Google is redesigning its search engine — and it’s AI all the way down
Google is redesigning its search engine — and it’s AI all the way down
Out: 10 blue links. In: all AI everything.
Headline fix: Google kills the one good thing it has going for it with AI
Search sucks for some time now. I'd say the best thing google offers today is Gmail - but there are plenty of arguments against that too.
No, gmail's Inbox is the best mail client out there!
........................wait
ProtonMail is like the best if you can get if you're a small user that regularly cleans their inbox and keeps things that matter.
I never use more than a handful of MBs, so I find 15GB of storage that GMail offers me a bit much. It's been this way for me for years so ProtonMail does it.
I like most of their basic tool apps for being so basic. Notes, clock, calendar, Gmail, etc. I will lament the day they fuck all these up.
They don't really have a choice. Classic website search will be useless in the near future because of the rapid rise of LLM-generated pages. Already for some searches 1 out of 3 results is generated crap.
Their only hope it's that somehow they'll be able to weed out LLM pages with LLM. Which is something that scientists say it's impossible because LLMs cannot learn from LLM results so they won't be able to reliably tell which content is good.
The fact they're even trying this shows they're desperate, so they will try.
If they can't direct me to the right web site because they can't tell what's LLM junk, then how will they summarize an answer for me based on those same web sites they know about? It doesn't seem like LLM summaries are a way to avoid that issue at all.
Well, it's not exactly impossible because of that, it's just unlikely they'll use a discriminator for the task because great part of generated content is effectively indistinguishable from human-written content - either because the model was prompted to avoid "LLM speak", or because the text was heavily edited. Thus they'd risk a high false positive rate.
Do you have a source for those scientists you're referring to?
I know that LLMs can be trained on data output by other LLMs, but you're basically diluting your results unless you do a lot of work to clean up the data.
I wouldn't say it's "impossible" to determine if content was generated by an LLM, but I agree that it will not be reliable.
So far I'm mostly unaffected by this. That's probably because I usually internet mostly for niche hobbies and occasionally practical things and shopping. Like apartment hunting, since the industry is too spread out for anybody to get in bed with Google enough to get a big boost up the AI idiocy. Except maybe apartments.com, but that's where I've always ended up anyway even back before Google's enshitification.
Google search is still a very shitty product right now. In a blind test I would never conclude they are the market leader. It used to work a few years ago though.
Indeed. They started pushing things that make them profit before the things that you're searching for. They love the revenue stream but are realizing now that it's also killing their main product: googling.
But if they're moving to AI it will probably be the same, trying to guide you into selling something instead of giving what you want. Microsoft too is trying to paper over their os with ads so you know what direction they're going.
This is really funny to me because Google ruined their own search engine for advertising purposes; so much so that they now need to add "AI" to it to look good and hip again. Only if the "AI" results are actually good, it will hurt their advertising revenue, and it's not quite so simple to tweak it the same way they cooked their search algorithms to serve you more ads, plus it will burn an ungodly amount of money to process each request. And if it's bad, they'll have wasted billions on it and will ruin their reputation even worse.
And if it's bad, they'll have wasted billions on it and will ruin their reputation even worse.
Ah, the Meta approach! I love to see it!
It will not hurt their revenue. There's no way any of these companies haven't thought about how to increase revenue with what they're doing.
Just because we haven't seen how yet, doesn't mean it isn't planned.
And it will not cost an "ungodly amount of money" to process these requests. Ofc Google will cache answers, because alot of what people ask, are the same. Then maybe the info can be updated sometimes, but ofc they won't do it every time.
Nah. It's not going to be "AI." It's going to be YouTube results, followed by Reddit results, followed by "Sponsored" results, followed by AI-written Bot results, then a couple pages of Amazon results and finally, on page 10 or so, a ten-year-old result that's probably no longer relevant.
Just fix google back to how it was and create an entirely new search engine with AI and call it Sairch.
Sadly, old Google doesn't work either thanks to the efforts of SEO and the AI generated garbage.
The problem with search is that the motives of those being searched aren't to provide you with the most helpful answer. The motives are to get you to visit their website then stay/click/buy as much as possible. They'll tailor their content to match whatever algorithm the engine is using.
That's why Google's new plan is to collect all of the information ahead of time and skip the "visit other websites" step. Then you can stay/click/buy on their website as much as possible.
Seriously though. Just skip all this nonsense, you selfish piece of shit, and open your wallet so the hungry corpos can feast on its contents - they have poor, innocent, starving shareholders to feed... you monster.
Is it Scottish?
I wonder how many Malaysian employees will be the brains behind this "AI" tech
AI = Absent Indians
I'm aware of a lot of the fake AI scandals, but it doesn't apply here. Google has good models and human workers cannot go through your results in real time
I noticed DDG now has AI. Damn it
It has a chatbot you can interact with separately. It doesn't uses AI in its search engine as far as I know.
It may summarise Wikipedia articles in your search results, though you can turn that off.
Everything now has AI in it. And if it doesn't, it soon will. Get used to it.
Great. now the search engine will tell me "I am not designed to provide that information" when I don't use the specific, constantly changing magic words it wants.
This also reminds me that I'm still annoyed my phone options are more or less limited Android and iPhone.
I dislike this AI-first approach because it provides only a small selection of results that are influenced by the phrasing of the query. You can't just replace paginated results.
googles search results got so bad in the last few months that i switched to a searXNG instance and couldn't be happier at the moment. no profit incentive, so i get no-bullshit results. they can keep their SEO-infested AI garbage results.
Google already lost me around 2016. All other search engines lost me to AI. Google is too late
There has never been a better time for someone to swoop in and remake web search. Hell, there are probably dozens of software engineers from Google that have direct experience with search AND were laid off.
I'm surprised that no one is trying to compete with Google at the weakest point it's been since going public.
I think the problem is that search does not make money. Ads make money, and subscriptions make money. Convincing people to switch from Google ads to New Google ads would involve dumping tons of money into becoming popular enough to attract advertisers. Convincing people to pay for search, like Kagi is doing, is probably even harder.
You guys still use Google? 🥹
It still gives better results than DDG for many queries.
Not in my experience
Example
Nah. It’s shyte.
I don't, but its good to know what's happening over there
It's going to be even shittier now. Lol
Aaaaaaand I'm entirely out. No thanks.
And it can go fuck it self all the way down. I can only think of one good thing to do with Google and that is to de-googlelize yourself.
Cool. Still not gonna use it though.
Well it’s a step forward for efficiency at least. Now I can see the LLM generated crap straight it in the search page, rather than having to click through to an automated blogspam page.
If they are really going all-in on this, it almost feels like Google admitting defeat on search, having now been drown by the (partially self inflicted) deluges of SEO and now “AI”.
It's going to find 1 billion more results that all are equally as irrelevant as the 8 billion results that was initially pulled up per search.
But can it find a product that you will want to buy. That's the real question.
Fooook google
Is this really new? Haven't they been using soft computing methods since, basically forever?
Yo dog, we stuffed AI in your AI so you can use AI while you use "AI"
How long until this takes over the api's that metasearch engines like Duck Duck Go, Kagi, and searchxng need?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
That future is apparently here: Google is starting to roll out “AI Overviews,” previously known as the Search Generative Experience, or SGE, to users in the US and soon around the world.
Reid ticks off a list of features aimed at making that happen, all of which Google announced publicly on Tuesday at its I/O developer conference.
It’s not really beneficial to add AI.” Where she figures Gemini can be most helpful is in more complex situations, the sort of things you’d either need to do a bunch of searches for or never even go to Google for in the first place.
(You hear this one a lot in AI because it can be tricky to wade through tons of same-y listings and reviews to find something actually good.)
With Gemini, she says, “we can do things like ‘Find the best yoga or pilates studio in Boston rated over four stars within a half-hour walk of Beacon Hill.’” Maybe, she continues, you also want details on which has the best offers for first-timers.
As AI has come for search, products like Perplexity and Arc have come under scrutiny for combing and summarizing the web without directing users to the actual sources of information.
The original article contains 995 words, the summary contains 203 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I was wondering who could defeat google, looks like Google is up to the task
We've leant nothing from the Terminator movies.....this AI bollocks is everywhere..🤦🏻♂️
Hey Arnie(AI) became the good guy in some of the movies!
I'm just gonna plug "Kagi" here.
Kagi is a paid search engine. Yeah, sucks that we have to pay for good or decent search results, but... as the economic models of the internet change, we need to change with them. I've personally lost faith in freemium ad-supported websites in general.
Kagi started as an AI company. and they do a bunch of weird things otherwise, which made me stop giving them money.
It's no surprise that "free" search funded through advertising led to this. The economic incentives were always going to lead us to the pay-to-win enshittification that we see today.
Paid search might look better initially, but a for-profit model will eventually lead to the same results. It might manifest differently, maybe through backroom deals they never talk about, but you'd better believe there will always be more profit to be made through such deals than through subscription fees.
Newspapers were always partially advertisement driven.
But I think everyone would agree with me that Newspapers were better when a substantial base of their $$$ came from their subscriber base.
Nothing is absolute in the world of money. There's always additional sources of money elsewhere. From this perspective, I think we can argue that purely advertisement-driven media is what is most dangerous. Search is an important part of modern digital media, so thinking of the economic realities of funding, and how those economic incentives shape the website and future business is important.
Maybe it fails, but Kagi is trying something new. And that's good enough as an experiment for me. I dunno, maybe I'll revisit the idea in 5 years or so, that's really not much money in the great scheme of things.
At very least, Kagi now has a "Fediverse search", and now that "search-lemmy" seems to have died, I need something like Kagi to more easily search Lemmy.world and other Fediverse locations. (Google ain't so good at this yet).
I don't need ads on Lemmy thanks
If u want ai powered search results I would recommend this tool instead: https://github.com/muntedcrocodile/Sydney
But nobody should want AI powered anything.
Its way better especially considering my tool can use a Foss model and ddg instead of proprietary and google.
Honestly, I've been using Bing a lot in recent months thanks to its integrated AI. Google is now just for when I know I want a specific web page, when it's a general answer I want then nothing beats Bing Chat. So this is a good move by Google.
It's so funny people are downvoting this because they wish it wasn't true
No, we're downvoting because they're seemingly pro-AI at all.