3 ms·

The one way forward for them would have been to maintain their quality, but they decided to cash in on their monopoly instead. Peak short-termis.

ajross 1y ago
Seems to my untrained eyes like Google's AI search is actually the best on the market, no? Seems like a lot of HN users have trained themselves not to type queries into the search prompt anymore and then complain about the quality of a product they don't use.
- hobs 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - halfmatthalfcat 1y ago
    I take it you’re the rebellious teenager then?
    - hobs 1y ago
      Against the biggest corporations? Sure, I'd much rather fulfill the role of overly critical teenager then defensive protective parent when it comes to rapacious companies who deserve none of our support.
- marcus_holmes 1y ago
  Possibly their AI search - I don't know, I switched to Kagi to get a search engine that actually did what I asked instead of just trying to put as many ads in front of me as it could.
  - chneu 1y ago
    I tried to like Kagi but the UI is awful and the results were often way off from what was relevant. Then the limitations were pretty lame.
    - malnourish 1y ago
      What's wrong with the UI, what limitations have you experienced? I've found my searches relevant and haven't noticed any limitations.
      - chneu 1y ago
        The paywall. I'm not against paying, but their free tier limitations are way too low. The UI is just horrible and a huge waste of space. I had to use a user style to make it a non-headache to use. Kagi routinely lacks results that every other search engine I use get no problem. I can't give any examples but I found myself going to page 5+ more often on Kagi than any other service.
        OskarS 1y ago
        If the paywall bothers you, then Kagi just isn't for you, the whole point of it is to have a business model where the users are customers, not the product. I have no problem with the UI. It's snappy, clean, doesn't have a bunch of cruft, it's easy to find results, etc. It feels like Google of yore. Same thing with the search results, I find them really excellent. In my experience, there's much less SEO spam. If you search for a programming language function, you get links to the proper documentation, not some trash "geeksforgeeks" site or whatever. I can't remember if I've ever had to go past page one. Obviously YMMV on that, it's entirely possible it's different depending on what you're searching for. But I'm very happy paying for Kagi, and will continue to do so.
  - dyauspitr 1y ago
    Kagi is okay. Decided to try it after all the hearsay on HN and it was severely underwhelming.
- bcoates 1y ago
  Every once in a while I bother not ignoring a Google AI overview, then I waste some time fact-checking it and find out it's wrong. Most recently about a python library (where it hallucinated a function that doesn't exist, complete with documentation and usage examples) and breaking news (where it authoritatively said [non-culture war, non-controversial, local] thing doesn't happen, above a dog-bites-man story from a conventional news source about how thing happened again)
  - ajross 1y ago
    > Every once in a while Pretty much what I said, no? You don't use the product and when you do, do it through a filter[1] where you only remember the bugs. Do you use other AI search products and find that they don't show this behavior? [1] I mean, come on: framing it as "bother not ignoring" is just a dead giveaway that you aren't doing a product evaluation in good faith!
    - bcoates 1y ago
      I am doing the review in good faith though--by default, I scroll past to the first result, then if it seems unsuitable and I'm desperate enough I check the LLM thingy. If it were providing any value it would sometimes be both novel and correct. Usually it's non-novel (correctly-harmelessly but unhelpfully, restating the web search results). When it's novel it's because it's wrong. I would remember the situation where reading the LLM thingy added any value if it ever happened. The weird little UI thing they do where they only show the LLM result if you wait for it to render makes this very easy, I have to scroll up to even consider it.
    - chneu 1y ago
      I think you're also showing some bias. People are now changing how they search and gather information to use AI. You're automatically discounting that person's experience because they avoid using AI for valid reasons. A lot of times Google AI is outright wrong, not even close to correct. It makes sense to not rely on it and only going back to see if it's improved. I don't "ignore AI". I just haven't changed how I search and gather information because it's clearly not accurate yet. I still have to fact check it which negates the benefits(time saving). Occasionally I go back to see if it's improved and usually it hasn't. That's not bias.
- waldrews 1y ago
  The model that's doing AI Summary for search results - that presumably needs to be fast and cheap because of the scale - is still sufficiently bad as to give people a bad taste. Presumably they're frantically working to scale their better models for this use case. If you could get Gemini Pro on every search result the experience would be effectively perfect (in the sense of better error rates than what a non-specialist educated human reading the top results and summarizing them would achieve). That's years away from a scaling/cost/speed perspective.
  - zdragnar 1y ago
    I've been pleasantly surprised at the quality of the answers, but they've been wrong enough that I'll never not double check them anyway.
  - flokie 1y ago
    In the US (to start) there's now a flavor of Gemini 2.5 to power Search experiences like AI Mode and AI Overviews. Should be sufficiently good at this point. source: https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-ai-mode-update/#ai-mode-search https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-ai-mode-up...
  - bionhoward 1y ago
    One funny thing about Google summaries is “copy text” merges all of the links into a giant blob which gets interpreted as a single extremely long broken link. Not a great sign for attention to detail if they don’t even copy their own pasta (it’s been like this for months)
- WorldMaker 1y ago
  Having reluctantly used both, Bing's Copilot seems a lot more grounded on current search results below it versus Google's Gemini seems a lot more likely to conduct its own searches from a different query than what was asked, so also a lot more likely to hallucinate things or to provide answers that seem way different from the rest of the search page. In terms of "best on the market" for AI search, I know that I am much more likely to trust the one that seems more like a direct summary of the stuff the search engine is traditionally responding with (and presumably has been well tuned in the last several decades) versus the one more likely to make stuff up or to leave the realm of what you are actually asking for some other search it thinks is better for you. Though admittedly that's a very personal judgment call; some people want the assistant to search for "what they really mean" rather than "what they asked for". It's also a lot of gut vibes from how these AIs write about their research and some of that can be hallucinations and lies and "prompt optimization" as much or more than any sort of "best on the market" criteria.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
dyauspitr 1y ago
That’s a cheap argument. Even with high quality results (which I still think Google is the best at), LLMs are infinitely easier to use.

ajross 1y ago

Seems to my untrained eyes like Google's AI search is actually the best on the market, no? Seems like a lot of HN users have trained themselves not to type queries into the search prompt anymore and then complain about the quality of a product they don't use.

hobs 1y ago
[flagged]
- halfmatthalfcat 1y ago
  I take it you’re the rebellious teenager then?
  - hobs 1y ago
    Against the biggest corporations? Sure, I'd much rather fulfill the role of overly critical teenager then defensive protective parent when it comes to rapacious companies who deserve none of our support.
marcus_holmes 1y ago
Possibly their AI search - I don't know, I switched to Kagi to get a search engine that actually did what I asked instead of just trying to put as many ads in front of me as it could.
- chneu 1y ago
  I tried to like Kagi but the UI is awful and the results were often way off from what was relevant. Then the limitations were pretty lame.
  - malnourish 1y ago
    What's wrong with the UI, what limitations have you experienced? I've found my searches relevant and haven't noticed any limitations.
    - chneu 1y ago
      The paywall. I'm not against paying, but their free tier limitations are way too low. The UI is just horrible and a huge waste of space. I had to use a user style to make it a non-headache to use. Kagi routinely lacks results that every other search engine I use get no problem. I can't give any examples but I found myself going to page 5+ more often on Kagi than any other service.
      - OskarS 1y ago
        If the paywall bothers you, then Kagi just isn't for you, the whole point of it is to have a business model where the users are customers, not the product. I have no problem with the UI. It's snappy, clean, doesn't have a bunch of cruft, it's easy to find results, etc. It feels like Google of yore. Same thing with the search results, I find them really excellent. In my experience, there's much less SEO spam. If you search for a programming language function, you get links to the proper documentation, not some trash "geeksforgeeks" site or whatever. I can't remember if I've ever had to go past page one. Obviously YMMV on that, it's entirely possible it's different depending on what you're searching for. But I'm very happy paying for Kagi, and will continue to do so.
- dyauspitr 1y ago
  Kagi is okay. Decided to try it after all the hearsay on HN and it was severely underwhelming.
bcoates 1y ago
Every once in a while I bother not ignoring a Google AI overview, then I waste some time fact-checking it and find out it's wrong. Most recently about a python library (where it hallucinated a function that doesn't exist, complete with documentation and usage examples) and breaking news (where it authoritatively said [non-culture war, non-controversial, local] thing doesn't happen, above a dog-bites-man story from a conventional news source about how thing happened again)
- ajross 1y ago
  > Every once in a while Pretty much what I said, no? You don't use the product and when you do, do it through a filter[1] where you only remember the bugs. Do you use other AI search products and find that they don't show this behavior? [1] I mean, come on: framing it as "bother not ignoring" is just a dead giveaway that you aren't doing a product evaluation in good faith!
  - bcoates 1y ago
    I am doing the review in good faith though--by default, I scroll past to the first result, then if it seems unsuitable and I'm desperate enough I check the LLM thingy. If it were providing any value it would sometimes be both novel and correct. Usually it's non-novel (correctly-harmelessly but unhelpfully, restating the web search results). When it's novel it's because it's wrong. I would remember the situation where reading the LLM thingy added any value if it ever happened. The weird little UI thing they do where they only show the LLM result if you wait for it to render makes this very easy, I have to scroll up to even consider it.
  - chneu 1y ago
    I think you're also showing some bias. People are now changing how they search and gather information to use AI. You're automatically discounting that person's experience because they avoid using AI for valid reasons. A lot of times Google AI is outright wrong, not even close to correct. It makes sense to not rely on it and only going back to see if it's improved. I don't "ignore AI". I just haven't changed how I search and gather information because it's clearly not accurate yet. I still have to fact check it which negates the benefits(time saving). Occasionally I go back to see if it's improved and usually it hasn't. That's not bias.
waldrews 1y ago
The model that's doing AI Summary for search results - that presumably needs to be fast and cheap because of the scale - is still sufficiently bad as to give people a bad taste. Presumably they're frantically working to scale their better models for this use case. If you could get Gemini Pro on every search result the experience would be effectively perfect (in the sense of better error rates than what a non-specialist educated human reading the top results and summarizing them would achieve). That's years away from a scaling/cost/speed perspective.
- zdragnar 1y ago
  I've been pleasantly surprised at the quality of the answers, but they've been wrong enough that I'll never not double check them anyway.
- flokie 1y ago
  In the US (to start) there's now a flavor of Gemini 2.5 to power Search experiences like AI Mode and AI Overviews. Should be sufficiently good at this point. source: https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-ai-mode-update/#ai-mode-search https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-ai-mode-up...
- bionhoward 1y ago
  One funny thing about Google summaries is “copy text” merges all of the links into a giant blob which gets interpreted as a single extremely long broken link. Not a great sign for attention to detail if they don’t even copy their own pasta (it’s been like this for months)
WorldMaker 1y ago
Having reluctantly used both, Bing's Copilot seems a lot more grounded on current search results below it versus Google's Gemini seems a lot more likely to conduct its own searches from a different query than what was asked, so also a lot more likely to hallucinate things or to provide answers that seem way different from the rest of the search page. In terms of "best on the market" for AI search, I know that I am much more likely to trust the one that seems more like a direct summary of the stuff the search engine is traditionally responding with (and presumably has been well tuned in the last several decades) versus the one more likely to make stuff up or to leave the realm of what you are actually asking for some other search it thinks is better for you. Though admittedly that's a very personal judgment call; some people want the assistant to search for "what they really mean" rather than "what they asked for". It's also a lot of gut vibes from how these AIs write about their research and some of that can be hallucinations and lies and "prompt optimization" as much or more than any sort of "best on the market" criteria.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

dyauspitr 1y ago

That’s a cheap argument. Even with high quality results (which I still think Google is the best at), LLMs are infinitely easier to use.