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- faeriechangling 3y agoIf we're going off anecdotes, we've also seen an explosion in popularity of the 2-3 hour podcast and season long Netflix binges. Doesn't this generation have an absurdly long attention span compared to the generation of the 30 minute TV show with three 2-3 minute commercial breaks?
- asdff 3y agoThere's things that are different though. People listening podcasts are sometimes multitasking so that's divided focus right there. In terms of modern TV and movies, shots are actually shorter these days. To its worst extent you can end up with these sorts of scenes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by4UZ-79MK4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by4UZ-79MK4
- ChildOfEru 3y agoArticles written by an AI and then summarized by another program. Nothing can go wrong here.
- jraph 3y agoPrivacy aside if it's done server side, I think this crosses another dangerous line. With this, Google controls how content you read is summarized, they could introduce biases, intentionally or not, and I'm not sure we should trust such an actor for this.
- andrewfurey2003 3y agoSolution: dont use google.
- gumballindie 3y agoSeems like that's the direction things are moving. Google's becoming heavily enshitified.
- mrd3v0 3y agoBecoming? I beg your pardon? Their entire business was built on this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Alphabet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisit... I know this is HN and all, but to wait all of these years of acquisitions, poaching, project terminations, Chrome shenanigans to destroy the internet, main product "SEO" degradation and literally every single sign of enshittification...Google has always been one of the prime examples of enshittification. That's why they are very successful at making money.
- jraph 3y agoOf course I can, and do, avoid Google. That's an individual solution. I'm interested in a world that's as good as possible not only for me, but for the other people too. Most people around still use Google. They might find this new feature useful and start using it, and possibly suffer this bias. Not only they may get manipulated individually, but it can have broader consequences, even to those avoiding the feature. If Facebook can influence which president get elected in a country, it will also affect people avoiding facebook (sometime for this very reason). Avoiding stuff for oneself is a first step but it's hardly a solution, these big corporations have a non negligible effect on the world, still with you as a member. We'll have to start to raise awareness around these things, in addition to all the subjects on which we already need awareness. But same old same old I guess, Google already puts you in a bubble, just even more concerning I guess. It was manipulating us, now it's another, new, potential manipulation angle.
- NewEntryHN 3y agoThe example really doesn't sell it to me. The search "what is the most common element on the periodic table" currently returns a big display with "Hydrogen" as the answer, followed by a brief explanation. That's all I need for such a query. In comparison any text written by a "generative AI" is mostly noise.
- adamredwoods 3y agoArticles are getting too long? Since when has this been a problem? I think it's the amount of crap ads injected while I'm trying to read the article that is the main problem.
- enonimal 3y agoselling the solution to a problem they created
- canadianwriter 3y agoSEO rears it's ugly head again - yes, articles have gotten much longer, why? Because the Google bots think longer content = more authoritative content. It's not actually a direct correlation, but enough people take that as gospel that they will pad out an article to make it super long just for the SEO value. Similar to recipe websites giving their entire life story before a recipe.
- jedberg 3y agoHave you tried to find a recipe online? Every one comes with a life story because of SEO. Ironically Google is the main cause of articles getting really long and full of fluff.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y agoHard pass. I don't want Google, or even a trustworthy neutral party, to decide my view of the world. (Compromised as it may be already.) We're all unique and unpredictable. In a given article, a random sentence or point considered throwaway by most people and algorithms could turn out to be meaningful to me. I've been trained not to even trust the basic facts they pull of out content like movie showtimes or whatever. Once you see it wrong a few times you realize it's folly not to keep the responsibility of finding information yourself.
- uwerewarned 3y agoGoogle is like a trustworthy neutral party except for the trustworthy and neutral bit
- patrickaljord 3y agofor non political issues it should fine, eg to describe an algorithm or other non-controversial tech issues for example.
- lionkor 3y agoAs long as they dont own a product in that field, yeah.
- oceanplexian 3y ago[flagged]
- carlosjobim 3y ago
- uwerewarned 3y agoI'd stay away from anything Google does. They have proved to be sectarians in politics and machiavellian in business and privacy
- skybrian 3y ago“Summarize this YouTube video” (given a link) is what I’d like to see and Google could easily do when there’s a transcript, but they’d probably rather make people watch the video. I think Kagi might do this? Any other good solutions?
- hostcontroller 3y agoI used summarize.tech [0] once, and it worked fine, although it was quite repetitive iirc. [0]: https://www.summarize.tech https://www.summarize.tech
- Xeophon 3y agoKagi has such a feature, its called Universal Summarizer [0] [0] https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DUF8uR6Z6KLc&target_language=&summary=summary https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww...
- cesarvarela 3y agoI've been using this one: https://glasp.co/youtube-summary https://glasp.co/youtube-summary
- crazygringo 3y agoExactly. It's already easy enough to scan an article in 15 seconds to get the overall gist. But scanning through a YouTube transcript, in the tiny box, without any punctuation, without paragraphs, without sections, takes forever.
- speedgoose 3y agoChatGPT plus with a YouTube plugin does that too.
- skybrian 3y agoInteresting. I see multiple plugins. Any there any you recommend?
- kubb 3y agoThey already have your browsing data, folks. This is just caused by the LLM push at Google. They got a top-down mandate to sprinkle LLMs on everything and this is the result.
- huac 3y agoNet effect: fewer clicks to source websites, fewer clicks on ads on said websites.
- px43 3y agoGood. The adtech industry needs to die in a fire.
- hardlianotion 3y agoNo thanks.
- nicbou 3y agoIronically, articles got pointlessly long because of Google. Everyone stretches their content because long form ranks better. A few hours ago I wanted to know the difference between a typhoon and a hurricane. Here is the answer: they're the same thing, just in a different ocean. I clicked three or four articles and had to read for a few minutes to get to that answer. It's even worse with videos. It takes 10 minutes to answer the simplest questions, because that's the ideal length for monetisation.
- tsunamifury 3y agoGoogle shifted ranking to length under the guise of quality to cover for the increased ad impressions they were getting for those junk rambling articles. Google has been enshitifiying the web for a good while now, and I used to work there! I worked hard to make the core product more efficient but ultimately your internal goals just override the external ecosystem. And with so much power google was able to exert a shifting force on the web.
- andsoitis 3y ago> A few hours ago I wanted to know the difference between a typhoon and a hurricane. Here is the answer: they're the same thing, just in a different ocean. I clicked three or four articles and had to read for a few minutes to get to that answer. I just googled “what is the difference between typhoon and hurricane” Top result is from the Red Cross, with this blurb conveniently extracted so I don’t even need to click into the article unless I’m curious more deeply: If it's above the North Atlantic, central North Pacific or eastern North Pacific oceans (Florida, Caribbean Islands, Texas, Hawaii, etc.), we call it a hurricane. If it hovers over the Northwest Pacific Ocean (usually East Asia), we call it a typhoon.
- jeffbee 3y agoWith this Search Lab enabled Google just gives you the answer above all the results. """ The only difference between a hurricane and a typhoon is the location where the storm occurs. If a storm is above the North Atlantic, central North Pacific, or eastern North Pacific oceans, it's called a hurricane. If it hovers over the Northwest Pacific Ocean (usually East Asia), it's called a typhoon. """
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- darkwater 3y agoBut yeah, keep using Chrome because it's allegedly "faster" or so you don't have to test the page you are developing on 3 different engines.
- alach11 3y agoI wonder how much they're projecting to spend on this? Or maybe they're prepared to eat a loss on this just to stay relevant in the face of Bing/Kagi/OpenAI? Results from these models are orders of magnitude more expensive than traditional search. Maybe they have some benefits of scale where they can cache and serve up the same summaries to many people?
- px43 3y agoI use the "summarize everything" extension that uses my OpenAI key, so it costs me a fraction of a penny any time I summarize something. Subsidizing something like this at scale would be pretty dumb.
- indymike 3y agoThis is where you start to sympathize with the news people in Canada who want google to pay for links. If google just summarizes at scale, interdicts the traffic and revenue, where's the incentive to create content? This is a failure mode for the information economy.
- px43 3y agoIf your only incentive for creating content is harvesting attention and eyeballs, then the internet is better off without your content.
- monsieurgaufre 3y agoWith that way of thinking, you exclude almost every content, ever. Most people do not produce content to be left unread.
- nicbou 3y agoI just like the fruits of my labour to be attributed to me, not to a large corporation.
- indymike 3y agoI'm not sure that is the case: TV and radio use that model and are/were valuable.
- monsieurgaufre 3y agoI do agree with you. Google's behavior in regard to informations reminds me a lot of the "torrent leeches" of the past: siphon everything you can, give nothing back, ..., profit. But at a huge scale with an impact on society far more than "a few more bytes on a personal hard drive".
- konschubert 3y agoI understand the worries about privacy and monopoly power. But this doesn't change that this is a useful feature. PS: That being said, I have started developing a distaste for google search. I have been served so much SPAM lately, that I am now starting to associate that search box with low-quality content.
- vittor1o 3y agoI do believe contextual link previews help with overall browsing UX. I like how Wikipedia has a summary when you hover over a link. Where this summary comes from does matter. For those who don't like when Google summarizes content for you but like the idea of getting a link preview with a summary provided by the website owner via meta tags before navigating to a third-party website - I've built a product called Linkz.ai [0] - that allows website owners to install link preview popups with 1 line of code. [0] https://linkz.ai https://linkz.ai
- Dwedit 3y agoJust another trick to spy on your internet activity.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ladino 3y agoi use https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cbgecfllfhmmnknmamkejadjmnmpfjmp?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cbgecfllfhmmnknmam... for summaries with GPT4 (API Key)
- NotGMan 3y agoSo if you opt in then your website won't get clicks -> no ad revenue for you since google will "steal" the clicks via their summarization. And if you opt out google will eventually just push you down.
- rchaud 3y agoThis has already been the case for a while with "Zero-click searches". It's when you look up a trivial piece of info that can be said in one line. Google will show that sentence on the search results. You don't have to click through to the full page.
- mrguyorama 3y agoThe best part is that product wasn't even that accurate, and has no qualms about showing you straight up bullshit or a lie stolen out of context from whoever did the actual research. Google is ahead of the curve in how ready they are for LLMs!
- standardUser 3y agoAnyone who has spent time with AI chatbots knows how often they are just completely wrong, often in surprising and confusing ways. It's hard enough to parse articles for accuracy and coherency without first passing them through as random error-adding machine.
- px43 3y agoHumans are worse. Obviously if you don't know how to discern garbage data from legit data, you're going to have a bad time, but these emerging tools are strictly better than anything that has existed before.
- standardUser 3y agoThe range of errors we expect from humans is more narrow, more relatable and we have more experience parsing them. Adapting to parse AI-written material will require developing new skills, and I'd argue those skills will be more difficult to develop because the errors/inconsistencies generated by AI are not as relatable to humans as errors introduced by humans.
- Lolaccount 3y agoGoogle Reader will aggregate articles for you.
- donohoe 3y agoAnd of course there is no way for a publisher to opt-out of this without removing them from the search engine entirely.
- Hamcha 3y agoShouldn't they worry about Search being incredibly low quality nowadays first? They're literally featuring a wrong ChatGPT answer as an answer to this question: https://www.google.com/search?q=country+in+africa+that+starts+with+%22K%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=country+in+africa+that+start...
- renewiltord 3y agoThis sounds like a fantastic feature. And honestly I think all of these negative comments are just the HN reactionary trend. Lots of people are going to use this tool and it's going to be great to bypass all those annoying sites that have a lot of crap on them. Being built into the browser makes this very useful. Also, all this wailing and gnashing of teeth is really quite annoying. Look at you people embarrassing yourselves.
- Devasta 3y agoI'll use AI to puff out articles with nonsense so they get higher ranks, and then Google will use AI to shorten them again. The Dead Internet theory will soon be indisputable.
- faeriechangling 3y agoLLM's already summarize articles for you. This approach to me combines the downsides of individual articles and the downsides of LLMs. I guess Google likes it since you presumably might be finding these articles through Google search.
- buro9 3y agoWelp... I wondered when Google would start encouraging me to put my work profile into Firefox, I guess today is the day.
- nineplay 3y agoGreat, another excuse for people not to read the article. We've got enough problems with people reading a headline and running with it. I hate to think of google summarizing some scientific study - particularly some "pop" scientific study - and have everyone confidently reciting it as though it's been conclusively proven without making any effort to look at the source.
- giantrobot 3y agoIt also introduces a second order problem when the summarization algorithm is updated/changed. Anyone reading an article before the update can get one summary while everyone reading after the update can potentially get a totally different summary. It's like when people talk about Google search results without realizing their search/browsing history has put them in a particular bubble. There's no guarantee any two people's result ranking will be the same which can affect their understanding or perspective on a topic.
- hnburnsy 3y agoOK Google, now summarize YouTube videos so I don't have to watch the entire videos or the ads. Luckily there are AI tools out there do this.
- hnburnsy 3y agoHere is one... https://www.summarize.tech/ https://www.summarize.tech/
- speak_plainly 3y agoReading is not a binary process and you can scale your engagement with any written work. If you use a variety of techniques, there is probably no need for a machine summary. For example, start by skimming and scanning an article and you may be able to pull out all the salient points and satisfy your reading goal or choose to go deeper with your analysis depending on time and interest and what you are trying to accomplish: https://advice.writing.utoronto.ca/researching/skim-and-scan/ https://advice.writing.utoronto.ca/researching/skim-and-scan...
- fl0ki 3y agoSkimming isn't really possible for people that rely on screen readers. I think effective summarization would be useful for them. Whether this is an effective implementation, however, remains to be seen.
- tomjen3 3y agoIt takes much more time to even skim an article than to run it through a summerizer. Not to mention that it’s generally hard to skim a YouTube video.
- bastardoperator 3y ago[flagged]
- gnicholas 3y agoThere are other Chrome extensions that will do stuff like this. I'd never choose to have Google do it for me if I could have a third-party extension that I trust do it instead (or even one I don't trust 100%, but which offers some level of anonymization).
- eur0pa 3y agoNo thank you.
- Transpire7487 3y agoHard pass. I don't want my browser doing anything except displaying webpages.
- GenericPoster 3y agoGood feature, I might actually start using chrome again if recipes are summarized how I expect them to. Generally speaking, there's already a problem with people only reading the titles and basing their opinion of off that. Hopefully this will encourage people to read more, since it will be significantly shorter than the actual article. This won't affect the people who care about the topic. I'm not really worried about bias, since from my experience, summarization software will inherit the bias of the creator. Sure, it's behind generative AI, which can introduce more bias but it's not like the original article is hidden. No one is forced to use it.
- renegat0x0 3y agoThere is no neutral source ofninformation. Legacy tv is often controlled by governments and corporations. Social media are also controlled, by corporations, and by some degree by governments. There is also bias, censorship and moderation. People were Hunters before. Were searching for food. We do not need now to hunt. We had to hunt for information, we do not need now. We rely more and more on services and corporations. We choose the jest one, which becomes monopoly after some time. After some longer period of time monopolystic corporation becomes monster. Circle of life. We may not want to use chatgpt or other bots, but eventually we will. Common people use the easiest route. They will decide, what is popular, and what will be used.
- ProfessorLayton 3y agoInterestingly, OSX has had a Summary Service for as long as I can remember: Simply select text > App (Menu bar) > Services > Summarize[1]. I still use it from time to time, and it's pretty good, and completely offline! [1] It's off by default these days, you'll have to turn on the Summary service under service settings.