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I truly don't get Google's move. I'm sure the model is fine, but it's not Google Search, and when I want Search I want Search. If I wanted to ask an AI, why ca

by qsort 4mo ago

I truly don't get Google's move. I'm sure the model is fine, but it's not Google Search, and when I want Search I want Search. If I wanted to ask an AI, why can't I ask the one from my subscription... that I'm already paying for... that's actually good... that can also search the web? I assume it's a play to test the waters for how the ad market is going to work, because as a product I really can't see why I would ever use it. Dropbox comment moment incoming?

mrweasel 4mo ago
> I truly don't get Google's move. Users aren't adopting their AI at the rate shareholders expect, so they now force the adoption at the cost of search.
- Legend2440 4mo ago
  According to Google, users are adopting it. They say AI mode is the most popular feature they've ever introduced, and is driving an increase in total search queries. >Just one year after its debut, AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users, with queries more than doubling every quarter since launch. As people have realized just how much more Search can do for them, they’re searching more than ever before — so much so that last quarter, we saw queries reach an all-time high. >Another place where we’ve been rapidly innovating is in the Gemini app. Last year at I/O, the Gemini app had 400 million monthly active users. Today, we’ve surpassed 900 million, more than doubling in a year. In that same time, daily requests have grown over seven times.
  - gazebo2 4mo ago
    I mean, "AI Mode" is the default result when you Google something, so of course they're seeing high usage. Driving an increase in total queries is probably because instead of just Googling something and getting the right results like it was 10~ years ago, now you have to interrogate a chatbot or try multiple queries. I would think higher total queries is more an indicator that your search function isn't effective.
    - SirFatty 4mo ago
      "I mean, "AI Mode" is the default result when you Google something" No, it's not. AI mode is something you have to select (in the search window). There is an AI overview provided with your basic search results.
      - pbhjpbhj 4mo ago
        I agree with their assessment that '"AI mode" is the default' - https://ibb.co/Pz9LqKRb https://ibb.co/Pz9LqKRb. That's what I get, in the UK, logged out of Google, from a search in Firefox omnibar using "Google" as provider. I'm aware that they have other things that can be described as AI modes.
        blueg3 4mo ago
        That's AI Overview, just like it says at the top of the box. AI Mode in that screenshot is the tab to the left of All.
    - esseph 4mo ago
      > Driving an increase in total queries is probably because instead of just Googling something and getting the right results like it was 10~ years ago, now you have to interrogate a chatbot or try multiple queries. I would think higher total queries is more an indicator that your search function isn't effective. I wonder how much the search results thing is related to language and locality. I have a hunch but I haven't really dug into it. I live in the US, I speak English, and my browser is normally chrome. The number of times I've gone to the 2nd page in Google search results you can probably count on one hand in the last 15yr or so. I use the standard Google search things when I want specifics... Using quotes, site:news.ycombinator.com to search a site, or add a "-" to remove results from that site. I use a "+" when needed. Nothing fancy. When people say they can't find things in Google search, I'm genuinely baffled. I have a strong suspicion that it has something to do with the combination of browser, locality, and language. Why? Could be tons of reasons for that, some probably anti-competitive on the browser side. I have tried to use ecosia, start page, duckduckgo, etc. Was never happy with those results and always ended up back at Google search. I just want to know what's different, you know? I look up some pretty obscure stuff sometimes. Note: I do normally have my Google account logged in in the browser when doing search, however I have search personalization and history turned off, so that should not be influencing the quality of my search results compared to whatever "baseline" is.
  - autoexec 4mo ago
    > They say AI mode is the most popular feature they've ever introduced, and is driving an increase in total search queries. Technically, all the people who google "how do I disable this shitty AI mode in google" would count as "driving an increase in total search queries." An easy way to make a feature popular is to force it on everyone. Then you can pat yourself on the back when 100% of your users are using it!
    - baggachipz 4mo ago
      I remember when Internet Explorer was the most used browser. The fact that people were just using it to download Chrome doesn't matter to stats.
  - mrweasel 4mo ago
    While I'm not opposed to the idea that Google AI mode is so good that people use it more, I also feel like the average person only have so many queries per day. Google statement would indicate that people had a number of queries that they just opted to ignore, because find the answers was to cumbersome. I'm not entirely sure I'm buying that, unless users keep prompting the AI to reduce the amount of reading they need to do. Sort of interrogating the AI, rather than reading a Wikipedia page.
    - dandanua 4mo ago
      The fact that users are using more search queries means they can't find what they want with a lesser number of queries. It seems that Google's PR team doesn't have an incentive to understand that, or thinks that everyone else is stupid.
      - bluefirebrand 4mo ago
        My guess is that they are spinning it as "users enjoy talking to the AI instead of searching, so they do it more" Rather than "users don't find what they want with the AI as easily so they have to spend longer with it"
    - Legend2440 4mo ago
      AI mode isn't for queries, it's for questions. You ask it direct, specific things like 'how do I do <x> in <y>' and it provides a fast answer. People have many more questions in their life than they do queries.
      - gbalduzzi 4mo ago
        In programming forums like Hacker News people are incredibly detached from the average experience with technology, sometimes it is buffling. Most non technical people I know asked questions to Google even before the AI overview. Instead of looking for the answer in seo-bloated articles, they find it in the overview. I think google should improve in detecting the kind of query when I need a link that I don't remember, and deactivate the overview on those. If I search for "ryanair booking" I clearly need the url for booking a Ryanair flight, AI overview is useless
  - dpkirchner 4mo ago
    These are the same folks that removed the very useful Google cache feature because people weren't using it any more. What they forgot to say is they hid the feature beforehand. Of course they have more AI queries every day. They have full control over what goes to LLMs and what doesn't.
    - xp84 4mo ago
      Really smells like some high-ups' bonus was tied to these KPIs and they're guaranteeing that they can't lose.
  - Sleaker 4mo ago
    Isnt this essentially just slight of hand? Google basically defaults to AI search now doesn't it? So of course it will be 'fastest adopted' it's what is shoved in peoples faces. If the results are garbage, or people have difficulty with it... Of course number of searches goes up. That doesn't mean the product is better or its not resulting in brand damage.
    - largbae 4mo ago
      Don't believe your lying eyes, AI results are better!
  - rolph 4mo ago
    how many of those queries contain keyword groups such as "how do i get rid of the AI search?"
  - watwut 4mo ago
    > driving an increase in total search queries I search more when I cant find the thing I am looking for. I search less when I find the thing I am looking for. Second, it takes additional effort to not do AI search.
    - kungp 4mo ago
      Yeah, seems obvious that more searches = results are worse. Who would go "Google sure is good nowadays, I'm gonna ask it for more things than I used to"
- nova22033 4mo ago
  That doesn't make sense. Presumably AI search costs more
jeffwask 4mo ago
> it's not Google Search ...and it really hasn't been for a good number of years now. I left a while ago when results were all SEO copy pasta blogs this is just a final nail in the coffin.
BiraIgnacio 4mo ago
Well, if the marketing teams are being told to reach people using AI or something like that, then Google is just playing to their real customers.
shevy-java 4mo ago
> I truly don't get Google's move. Because Google wants to kill off its search engine here. It is very clear. > I assume it's a play to test the waters for how the ad market is going to work, because as a product I really can't see why I would ever use it. Dropbox comment moment incoming? This assumes that Google search is still a high priority for Google. With their privatized adNetwork, they are trying to get people to trust them, and abuse users via their ads. That is their business model. Google is an adCompany. It stopped being a tech company many years ago already. Also they control the adMarket for the most part. Just look at youtube.
mrdependable 4mo ago
They want to capture more of the value that was previously going to others. That's basically what this has all been leading to. Why let a cooking website get visitors and ad revenue when they are free to take the content and show it as their own? Now they are going to do the same to e-commerce. Either they are going to let customers buy their products through Google's interface, or they won't be discovered. No more ownership of the customer relationship. Stores will be a backend warehouse and manufacturer now with Google taking a percentage of all profits.
- georgeecollins 4mo ago
  Exactly! They also have been letting the results of google search get seriously degraded by ads. Would many people prefer AI over google search circa 2010? They killed their competition and now they will give you the product that gives them the most money.
- strifey 4mo ago
  This has been their MO with their search for a decade+ now. "Native" results hiding actual search results below the fold killed many 2010s era websites that relied on search traffic.
- jeltz 4mo ago
  It is the same thing as when they pushed for AMP. They wanted to prevent traffic from leaving google.com then too.
  - dpkirchner 4mo ago
    In that case at least they could point out that end users got better results with AMP than they do with news sites w/o ad blockers. The AI results are just wrong so often I don't really get it.
    - pluc 4mo ago
      The results are not wrong, they are AI. Google wants that to become a distinct thing that is neither. What's a better answer for Google than one that generates more usage? If we all push in the same direction we can make AI work, we just need to accept we will need to hold its hand for a while.
micromacrofoot 4mo ago
they ruined search a while ago and they want to stop the bleeding
dandanua 4mo ago
The intention is to kill the web in its current form, obviously. If only 1/3 of their users have left, then it is still a win for them in the long run, as they will gain the fraction of content they directly supply to users. Singularity is here and it's spreading faster than a cancer.
pupppet 4mo ago
They see AI killing the incentive for anyone to produce human-generated content so they're squeezing the last few bucks out of the internet as we know it before it finally goes belly-up.
nomel 4mo ago
My read on it is "AI is taking over internet content generation, and we can't filter because we'll end up filtering everything that makes us the most money"
osigurdson 4mo ago
I don't see search and AI as fundamentally distinct things. Usually I just want an answer.
- ttctciyf 4mo ago
  If you don't care about the facticity of the answer, AI is less clicks, granted.
  - hilariously 4mo ago
    I dont think about less keypresses though - google search would let you type two words and get the thing you know you want, an ai search doesn't really fit the mode that old school search folks were using
- malfist 4mo ago
  For the same reason I read a book instead of just the plot summary on the back cover
  - gruez 4mo ago
    You really want to read the author's life story when searching for a recipe? Or wade through some content marketing plug for some vacuum cleaner shop in Albuquerque when all you want to do is figure out how to change filters on your vacuum? There are definitely gems on the web out there, but chances are I'm not discovering them via search, and I'd rather get the straight answer from the AI.
    - bluefirebrand 4mo ago
      All of this stuff is Google's fault in the first place with page ranking shit they built! So now you're trusting them to provide the cure?
- scottmcmac 4mo ago
  Maybe we use search differently, but I very often don't just want an answer, I want to find a website to help me. Maybe it is because I need to do business with a company and need to find their website to interact with them, or maybe I saw a cool site awhile ago that's relevant to what I'm doing now and didn't bookmark it (because I dropped that habit when Google search was good), or want to read the official documentation about a product I bought, that someone already put a lot of effort into making complete enough and digestible to a wide audience... and the LLM responses tend to get in the way. Like the parent I use good/paid AI when I want an AI response. So, yeah, an omnibox that knows when I want "an answer" and one that knows when I want to find a thing sounds slightly more convenient than switching between two tools, but Google search is not that Omnibox.
crazygringo 4mo ago
> but it's not Google Search, and when I want Search I want Search. Not me. I really appreciate having both results simultaneously. I can scan the first couple sentences of the AI response, and if that already has the answer then great. I can expand it to see if there's more. Or, if I see that the AI mode didn't understand my brief search query, I just glance at the search results below. And often times, when I do need to follow a link, I find the source result links in the AI mode to be a better quality than the search result links. It's the best of both worlds.
- miltonlost 4mo ago
  Hope the answer in the AI response is right!
- tredre3 4mo ago
  > I can scan the first couple sentences of the AI response, and if that already has the answer then great. But how do make the determination that the answer is good and you should stop reading the page? Vibes?
  - aprdm 4mo ago
    How do you make it without AI ? Are you parsing through millions of pages yourself ?
    - Forgeties79 4mo ago
      The LLM results are presented confidently and succinctly in a way that is designed to tell you “yes” OR, it not applicable, it just mashes together statements (which often leads to a response that contradicts itself one sentence later). That’s not the same as your vetting search results. Well before Google screwed it all up there used to be some correlation between top hits and what you were looking for. SEO has muddied the waters for many years now and it’s never been truly “merit based” or “objective” or whatever we want to call it, but generally speaking, the first results were the best by default.
mauriciolange 4mo ago
I thought the same at first, but now I find myself relying on the AI answer (as it is usually reliable) and, also more and more, I continue interacting in the AI mode on the topic that motivated my search in the first place.
burnte 4mo ago
I think it's a multifold problem and they've chosen bad solutions. 1. To protect ad revenue they make search results worse to increase the number of searches by making people refine their searches. This made people upset because search result quality went down. 2. "AI everywhere!" put them in a panic, so they shoved am LLM into results, hoping it could pick through bad results and give good data to the user. 3. LLMs are expensive to run, so they're using a cheap model. Cheap model + bad results = abysmal user experience. There are too many groups with opposed interests fighting. Ad groups wants worse results so people search more (not realizing this just drives users away). Search groups want a better product so they stop losing users, and the AI group is being given a bad name because management is using their worst AI product on search. So the whole experience is just garbage.
- gruez 4mo ago
  >1. To protect ad revenue they make search results worse to increase the number of searches by making people refine their searches. This made people upset because search result quality went down. Why would this work? Were yahoo and askjeeves sandbagging their results too just so they can get more clicks?
  - burnte 4mo ago
    > Why would this work? Humans are predictable and hate change. For a short while it DOES work, people are used to great results, assume they're not using the the best keywords, and they'll reformulate their searches. For a while. After a while of all searches being not as good as they used to be, people start looking for other alternatives, which is why DDG is seeing an uptick. It's called enshittification. It's easier than improving a product. > Were yahoo and askjeeves sandbagging their results too just so they can get more clicks? No idea.
- alex1138 4mo ago
  I don't know how much control Goog has over Youtube despite owning them but I do note in passing they removed dislikes, removed upload dates (apparently?), removed 5 stars. Easier to trick people into ads The platform has been various kinds of hostile for a few years now
SecretDreams 4mo ago
Soon, the internet will be so completely full of AI crap enabled by the mega corps that search will be quite a bit less relevant anywho. Maybe google is trying to front run the demise of the internet that they were supposed to protect?
1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago
"I truly don't get Google's move." "AI" gets higher volume of use than search. This was disclosed by Google under oath More traffic, more usage time, more data collection
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago
  "AI Mode queries are doubling every quarter." https://www.wired.com/story/even-if-you-hate-ai-you-will-use-google-ai-search/ https://www.wired.com/story/even-if-you-hate-ai-you-will-use...
aprdm 4mo ago
I don't disagree with you, but google search has gone so downhill that I had stopped using it before they moved to the AI approach, which is actually pretty decent.
elorant 4mo ago
What if their move is to make AI search horrible so that OpenAI has no moves left here because trust in the product collapses?
varenc 4mo ago
> that can also search the web? Slight digression: Claude/ChatGPT/etc all can search the web, but Google's AI already has a local copy of the web. It's much faster because of Google's TPUs, but also because Google has a copy of almost the entire web available locally. I recall others testing this and they observe that Google doesn't actually make HTTP requests to sites it references. It just uses its local cache. That's an advantage that all others seem to lack. Of course, I agree that when I want search, I want search. But personally I've found if I want an LLM to very quickly answer a simple question, the type of thing all of them would do an equally good job on, I prefer Google's for its sheer speed.
ubermonkey 4mo ago
Bad results keep you on their site longer, increasing ad revenue.
basisword 4mo ago
I imagine most people aren't actually searching the web these days. They're searching for an answer to a question. They already now the 5-10 websites they use and go to those directly. They're mostly living in walled gardens, streaming services, or Amazon. When they use Google they want an answer and AI provides that.
onetokeoverthe 4mo ago
[dead]
ptdorf 4mo ago
> I truly don't get Google's move. Because the goal is not to provide the best answers. It's for users to train their AI.
jm4 4mo ago
They probably lose a ton of traffic to AI or anticipate that happening. This is a way to keep people on Google search. Like you, I use both search and AI separately. Even casual, nontechnical users are starting to work like that. Including AI with traditional search results will keep a lot of users from jumping ship in the first place and will help win back users from ChatGPT. I know a lot of people hate AI - at a minimum, there’s a vocal minority - but the reality is AI is eating search like nothing we’ve ever seen.
JoeOfTexas 4mo ago
I find it useful, and use it almost daily. Helps answer "how to" questions for working on my house, development or just general questions. If I need more info, I just look at the links or videos which are also right there. To each their own.
stainablesteel 4mo ago
initially, not a lot of people were using gemini google pushed it into their other products to attract people to AI there was and still are a decent number of people who haven't really used it, as crazy as that sounds
paustint 4mo ago
On the flip side I retrained myself to ask llm questions on my phone or computer browser search bar with the expectation of getting an llm response toy question with no desire to look at anything else. If I truly want to search I will ignore the llm results, but I like the convenience of a quick llm search that knows "all the things". I get the answer to my question without searching multiple ad-ridden websites (since the ad provider does all the things)

by qsort 4mo ago

mrweasel 4mo ago

> I truly don't get Google's move. Users aren't adopting their AI at the rate shareholders expect, so they now force the adoption at the cost of search.

Legend2440 4mo ago
According to Google, users are adopting it. They say AI mode is the most popular feature they've ever introduced, and is driving an increase in total search queries. >Just one year after its debut, AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users, with queries more than doubling every quarter since launch. As people have realized just how much more Search can do for them, they’re searching more than ever before — so much so that last quarter, we saw queries reach an all-time high. >Another place where we’ve been rapidly innovating is in the Gemini app. Last year at I/O, the Gemini app had 400 million monthly active users. Today, we’ve surpassed 900 million, more than doubling in a year. In that same time, daily requests have grown over seven times.
- gazebo2 4mo ago
  I mean, "AI Mode" is the default result when you Google something, so of course they're seeing high usage. Driving an increase in total queries is probably because instead of just Googling something and getting the right results like it was 10~ years ago, now you have to interrogate a chatbot or try multiple queries. I would think higher total queries is more an indicator that your search function isn't effective.
  - SirFatty 4mo ago
    "I mean, "AI Mode" is the default result when you Google something" No, it's not. AI mode is something you have to select (in the search window). There is an AI overview provided with your basic search results.
    - pbhjpbhj 4mo ago
      I agree with their assessment that '"AI mode" is the default' - https://ibb.co/Pz9LqKRb https://ibb.co/Pz9LqKRb. That's what I get, in the UK, logged out of Google, from a search in Firefox omnibar using "Google" as provider. I'm aware that they have other things that can be described as AI modes.
      - blueg3 4mo ago
        That's AI Overview, just like it says at the top of the box. AI Mode in that screenshot is the tab to the left of All.
  - esseph 4mo ago
    > Driving an increase in total queries is probably because instead of just Googling something and getting the right results like it was 10~ years ago, now you have to interrogate a chatbot or try multiple queries. I would think higher total queries is more an indicator that your search function isn't effective. I wonder how much the search results thing is related to language and locality. I have a hunch but I haven't really dug into it. I live in the US, I speak English, and my browser is normally chrome. The number of times I've gone to the 2nd page in Google search results you can probably count on one hand in the last 15yr or so. I use the standard Google search things when I want specifics... Using quotes, site:news.ycombinator.com to search a site, or add a "-" to remove results from that site. I use a "+" when needed. Nothing fancy. When people say they can't find things in Google search, I'm genuinely baffled. I have a strong suspicion that it has something to do with the combination of browser, locality, and language. Why? Could be tons of reasons for that, some probably anti-competitive on the browser side. I have tried to use ecosia, start page, duckduckgo, etc. Was never happy with those results and always ended up back at Google search. I just want to know what's different, you know? I look up some pretty obscure stuff sometimes. Note: I do normally have my Google account logged in in the browser when doing search, however I have search personalization and history turned off, so that should not be influencing the quality of my search results compared to whatever "baseline" is.
- autoexec 4mo ago
  > They say AI mode is the most popular feature they've ever introduced, and is driving an increase in total search queries. Technically, all the people who google "how do I disable this shitty AI mode in google" would count as "driving an increase in total search queries." An easy way to make a feature popular is to force it on everyone. Then you can pat yourself on the back when 100% of your users are using it!
  - baggachipz 4mo ago
    I remember when Internet Explorer was the most used browser. The fact that people were just using it to download Chrome doesn't matter to stats.
- mrweasel 4mo ago
  While I'm not opposed to the idea that Google AI mode is so good that people use it more, I also feel like the average person only have so many queries per day. Google statement would indicate that people had a number of queries that they just opted to ignore, because find the answers was to cumbersome. I'm not entirely sure I'm buying that, unless users keep prompting the AI to reduce the amount of reading they need to do. Sort of interrogating the AI, rather than reading a Wikipedia page.
  - dandanua 4mo ago
    The fact that users are using more search queries means they can't find what they want with a lesser number of queries. It seems that Google's PR team doesn't have an incentive to understand that, or thinks that everyone else is stupid.
    - bluefirebrand 4mo ago
      My guess is that they are spinning it as "users enjoy talking to the AI instead of searching, so they do it more" Rather than "users don't find what they want with the AI as easily so they have to spend longer with it"
  - Legend2440 4mo ago
    AI mode isn't for queries, it's for questions. You ask it direct, specific things like 'how do I do <x> in <y>' and it provides a fast answer. People have many more questions in their life than they do queries.
    - gbalduzzi 4mo ago
      In programming forums like Hacker News people are incredibly detached from the average experience with technology, sometimes it is buffling. Most non technical people I know asked questions to Google even before the AI overview. Instead of looking for the answer in seo-bloated articles, they find it in the overview. I think google should improve in detecting the kind of query when I need a link that I don't remember, and deactivate the overview on those. If I search for "ryanair booking" I clearly need the url for booking a Ryanair flight, AI overview is useless
- dpkirchner 4mo ago
  These are the same folks that removed the very useful Google cache feature because people weren't using it any more. What they forgot to say is they hid the feature beforehand. Of course they have more AI queries every day. They have full control over what goes to LLMs and what doesn't.
  - xp84 4mo ago
    Really smells like some high-ups' bonus was tied to these KPIs and they're guaranteeing that they can't lose.
- Sleaker 4mo ago
  Isnt this essentially just slight of hand? Google basically defaults to AI search now doesn't it? So of course it will be 'fastest adopted' it's what is shoved in peoples faces. If the results are garbage, or people have difficulty with it... Of course number of searches goes up. That doesn't mean the product is better or its not resulting in brand damage.
  - largbae 4mo ago
    Don't believe your lying eyes, AI results are better!
- rolph 4mo ago
  how many of those queries contain keyword groups such as "how do i get rid of the AI search?"
- watwut 4mo ago
  > driving an increase in total search queries I search more when I cant find the thing I am looking for. I search less when I find the thing I am looking for. Second, it takes additional effort to not do AI search.
  - kungp 4mo ago
    Yeah, seems obvious that more searches = results are worse. Who would go "Google sure is good nowadays, I'm gonna ask it for more things than I used to"
nova22033 4mo ago
That doesn't make sense. Presumably AI search costs more

jeffwask 4mo ago

> it's not Google Search ...and it really hasn't been for a good number of years now. I left a while ago when results were all SEO copy pasta blogs this is just a final nail in the coffin.

BiraIgnacio 4mo ago

Well, if the marketing teams are being told to reach people using AI or something like that, then Google is just playing to their real customers.

shevy-java 4mo ago

> I truly don't get Google's move. Because Google wants to kill off its search engine here. It is very clear. > I assume it's a play to test the waters for how the ad market is going to work, because as a product I really can't see why I would ever use it. Dropbox comment moment incoming? This assumes that Google search is still a high priority for Google. With their privatized adNetwork, they are trying to get people to trust them, and abuse users via their ads. That is their business model. Google is an adCompany. It stopped being a tech company many years ago already. Also they control the adMarket for the most part. Just look at youtube.

mrdependable 4mo ago

They want to capture more of the value that was previously going to others. That's basically what this has all been leading to. Why let a cooking website get visitors and ad revenue when they are free to take the content and show it as their own? Now they are going to do the same to e-commerce. Either they are going to let customers buy their products through Google's interface, or they won't be discovered. No more ownership of the customer relationship. Stores will be a backend warehouse and manufacturer now with Google taking a percentage of all profits.

georgeecollins 4mo ago
Exactly! They also have been letting the results of google search get seriously degraded by ads. Would many people prefer AI over google search circa 2010? They killed their competition and now they will give you the product that gives them the most money.
strifey 4mo ago
This has been their MO with their search for a decade+ now. "Native" results hiding actual search results below the fold killed many 2010s era websites that relied on search traffic.
jeltz 4mo ago
It is the same thing as when they pushed for AMP. They wanted to prevent traffic from leaving google.com then too.
- dpkirchner 4mo ago
  In that case at least they could point out that end users got better results with AMP than they do with news sites w/o ad blockers. The AI results are just wrong so often I don't really get it.
  - pluc 4mo ago
    The results are not wrong, they are AI. Google wants that to become a distinct thing that is neither. What's a better answer for Google than one that generates more usage? If we all push in the same direction we can make AI work, we just need to accept we will need to hold its hand for a while.

micromacrofoot 4mo ago

they ruined search a while ago and they want to stop the bleeding

dandanua 4mo ago

The intention is to kill the web in its current form, obviously. If only 1/3 of their users have left, then it is still a win for them in the long run, as they will gain the fraction of content they directly supply to users. Singularity is here and it's spreading faster than a cancer.

pupppet 4mo ago

They see AI killing the incentive for anyone to produce human-generated content so they're squeezing the last few bucks out of the internet as we know it before it finally goes belly-up.

nomel 4mo ago

My read on it is "AI is taking over internet content generation, and we can't filter because we'll end up filtering everything that makes us the most money"

osigurdson 4mo ago

I don't see search and AI as fundamentally distinct things. Usually I just want an answer.

ttctciyf 4mo ago
If you don't care about the facticity of the answer, AI is less clicks, granted.
- hilariously 4mo ago
  I dont think about less keypresses though - google search would let you type two words and get the thing you know you want, an ai search doesn't really fit the mode that old school search folks were using
malfist 4mo ago
For the same reason I read a book instead of just the plot summary on the back cover
- gruez 4mo ago
  You really want to read the author's life story when searching for a recipe? Or wade through some content marketing plug for some vacuum cleaner shop in Albuquerque when all you want to do is figure out how to change filters on your vacuum? There are definitely gems on the web out there, but chances are I'm not discovering them via search, and I'd rather get the straight answer from the AI.
  - bluefirebrand 4mo ago
    All of this stuff is Google's fault in the first place with page ranking shit they built! So now you're trusting them to provide the cure?
scottmcmac 4mo ago
Maybe we use search differently, but I very often don't just want an answer, I want to find a website to help me. Maybe it is because I need to do business with a company and need to find their website to interact with them, or maybe I saw a cool site awhile ago that's relevant to what I'm doing now and didn't bookmark it (because I dropped that habit when Google search was good), or want to read the official documentation about a product I bought, that someone already put a lot of effort into making complete enough and digestible to a wide audience... and the LLM responses tend to get in the way. Like the parent I use good/paid AI when I want an AI response. So, yeah, an omnibox that knows when I want "an answer" and one that knows when I want to find a thing sounds slightly more convenient than switching between two tools, but Google search is not that Omnibox.

crazygringo 4mo ago

> but it's not Google Search, and when I want Search I want Search. Not me. I really appreciate having both results simultaneously. I can scan the first couple sentences of the AI response, and if that already has the answer then great. I can expand it to see if there's more. Or, if I see that the AI mode didn't understand my brief search query, I just glance at the search results below. And often times, when I do need to follow a link, I find the source result links in the AI mode to be a better quality than the search result links. It's the best of both worlds.

miltonlost 4mo ago
Hope the answer in the AI response is right!
tredre3 4mo ago
> I can scan the first couple sentences of the AI response, and if that already has the answer then great. But how do make the determination that the answer is good and you should stop reading the page? Vibes?
- aprdm 4mo ago
  How do you make it without AI ? Are you parsing through millions of pages yourself ?
  - Forgeties79 4mo ago
    The LLM results are presented confidently and succinctly in a way that is designed to tell you “yes” OR, it not applicable, it just mashes together statements (which often leads to a response that contradicts itself one sentence later). That’s not the same as your vetting search results. Well before Google screwed it all up there used to be some correlation between top hits and what you were looking for. SEO has muddied the waters for many years now and it’s never been truly “merit based” or “objective” or whatever we want to call it, but generally speaking, the first results were the best by default.

mauriciolange 4mo ago

I thought the same at first, but now I find myself relying on the AI answer (as it is usually reliable) and, also more and more, I continue interacting in the AI mode on the topic that motivated my search in the first place.

burnte 4mo ago

I think it's a multifold problem and they've chosen bad solutions. 1. To protect ad revenue they make search results worse to increase the number of searches by making people refine their searches. This made people upset because search result quality went down. 2. "AI everywhere!" put them in a panic, so they shoved am LLM into results, hoping it could pick through bad results and give good data to the user. 3. LLMs are expensive to run, so they're using a cheap model. Cheap model + bad results = abysmal user experience. There are too many groups with opposed interests fighting. Ad groups wants worse results so people search more (not realizing this just drives users away). Search groups want a better product so they stop losing users, and the AI group is being given a bad name because management is using their worst AI product on search. So the whole experience is just garbage.

gruez 4mo ago
>1. To protect ad revenue they make search results worse to increase the number of searches by making people refine their searches. This made people upset because search result quality went down. Why would this work? Were yahoo and askjeeves sandbagging their results too just so they can get more clicks?
- burnte 4mo ago
  > Why would this work? Humans are predictable and hate change. For a short while it DOES work, people are used to great results, assume they're not using the the best keywords, and they'll reformulate their searches. For a while. After a while of all searches being not as good as they used to be, people start looking for other alternatives, which is why DDG is seeing an uptick. It's called enshittification. It's easier than improving a product. > Were yahoo and askjeeves sandbagging their results too just so they can get more clicks? No idea.
alex1138 4mo ago
I don't know how much control Goog has over Youtube despite owning them but I do note in passing they removed dislikes, removed upload dates (apparently?), removed 5 stars. Easier to trick people into ads The platform has been various kinds of hostile for a few years now

SecretDreams 4mo ago

Soon, the internet will be so completely full of AI crap enabled by the mega corps that search will be quite a bit less relevant anywho. Maybe google is trying to front run the demise of the internet that they were supposed to protect?

1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago

"I truly don't get Google's move." "AI" gets higher volume of use than search. This was disclosed by Google under oath More traffic, more usage time, more data collection

1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago
"AI Mode queries are doubling every quarter." https://www.wired.com/story/even-if-you-hate-ai-you-will-use-google-ai-search/ https://www.wired.com/story/even-if-you-hate-ai-you-will-use...

aprdm 4mo ago

I don't disagree with you, but google search has gone so downhill that I had stopped using it before they moved to the AI approach, which is actually pretty decent.

elorant 4mo ago

What if their move is to make AI search horrible so that OpenAI has no moves left here because trust in the product collapses?

varenc 4mo ago

> that can also search the web? Slight digression: Claude/ChatGPT/etc all can search the web, but Google's AI already has a local copy of the web. It's much faster because of Google's TPUs, but also because Google has a copy of almost the entire web available locally. I recall others testing this and they observe that Google doesn't actually make HTTP requests to sites it references. It just uses its local cache. That's an advantage that all others seem to lack. Of course, I agree that when I want search, I want search. But personally I've found if I want an LLM to very quickly answer a simple question, the type of thing all of them would do an equally good job on, I prefer Google's for its sheer speed.

ubermonkey 4mo ago

Bad results keep you on their site longer, increasing ad revenue.

basisword 4mo ago

I imagine most people aren't actually searching the web these days. They're searching for an answer to a question. They already now the 5-10 websites they use and go to those directly. They're mostly living in walled gardens, streaming services, or Amazon. When they use Google they want an answer and AI provides that.

onetokeoverthe 4mo ago

[dead]

ptdorf 4mo ago

> I truly don't get Google's move. Because the goal is not to provide the best answers. It's for users to train their AI.

jm4 4mo ago

They probably lose a ton of traffic to AI or anticipate that happening. This is a way to keep people on Google search. Like you, I use both search and AI separately. Even casual, nontechnical users are starting to work like that. Including AI with traditional search results will keep a lot of users from jumping ship in the first place and will help win back users from ChatGPT. I know a lot of people hate AI - at a minimum, there’s a vocal minority - but the reality is AI is eating search like nothing we’ve ever seen.

JoeOfTexas 4mo ago

I find it useful, and use it almost daily. Helps answer "how to" questions for working on my house, development or just general questions. If I need more info, I just look at the links or videos which are also right there. To each their own.

stainablesteel 4mo ago

initially, not a lot of people were using gemini google pushed it into their other products to attract people to AI there was and still are a decent number of people who haven't really used it, as crazy as that sounds

paustint 4mo ago

On the flip side I retrained myself to ask llm questions on my phone or computer browser search bar with the expectation of getting an llm response toy question with no desire to look at anything else. If I truly want to search I will ignore the llm results, but I like the convenience of a quick llm search that knows "all the things". I get the answer to my question without searching multiple ad-ridden websites (since the ad provider does all the things)