You knew it was coming: Google begins testing AI-only search results | This version of Google won't show you the 10 blue links at all—Gemini completely takes over the results in AI Mode
You knew it was coming: Google begins testing AI-only search results | This version of Google won't show you the 10 blue links at all—Gemini completely takes over the results in AI Mode
AI Mode could be the future of Google, but it’s currently just an experiment.
Google has become so integral to online navigation that its name became a verb, meaning "to find things on the Internet." Soon, Google might just tell you what's on the Internet instead of showing you. The company has announced an expansion of its AI search features, powered by Gemini 2.0. Everyone will soon see more AI Overviews at the top of the results page, but Google is also testing a more substantial change in the form of AI Mode. This version of Google won't show you the 10 blue links at all—Gemini completely takes over the results in AI Mode.
This marks the debut of Gemini 2.0 in Google search. Google announced the first Gemini 2.0 models in December 2024, beginning with the streamlined Gemini 2.0 Flash. The heavier versions of Gemini 2.0 are still in testing, but Google says it has tuned AI Overviews with this model to offer help with harder questions in the areas of math, coding, and multimodal queries.
With this update, you will begin seeing AI Overviews on more results pages, and minors with Google accounts will see AI results for the first time. In fact, even logged out users will see AI Overviews soon. This is a big change, but it's only the start of Google's plans for AI search.
Gemini 2.0 also powers the new AI Mode for search. It's launching as an opt-in feature via Google's Search Labs, offering a totally new alternative to search as we know it. This custom version of the Gemini large language model (LLM) skips the standard web links that have been part of every Google search thus far.
startpage. you're welcome.
it's also not us owned or based.
This is my choice
I mean their search results have gone to absolute shit anyway, the AI is probably better at this point.
doubt
Wait, google does searches now too? Wow they have a service for everything.
searxng
Been using Ecosia for months now. DuckDuckGo and Startpage before that. I'm pretty happy with Ecosia search results, can't complain.
I don't need to care. I stopped using Google search months ago.
Ok, but why should I go to Google for ai answers when I can get the same from openai, other models or even local installations without all the ads?
Unfortunately this isn’t about you, but the 90% of people who don’t understand what AI is at all and don’t give a shit where the responses come from as long as “scorpio dream meaning high school teacher truck” and “can you gregnant with cousin?” Give them answers they like
/s to an extent, but here we are
PREGANANANT
Which is EXACTLY why I just moved to using Vivaldi browser and StartPage as a search engine. Fuck these guys.
AI is over hyped and doesn’t need to be shoved in our faces. Ugh.
It’s another tech bubble like the dot com bubble. But at this point, the AI bubble, the crypto bubble, and the capitalism bubble will all crash at the same time as the world economy falls apart and we end up in another global war. I guess the accelerationists that survive will get their wish and see what remains and if it’s the neofuedalist white supremacy utopia they dream of
Kagi. But you free loaders would have to pay for something.
I was with kagi for a year.
It was fine.
Their CEO is an asshole though. There was that thing where he went a bit nutty over some mild criticism. I don't remember the details.
Anyhoo. Searx is nice for the moment.
The weirdest thing about switching to kagi was learning that the first few results have a good chance of being relevant. I got so used to scrolling down after a search. It was just weird to have the useful results on top. Similarly, learning that search syntax is actually meaningful and respected by the search engine (for the majority of cases).
I'm interested, but a bit reluctant. I find DuckDuckGo quite adequate for most things, except shopping online, something that I have to rely on for certain categories of items. How is Kagi on shopping?
I've been using Kagi for a bit. If I search for things one can buy, I get results similar to Google.
What have you found lacking in DDG for online shopping?
I don't really use it.
They have a free trial, no cc needed.
Sounds cool, can’t wait!
Stick to SEARCH, not making shit up (euphemistically called "hallucinating").
The future is coming and it sure looks like garbage. I have long since left Google behind.
It’s been a long time I use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for basic stuff (which let’s be honest, more than 80% is just a simple query to find a certain area of some website, like “Firefox download Windows”, “Discord site status”, “Microsoft office pricing” etc.). If I want to search something more related to my own language or recent events in my county, Google is a must, but that’s like 10% of all my search engine usage. I don’t really need Google to know about the other 90%.
Yeah I think most of my searches start with the name of the site I want results from.
Microsoft doesn't want to end up like Google. Fuck that company! One way you can tell is on outlook...which I use with a proper 10' pole on my work computer only. Fuck no, never at home ever ever.... Have you ever received an email on outlook and just saw the title or maybe you read halfway through and got interrupted?.... Where the fuck is it now? Its gone! Sure you could go email by email and try to be your own search engine. But its no use, whatever Tim was talking about with the over pressured valve at the Central boiler, blah blah you should let people know to exit the blah blah, otherwise 3rd degree bur...yeah that shit's gone. Might as well write your own email to finish the story. See, Microsoft doesn't want to be like Google at all. On my 14.9992G full gmail, I was always able to go find out what Amazon offer I got 8 years ago. Look 404! Yeah that's it! 404! With Gemini spying on my every move that's gotta stop. It's gonna try to learn my porn habits. I'm gonna go search for all the wrong porn on purpose.
I am no longer feeling lucky
Yup, this was all the motivation I needed to jump ship from Google, fuck those clowns.
Does EVERY axis in life have to be fucked up at the same time?
Can we have one thing that is just doing ok?
Government - fucked.
Education - fucked.
Healthcare - fucked.
Environment - fucked.
Societal and Social Cohesion - fucked.
Wealth Inequality - fucked.
Personal Technological Autonomy - fucked, and under continuous attack.
Technological Enshittification - Running like gangbusters. So really - fucked.
Damn, someone give me some kind of ladder to climb out of this pit of despair.
And yet, resistance seems very weak…
That's weird -- we water our soil with nutrients like "there's no point in voting", "they're all out to get us", "politicians are shit", "nothing changes", "governments are bad".
I wonder why people haven't been motivated to fight. Whenever they express faith in our leaders, or institutions, or have any positivity, we're quick to shut them down. But still.
I'm from India so two more things to add to the list
Air - fucked.
Cleanliness - megafucked.
Every civilization rises and falls. We're on the down slope ATM. Sorry. The 80s and 90s were pretty nice in America!
That feel when the Matrix actually called it
Every single one of these flows from wealth inequality.
Does EVERY axis in life have to be fucked up at the same time?
Yes. There are many texts written on this since start of writing, some are written down from what was carried in word before that since start of speaking.
The ladder has been privatized.
You get the greased pole.
I know it isn't much, but services like mastodon, lemmy, kbin, friendica, Peertube, etc have shown me there is connected pushback.
Tilde communities have given me something smaller scale to focus on.
Problems exist, but there's never been a safer time to be a homosapien on Earth. A book called Abundance helped me gain a little perspective in these gloomy days.
Also Homo Deus.
Thanks, I'll check it out, though it's going to take more than motivational books to pull the US out of the current nosedive...
safety because more people are alive? but also most dangerous because more people die daily than at any other time
Is this for human beings, or is it for Google to show their investors to prove that AI is totally going to revolutionize something eventually?
Screw Google either way, I'm not going to use their search engine either way, but this doesn't feel like a product they are genuinely committed to releasing. Maybe I'm wrong, and in that case, screw them even more.
I noticed today that UDM mode for Google is displaying sponsored results now, too...
yeah udm14 getting pretty bad lately. That is why I moved to startpage which is same Google services without AI and sponsored contents
https://www.google.com/search?q=drp&udm=14 still works for me....
It's never not worked, but they're running sponsored links now. I've hit them 3 times today out of maybe 50 searches. But they're there.
Would this be the same AI that spits out incorrect summarys or just flat out gets data incorrect constantly? What could possibly go wrong by making that the ONLY way to look for things going forward. Fucking morons.
I recently had a dream that involved a suburb of Green Bay, Wisconsin. I have never been to Green Bay Wisconsin. I know it as a rather small city that is the home to the Green Bay Packers, an administratively anachronistic NFL team that draws a large plurality of its fan base from the greater Milwaukee area. Off the top of my head, I don’t know if Green Bay has “suburbs” in the usual American sense at all.
I googled the name of this completely nonexistent community, along with the words “Green Bay,” and the AI very confidently hallucinated it into existence, describing it as a lovely shopping and residential area just over the bridge of the same name.
Yup. No problem though. In the future AI can just add the now very real town to you AR eyeballs brought to you by Chipotle Exxon and T mobile.
Oh wow sounds great, can I get in line now to not use it?
I don't really get Google's angle since it's pretty obvious that their AI search sucks. Maybe it's just to impress shareholders?
I mean, they're ruining their search anyways. It's almost unusable at this point, it's like asking for relevant ads and two year old Reddit posts
Is it censorship? Did they decide to just straight up sell SEO? Are websites locking down and blocking their crawlers to stop AI training crawlers?
I legitimately find Bing to be better at this point, but whatever they're doing it's maddening. Even better AI assisted web searches kinda suck because the data fed into them is more of the same
But solid chance they're trying to boost Gemini, which has been a shockingly bad llm for a company that basically wrote the book on AI not too long ago
There’s also the problem that there’s much more noise in the web nowadays—it has been growing exponentially and people try to manipulate the search engines. It becomes more difficult to filter out that’s good and what’s bad. Be too strict and you risk missing valuable but less polished information. Be too lenient, and you drown in low-quality, SEO-optimized content that prioritizes visibility over usefulness.
This makes sense to me. All other reasons presented sound like wishful thinking that google is still the same company from 2005
Thanks Google, I hate it. At least the udm=14 trick and website still works, at least until google decides to stop supporting that feature. Definitely going to be using that more and more if this becomes the default google experience.
You can also use startpage. They use Google services without AI
Hmm, in theory I don't have a problem with an AI telling me the answer to my question or whatever I'm searching for - but this isn't a web search. If I'm actually searching for a particular page or context, then I want to be able to do that.
These are two entirely different things, and if Google goes down this route they aren't a search engine anymore - they are an LLM provider.
Couldn't agree more. I use both tools as they have their place, but when I want a search engine, I don't want to get an AI answer for the result. Like if I'm searching for documentation on something, what benefit would the AI provide me over just giving the link?
Yes, the problem is that the place for LLM "search results" is the garbage can.
The model uses "advanced reasoning, thinking, and multimodal capabilities"...
Well, LLM's are incapable of actually doing the first two, so we're already off to a great start.
I don't think it's much in the way of hyperbole to say that if they make this the default or worse, only search output option then this will be the thing that literally destroys the company.
No one except idiotic boardroom denizens actually wants this. Google failing to provide actual search results is the singular one and only thing that could actually get users to switch away from using it -- and not do that thing where they just grumble and bitch and moan but keep using it anyway. And if no one is searching on Google then nobody is seeing ads on Google, which means Google will not be selling ads.
I will laugh so hard if this happens.
Sadly, I've seen how much the average non-tech enthusiast LOVES all this AI stuff. Like, people's parents/grandparents who only occasionally use a computer when they have to. The types of folks who will call tech support and actually need the answer, "Is your computer powered on?" And there are far more people out there like that than many tech folks think. That's the market that keeps powering this stuff.
Somehow, a huge amount of people hate thinking. Like it's painful or like exertion or something. Anything that can just give them what they want is better.
It doesn't matter if it's right or wrong. They just want an answer. They don't want to know why, or how, they want to know now.
It's the shortcut to knowledge all the ancient parables warned us about. Instead of physically destroying your mind, it stops it from working at all.
Is there any escape from shitty AI slop in my search results?
What search engines are there that I can use that arent a proxy for one of the big ones? And yes I know about Kagi, I’d prefer open source if possible.
There's a new beta one which only uses its own index: https://stract.com/
And best of all it's written in Rust.
There's not really a strong player in the open source search space.
Mwmnl exists, but per their own readme:
The quality is a long way's off from matching the commercial engines at the moment
Kagi provides the source code for many of their services, but is not truly open source, especially because at its core, it relies on applying its own rankings to other's indexes.
That said, search is a space where the old adage rings true:
If you're not paying for it; you are the product!
For what it's worth, I find value in my Kagi subscription.
Maybe something to use only for fun, but check out Marginalia. It’s open source and as far as I know, runs in the guy’s computer at his house. It deprioritizes commercial websites and boosts small blogs instead.
Every time I go there I find something genuinely interesting or cozy to read.
Moving from enshitified closed source to a different closed source that's trying to position itself as user first isn't necessarily bad.
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I hate this.
DuckDuckGo is pretty easy to switch to. You can go to settings and disable AI chat in it.
Ew, it is still on by default :( Unless you set your browser to save site data for this site, you would still see the AI :( Fortunately, the Javascriptless version has no such pest.
Considering how often Google's AI hallucinates some garbage for an answer this is going to be terrible
When I use a web search tool I want to look at the websites themselves. Not having to go through Gemini (the AI not the protocol) telling me what IT thinks I want...
Assuming AGI ever develops and bothers to sift through data. I've no problem with AI as a tool (that is, Dumb AI like we currently have.)
When I'm doing a web search rather than actually calling up Gemini (The AI not the Protocol) I want a WEB SEARCH... that means I am not looking to use AI. I'm wanting to use OI (Organic Intelligence.)
Of all the sources of truth, why pick auto-complete?
Do people still use google? I haven't touched it for yonks now. Except GRIS, that still works well.
Not the search but I'm still stuck with the email. :/
Google search results are so terrible that at this point it's a mercy.
Alphabet/Google needs to fire their CEO. He’s an obvious idiot, not good with employees, not good with investors, and not good at lobbying. That’s like 99% of a CEO’s job. Just get rid of him and Google’s stock price will probably jump 20%.
Is DuckDuckGo still the best alternative at this point, or has Bing been toiling away in the dark to improve itself?
In terms of result quality? In my opinion, based on my particular search habits:
Kagi > SearXNG > Brave > Startpage/Google > DDG/Ecosia/Bing
Everyone is going to have their own opinions on each of those companies, but from a results lens, that's what I find to be most/least effective.
DDG uses Bing under the hood for the main results, so it doesn't really matter too much in terms of results.
You can also use Ecosia, if your prefer a different shade of lipstick on your
pigsearch results.
I noticed Edge would only show me corporate/authority friendly results recently as well oddly cutting down the number of results I see to a very unnaturally short amount of results.
Deleting it and moving to DuckDuckGo which while the corporate friendly things were still at the top, it at least showed me some opposition results.
Guessing Edge by default sent you to Bing, no surprise the DDG results look similar, given that they use Bing under he hood. They shuffle rankings slightly, but it's the same index.
I’m so glad I switched to Kagi. The writing was on the wall once they started rolling out the AI suggestions wide.
i haven't used Google for search in years. duck duck go ftw
I didn't expect this. You mean it doesn't have ads? All I tend to get for hits on Google are paid search results anyway. Surely they'll soon bring some ad links into these results.
Like all Google products, they will still make a halfhearted attempt to make it as useful as they can before absolutely destroying it with ads
And we still pay the vig to AdWords or does all my money go to LinkedIn now?
this sounds like what Google wanted to be since its inception: ask a question, get an answer
somewhere along the journey, the reality of needing to make money drove the enshitification of search results: ask a question, get offers to sell you an answer
this seems like a step in a better direction
Right because when I search for factual information what I really want is an LLM to tell me "sorry Dave I can't answer that question right now." (See: any election related information. As in it doesn't just kick you back to the web search results it just straight up refuses to give you the answer.)
It baffles me how wholly some people are just accepting the complete erosion of the internet. I have lecturers at university, so theoretically educated people, who tell us point blank to plug any questions we have about weekly topics into ChatGPT. The respect I have for these teachers and their content is less than zero at this point.
