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No, this is very much an AI overview thing. In the beginning Google put the most likely-to-match-your-query result at the top, and you could click the link to s
by muglug 1y ago
No, this is very much an AI overview thing. In the beginning Google put the most likely-to-match-your-query result at the top, and you could click the link to see whether it answered your question.
Now, frequently, the AI summaries are on top. The AI summary LLM is clearly a very fast, very dumb LLM that’s cheap enough to run on webpage text for every search result.
That was a product decision, and a very bad one. Currently a search for "Suicide Squad" yields
> The phrase "suide side squad" appears to be a misspelling of "Suicide Squad"
- weatherlite 1y ago> That was a product decision, and a very bad one. I don't know that it's a bad decision, time will judge it. Also, we can expect the quality of the results to improve over time. I think Google saw a real threat to their search business and had to respond.
- Miraste 1y agoTheir "AI Overview" has not noticeably improved on its (many) failings for at least a year. In that time, Google's LLMs have gotten much better. They aren't implementing the advances they've made, presumably for cost reasons. Meanwhile, every single person I know has come to trust Google less. That will catch up with them eventually.
- gambiting 1y agoThe threat to their search business had nothing to do with AI but with the insane amount of SEO-ing they allowed to rake in cash. Their results have been garbage for years, even for tech stuff where they traditionally excelled - searching for "what does class X do in .NET" yields several results for paid programming courses rather than the actual answer, and that's not an AI problem.
- bee_rider 1y agoSEO-wise (and in no other way), I think we should have more sympathy for Google. They are just… losing at the cat-and-mouse game. They are playing cat against a whole world of mice, I don’t think anyone other than pre-decline Google could win it.
- Arainach 1y agoThe number of mice has grown exponentially. It's not clear anyone could have kept up. Millions, probably tens of millions of people have jobs trying to manipulate search results - with billions of dollars of resources available to them. With no internal information, it's safe to say no more than thousands of Googlers (probably fewer) are working to combat them. If every one of them is a 10x engineer they're still outnumbered by more than 2 orders of magnitude.
- anonymars 1y agoI understand what you're saying, but also supposedly at some point quality deliberately took a back seat to "growth" https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ > The key event in the piece is a “Code Yellow” crisis declared in 2019 by Google’s ads and finance teams, which had forecast a disappointing quarter. In response, Raghavan pushed Ben Gomes — the erstwhile head of Google Search, and a genuine pioneer in search technology — to increase the number of queries people made by any means necessary. (Quoting from this follow-up post: https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/)
- anonymars 1y agoBtw this was the HN discussion, I realized, well, where else would I have come across that? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
- h2zizzle 1y agoNo, they made the problem by not dealing with such websites swiftly and brutally. Instead, they encouraged it.
- zargon 1y agoGoogle isn’t even playing that game, they’re playing the line-go-up game, which precludes them from dealing with SEO abuse in an effective way.
- lelanthran 1y ago
- bee_rider 1y agoThey are doing an OK job of making AI look like annoying garbage. If that’s the plan… actually, it might be brilliant.
- weatherlite 1y agoI can't argue here, for me they are mostly useful but I get that one catastrophic failure or two can make someone completely distrust them. But the actual judges are gonna be the masses, we'll see. For now adoption seems quite strong.
- flomo 1y agoRight, the classic google search results are still there. But even before the AI Overview, Google's 'en' plan has been to put as many internal links at the top of the page as possible. I just tried this and you have to scroll way down below the fold to find Barry's homepage or substack.
- h2zizzle 1y agoNo, the search queries are likely run through a similar "prompt modification" process as on many AI platforms, and the results themselves aren't ranked anything like they used to be. And, of course, Google killed the functionality of certain operators (+, "", etc.) years ago. Classic Google Search is very much dead.
- yonatan8070 1y agoWas there ever an announcement regarding the elimination of search operators? Or does Google still claim they are real?
- h2zizzle 1y agoNothing for "" afaik. + was killed to make Google+ discoverable (or so Google claimed at the time).
- flomo 1y agoAt some point, Google search was so good that you didn't really need the operators, like you weren't just prodding some primitive AltaVista to give the results. So I think "almost nobody used that" came long before the en-plan of filling the top 50% with internal links.