10 ms·

Google will start showing AI-powered search results for users who didn't opt-in

117 points by microflash 3y ago

a1o 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
webkike 3y ago
I think this might be the tipping point for me to start looking for alternatives in the search engine space
- dontreact 3y ago
  I think there is probably the option to opt out of this feature, it's just that it will be on by default?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- riku_iki 3y ago
  Maybe ad blockers will allow to hide this stuff
- ttt3ts 3y ago
  I would recommend https://github.com/searxng/searxng https://github.com/searxng/searxng One of my biggest gripes with Google search these days are it's bad UI. Started using searxng a few years ago when Google made everything above the fold useless videos, excessive whitespace, and dynamically poping content to accedently click.
throwup238 3y ago
I wonder if Kagi's implementation of the same feature influenced anyone at google or if this was an inevitable development. Google has been providing the AI answer boxes for years but it's never been very user driven. With Kagi you can use !fast/!expert bangs to use one of several LLMs fed the top few search results or as of last month, just end the search query with a question mark (no affiliation just a happy customer). It's almost completely changed how I use search.
- Maxion 3y ago
  It's quite interesting what a search engine can be in 2024 when the product isn't the one using it, but the search results themselves. Kagi with a wayy smaller budget than Google have really managed to make something pretty cool. Still does not replace google for 100% of my searches, but for the ones it does it is remarkably good, and so much less mentally taxing when working on a coding problem. I don't have to on top of everything manually filter search results, I can just click the top link.
  - ilaksh 3y ago
    Kagi uses the Google search API.
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      "Our data includes anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Yandex, Mojeek and Brave, specialized search engines like Marginalia, and sources of vertical information like Wolfram Alpha, Apple, Wikipedia, Open Meteo, Yelp, TripAdvisor and other APIs. Typically every search query on Kagi will call a number of different sources at the same time, all with the purpose of bringing the best possible search results to the user." So that's only telling a small part of the story.
      - lolinder 3y ago
        Not to mention that they have their own index that they're constantly working to expand: > But most importantly, we are known for our unique results, coming from our web index (internal name - Teclis) and news index (internal name - TinyGem). Kagi's indexes provide unique results that help you discover non-commercial websites and "small web" discussions surrounding a particular topic. Kagi's Teclis and TinyGem indexes are both available as an API. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
xnx 3y ago
Surprised to see negative reactions to this. Generated search results that distill actual content are definitely better than blogspam that has only a few useful tidbits in thousands of words and dozens of huge ad blocks.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- imp0cat 3y ago
  It sure must have looked like an easy way to combat blogspam to some manager. However, seems to me that distilled blogspam is still a blogspam.
  - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
    As soon at the Doubleclick CTR drops they'll be reversing this change like they did on the recent change to stop profiling anonymous YouTube users.
- hackerlight 3y ago
  It's basically Perplexity which is a very good product. Google is on the money here.
tayo42 3y ago
Do the swe/people actually doing the implementation of this really think llms are ready to be used like this and won't just piss off and turn people against "ai" What chat gpt did was interesting, in hindsight I think it was a mistake calling it ai.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- geitir 3y ago
  At least google will still walk back on things when they truly suck. Recent example is where they replaced the default Shopping, Images, Videos tabs when you search for something with autogenerated suggestions. It was awful. But, even though it took them a few months, that entire change seems to be reverted.
neximo64 3y ago
This is actually a nice feature, why would I need to opt in to it?
- riku_iki 3y ago
  Some people don't trust current quality of AI
  - kleiba 3y ago
    Well, the way I see it, you shouldn't really trust any information that's out there on the internet. It's your own responsibility to put search results into perspective, whether it's someone's blog or AI generated content.
    - riku_iki 3y ago
      Correct, and I have my workflow to reduce noise/signal ratio, for example by adding: site:stackoverflow for programming questions, or by adding site:ycombinator.com for tech queries, and reading discussions how answer was derived. For AI, I expect noise-signal will be not as good as I expect.
    - add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
      Right, so I want a list of results where I can assess the information from each in the context of the source it came from, its reputation, etc. And other metadata like how old the article is. It's a non starter to have that critical context stripped out and be given an opaque answer by an AI without having seen the underlying information in the context it originated from.
    - rchaud 3y ago
      AI is faceless, a website is not. The other content on the website will provide a clue as to whether the site is trustworthy or not. This is how web search has worked since the beginning.
  - impulser_ 3y ago
    Yeah, but this is essentially the same as Google results now but instead of just links it uses AI to summarize the results into a text blob. It still contains links to where it got it information in the summary and it allows you to ask follow up questions. It's not like it generating new information. It just summarizes information based on the same links you would have gotten without it.
dylan604 3y ago
so search is no longer a result of links to a page where information is found. search is now just an answer to a question. I don't really have a problem as that's what people really want. what I do have an issue with is that the people that put time/energy/effort into providing the information that Google has taken to train their data service get no credit or any attempt at being rewarded for their effort. sure, they might still provide links to SEO crap sites to make it "feel" like web search. this is just the latest of steps to remove the ability to actually finding a website. to me, this should be a totally separate product. the Googs Answer All 5000(TM) will just give the answer to whatever is being asked with no method of inspecting the validity of the answer.
gentleman11 3y ago
Instead of visiting content creators or information sources directly, you allow google to insert themselves between you and them. The sources get starved and google later has the opportunity to shape what is said to influence you (ie, “advertise” in a more varied way, or else give a political spin or some pro corporate or PR approved way) see also: amazons ai review summarizer will one day have a larger role and will surely skew things to increase sales
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
lukev 3y ago
The quality of these results is in my experience quite poor, so this is worrying to me. (The other comment about "distilled blogspam" hits the nail on the head I think.) It highlights a fundamental tension around Google's core product: Users want accurate information. From their perspective, that is the singular purpose of using Google. But Google's internal purpose is only to sell ads. It makes no difference to their bottom line whether the information they give users is correct unless it gets so bad they start losing ad impressions. Speaking even more broadly, it's very depressing to me how secondary the goal of building a good, useful or functional thing is subservient or at best orthogonal to the goal of making money.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Best monthly purchase I make now is Kagi. Replaced our Netflix membership with it. Recommend so you don't need to be worried by what Google does with your search.
  - StressedDev 3y ago
    Yup - I do not use Kagi but Kagi's incentive is to make the best search engine. Google's incentive to make the best ad impressions engine.
- freedomben 3y ago
  I disagree, I think (especially as evidenced by Gemini) Google's people has a specific mission to make the world a better place, and "better" being defined by them such as ensuring that DEI is injected into everything. I am generally very supportive of diversity, but I think it's pretty clear that the goals of helping you find information and the goals of filtering/shaping that information to make the world more reflective of what they think it should be, are fundamentally in tension. That is what concerns me the most.
  - lukev 3y ago
jeffbee 3y ago
I've had these enabled since launch and I think they are great. It usually provides 2-3 stanzas of summary, each with a carousel of sources. It's a useful format because in a ranked list it is not always immediately obvious when there are multiple classes of results, the union of which answers your question. With the summary result, the correspondence between sources and relevant facts in more obvious.
divbzero 3y ago
Bing has also included AI-powered search results since last year: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/02/07/reinventing-search-with-a-new-ai-powered-microsoft-bing-and-edge-your-copilot-for-the-web/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/02/07/reinventing-sear...
rchaud 3y ago
What was the final edition of Encarta Encyclopedia? 2009? Might have to go back to the old ways of doing things.
ilaksh 3y ago
This could be considered a new era for the internet. Or whenever it starts being used to serve the majority of search results. People who are skeptical of AI won't like it of course. But it will be a literal and practical change to the way the majority of internet searches work. Google basically becomes the de facto personal agent for most people at that point. I would not be surprised to see Google Assistant merge into the main search product. Microsoft had actually been strategic by promoting Copilot. I know that many HNers generally hate Blockchain and smart contracts and decentralized technologies, but I feel this direction is the only viable alternative to monopoly platforms that are now even more directly acting as our interface to the world via agents. Exactly what that looks like I don't know. But I do know it involves open protocols and probably open marketplaces for knowledge and other types of tasks.
- mateo1 3y ago
  Who will write pages for google to summarize from now on? This will kill the last bits of remaining organic content creators on the internet.
  - bugglebeetle 3y ago
    If Google was smart, they would use their existing ranking systems to find the highest quality creators and pay them to do this. Instead, they’ll probably train an LLM on SEO’d blogspam and call it a day.
- xanderlewis 3y ago
  > People who are skeptical of AI won't like it of course. Very few (if any) are sceptical of ‘AI’. They are usually sceptical (and rightly so) of LLMs. They’re very different things.
- lolinder 3y ago
  > I know that many HNers generally hate Blockchain and smart contracts and decentralized technologies Whoa, slow down. There's definitely a lot of skepticism about blockchain and smart contracts around here, but that skepticism does not generalize to decentralization as a whole. Self-hosters are strongly represented on here, as are proponents of federated tech and P2P. There's specifically a lot of skepticism about blockchain and web3 on HN, and I'm really curious to know how you think those specific decentralized technologies are going to make a difference in the search space.
Socnic 3y ago
The problem with that is that Google, now more then ever, can show you whatever they want. Another step toward being just a dumb TV. (AKA propaganda engine)
kibwen 3y ago
I categorically do not want an LLM regurgitating answers at me. What I want is a librarian, who can sift through the impossibly vast oceans of information and point me at resources that are relevant to my query.
- spdif899 3y ago
  As others have mentioned in nearby threads, Kagi has some good examples of this in action. Appending a question mark to your query will run a GPT model to interpret and summarize the results, providing sources for each reference so that you can read through in more detail. It's way less "trust me bro" than google and feels more like a research assistant.
- therealdrag0 3y ago
  Why not? A librarian leaves you with more work to do. An LLM is an assistant that adapts the information to your specific scenario saving you work.
  - brink 3y ago
    Let me choose how much work is enough for me. I don't need an LLM wiping my butt, and I enjoy reading the filtered results; not all work is bad.
    - therealdrag0 3y ago
      The same could be said about the librarians job. Sure pick your own level of involvement.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - namaria 3y ago
    An LLM is not an assistant. It's a tool that will fill up the gaps with plausible sounding content. If it happens to have a lot of data on what you're looking for in its training good. If not, you SOL, risking being fooled by confidence.
7ewis 3y ago
Is SGE any good? Would love to try it, but I'm in the UK. Did try enabling it with a VPN a few months ago without any luck.
habitue 3y ago
Didn't opt in? Since when do we get to opt into a tech company's product changes? I get that generative AI is the latest terrible thing, but this seems like a normal product rollout to me
bionhoward 3y ago
“You may not use the Services to develop machine learning models or related technology.” If these start showing up on ML searches, I’m going to troll them HARD.
paxys 3y ago
Google has been showing "AI-powered" search results for well over a decade now.
1024core 3y ago
I was writing some Python code (not my primary language), and wanted to know if there was something built into f-strings that would nicely wordwrap the output. I did a Google search for "how can I create f-strings in python so the output is wrapped at some fixed length". Except, for Google, I did not use the "how do I" etc. and just threw some keywords at it: "python f-string wrapping", "python f-string folding", etc. All I got back was various results on how to wrap f-strings themselves. Frustrated, I typed "how can I create f-strings in python so the output is wrapped at some fixed length" into ChatGPT, and back came the answer: ... However, f-strings themselves don't provide a built-in method for wrapping text at a specific width. ... For text wrapping, you can use the textwrap module ... Here's how you can combine f-strings with the textwrap module to achieve text wrapping: ... (followed by a full example). I think "Search" will be changing dramatically over the next year or two. And websites which depend on Search traffic to survive will be in deep trouble.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  The double standard here is hilarious. The ChatGPT result you got is better largely because you typed in a longer search doc. The illusion of superiority that surrounds ChatGPT is significantly due to the human factors curiosity that people are willing to type in a long-ass search string in the conversational context. They will type "best pants" into Google then complain about the futility of it, then switch tabs and spend ten minutes writing a short essay on pants for ChatGPT, and rave about the results. If you take the entire quoted search sentence from your third paragraph, then Google also presents a complete solution.
  - slifin 3y ago
    I feel like Google has trained this behaviour into its long time users Previously writing human like sentences would not yield good results Now its more like <key word> <key word> reddit
    - hparadiz 3y ago
      Google and the companies that litter the results page only have themselves to blame. When I was trying to find some boiler plate for pulling something from AWS parameter store I got total nonsense docs that weren't even what I wanted but it was mostly AWS docs or online tech diploma mill nonsense. Then I used chatgpt and it did 90% of the work in 20 seconds. Sometimes Google should just show me the code on GitHub but instead Google wastes my time.
KolmogorovComp 3y ago
Side-question but relevant (wanted to do an Ask HN about it for a while). I have a relatively large corpus (~10k pages), and would like to augment traditional keyword search with AI. Eg: write my question and get an LLM answer *backed-up* by search and linking to the part of the corpus used. What are my options here? Local option would be best.
Noumenon72 3y ago
I use the same Google account at work and home but only got AI-powered results at work, making me wonder what else Google does differently when you connect from a favored IP.
yoyopa 3y ago
I don't want to search. I want to filter your ridiculously large database to find certain information.
vicnov 3y ago
I would have been on board with it, if I didn’t get a completely wrong AI generated response from Google the other day. I was for some reason looking into history of Reddit and ended up searching “what happened to former AMA coordinator Victoria Taylor”. Google AI summary got confused and told me that she got fired because hundreds of redditors voted for her ouster (clearly mixing up Victoria’s story and Ellen Pao’s) I know n=1, but feels like maybe a little too early to get it out of the experimental mode.
- __loam 3y ago
  I think this points to bigger issues with the AI field generally with respect to adoption and development. The output of these systems is fundamentally unverifiable. Building a system to verify these answers would be orders of magnitude more expensive and maybe computationally impossible. It looks really impressive because it's 95% of the way there, but 5% error rate is atrocious, in was expensive to get this far, and improving it much more will be more and more expensive. What we've essentially built is a search engine that is 5 times more expensive to operate and that alienates the content from its context, which makes it less valuable. Maybe it's good enough for programming since you can immediately verify the output but I suspect we're pretty far away from the breakthroughs ai boosters insist we are mere months away from. We've had some form of self driving for a while now and the other company that seems close is waymo, and that seems to have taken over a decade of huge research and capital expenditures.
huytersd 3y ago
It’s actually working pretty well. I’m usually am satisfied by the AI response atleast 50% of the time.

117 points by microflash 3y ago

a1o 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

webkike 3y ago

I think this might be the tipping point for me to start looking for alternatives in the search engine space

dontreact 3y ago
I think there is probably the option to opt out of this feature, it's just that it will be on by default?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
riku_iki 3y ago
Maybe ad blockers will allow to hide this stuff
ttt3ts 3y ago
I would recommend https://github.com/searxng/searxng https://github.com/searxng/searxng One of my biggest gripes with Google search these days are it's bad UI. Started using searxng a few years ago when Google made everything above the fold useless videos, excessive whitespace, and dynamically poping content to accedently click.

throwup238 3y ago

I wonder if Kagi's implementation of the same feature influenced anyone at google or if this was an inevitable development. Google has been providing the AI answer boxes for years but it's never been very user driven. With Kagi you can use !fast/!expert bangs to use one of several LLMs fed the top few search results or as of last month, just end the search query with a question mark (no affiliation just a happy customer). It's almost completely changed how I use search.

Maxion 3y ago
It's quite interesting what a search engine can be in 2024 when the product isn't the one using it, but the search results themselves. Kagi with a wayy smaller budget than Google have really managed to make something pretty cool. Still does not replace google for 100% of my searches, but for the ones it does it is remarkably good, and so much less mentally taxing when working on a coding problem. I don't have to on top of everything manually filter search results, I can just click the top link.
- ilaksh 3y ago
  Kagi uses the Google search API.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    "Our data includes anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Yandex, Mojeek and Brave, specialized search engines like Marginalia, and sources of vertical information like Wolfram Alpha, Apple, Wikipedia, Open Meteo, Yelp, TripAdvisor and other APIs. Typically every search query on Kagi will call a number of different sources at the same time, all with the purpose of bringing the best possible search results to the user." So that's only telling a small part of the story.
    - lolinder 3y ago
      Not to mention that they have their own index that they're constantly working to expand: > But most importantly, we are known for our unique results, coming from our web index (internal name - Teclis) and news index (internal name - TinyGem). Kagi's indexes provide unique results that help you discover non-commercial websites and "small web" discussions surrounding a particular topic. Kagi's Teclis and TinyGem indexes are both available as an API. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

xnx 3y ago

Surprised to see negative reactions to this. Generated search results that distill actual content are definitely better than blogspam that has only a few useful tidbits in thousands of words and dozens of huge ad blocks.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
imp0cat 3y ago
It sure must have looked like an easy way to combat blogspam to some manager. However, seems to me that distilled blogspam is still a blogspam.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  As soon at the Doubleclick CTR drops they'll be reversing this change like they did on the recent change to stop profiling anonymous YouTube users.
hackerlight 3y ago
It's basically Perplexity which is a very good product. Google is on the money here.

tayo42 3y ago

Do the swe/people actually doing the implementation of this really think llms are ready to be used like this and won't just piss off and turn people against "ai" What chat gpt did was interesting, in hindsight I think it was a mistake calling it ai.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
geitir 3y ago
At least google will still walk back on things when they truly suck. Recent example is where they replaced the default Shopping, Images, Videos tabs when you search for something with autogenerated suggestions. It was awful. But, even though it took them a few months, that entire change seems to be reverted.

neximo64 3y ago

This is actually a nice feature, why would I need to opt in to it?

riku_iki 3y ago
Some people don't trust current quality of AI
- kleiba 3y ago
  Well, the way I see it, you shouldn't really trust any information that's out there on the internet. It's your own responsibility to put search results into perspective, whether it's someone's blog or AI generated content.
  - riku_iki 3y ago
    Correct, and I have my workflow to reduce noise/signal ratio, for example by adding: site:stackoverflow for programming questions, or by adding site:ycombinator.com for tech queries, and reading discussions how answer was derived. For AI, I expect noise-signal will be not as good as I expect.
  - add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
    Right, so I want a list of results where I can assess the information from each in the context of the source it came from, its reputation, etc. And other metadata like how old the article is. It's a non starter to have that critical context stripped out and be given an opaque answer by an AI without having seen the underlying information in the context it originated from.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    AI is faceless, a website is not. The other content on the website will provide a clue as to whether the site is trustworthy or not. This is how web search has worked since the beginning.
- impulser_ 3y ago
  Yeah, but this is essentially the same as Google results now but instead of just links it uses AI to summarize the results into a text blob. It still contains links to where it got it information in the summary and it allows you to ask follow up questions. It's not like it generating new information. It just summarizes information based on the same links you would have gotten without it.

dylan604 3y ago

so search is no longer a result of links to a page where information is found. search is now just an answer to a question. I don't really have a problem as that's what people really want. what I do have an issue with is that the people that put time/energy/effort into providing the information that Google has taken to train their data service get no credit or any attempt at being rewarded for their effort. sure, they might still provide links to SEO crap sites to make it "feel" like web search. this is just the latest of steps to remove the ability to actually finding a website. to me, this should be a totally separate product. the Googs Answer All 5000(TM) will just give the answer to whatever is being asked with no method of inspecting the validity of the answer.

gentleman11 3y ago

Instead of visiting content creators or information sources directly, you allow google to insert themselves between you and them. The sources get starved and google later has the opportunity to shape what is said to influence you (ie, “advertise” in a more varied way, or else give a political spin or some pro corporate or PR approved way) see also: amazons ai review summarizer will one day have a larger role and will surely skew things to increase sales

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

lukev 3y ago

The quality of these results is in my experience quite poor, so this is worrying to me. (The other comment about "distilled blogspam" hits the nail on the head I think.) It highlights a fundamental tension around Google's core product: Users want accurate information. From their perspective, that is the singular purpose of using Google. But Google's internal purpose is only to sell ads. It makes no difference to their bottom line whether the information they give users is correct unless it gets so bad they start losing ad impressions. Speaking even more broadly, it's very depressing to me how secondary the goal of building a good, useful or functional thing is subservient or at best orthogonal to the goal of making money.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Best monthly purchase I make now is Kagi. Replaced our Netflix membership with it. Recommend so you don't need to be worried by what Google does with your search.
- StressedDev 3y ago
  Yup - I do not use Kagi but Kagi's incentive is to make the best search engine. Google's incentive to make the best ad impressions engine.
freedomben 3y ago
I disagree, I think (especially as evidenced by Gemini) Google's people has a specific mission to make the world a better place, and "better" being defined by them such as ensuring that DEI is injected into everything. I am generally very supportive of diversity, but I think it's pretty clear that the goals of helping you find information and the goals of filtering/shaping that information to make the world more reflective of what they think it should be, are fundamentally in tension. That is what concerns me the most.
- lukev 3y ago

jeffbee 3y ago

I've had these enabled since launch and I think they are great. It usually provides 2-3 stanzas of summary, each with a carousel of sources. It's a useful format because in a ranked list it is not always immediately obvious when there are multiple classes of results, the union of which answers your question. With the summary result, the correspondence between sources and relevant facts in more obvious.

divbzero 3y ago

Bing has also included AI-powered search results since last year: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/02/07/reinventing-search-with-a-new-ai-powered-microsoft-bing-and-edge-your-copilot-for-the-web/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/02/07/reinventing-sear...

rchaud 3y ago

What was the final edition of Encarta Encyclopedia? 2009? Might have to go back to the old ways of doing things.

ilaksh 3y ago

This could be considered a new era for the internet. Or whenever it starts being used to serve the majority of search results. People who are skeptical of AI won't like it of course. But it will be a literal and practical change to the way the majority of internet searches work. Google basically becomes the de facto personal agent for most people at that point. I would not be surprised to see Google Assistant merge into the main search product. Microsoft had actually been strategic by promoting Copilot. I know that many HNers generally hate Blockchain and smart contracts and decentralized technologies, but I feel this direction is the only viable alternative to monopoly platforms that are now even more directly acting as our interface to the world via agents. Exactly what that looks like I don't know. But I do know it involves open protocols and probably open marketplaces for knowledge and other types of tasks.

mateo1 3y ago
Who will write pages for google to summarize from now on? This will kill the last bits of remaining organic content creators on the internet.
- bugglebeetle 3y ago
  If Google was smart, they would use their existing ranking systems to find the highest quality creators and pay them to do this. Instead, they’ll probably train an LLM on SEO’d blogspam and call it a day.
xanderlewis 3y ago
> People who are skeptical of AI won't like it of course. Very few (if any) are sceptical of ‘AI’. They are usually sceptical (and rightly so) of LLMs. They’re very different things.
lolinder 3y ago
> I know that many HNers generally hate Blockchain and smart contracts and decentralized technologies Whoa, slow down. There's definitely a lot of skepticism about blockchain and smart contracts around here, but that skepticism does not generalize to decentralization as a whole. Self-hosters are strongly represented on here, as are proponents of federated tech and P2P. There's specifically a lot of skepticism about blockchain and web3 on HN, and I'm really curious to know how you think those specific decentralized technologies are going to make a difference in the search space.

Socnic 3y ago

The problem with that is that Google, now more then ever, can show you whatever they want. Another step toward being just a dumb TV. (AKA propaganda engine)

kibwen 3y ago

I categorically do not want an LLM regurgitating answers at me. What I want is a librarian, who can sift through the impossibly vast oceans of information and point me at resources that are relevant to my query.

spdif899 3y ago
As others have mentioned in nearby threads, Kagi has some good examples of this in action. Appending a question mark to your query will run a GPT model to interpret and summarize the results, providing sources for each reference so that you can read through in more detail. It's way less "trust me bro" than google and feels more like a research assistant.
therealdrag0 3y ago
Why not? A librarian leaves you with more work to do. An LLM is an assistant that adapts the information to your specific scenario saving you work.
- brink 3y ago
  Let me choose how much work is enough for me. I don't need an LLM wiping my butt, and I enjoy reading the filtered results; not all work is bad.
  - therealdrag0 3y ago
    The same could be said about the librarians job. Sure pick your own level of involvement.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- namaria 3y ago
  An LLM is not an assistant. It's a tool that will fill up the gaps with plausible sounding content. If it happens to have a lot of data on what you're looking for in its training good. If not, you SOL, risking being fooled by confidence.

7ewis 3y ago

Is SGE any good? Would love to try it, but I'm in the UK. Did try enabling it with a VPN a few months ago without any luck.

habitue 3y ago

Didn't opt in? Since when do we get to opt into a tech company's product changes? I get that generative AI is the latest terrible thing, but this seems like a normal product rollout to me

bionhoward 3y ago

“You may not use the Services to develop machine learning models or related technology.” If these start showing up on ML searches, I’m going to troll them HARD.

paxys 3y ago

Google has been showing "AI-powered" search results for well over a decade now.

1024core 3y ago

I was writing some Python code (not my primary language), and wanted to know if there was something built into f-strings that would nicely wordwrap the output. I did a Google search for "how can I create f-strings in python so the output is wrapped at some fixed length". Except, for Google, I did not use the "how do I" etc. and just threw some keywords at it: "python f-string wrapping", "python f-string folding", etc. All I got back was various results on how to wrap f-strings themselves. Frustrated, I typed "how can I create f-strings in python so the output is wrapped at some fixed length" into ChatGPT, and back came the answer: ... However, f-strings themselves don't provide a built-in method for wrapping text at a specific width. ... For text wrapping, you can use the textwrap module ... Here's how you can combine f-strings with the textwrap module to achieve text wrapping: ... (followed by a full example). I think "Search" will be changing dramatically over the next year or two. And websites which depend on Search traffic to survive will be in deep trouble.

jeffbee 3y ago
The double standard here is hilarious. The ChatGPT result you got is better largely because you typed in a longer search doc. The illusion of superiority that surrounds ChatGPT is significantly due to the human factors curiosity that people are willing to type in a long-ass search string in the conversational context. They will type "best pants" into Google then complain about the futility of it, then switch tabs and spend ten minutes writing a short essay on pants for ChatGPT, and rave about the results. If you take the entire quoted search sentence from your third paragraph, then Google also presents a complete solution.
- slifin 3y ago
  I feel like Google has trained this behaviour into its long time users Previously writing human like sentences would not yield good results Now its more like <key word> <key word> reddit
  - hparadiz 3y ago
    Google and the companies that litter the results page only have themselves to blame. When I was trying to find some boiler plate for pulling something from AWS parameter store I got total nonsense docs that weren't even what I wanted but it was mostly AWS docs or online tech diploma mill nonsense. Then I used chatgpt and it did 90% of the work in 20 seconds. Sometimes Google should just show me the code on GitHub but instead Google wastes my time.

KolmogorovComp 3y ago

Side-question but relevant (wanted to do an Ask HN about it for a while). I have a relatively large corpus (~10k pages), and would like to augment traditional keyword search with AI. Eg: write my question and get an LLM answer *backed-up* by search and linking to the part of the corpus used. What are my options here? Local option would be best.

Noumenon72 3y ago

I use the same Google account at work and home but only got AI-powered results at work, making me wonder what else Google does differently when you connect from a favored IP.

yoyopa 3y ago

I don't want to search. I want to filter your ridiculously large database to find certain information.

vicnov 3y ago

I would have been on board with it, if I didn’t get a completely wrong AI generated response from Google the other day. I was for some reason looking into history of Reddit and ended up searching “what happened to former AMA coordinator Victoria Taylor”. Google AI summary got confused and told me that she got fired because hundreds of redditors voted for her ouster (clearly mixing up Victoria’s story and Ellen Pao’s) I know n=1, but feels like maybe a little too early to get it out of the experimental mode.

__loam 3y ago
I think this points to bigger issues with the AI field generally with respect to adoption and development. The output of these systems is fundamentally unverifiable. Building a system to verify these answers would be orders of magnitude more expensive and maybe computationally impossible. It looks really impressive because it's 95% of the way there, but 5% error rate is atrocious, in was expensive to get this far, and improving it much more will be more and more expensive. What we've essentially built is a search engine that is 5 times more expensive to operate and that alienates the content from its context, which makes it less valuable. Maybe it's good enough for programming since you can immediately verify the output but I suspect we're pretty far away from the breakthroughs ai boosters insist we are mere months away from. We've had some form of self driving for a while now and the other company that seems close is waymo, and that seems to have taken over a decade of huge research and capital expenditures.

huytersd 3y ago

It’s actually working pretty well. I’m usually am satisfied by the AI response atleast 50% of the time.