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> Enter 2024 with AI. The top 20% of search results are a wall of text from AI... I'll be the contrarian here and say I actually like Google's AI Overview? For
by binkHN 2y ago
> Enter 2024 with AI. The top 20% of search results are a wall of text from AI...
I'll be the contrarian here and say I actually like Google's AI Overview? For the first time in a long time, I can search for an answer to a question and, instead of getting annoying ads and SEO-optimized uselessness, I actually get an answer.
Google is finally useful again. That said, once Google screws with this and starts making search challenging again, as it has been for years, I'll go elsewhere.
- moralestapia 2y agoYou're definitely a contrarian. Google search is awfully bad these days.
- lm28469 2y ago> I can search for an answer to a question and, instead of getting annoying ads and SEO-optimized uselessness, I actually get an answer. You get the average of the seo optimized answers
- verdverm 2y agoI use google.com for search and Gemini for Q&A. Two sites for two modes. I also use uBlock to remove the ai response from my search results to keep them clean and separate
- m_ke 2y agoIt would be great if it wasn't completely wrong 50% of the time.
- binkHN 2y agoI find it mostly right 70% of the time.
- GiorgioG 2y agoDescribes my general experience with AI across the board. Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, etc. It’s like I’m talking to a genius toddler. With ChatGPT losing 5 billion dollars on 3.7B in revenue this is unsustainable. It feels like the dotcom bubble all over again.
- Analemma_ 2y agoThis is true, but fairly or unfairly, asking a question to a chat bot feels like “opting in” to the possibility that the answers you get will be hallucinated garbage, in a way that doing a Google search does not. It’s a tough problem for Google to overcome— the fact that they will be held to a higher standard—- but that’s what it is: we have already learned to accept bullshit from LLMs as a fact of life, whereas on the top of Google results it feels like an outrage.
- scarface_74 2y agoI have been a paying ChatGPT user for awhile. It’s simply a matter of saying “verify that” and it will give you wen citations
- Analemma_ 2y agoIt invents citations too, constantly. You could look up the things it cites, although at that point, what are you actually gaining? And I’m not saying this makes them useless: I pay for Claude and am a reasonably happy customer, despite the occasional bullshit. But none of that is relevant to my point that the bots get held to a different standard than Google search and I don’t see an easy way for Google to deal with that.
- JustExAWS 2y agoDo you pay for ChatGPT? The paid version of ChatGPT has had a web search tool for ages. It will search the web and give you live links.
- traverseda 2y agoThat's a very pessimistic take. It's right about 50% of the time!
- ethbr1 2y agoBoth of your requirements for correctness are just 50% too high.
- jsheard 2y agoThe mark of a great product/feature is always when they feel the need to force it on users, because they know that a significant portion of users would switch it off if they could.
- TiredOfLife 2y agoCompared to 0% of relevant results in first 10 pages it's an enormous improvement.
- Ancalagon 2y agoYeah the AI summaries are garbage still
- Terr_ 2y agoThe difficulty of verifying the answer isn't-wrong is another important factor. Bad search results are often obvious, but LLM nonsense can have tricky falsehoods. If a process gives false results half the time, and verifying any result takes half as long as deriving a correct solution yourself... Well, I don't know the limiting sum of the infinite series offhand, but it's a terrible tool.
- toddmorey 2y agoFor quick simple steps like how to get a Bluetooth keyboard into pairing mode, it seems to work really well. I hated the prior world where everyone attempted to hide the real answer 3/4ths of the way through a useless blog post or YouTube video.
- lubujackson 2y agoWhich, we should note, didn't happen 10 years ago before the accountants took over search at Google. Those good, lean, helpful pages still exist. Google incentives websites to have pages of slop on everything now because they track how long you spend on a site as a "metric of a good match". Forrest for the trees...
- TiredOfLife 2y agoStack overflow launched 16 years ago, when for many years most of google results already were expertexchange type of sites with the obfuscated answers hidden pages deep in the link.
- aix1 2y ago> expertexchange This reminded me that, rather hilariously, it used to be called expertsexchange.com before adding a dash (experts-exchange.com).
- hinkley 2y agoExpert sex change will long be remembered. I recall there was an Italian site that had a very spicy “Le Tits Now” reading but it escapes me.
- whimsicalism 2y agoi think if anything by google actively penalizes long slip articles with lots of affiliate links
- hinkley 2y ago
- Schnitz 2y agoThe AI answers are nowhere near good enough to always be at the top, without any clear indication that they are just a rough guess. Especially for critical things like visa requirements or medical information. When you search Google for these sort of things, you want the link to the authoritative source, not a best guess. It’s very different for queries like say “movies like blade runner”.
- pishpash 2y agoIt seems damning enough that Google itself doesn't know what is a more authoritative source or they would have weighted their AI output appropriately. What does that say about their traditional search results?
- Schnitz 2y agoI doubt that was the decision process. It’s much more likely that there is a directive coming down from the top that “we need to go all in on AI”, which then gets amplified down by middle management and the result is AI smeared over all results irregardless if helpful. That then drives up some vanity metric like “searches answered by AI summaries”, while metrics like “bad AI summaries shown” don’t get attention. As a result the organization is happy, people can get promoted, etc.
- whimsicalism 2y agoagreed and frankly I am a big fan of LLMs in general… it just doesn’t seem like the one behind google search is all that smart
- BadCookie 2y agoAn example: I was looking up what a good diet is to follow after a child has been vomiting. The AI said to avoid giving fruit juice … yet the authoritative sources said the opposite. I already knew not to trust the AI, but this was nail in the coffin for me.
- mrkramer 2y agoNot all queries are the same but I agree with you that the authority of source is crucial. That's why for example .gov sites rank high and should rank high because government is usually the most trusted source. But when you are looking for new shoes to buy or food recipes then .gov sites can't help you and that's where things get ugly....SEO spam ugly.
- asdff 2y agoWere you not googling before? They had a bullet point summary that was actually more accurate because it scraped direct quotes from the website. Now I am getting wrong info from the ai summary. Its a huge step back from just what was there previously but its sold as some advancement.
- crazygringo 2y agoIt definitely didn't seem more accurate to me. If quite frequently either scraped quotes that weren't actually an answer to my search (the webpage was correct, but the link between my search and the webpage was not), or it was an answer but the answer was wrong (because the webpage was wrong). The AI summary now isn't perfect because it can still regurgitate wrong information from the Internet, or hallucinate information when there isn't any -- but it seems to actually understand what I want now, so it doesn't suffer from the incorrect matching problem. Also, there are way more AI answers now than there ever were snippet answers.
- hombre_fatal 2y agoAgreed. My friend and I used to paste pre-AI Google search snippets to each other when they were so bad, especially when it quoted a comment on Reddit.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- whimsicalism 2y ago…i’m no fan of the google AI feature but it is way more accurate than the scraped bullet point predecessor which would often scrape things while missing something key like a “here is the opposite of what we are talking about:” in the webpage
- nicbou 2y agoThe answers come from the same websites. They just get stripped of their traffic. As someone who puts a ton of work into writing accurate, helpful guides, it's devastating to have my work plundered like that. Once these monopolies have successfully established themselves, they will become indistinguishable from the ad-invested websites they replace. The only difference is that they will create no new information of their own, and they will destroy the indieweb that once provided it.
- zblevins 2y agoWhere are you publishing your guides? Would love to add another bookmark to my collection.
- nicbou 2y agoUnless you are thinking of moving to Germany, it might not be helpful to you. https://allaboutberlin.com https://allaboutberlin.com
- zblevins 2y agoYou’re correct but this is pretty interesting and I’m sure helpful for people in Berlin!
- kylebenzle 2y agoDo you just like collecting links to online "guides" to anything? No preference for any subject matter, just a collection of random "guides"? Interesting, you could make a guide for that!
- zblevins 2y agoYou could say that. I have found that a lot of guides produced by folks on Hacker News to be generally interesting. Probably too much free time? Either way a guide of guides does seem like a good use of that free time.
- 2y ago
- warner25 2y agoBut "search" and "getting an answer to a question" are two different things, aren't they? I realize that the trend has been going this way for a long time - probably since Ask Jeeves started blurring the line - and this is indeed how a lot of people try / want to use search engines, but still... I wish that Google (and competitors) would have separate pages for something like "Ask Google" vs. traditional search (where I want to find a particular document or quality content on a certain topic instead of just getting a specific answer). May I ask how old you are? I'm 38 and I've been trying hard to break my 10 year-old of the habit of just typing questions into search engines (or telling me to "Ask Google" whenever she asks me a question and I say, "Oh, I don't know").
- darknavi 2y agoYes, they very much are two different things. I loath products like Facebook, Messenger, Google Photos, etc. are turning their traditional "search" page/feature into a one-stop AI slop shop. All I want to do is find a specific photo album by name.
- the_snooze 2y agoThey're perfectly capable of implementing all the same search operators as 1990s Yahoo and 2000s Google. It's a solved problem. The issue is that they don't want to. They'd rather be a middleman offering you "useful recommendations" (that they or may not sell to the highest bidder) instead of offering you value.
- ClimaxGravely 2y agoThe few times I gave it a try it was dead wrong. The dream is nice but the execution is lacking.
- scarface_74 2y agoSearch for anything with Google that has high ad monetization potential. You will find that Google turns off the AI overview.
- cyanydeez 2y ago"Be Socially destructively evil via diffusion of content"
- flakes 2y agoIts hit or miss for me. This week I was googling how to use libarchive and the AI generated responses at the top of each query were either incorrect or hallucinations of methods that don’t exist. I don’t mind playing with AI to help scratch together some code, but I do that using better models. Whatever model google is using for search results is too crappy for me to consider trusting.
- crazygringo 2y agoI totally agree, I really appreciate them. Half the time they give me the answer straight away. And when they're not helpful, it's no different from the first search result not being helpful and going to the second. Plus, they do a pretty good job of only showing them for the types of searches where they're appropriate. Are the right 100% of the time? Of course not. But snippets weren't right 100% of the time, and not infrequently clicking on the top search result will contain information that's wrong as well. Because the Internet isn't 100% right. The idea that a "wall of text from AI" is somehow bad doesn't make any sense to me. And it's not a "wall", it's basically paragraph-sized. Where the context is really helpful in determining whether the answer seems correct/reasonable.
- jayd16 2y agoThey're strictly worse. They're just a summary, so any information is in the results or hallucinated. If the AI could accurately point to the correct information, they would just order the results as such, but instead it's just a paragraph of spaghetti on a wall to look cutting edge.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- QuadmasterXLII 2y agoThey are also wrong just slightly too often. After the fifth time I was twenty minutes in to trying to use command line options that just don’t exist before realizing that I was being led down the winding path by an ai hallucination that I mistook for a stack overflow quote, I broke and paid for Kagi. Which then immediately added an AI drek feature, fml.
- christophilus 2y agoSame with Brave search. The AI answer is often good enough for me to not need to go further. I’m with you, except I don’t use Google.
- pishpash 2y agoIt's wrong enough and unsourced enough that it's more cognitive load to vet the result than not having it. Google is barely more useful because of this.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kotaKat 2y agoI just want to be able to turn the stupid overview off. That's all. One simple toggle. I don't get why a Google Workspaces account can have Gemini forcibly disabled across the entire enterprise yet still have these AI features seep in with no way to manage it at the enterprise level.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ajkjk 2y agoGoogle search had gotten so bad the AI overview is passable in comparison. They don't deserve credit for that! Search was better at getting useful information fifteen years ago than it does now. (And yes, the internet is way more full of garbage now--but they did that, they are responsible for that too!) ... unless you want anything like a perspective or an opinion on something, instead of a factual answer to a question, in which case it's totally useless.
- jayd16 2y agoWhy do we think the AI is any better? Isn't it based on the same dataset as search? How can it be anything but strictly worse for any given query?
- ajkjk 2y agoEr.. I used it and that's what I thought? Search goes out of its way to hide why I want and show me bullshit shopping ads and influencer videos. The overview at least tries to help. For now. But I will emphasize: it's still not that helpful, it's just less corrupted than the main body results are... so far.
- 0xbadcafebee 2y agoIs Google supposed to give you an answer, or help you find something you're looking for? Back when they only tried to help you find something, they were good at that. Really good. Then the ads and meta-slop came in and you couldn't find things anymore. Then they decided they also wanted to answer questions, which is hard enough (they're often wrong). So they have to focus harder on answering questions. And since they're trying to do both in one page/place, the question-answering has taken center stage, and finding things is now next to impossible. So they're no longer a search engine. They're a crap version of OpenAI.
- yieldcrv 2y agoI dont find it useful for the things I search I still have to check the sources and then add “reddit” to the end of my search query so for me its actually an additional third step or remembering not to trust the ai overview
- whimsicalism 2y agoif google’s AI overview were as smart as 4o, i would like it a lot more.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoAn answer is only as good as the expertise behind it. When searching I always pay attention to the source, and will skip ones that look less trustworthy. One major advantage of Google's original pagerank was that originally it worked well and number of links to a page was a good proxy for trustworthiness and authority on a subject. It used to be that you'd find what you were looking for in the top few Google search results, which was a massive improvement to Alta Vista which was the existing competition where you'd have to wade though pages of keyword match sites listed in no particular order. Anyway, source is critically important, and if I'm looking to find something authoritative then the output of an LLM, even if RAG based, is not what I'm looking for! Increasingly people may be looking to search to verify stuff suggested by an LLM, which makes a search engine that puts LLM output as it's top result rather unhelpful! It doesn't help that with Google in particular their AI output is all heavily DEI biased, and who knows what else ... I just don't trust it as objective.
- xboxnolifes 2y agoI sometimes like it, but I've gotten very skeptical of it. One day a friend and I searched the exact same question in Google and got opposing answers for the identical search string. Thus wasn't in the "AI" widget, but one of their usual widgets that give answers to questions. I assume both use some form of AI anyway.
- griomnib 2y agoI think when it’s good it’s pretty good. But knowing when it is good is still hard, as I can’t trust it more than an LLM. But with an LLM I have a simple chat window, not a bag of rabid SVPs fighting to be on the SERP page.
- antihero 2y agoArc Search is what Gemini dreams of being. I’ve found it to be incredibly useful tool to cut through a lot of the crap.
- onion2k 2y agoGoogle's AI summary of search results hallucinates. You might like it, but you may also end up seeing, and believing in, something that just doesn't exist. For example, it says there's a sequel to a Disney film called Encanto, and there just isn't. https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3leezrzlvrk2m https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3lee...
- KTibow 2y agoMost if not all of the times it "hallucinated" it was paraphrasing the web.
- onion2k 2y agoAnd in doing that it's endorsing some random website that makes things up and elevating that garbage to be something users trust 'because it's on Google.' Users will need to learn that Google is only as trustworthy as the crappy websites it uses for data that drives its AI. I'll leave it up to you to work out how that might impact Google's brand.
- selimthegrim 2y agoIt also misidentified an article by Bernard Vonnegut about ice crystals as written by Kurt Vonnegut