4 ms·

Expanding AI Overviews and Introducing AI Mode

52 points by meetpateltech 2y ago

jazzyjackson 2y ago
> AI Overviews are one of our most popular Search features — now used by more than a billion people There's no way to opt-out... of course its popular. Does Google believe their own BS?
mococa 2y ago
I believe that this will eventually make the motivation to create websites for humans disappear, and instead of SEO, we will be optimizing for SAIO.
- melvinroest 2y ago
  Companies are already talking about that. At least, I've been to a few conferences where SAIO (I forgot what they called it) was mentioned and elaborated upon. I vaguely remember that it was elaborated upon to build a whole suite of tools that could predict what the chances are - given the content that you have - that you too would rank in the AI overview.
- hooverd 2y ago
  Ugh. I like websites for humans. I'm firmly opposed to having all my knowledge pre-digested by a third party.
- hbcondo714 2y ago
  SAIO = Search Artificial Intelligence Optimization[1] I have a website that has been receiving traffic from chatgpt.com but the prompts users are entering for my website to appear as a reference / link aren't made available so how much optimization can really be done? [1] https://datascientest.com/en/all-about-saio https://datascientest.com/en/all-about-saio
input_sh 2y ago
> As we’ve rolled out AI Overviews, we’ve heard from power users that they want AI responses for even more of their searches. Ah yes, I'm sure many power users told you exactly that.
- acedTrex 2y ago
  Reworded: We've heard from sundar that users want AI responses for more of their searches
uejfiweun 2y ago
I know it's common for everyone to shit on Google here on HN, but I have to say, I do like the AI overviews. They're easy to ignore and sometimes helpful... and I've seen lots of non-tech friends and family using them. I really don't get the vehement hatred the tech / HN community has for this feature (nor do I get the common complaint that "Google search is useless," it works better than all the others for me...)
- AnIrishDuck 2y ago
  I appreciate the alternative perspective. I have found them outright wrong or misleading often enough to generally just skip them, or get mad when I slip and catch myself reading them.
- pton_xd 2y ago
  > I've seen lots of non-tech friends and family using them. Same. It's because it's the first thing that pops up and they don't know any better, and they trust Google. I've seen misleading or wrong information often enough to not waste my time reading them.
- owlninja 2y ago
  The downvotes confirm how HN feels but I largely agree with you. I do not find them wrong as often as everyone here claims and it appears most regular users are enjoying the feature at this point.
- dgritsko 2y ago
  For me, it's the fact that content generated by an LLM is fundamentally different than content that comes directly from a search index, but displaying them alongside each other conflates the two. Most people don't know the difference, and place the same level of importance (or maybe even more importance) on AI-generated content. Yes, this content is convenient. However, if the content isn't accurate or correct (which it may or may not be, given that it's just a statistically likely sequence of tokens) then is it actually beneficial as a whole?
- simonw 2y ago
  The failure cases for them are really bad. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen people "prove" something on social media with a screenshot of a Google AI Overview that's parroting false information it found on the web. (Try searching for "encanto 2").
iamleppert 2y ago
I really don't understand what their endgame is here. AI Search can't be good for their ads business, because by its very nature it bypasses most of the ads. Why would I spend money on Google ads anymore if it doesn't drive traffic to my web site?
- 85392_school 2y ago
  Ads for products and locations still show up (at least in the existing Overview).
- AnIrishDuck 2y ago
  Ads in the AI overview. That's always been the endgame for them here.
  - visarga 2y ago
    > Ads in the AI overview. That's always been the endgame for them here. The fundamental problem of ads is that they sell other things than we need. LLMs won't change that.
  - tmpz22 2y ago
    Maybe even Ads trained into the AI itself?
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      Exactly. It's so trivially obvious I'm not sure why it's not more often remarked. What's better than organic-looking ad insertions into results? LLMs smart enough to invisibly weave ad buys into their results. "What's the best ___?" -> $$$
  - techjamie 2y ago
    I wouldn't doubt that's the goal, though it seems risky. There's a fair chance the LLM could hallucinate details about your product and lead to it falsely advertising. Given Gemini's history recommending people eat glue, among other things, I wouldn't trust it with that responsibility.
85392_school 2y ago
Almost a competitor to Deep Research. It also reminds me of Learn About in some ways.
- simonw 2y ago
  Google were the first company to release a product called Deep Research, which is very similar to the product OpenAI launched later: https://blog.google/products/gemini/google-gemini-deep-research/ https://blog.google/products/gemini/google-gemini-deep-resea...
giancarlostoro 2y ago
Can I get back 2000s Google results? Aka no ridiculous filtering outside of spam / malware? I don't know what happened in the last four years but Google and YouTubes search capabilities feel broken, things I used to find I no longer can type the same queries to find. Search has regressed. I find myself just asking Grok for things I typically ask Google. I also use Kagi, but its not quite the scale of someone like Google who used to provide peak results before all this AI craze was even a thing. Honestly I'd pay money at this point to get back the legacy google search results capability on google.
- CharlesW 2y ago
  If I may suggest something crazy: Try Bing for a month. You can turn off most of the crap. Backstory: I've been a Google user since it was in beta, having moved from AltaVista. A few months ago, I decided I wanted to try something different in an ongoing effort to reduce my Google footprint. Kagi is the obvious alternative, but they don't have the right plan for me — if their no-AI plan offered unlimited searches, I'd be using it. As an experiment, I set Bing as my default search engine, and it's been fine. You can turn off the front page "tabloid" crap, and also Copilot responses on result pages.
  - giancarlostoro 2y ago
    > having moved from AltaVista High five! Same here! Not many people seem to know what AltaVista is or was. I do use Bing in one browser on my work computer, its okay, still find it much easier to just ask Grok for links to things... I get summaries and exactly what I was looking for.
    - CharlesW 2y ago
      Yes! That's an important point — I'm also using LLMs for search quite a bit, and in fact that really got the ball rolling in terms of reducing my dependence on Google Search specifically.
- jsemrau 2y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
rsynnott 2y ago
Oh, good. Just what I wanted, more mandatory AI bullshit.
siliconc0w 2y ago
The hard but simple choice is to accept they need to just make gemini the default experience. The ChatGPT-style experience is just categorically better - you can get a straight answer, an answer grounded in search, deep reasoning, deep research, code artifacts, image-generation, memory, agents, etc. They'll continue to bleed users until they offer a competitive experience that doesn't require going to a subdomain or submenu.
- acedTrex 2y ago
  Horrific take, google search is already bad enough. Defaulting to chatgpt style would make it useless. GPT is not a search engine.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    Conversational interfaces are going to be the future for a lot of use cases, because the benefit of context to accuracy is too large. It finally solves the "user too dumb to formulate the search query for what they actually want" problem.
hooverd 2y ago
I wonder if the end-goal is AI advertising "nudges" based on some sort of psychometric profile. Who needs ads when you have a mass manipulation machine. Just figure out what drives X product even if you never see it directly.
blibble 2y ago
www.udm14.com
marban 2y ago
In every 20-year-old search engine, there are code fragments that ask themselves: What happened?
- josh-sematic 2y ago
  There are probably pieces of code that are dead but nobody knows they’re dead and the reason they’re dead is not discoverable by static analysis. Like junk DNA, just relics of a bygone past being carried needlessly into the future…
freshnode 2y ago
I would like to meet the "power users" who asked for more of this. Enshittification marches on.
visarga 2y ago
Disappointing not to have any of this in EU.
fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
What I want is for them to show the exact text that supports each claim. Often the sources they link do not say what the summary says they say.
jaredcwhite 2y ago
I'm not sure I've ever seen such a wide chasm between what a company thinks its users want and what its users actually want. Company: Everyone loves the latest versions of our core products! Everyone: Never has your product quality been so poor. Please reverse the last several years of "progress" — m'k'thanks'bye! Oh well. DuckDuckGo has served me well for many years now and as long as I switch off all their AI overview nonsense, it's pretty much the same as it ever was (just a bit harder to find real human-grade content amongst the flood of generated SEO spam).
goyel 2y ago
[dead]
t-3 2y ago
Is this why they've started requiring javascript lately? That little bit of annoyance finally pushed me to change default search engines in my "dirty" browser that touches sites I don't trust.
unsignedint 2y ago
Google's AI mode hasn't rolled out to me yet, but do you know if it will handle political questions? Gemini is notorious for avoiding anything political—even something as simple as asking about the current president—so I'm curious.

52 points by meetpateltech 2y ago

> AI Overviews are one of our most popular Search features — now used by more than a billion people There's no way to opt-out... of course its popular. Does Google believe their own BS?

mococa 2y ago

I believe that this will eventually make the motivation to create websites for humans disappear, and instead of SEO, we will be optimizing for SAIO.

melvinroest 2y ago
Companies are already talking about that. At least, I've been to a few conferences where SAIO (I forgot what they called it) was mentioned and elaborated upon. I vaguely remember that it was elaborated upon to build a whole suite of tools that could predict what the chances are - given the content that you have - that you too would rank in the AI overview.
hooverd 2y ago
Ugh. I like websites for humans. I'm firmly opposed to having all my knowledge pre-digested by a third party.
hbcondo714 2y ago
SAIO = Search Artificial Intelligence Optimization[1] I have a website that has been receiving traffic from chatgpt.com but the prompts users are entering for my website to appear as a reference / link aren't made available so how much optimization can really be done? [1] https://datascientest.com/en/all-about-saio https://datascientest.com/en/all-about-saio

input_sh 2y ago

> As we’ve rolled out AI Overviews, we’ve heard from power users that they want AI responses for even more of their searches. Ah yes, I'm sure many power users told you exactly that.

acedTrex 2y ago
Reworded: We've heard from sundar that users want AI responses for more of their searches

uejfiweun 2y ago

I know it's common for everyone to shit on Google here on HN, but I have to say, I do like the AI overviews. They're easy to ignore and sometimes helpful... and I've seen lots of non-tech friends and family using them. I really don't get the vehement hatred the tech / HN community has for this feature (nor do I get the common complaint that "Google search is useless," it works better than all the others for me...)

AnIrishDuck 2y ago
I appreciate the alternative perspective. I have found them outright wrong or misleading often enough to generally just skip them, or get mad when I slip and catch myself reading them.
pton_xd 2y ago
> I've seen lots of non-tech friends and family using them. Same. It's because it's the first thing that pops up and they don't know any better, and they trust Google. I've seen misleading or wrong information often enough to not waste my time reading them.
owlninja 2y ago
The downvotes confirm how HN feels but I largely agree with you. I do not find them wrong as often as everyone here claims and it appears most regular users are enjoying the feature at this point.
dgritsko 2y ago
For me, it's the fact that content generated by an LLM is fundamentally different than content that comes directly from a search index, but displaying them alongside each other conflates the two. Most people don't know the difference, and place the same level of importance (or maybe even more importance) on AI-generated content. Yes, this content is convenient. However, if the content isn't accurate or correct (which it may or may not be, given that it's just a statistically likely sequence of tokens) then is it actually beneficial as a whole?
simonw 2y ago
The failure cases for them are really bad. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen people "prove" something on social media with a screenshot of a Google AI Overview that's parroting false information it found on the web. (Try searching for "encanto 2").

iamleppert 2y ago

I really don't understand what their endgame is here. AI Search can't be good for their ads business, because by its very nature it bypasses most of the ads. Why would I spend money on Google ads anymore if it doesn't drive traffic to my web site?

85392_school 2y ago
Ads for products and locations still show up (at least in the existing Overview).
AnIrishDuck 2y ago
Ads in the AI overview. That's always been the endgame for them here.
- visarga 2y ago
  > Ads in the AI overview. That's always been the endgame for them here. The fundamental problem of ads is that they sell other things than we need. LLMs won't change that.
- tmpz22 2y ago
  Maybe even Ads trained into the AI itself?
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    Exactly. It's so trivially obvious I'm not sure why it's not more often remarked. What's better than organic-looking ad insertions into results? LLMs smart enough to invisibly weave ad buys into their results. "What's the best ___?" -> $$$
- techjamie 2y ago
  I wouldn't doubt that's the goal, though it seems risky. There's a fair chance the LLM could hallucinate details about your product and lead to it falsely advertising. Given Gemini's history recommending people eat glue, among other things, I wouldn't trust it with that responsibility.

85392_school 2y ago

Almost a competitor to Deep Research. It also reminds me of Learn About in some ways.

simonw 2y ago
Google were the first company to release a product called Deep Research, which is very similar to the product OpenAI launched later: https://blog.google/products/gemini/google-gemini-deep-research/ https://blog.google/products/gemini/google-gemini-deep-resea...

giancarlostoro 2y ago

Can I get back 2000s Google results? Aka no ridiculous filtering outside of spam / malware? I don't know what happened in the last four years but Google and YouTubes search capabilities feel broken, things I used to find I no longer can type the same queries to find. Search has regressed. I find myself just asking Grok for things I typically ask Google. I also use Kagi, but its not quite the scale of someone like Google who used to provide peak results before all this AI craze was even a thing. Honestly I'd pay money at this point to get back the legacy google search results capability on google.

CharlesW 2y ago
If I may suggest something crazy: Try Bing for a month. You can turn off most of the crap. Backstory: I've been a Google user since it was in beta, having moved from AltaVista. A few months ago, I decided I wanted to try something different in an ongoing effort to reduce my Google footprint. Kagi is the obvious alternative, but they don't have the right plan for me — if their no-AI plan offered unlimited searches, I'd be using it. As an experiment, I set Bing as my default search engine, and it's been fine. You can turn off the front page "tabloid" crap, and also Copilot responses on result pages.
- giancarlostoro 2y ago
  > having moved from AltaVista High five! Same here! Not many people seem to know what AltaVista is or was. I do use Bing in one browser on my work computer, its okay, still find it much easier to just ask Grok for links to things... I get summaries and exactly what I was looking for.
  - CharlesW 2y ago
    Yes! That's an important point — I'm also using LLMs for search quite a bit, and in fact that really got the ball rolling in terms of reducing my dependence on Google Search specifically.
jsemrau 2y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976

rsynnott 2y ago

Oh, good. Just what I wanted, more mandatory AI bullshit.

siliconc0w 2y ago

The hard but simple choice is to accept they need to just make gemini the default experience. The ChatGPT-style experience is just categorically better - you can get a straight answer, an answer grounded in search, deep reasoning, deep research, code artifacts, image-generation, memory, agents, etc. They'll continue to bleed users until they offer a competitive experience that doesn't require going to a subdomain or submenu.

acedTrex 2y ago
Horrific take, google search is already bad enough. Defaulting to chatgpt style would make it useless. GPT is not a search engine.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  Conversational interfaces are going to be the future for a lot of use cases, because the benefit of context to accuracy is too large. It finally solves the "user too dumb to formulate the search query for what they actually want" problem.

hooverd 2y ago

I wonder if the end-goal is AI advertising "nudges" based on some sort of psychometric profile. Who needs ads when you have a mass manipulation machine. Just figure out what drives X product even if you never see it directly.

blibble 2y ago

www.udm14.com

marban 2y ago

In every 20-year-old search engine, there are code fragments that ask themselves: What happened?

josh-sematic 2y ago
There are probably pieces of code that are dead but nobody knows they’re dead and the reason they’re dead is not discoverable by static analysis. Like junk DNA, just relics of a bygone past being carried needlessly into the future…

freshnode 2y ago

I would like to meet the "power users" who asked for more of this. Enshittification marches on.

visarga 2y ago

Disappointing not to have any of this in EU.

fngjdflmdflg 2y ago

What I want is for them to show the exact text that supports each claim. Often the sources they link do not say what the summary says they say.

jaredcwhite 2y ago

I'm not sure I've ever seen such a wide chasm between what a company thinks its users want and what its users actually want. Company: Everyone loves the latest versions of our core products! Everyone: Never has your product quality been so poor. Please reverse the last several years of "progress" — m'k'thanks'bye! Oh well. DuckDuckGo has served me well for many years now and as long as I switch off all their AI overview nonsense, it's pretty much the same as it ever was (just a bit harder to find real human-grade content amongst the flood of generated SEO spam).

goyel 2y ago

[dead]

t-3 2y ago

Is this why they've started requiring javascript lately? That little bit of annoyance finally pushed me to change default search engines in my "dirty" browser that touches sites I don't trust.

unsignedint 2y ago

Google's AI mode hasn't rolled out to me yet, but do you know if it will handle political questions? Gemini is notorious for avoiding anything political—even something as simple as asking about the current president—so I'm curious.