15 ms·

I don't want to spend my one precious life dealing with Google's AI search

• ashryan 2y ago
  The good news is that we don't have to: there are alternatives.
  • browningstreet 2y ago
    I recently switched from DDG back to Google, but now I need to switch back to DDG because it's quicker and easier to get to Google Maps via the !gm bang via DDG than it is through any direct typing mechanism made available by Google.
• wrs 2y ago
  This is kinda crazy considering the tremendous effort Google has gone to over the decades to shave milliseconds off their response time. They invented a whole TCP replacement to reduce page latency, and now this?
  • h2odragon 2y ago
    "happy users" has not been on google's priority list for a long, long time. 20 years or more.
    • phreeza 2y ago
      Google is not a monolith, there are plenty of people at Google trying to make a good user experience.
      • buildsjets 2y ago
        The cafeteria ladies?
      • _hcuq 2y ago
        Google is evil. Sorry. It is driving people mad via the YouTube algorithms. And it is destroying democracy.
        • FredPret 2y ago
          Which democracies have descended into dictatorships because of Google? All Youtube does is feed me engineering and astronomy videos. It's actually improving my life. Your algorithm is a reflection of you.
          • Alupis 2y ago
            > Your algorithm is a reflection of you. This is objectively false. "The" algorithm is designed to maximize engagement - so you will be shown content you are most likely to watch, click, listen to the most. As it turns out, "Outrage Porn" is highly engaging... Scroll through enough YouTube Shorts, and just like TikTok, your "algorithm" slowly but surely reduces to outrage porn. All paths lead to outrage porn. All of them...
            • supriyo-biswas 2y ago
              n=1, but I've watch a fair bit of Youtube shorts and this has never happened. The algorithm rewards what you watch, and someone addicted to politics and the culture of outrage around it, will get what they ask for.
              • Alupis 2y ago
                It usually starts off with just content you're overtly interested in. Then, they'll sprinkle in random clips every so many scrolls to guard against overfitting the model and getting stale for the user. Some of those random clips are Outrage Porn designed to get a reaction out of you... You scroll past, then scroll back because "wtf did I just see?" - and now you're in. The frequency starts to increase and pretty soon you're shouting at clouds feeling like you're the only one that realizes how crazy everything is... It's hard to keep your feed "clean" and dialed into just things that bring you intellectual stimulation or enjoyment. It's not impossible, but it's quit difficult. You constantly have to realign your algorithm lest it goes off into the weeds.
      • mateus1 2y ago
        But the good people are being driven out while the good product are being killed.
      • toomuchtodo 2y ago
        Leave and deliver somewhere it’s possible. You’re never going to win against corporate inertia and management interests at Google.
        • phreeza 2y ago
          Many people actually deliver things that are objectively improvements to user experience, such as latency improvements?
          • toomuchtodo 2y ago
            Serving ads and poor quality search results faster is an objective improvement? Agree to disagree. If the only thing gen AI delivers is killing Google’s search standing, it’ll have served a useful purpose.
            • phreeza 2y ago
              Is it a deterioration? I don't disagree that results are getting worse, but I'd still say all else being equal faster results are better than slower results.
              • toomuchtodo 2y ago
                https://mashable.com/article/google-search-low-quality-research https://mashable.com/article/google-search-low-quality-resea... https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_20... https://fortune.com/2024/01/18/why-is-google-search-so-bad-spam-links-seo-ai-algorithm/ https://fortune.com/2024/01/18/why-is-google-search-so-bad-s... | https://archive.is/CLO4S https://archive.is/CLO4S https://searchengineland.com/google-to-cut-thousands-of-search-quality-rater-jobs-after-dropping-contract-with-appen-436739 https://searchengineland.com/google-to-cut-thousands-of-sear... (I use Kagi, DDG, and OpenAI for search primarily, all paid for, so my first hand experience with Google Search is limited, intentionally; are faster poor results better than slightly slower good results? I can spare a few seconds for better, this is not high frequency trading)
      • mrguyorama 2y ago
        That does not matter one iota. Google's goal since they bought doubleclick has been to serve more ads and make more cash, and everything is subservient to that goal. If serving more ads reduces the user experience, they will not choose to stop serving those ads, they will choose to reduce the user experience. Companies are not democracies. If every single dev thinks that the user experience matters, but the CEO wants more ads, you will get more ads. It's literally a tyranny.
        • phreeza 2y ago
          You can get away with a lot of things even inside of a tyranny, if you are good at selling to your superiors. So in your example, a dev who wants to improve user experience might have to couch it in terms of how users are likely to come back more often an click on more ads, and if they do this well, they will often be allowed to do the improvements they want.
      • hehdhdjehehegwv 2y ago
        Leadership however is a monolith: they are all 100% locked into quarterly stock market price as the single criteria for making decisions. Or, as I like to say, Google hired some of the best, and promoted all of the worst…and after 25 years here we are.
      • ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
        I think those people are the minority. Ux at Google has always been poor and they have never been able to ship a bug free product. Now they are bending over backwards to stay in the AI race but honestly it just seems like they are done. They are a huge balloon so it will take a while to come down but the gas gas started leaking.
    • derefr 2y ago
      This isn't even about "happy users", though; it's about money. Where does Google's ad revenue come from if users give up on waiting for their searches to complete before they're ever shown any revenue-generating sponsored links? Actually, thinking about this more, I fundamentally don't understand Google's search experience strategy over the last 10 years. Even before AI answers, they were heuristic-ing answers into a little box that pushed sponsored ad placements below the fold. Why push sponsored results below the fold? How does Google make money from a search engine that just answers people's questions directly, rather than doing lead-gen for the rest of the Internet (with much of the Internet willing to pay for that)?
      • zitterbewegung 2y ago
        I think they just want to have your captured on their platform . If you get all of your answers then why pick a competitor?
        • theolivenbaum 2y ago
          They probably also know that some types of queries are not ad-worth (like age of an actor, etc), while others would never show a box
          • derefr 2y ago
            That's a really good point. Google has likely decided that some query categories are unprofitable-enough already that they can just drop the rest of the expected revenue from them, and instead use them as loss-leaders — aiming to give the customer a better (but zero-revenue) experience today, to increase retention, so they'll come back with positive-revenue-generating queries later. They've just done a rather braindead job of it, with the experience of these loss-leader queries feeling perceptually† worse than a regular SERP page would. It's like a grocery store running a sale on e.g. milk, selling it for below-cost — but then making you have to wait in a line for five minutes in front of the milk cooler to get it. It feels like so much friction that not only wouldn't lure people in; it would push people to avoid that grocer when its milk sales are happening, and shop at other stores instead! --- † I emphasize perceptually here. Even if the total time spent waiting for an AI answer is shorter than the time it would take to load a SERP page, read and select a link that looks like it'll have your answer, click it, load the resulting page, and read it — the AI experience could still feel longer, in large part because "the ball is in your court" for a lot of the self-navigated query, with you being given things to look at and click on; while "the ball is in their court" for the entirety of the AI response, with just a spinner and no indication of what's happening. As such, I wonder if this could be solved by just running a cute little animation under the AI prompt window: make it look like it's automating the loading of a [blurred to non-identifiability] SERP page, scrolling down, clicking a result, loading an [again blurred] page, highlighting a few random fragments of it, and then transposing them together to form the paragraphs of the answer — before the answer actually snaps into place on top of that animation. If you can predict how long before the AI answers, you can even use that to determine how long the animation should spend dicking around on the pretend SERP page and answer page.
  • gmuslera 2y ago
    Remember the Not be Evil? And how minimal used to be the Google search (and gmail) user interface? This is just another step into that direction. All the other optimizations were intended to minimize the intrusiveness of those anti optimizations.
  • georgeecollins 2y ago
    Not surprising to me after their AMP initiative. Supposedly this was supposed to make the mobile web faster. Really the point was to make it more difficult to get different bid for ads. This is just one example of a pattern of behavior of saying you are doing something for the consumer but really its just to exploit a monopoly. If you are in a field with digital advertising you really should read the link below, and be very suspicious of Google. https://texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/images/child-support/20220114_195_0_States%20Third%20Amended%20Complaint.pdf https://texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/images/...
  • christkv 2y ago
    Not yet in Europe it seems. I can’t wait /s. Might have to finally sign up for kagi.
  • caesil 2y ago
    Really seems like they are terrified and flailing wildly
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • barfbagginus 2y ago
    It is standard with Bing and chat GPT to wait a few seconds before the result appears. Early adopters excuse this since they value the AI text, realize it's being generated at high expense, and there's no way to make it much faster on the backend. Non-adopters won't value AI text or the technical hurdles. Google is in a hard place - they need to roll the feature out to stay relevant to early adopters of AI. But they can't give good results without making it a huge loss leader - their revenue comes from sending users to spam. They can't seriously commit to a loss leader that counters their entire business model, so they're going to half ass it. That stands to upset established users and early adopters alike, with an unfocused and executive sabotaged Hail Mary. I call this the "decline of AOL" phase of Google's lifecycle. There's a big crisis about the value and necessity of the service, but rather than innovating, execs can only push annoying ads and gimmicks.
  • pushedx 2y ago
    They've invented multiple TCP replacements to reduce page latency. Remember SPDY? Not to mention improvements to TCP itself (BBR congestion control). This is really sad. Seems like a product team throwing many tens of millions of dollars worth of performance research out the window.
  • surfingdino 2y ago
    AI is a play to appease Wall Street. It is similar to the VR race, which has just ended and anyone investing heavily in it would not necessarily be praised by the stock market. Companies like Alphabet, Meta, or Apple have to be seen to be innovating or else their stock will suffer. So, even if they know it is all not going to work they are forced to show they are keeping up. So they suck life of the new tech by deploying billions of USD to hoover up talent and tech and thus asphyxiate competition, especially smaller players. Once the dust settles in a couple of years there will be some leftover tech that might be useful and a whole bunch of patents kept at the ready for the next round of crazy. Google could be doing nothing, but there would be no end to the comments that they are finished and have no future. Funny that nobody expects Oracle or Autodesk to out-hallucinate their competition. I guess they don't because bank ledgers or high-rise designs are best kept away from the tricksters selling another iteration of Mechanical Turk under the guise of "saving humanity". Unfortunately for us, unlike previous advances in IT this one make things slower, uses way more energy, and spits out BS. Give it a couple of years and a wider war effort where compute power might get nationalised for the purpose of fighting the enemy in a more efficient way or designing deadlier weapons faster and we will not see AI available to the general public for much longer. Not that it's a bad thing, SEO spammers trying to outdo one another in who can publish more crap is something I'd like to see less of.
  • cyanydeez 2y ago
    They ditched real search results for markrting 5 years ago. Why pretend theyre doing anything but making ads more than anything else
  • 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
    "They invented a whole TCP replacement to reduce page latency, and now this?" What is the reason for the page latency. Is it TCP. No. It is pages laden with excessive amounts of advertising. Google is an advertising company. The problem is the advertising, which causes latency, not TCP. Moreover, they did not "invent" this TCP replacement, they borrowed the idea from djb (CurveCP) who may have borrowed it from someone else. CurveCP does better as it encrypts each packet individually, does not require TLS and allows multiple websites to be hosted on the same IP address. No plaintext domainnames on the wire (SNI) required. Nor some elaborate, complex and cumbersome Band-aid like ECH. Google's problem is how to deliver more advertising without affecting www speed, i.e., without web users noticing how much advertising slows the web down. But Google spins this problem as how to "make the web faster". It is Google's business, online advertising, that is slowing the web down. Google deliberately adds latency to pages when "loading" so that ad auctions can take place first. Advertising is the priority, not reducing latency.
  • xnx 2y ago
    If Google is interested in delivering useful results faster, HTTP response time is not the absolute measure. An AI generated result that saves you from having to go to another site (or multiple sites) saves much more time.
• Filligree 2y ago
  So the AI search generally provides correct results, but the guy… just doesn’t want to hear anything about AI? I suppose it’s an interesting psychological example.
  • pastureofplenty 2y ago
    I don't want to hear anything about AI either, especially if it takes an extra 3 seconds to load.
    • rkagerer 2y ago
      I just came from Google I/O, it was all AI, which I didn't want to hear anything about either.
  • hackernudes 2y ago
    The author of the article is annoyed about waiting for the results to appear in a box that takes up almost the whole screen (obscuring the traditional non-AI results). The author also points out that sometimes the AI information is wrong.
    • stevedonovan 2y ago
      Ah, Edge/Bing went through this phase recently. A split personality, where sensible stuff appeared on the left, and Copilot laboriously typing on the right. I disabled it, really did not add anything to the experience.
• throwaway888abc 2y ago
  Google now offers ‘web’ search — and an AI opt-out button https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/14/24074314/google-now-offers-web-search https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/14/24074314/google-now-offer...
  • delecti 2y ago
    The article mentions the "web" search, which is the "opt-out button" that link is talking about, but it doesn't acutally opt you out, it just turns off AI for that single query.
• egypturnash 2y ago
  Time to switch your default search engine I guess then, dude? You can do that, even if you're using Google's browser, it's the first thing in the 'search' pane of the prefs of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
  • knob 2y ago
    Hell no in Firefox. To change the setting on Firefox it is burried at the bottom of another bottom. I'm a 99% Firefox user.
    • aspenmayer 2y ago
      Firefox settings has a search bar, but don’t worry, it doesn’t use Google as it runs locally. /s
    • vaughnegut 2y ago
      Kagi has an extension that just switches it for you in Firefox
    • daedalus_j 2y ago
      Really? Open Settings, there's a "Search" tab on the sidebar. Literally the first item is "default search engine". At the bottom of that tab is the "Search shortcuts", which makes it trivially easy to have multiple search engines installed and use the one you want from your search bar. (I use @g for google, @d for DDG, and @k for Kagi, with an @v for DevDocs.io)
    • computerfriend 2y ago
      Click the URL bar. If on a page that provides a search engine, you can add it immediately. If not, click the cog on the right, then choose a new default search engine.
  • wasteduniverse 2y ago
    [dead]
• kernal 2y ago
  Hell Yeah. I've switched to Duck Duck Go AI Search.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  Well, there are a lot of things I don't want to spend my one precious life dealing with. Advertising, especially intrusive advertising. Spam. Misinformation, and people who believe it. Politics. Weeds. Google's AI search, so far, is pretty far down on the list, at least for me.
  • ziddoap 2y ago
    It's really neat how Google is also involved in almost all of those, too.
• jfim 2y ago
  The worst part is when it hallucinates an answer. Google slides doesn't have a morph transition (PowerPoint does), but the AI will confidently claim it does: https://www.google.com/search?q=google+slides+morph+transition https://www.google.com/search?q=google+slides+morph+transiti...
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • akira2501 2y ago
    For almost an entire decade, I forgot that bookmarks exist, why would anyone use them when you have Google? Over the past year, I've fallen in love with my bookmarks again. They're curated. They take me right to the answer I want. You can set the "omnibar" up to search your bookmarks. They don't hallucinate themselves into existence. So, thanks Google, I've gone back to 1999, for the total failure that your service is.
    • beachy 2y ago
      Identical experience! Though ironically, having useful bookmarks pushed me into turning on sync in chrome so they would be accessible one all devices, pulling me further into the Google tarpit.
    • skydhash 2y ago
      on macOS, I use anybox (I could do with a note app, but it’s neat). For the past year, any interesting link I come across, I add it there. The few I use daily, I add them to the browser as bookmarks. Most of my browsing is autocompleting from the history instead of search engines.
    • renegat0x0 2y ago
      I read that grimoire is quite popular repo. I haven't used it, but looks promising to self host. https://github.com/goniszewski/grimoire https://github.com/goniszewski/grimoire
    • rchaud 2y ago
• tr3ntg 2y ago
  In my very first interaction with their AI search results, the results were actually wrong. Very cool.
• elromulous 2y ago
  So many folks here criticizing Google for this move. Can you really blame them? A year or so ago everyone was eulogizing them because of chatgpt. Damned if they do or don't.
  • rsynnott 2y ago
    These... weren't necessarily the same people.
  • grraaaaahhh 2y ago
    >Can you really blame them? Yes.
• rgbrenner 2y ago
  “ Google’s AI search has arrived, uninvited, to my browser, and I cannot make it leave. ” You can make it leave. Firefox isn’t dead; browser choice still exists.
  • ozten 2y ago
    DuckDuckGo.com will fix this inside of Chrome as well.
    • sumeno 2y ago
      DDG is rolling out the same kind of thing with DuckAssist
      • divbzero 2y ago
        DuckDuckGo provides an option to turn off AI if you don’t want it: https://duckduckgo.com/settings https://duckduckgo.com/settings
  • doublerabbit 2y ago
    > Firefox isn’t dead Yet. That's to say that Firefox feels as it's currently on life support; alas one thanks to Google. All it would take is for Google to remove funding and the browser sinks, Mozilla with it too.
    • Always42 2y ago
      can you explain? From my understanding firefox is owned by mozilla?
      • beretguy 2y ago
        Google is paying to Mozilla a lot of money in exchange for Firefox having Google as default search.
      • doublerabbit 2y ago
• windowshopping 2y ago
  I just got sick of this yesterday and checked to see if there was a chrome extension removing it. There is, it just doesn't easily come up in searches right now. It works great though. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hide-google-ai-overviews/neibhohkbmfjninidnaoacabkjonbahn?pli=1 https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hide-google-ai-over...
  • elashri 2y ago
    If you are using ublock origin (which you should) then add that in the filters > google.com##.GcKpu
    • zamadatix 2y ago
      You can also use the same logic as that extension does instead: google.com##h1:has-text(AI Overview):upward(*) The upside being you don't have to rewrite it every time the sites layout is updated with new random IDs, only when the AI Overview heading itself changes wording or style.
  • spondylosaurus 2y ago
    Thank you!
  • causal 2y ago
    It's wild what hoops people jump through to stay on Chrome
    • windowshopping 2y ago
      I would need this same extension in another browser. This comment would make sense if you said "the hoops people jump through to stay on google," but I'm not sure what this has to do with Chrome.
• deleted 2y ago
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• _yb2s 2y ago
  I'm shocked Google thought this tool was production worthy, since it mostly gives really wrong results, in a confident manner. I don't think you can reasonable expect all users to realize it is low quality nonsense, when it is presented at the top of the results. It's one thing if you know you are using an LLM tool, but when using a search engine, people won't expect this.
  • avery17 2y ago
    Oh so its the same as regular search then.
    • yifanl 2y ago
      I would be rather embarrassed to spend $100 billion dollars creating a new feature that's not better than the legacy feature. (Notably, this isn't even a rewrite, this is greenfield work!)
  • nerdjon 2y ago
    > I'm shocked Google thought this tool was production worthy Honestly, I would not be surprised if they didn't think it was. But thanks their "Code Red" they seem determined to get as much out the door as possible to avoid someone else doing it first. > I don't think you can reasonable expect all users to realize it is low quality nonsense, when it is presented at the top of the results. And that is the problem, we are training a large number of non technical people that these tools are supposedly reliable. When the problems with them confidently giving very wrong results are well understood. But we just don't talk about it anymore outside of certain circles. If we did keep talking about it, all the AI hype would die off or at least he seriously hampered.
    • _yb2s 2y ago
      They're simultaneously both overhyped and underhyped because people aren't really thinking about them the right way, or using them the right way. They want to use it as an oracle where they ask a straightforward question, and get a straightforward correct answer. In reality they're more of a simulator- you describe a scenario with your prompt, and they play it out for you the way it would likely occur in real life. To accurately predict text as they are trained to do, they have to simulate the scenario generating the text, not provide the most correct and simple completion to the text. This is why you can ask it a simple physics question for example, and the default might be to give a wrong answer based on a popular misconception. But tell it that it should answer as Richard Feynman, and it can give the correct answer. It "knows" that the first answer was incorrect, but it's still a more appropriate/likely answer given the default scenario, where it effectively assumes it is supposed to act as a random internet stranger when it answers.
• deadbabe 2y ago
  Sick and tired of Google products. Why don’t they just pivot to being a hedge fund or something if they have more money than they know what to do with?
• swozey 2y ago
  I had this annoying thing running awhile ago and finally shut it off. You can do it in the Labs button - https://labs.google.com/search https://labs.google.com/search. Well, I can, not sure if everyone can.
• aiauthoritydev 2y ago
  AI-powered search is not a good idea as of today. Someday it would be, but that day is not today. Google knows this well, and hence that is why despite having their internal LLMs for a long time, they did not touch search with it. Google's hand is forced by OpenAI-related news and investor pressure. LLMs, on the other hand, are incredibly useful in their other products where we have to write text. I find myself relying heavily on Gemini to improve my grammar, emails, social media posts, and whatnot. This post too is spellchecked by Gemini.
  • kichimi 2y ago
    Perhaps not a popular opinion - and slightly besides your point, but english that is too formal and too correct can sound unnatural.
    • aiauthoritydev 2y ago
      Yes. But you can also use it just for basic typo and grammar correction.
• dr_kretyn 2y ago
  Same. May i recommend Ecosia? Not only it doesn't want to be smarter than needed, I actually feel good clicking on ads as the revenue goes to ecological causes.
• rznicolet 2y ago
  I wonder how this is going to play out. At a company I previously worked for, we ended up not rolling out personalized on-site search because while the results were better in theory, in practice it was so slow nobody wanted to use it. Then again, Google is so dominant that many folks won't quickly bounce to an alternative...
• Animats 2y ago
  DuckDuckGo? Useful trick with Google for common searches: add -"best" Kills most of the clickbait. Bing, unfortunately, does not have "-" exclusion.
  • GrantMoyer 2y ago
    DuckDuckGo rolled out its own LLM results, "DuckAssist". At least they are very upfront about how to disable it, though; they link directly to the relevant setting from each LLM result.
• AlexandrB 2y ago
  I continue to wonder about the economics of stuffing AI into everything. Compute isn't free - how are Google and Microsoft going to recoup the costs of running these models for every search?
  • oldpersonintx 2y ago
    [dead]
  • pflenker 2y ago
    That’s a secondary concern. Right now, the race is on, and while it is ongoing it’s acceptable to burn money. Later on, enshittification will kick in and make the end result of the race worse in order to stop burning money.
• aresant 2y ago
  I read this title and instantly related to it from the business owner / SEM / SEO perspective Google controls 90% of search and that's where most consumers start their journey The current state of the union with Google for businesses, especially small business / local business, is a disaster - Bidding on your own keyword, to prevent competitors from showing up as #1 - currently consumes 15 - 25% of total paid budget across a number of businesses we own. It's literally just a 1@%!@% tax. - Google constantly rolls out tests in the name of "quality" - recently for local businesses "hours of operation" became a search signal. Pragmatic enough right? But instantly the spammers started doing 24/7 hours with fake phone numbers etc registered. The road to hell is paved with good intentions they say, this is a constant theme with Google where they come up with some great idea, and then can't figure out how to defend vs the spammers creating massive headaches, costs, etc. - Google continually takes away visibility and contrl. EG their new AI budget manager takes further visibility away. Right now it drives a little efficiency. But when everybody has it? It will optimize SMB (and everybody else) to the fracture line. And NOW we are going to spend our precious life trying to figure out how the !%!@ to engage with an LLM (that Google doesnt' even understand)? I just want to give up. Honestly it's no wonder that private equity is gobbling up everything from dental practices, to plumbers, to HOUSING It's become such a crazy sophisticated game that nobody else can play and survive
• johndough 2y ago
  While I agree with the general message, I find it ironic that the author laments about Google wasting his time, yet wastes my time with two popups, one of which is extremely obnoxious, while simultaneously downloading 10s of JavaScript files and a needlessly large yet compressed-to-hell GIF.
• fyt2024 2y ago
  [dead]
• Animats 2y ago
  Google getting hammered on Twitter.[1] There's no way to make it stop. [1] https://twitter.com/di_friscoSEO/status/1790824143752954101/photo/1 https://twitter.com/di_friscoSEO/status/1790824143752954101/...
• autoexec 2y ago
  Leave JS off and google search is still nearly useless and full of unnecessary bloat before you get to real results, but at least it's instant.
• paul7986 2y ago
  I personally am liking chatGPT (i know its not that but feels like it) rolled into Google search. Overall im hoping OpenAI and Microsoft create a chatGPT phone to compete with iPhone and Android. Either they go the Android route (create a phone OS for manufacturers) or build a direct iPhone competitor. The UI/UX would be fairly minimal and ur chatGPT phone would be used as your 2nd brain / your AI friend. You wouldn't interact with the web so much .. maybe you still would with apps but not as much as your home screen 50% of the time would provide textually, graphically or audibly what you seek with minimal effort on your part. Your AI friend knows you well....
  • autoexec 2y ago
    > ur chatGPT phone would be used as your 2nd brain / your AI friend. That's what we need, a brain/"friend" that collects and analyzes every single thing we think/ask about to use against us later and/or sell to third parties. No thank you! The only AI "friend" you'll ever have will be run locally entirely on your own hardware and will never send/share/leak any part of your interactions with anyone else for any reason.
    • pessimizer 2y ago
      Any AI personal assistant that is working for me should do everything short of illegality to protect any information about me, or what I do, that I haven't explicitly told it I want to be shared, and with whom. You might say that's crazy, but that's just Overton. It's the expectation we have of librarians (and that they have of themselves.) It took PATRIOT to erode that norm (and many others.) Right now, that at the least means running it locally, although that's not going to be sufficient.
      • rchaud 2y ago
        So, what, you're going to get the AI to sign an NDA? They don't work for you, they work for the vendor. You can't hold an AI accountable, so you shouldn't trust it with your secrets.
    • paul7986 2y ago
• IncreasePosts 2y ago
  The trick, which is actually the solution to 99% of usability problems on the internet, is to simply disable javascript for the site.
• randgoog 2y ago
  For those of you missing the old Search experience, this new Search mode from Google might be particularly interesting to you: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1790473952256786805 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1790473952256786805
• deleted 2y ago
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• daft_pink 2y ago
  Kagi… just sayin'
  • leotravis10 2y ago
    Maybe you shouold read this: https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011314 Whip up a SearXNG instance or use one instead.
    • doublerabbit 2y ago
      Meh. Every search engine has it drama. But I still find Kagi more refreshing than Google.
    • daft_pink 2y ago
      I don’t really care about the tshirt drama or some type of ideological purity in their funding etc. Kagi just works well and I really love the way that you can prioritize the sites you like and block the sites that you don’t in the search and that there aren’t any ads and I’ve used a lot of other search engines and this is the only one I’ve like well enough that I actually enjoy using it and don’t find myself subconciously back at google.
• cdme 2y ago
  A solution in search of a problem that makes the existing solution worse. Kudos, Google.
• UtopiaPunk 2y ago
  I've been using DuckDuckGo for a while now on my personal machines, but still used Google on my work computer. I started getting the AI blurbs this week and they were so annoying, so I switched to DuckDuckGo on my work computer as well.
• labrador 2y ago
  No one is forcing this person to use Google. His article drips with AI phobia. There's no nuance to it. For example, I love LLMs but hate AI music and think it should be banned. AI music solves no problems for us like LLMs are helping us do. AI phobics hate all AI. I'm starting to feel personally attacked by people like this because I am enthusiastic about some AI.
  • ziddoap 2y ago
    >His article drips with AI phobia. Where? The article drips with annoyance, not fear, at 3 second searches that no longer have the results that were previously returned in fractions of a second. >There's no nuance to it. Why does there need to be? Author is annoyed. Author explained annoyance. The end. >I'm starting to feel personally attacked by people like this That is a very strong indicator that you should divest yourself from the topic for awhile. The author does not attack you in any way.
    • labrador 2y ago
      >>I'm starting to feel personally attacked by people like this > That is a very strong indicator that you should divest yourself from the topic for awhile. The author does not attack you in any way. Before some stray AI evangelist leaps into the comments to promise the tech will get better, I want to be clear that even if it were instantaneous, I still wouldn’t want it. I didn’t ask for results from the plagiarism machine! That doesn't sound like annoyance to me. It sounds like hate. Three days ago from my comment history: -4 points by labrador Maybe AI will speed up the development process afavour Maybe AI will replace eyes labrador I'm not going to stop talking about AI just because some hate it afavour And I won't stop mocking AI hype just because some believe it So you see, I'm starting to take it personally
• Vvector 2y ago
  https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/ Don't complain about a company having a monopoly while using their products WHEN THERE ARE COMPLETELY FREE AND VIABLE ALTERNATIVES.
  • renegat0x0 2y ago
    Yet FF also wanted to capture user search data. I feel that ff is also not the best option.
  • mkeedlinger 2y ago
    And alternatives that I honestly think are better. One reason I'm unwilling to move from Firefox right now: Recommended Extensions. They're extensions that are checked by Mozilla employees for quality, security and privacy. Extensions have such unfettered access to my browsing, and so many have such nefarious practices that I'll only install extensions that Mozilla vets.
    • raxxorraxor 2y ago
      This argument of allegedly hostile addons is true to an extend. They theoretically do indeed have access to your browsing, just like your browser has access to your browsing. However the security argument was used to inhibit ad blockers and get more control about browsers, an already quite restricted ecology. I gladly have the option to vet addons myself just like I do vet browser vendors. Some of the later and attached companies might have questionable goals. For me this feature of Firefox is the least important, but demands differ I guess.
  • gwervc 2y ago
    Yeah, free and "viable" alternatives funded at 90% by said monopoly haha.
    • Barrin92 2y ago
      There's no way Mozilla can win on this. You can't charge for a browser at the scale to compete with Google, not enough people will pay. When they start to open up alternative services that actually could generate revenue, people yell at them and tell them to work on the browser. This is 100% on the consumers, over and over open source projects receive no funding and exist by virtue of big companies subsidizing them because nobody is willing to pay for their principles.
• anonyfox 2y ago
  So what is left to do to get some visibility as an indie hacker? Spamming twitter/reddit like no tomorrow?
• freediver 2y ago
  Disclaimer: founder of Kagi search It would do Google good to publish an AI integration philosophy to address critical issues related to AI in search. Such a document would allow for public scrutiny, which is crucial when your user base is a few billion strong and you are as influential player in the field. It would also serve as a good platform for other companies to study. Kagi has an AI integration philosophy [1], which, while modest, has successfully navigated us through the current AI cycle and I think helped our users understand what they can expect from us. AI can enhance the search experience, but the core search functionality must be strong and robust first. An LLM grounded in search will only be as good as the search results it gets. Google's "all-in" rollout of AI into search without first addressing these foundational principles and improving the core search experience is interesting - does it really mean they are betting the house on AI? The more I see things like this from Google and others, the more I want to go back to basics and just continue improving the core search quality. [1] https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search#philosophy https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search#philosophy
  • leotravis10 2y ago
    Keep in mind that this guy and Kagi themselves can't be trusted as proof by this piece: https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011314
    • freediver 2y ago
      I'll let the public record speak to my ability to execute and run the business. If you have any concrete points that you think I did not already adequately address, I am happy to do it. Just please do not slander publicly (and keep things on-topic if you can).
  • whilenot-dev 2y ago
    It's fine to have a philosophy, yes, but if GDPR and the right to be forgotten is not taken seriously enough[0] by a founder of a young product I'll have a hard time to see anything beyond just a mere marketing piece without any liability. [0]: see sibling comment
• ccppurcell 2y ago
  I guess we are going to need something like ublock for AI content.
• j45 2y ago
  What's amazing is how unpolished the various AI search features are. When google first launched, it was visibly much better at finding results.
• wackget 2y ago
  While I agree the AI answer is unnecessary, I'm more angry about how it forces itself into the top of the page, causing the actual search results to be forced further down the page. There's a term for this; it's called "layout shift". And guess which giant search engine company actually punishes websites which include layout shift? You're damn right, it's Google: * https://developers.google.com/publisher-tag/guides/minimize-layout-shift https://developers.google.com/publisher-tag/guides/minimize-... * https://web.dev/articles/cls https://web.dev/articles/cls These big companies supposedly only hire world-class developers; the cream of the crop. And yet they can't even get the basics right. Stuff that I would have avoided in my first Geocities site when I was a kid. Stupid hypocritical twats.
  • okdood64 2y ago
    > I'm more angry about how it forces itself into the top of the page, causing the actual search results to be forced further down the page. Just scroll down? Is it that hard?
• shuntress 2y ago
  Chrome and the modern browser landscape is a monument to our failure to produce a good operating system.
• drewg123 2y ago
  I use firefox, and I've never seen this before. Turns out that it's because it seems to be tied to using a chrome based browser. I just tried chrome and chromium, and it happens to me on chromium and chrome when I do a google search in them. (was assuming it was some flag on my account or some a/b test i was in) Its ironic that this new feature may drive people off of chrome..
• filipwojda 2y ago
  the 3 seconds which the author hates to wait is the only metric Google will see in his point. they’ll optimize for latency not for quality lmao
• woopsn 2y ago
  A big part of the problem is illustrated by the fact we are now trained to google e.g. even basic information about our own podcast. Big tech gets so much more out of us than we get out of them - their products are entrenched largely by perception. You can use another search engine. Open a spreadsheet from your Documents directory. Run 7-13B models yourself with llama.cpp. Save a bookmark. Wait three seconds. Whatever you need to do you can do. The data brokers, ad men, media corporations etc. now identified as "the technology industry" are (explicitly) in the business of wasting precious time, not saving it.
  • frizlab 2y ago
    I have chosen to use another search engine, which I pay for. There are other alternative that are free and definitely good enough for a common usage.
• GoodJokes 2y ago
  [dead]
• CatWChainsaw 2y ago
  So AI-generated answers will kill websites and then we'll be completely dependent on Google and LLM whimsy to find out what real information is. I assume end users will have to deploy their own AI of some sort to wade through the shit. Increase in complexity of one magnitude and increase in inefficiency and bullshit of greater magnitudes, but you can't back out because that lowers your guard and yet another global prisoner's dilemma is born. This is what happens when you blindly worship at the altar of Progress.
• pentagrama 2y ago
  Why so many comments recommending switch browser from Google Chrome to Firefox? This is a Web Google Search feature right? If is only enabled on Chrome now I'm sure will soon be enabled on other browsers. I also encourage to switch to Firefox, but in this case to escape this feature is changing the default search engine on your browser, which I recommend Kagi (paid without ads) or Duck Duck Go (free with ads).
• pentagrama 2y ago
  The AI hype is so big and tech companies are blinded by this, is incredible that Google ship this to his first and flagship product on by default to many users, and not opt out option (I conclude that by the OP article). I remember see Google launching features off by default with some nagging to turning on, but this is so greedy and dictated by the race on AI, every company want to have AI on their branding like the popular girls on Mean Girls want to be in that group.
• danielscrubs 2y ago
  They are now using one area, Search, where they have close to monopoly to compete in another, LLMs, because bard.google.com cannot compete fair and square. Googlers will later proclaim that they won because they had the best product, and the new generations will believe them.