Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

chuckwnelson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 504 posts

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#21

Post by eastbound »

m_ke wrote: post #8

SEO ruined the web, guided by Google's ranking algorithm. Things will get even worse as scammy companies start flooding the web with LLM generated content pushing their products to bias LLMs to increase the probability of outputing their name for keywords related to their business.

This. If Google kept at “Pages must be short and provide straight answers”, then we’d have much better search results today.

Google is machine-gunning its foot since 2021, it’s really unclear to me whether they’re killing their baby just to make the job harder for competitors or something. For now… I open the Google Search results with a machete, and often don’t find any answer.

Talk about severing your own foot to avoid gangrene.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#22

Post by giraffe_lady »

wwweston wrote: post #18
m_ke wrote: post #8

SEO ruined the web, guided by Google's ranking algorithm. Things will get even worse as scammy companies start flooding the web with LLM generated content pushing their products to bias LLMs to increase the probability of outputing their name for keywords related to their business.

Libraries and librarians are starting to seem very relevant again. As are journalistic institutions.

What a relief then that those are all healthy, well-supported organizations with bright futures.

It's not a coincidence that the solution to this problem is exactly the organizations that are being systematically undermined and dismantled.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#23

Post by hobs »

binkHN wrote: post #15
m_ke wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be great if it wasn't completely wrong 50% of the time.

I find it mostly right 70% of the time.

Which would be great, except for that I found the top google result to be more than 70% relevant to my searches in the past, its a clear downgrade of relevancy.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#25

Post by traverseda »

m_ke wrote: post #12
binkHN wrote: post #7

> Enter 2024 with AI. The top 20% of search results are a wall of text from AI... I'll be the contrarian here and say I actually like Google's AI Overview? For the first time in a long time, I can search for an answer to a question and, instead of getting annoying ads and SEO-optimized uselessness, I actually get an answer. Google is finally useful again. That said, once Google screws with this and starts making sear…

It would be great if it wasn't completely wrong 50% of the time.

That's a very pessimistic take. It's right about 50% of the time!

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#26

Post by wwweston »

msoad wrote: post #17

I remember when the more tech savvy folks were migrating from Altavista and Yahoo to Google because they understood it is better sooner than others. The same thing is happening. I consider myself tech savvy (still!) and I have to admit that I rarely use Google for all sort of information. As a side note: I am using Safari and I noticed that Apple's search is also replacing my Google searches. In the past if I knew na…

Of course the savvy are using LLMs now, but they’re also reckoning with two things:

* you have to check an LLM result, especially if it cites something (because it may or may not exist)

* you can’t cite an LLM result

It’s a useful tool, but it lacks certain utility features that a useful web + effective search has. Or had.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#27

Post by Schnitz »

binkHN wrote: post #7

> Enter 2024 with AI. The top 20% of search results are a wall of text from AI... I'll be the contrarian here and say I actually like Google's AI Overview? For the first time in a long time, I can search for an answer to a question and, instead of getting annoying ads and SEO-optimized uselessness, I actually get an answer. Google is finally useful again. That said, once Google screws with this and starts making sear…

The AI answers are nowhere near good enough to always be at the top, without any clear indication that they are just a rough guess. Especially for critical things like visa requirements or medical information. When you search Google for these sort of things, you want the link to the authoritative source, not a best guess. It’s very different for queries like say “movies like blade runner”.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#28

Post by asdff »

binkHN wrote: post #7

> Enter 2024 with AI. The top 20% of search results are a wall of text from AI... I'll be the contrarian here and say I actually like Google's AI Overview? For the first time in a long time, I can search for an answer to a question and, instead of getting annoying ads and SEO-optimized uselessness, I actually get an answer. Google is finally useful again. That said, once Google screws with this and starts making sear…

Were you not googling before? They had a bullet point summary that was actually more accurate because it scraped direct quotes from the website. Now I am getting wrong info from the ai summary. Its a huge step back from just what was there previously but its sold as some advancement.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#29

Post by Deegy »

zknowledge wrote: post #13

Definitely agree, but I'm surprised Perplexity wasn't mentioned in this post. It's currently Perplexity Vs. Google

Once chatGPT and Claude (through MCP) added web search functionality I completely dropped Perplexity. I assume I'm not unique in this regard. Feels like the writing is on the wall for Perplexity.
Post reply on HN