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

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

#61

Post by crazygringo »

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…

I totally agree, I really appreciate them. Half the time they give me the answer straight away.

And when they're not helpful, it's no different from the first search result not being helpful and going to the second. Plus, they do a pretty good job of only showing them for the types of searches where they're appropriate.

Are the right 100% of the time? Of course not. But snippets weren't right 100% of the time, and not infrequently clicking on the top search result will contain information that's wrong as well. Because the Internet isn't 100% right.

The idea that a "wall of text from AI" is somehow bad doesn't make any sense to me. And it's not a "wall", it's basically paragraph-sized. Where the context is really helpful in determining whether the answer seems correct/reasonable.

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

#63

Post by maximus_01 »

kijiki wrote: post #33
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…

Apple's search is Google search. Google pays Apple $20 billion a year for that.

He means the top part above Google suggestions. If you type a url or company name Apple sometimes guesses the url and provides a direct link. Google not involved there - only if you click a Google suggestion or hit search/enter or whatever

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

#64

Post by scarface_74 »

Analemma_ wrote: post #38
GiorgioG wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Describes my general experience with AI across the board. Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, etc. It’s like I’m talking to a genius toddler. With ChatGPT losing 5 billion dollars on 3.7B in revenue this is unsustainable. It feels like the dotcom bubble all over again.

This is true, but fairly or unfairly, asking a question to a chat bot feels like “opting in” to the possibility that the answers you get will be hallucinated garbage, in a way that doing a Google search does not. It’s a tough problem for Google to overcome— the fact that they will be held to a higher standard—- but that’s what it is: we have already learned to accept bullshit from LLMs as a fact of life, whereas on t…

I have been a paying ChatGPT user for awhile. It’s simply a matter of saying “verify that” and it will give you wen citations

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

#65

Post by BiteCode_dev »

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.

Journalistic institutions have been requiring so much fact-checking, cross referencing and research lately it's a full time job to get informed.

Whenever I read or hear anything from the medias now, I'm now always asking myself "what are their political inclinations? who is owning them ? what do they want me to believe? how much of a blind spot do they got ? how lazy or ignorant they are in that context ? etc."

They killed the trust I had in them so many times I can't get any the benefit of the doubt anymore.

It's exhausting.

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

#66

Post by lubujackson »

toddmorey wrote: post #31
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…

For quick simple steps like how to get a Bluetooth keyboard into pairing mode, it seems to work really well. I hated the prior world where everyone attempted to hide the real answer 3/4ths of the way through a useless blog post or YouTube video.

Which, we should note, didn't happen 10 years ago before the accountants took over search at Google. Those good, lean, helpful pages still exist. Google incentives websites to have pages of slop on everything now because they track how long you spend on a site as a "metric of a good match". Forrest for the trees...

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

#67

Post by jsheard »

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.

The mark of a great product/feature is always when they feel the need to force it on users, because they know that a significant portion of users would switch it off if they could.

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

#68

Post by the_snooze »

darknavi wrote: post #52
warner25 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But "search" and "getting an answer to a question" are two different things, aren't they? I realize that the trend has been going this way for a long time - probably since Ask Jeeves started blurring the line - and this is indeed how a lot of people try / want to use search engines, but still... I wish that Google (and competitors) would have separate pages for something like "Ask Google" vs. traditional search (wher…

Yes, they very much are two different things. I loath products like Facebook, Messenger, Google Photos, etc. are turning their traditional "search" page/feature into a one-stop AI slop shop. All I want to do is find a specific photo album by name.

They're perfectly capable of implementing all the same search operators as 1990s Yahoo and 2000s Google. It's a solved problem.

The issue is that they don't want to. They'd rather be a middleman offering you "useful recommendations" (that they or may not sell to the highest bidder) instead of offering you value.

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

#69

Post by crazygringo »

asdff wrote: post #28
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.

It definitely didn't seem more accurate to me. If quite frequently either scraped quotes that weren't actually an answer to my search (the webpage was correct, but the link between my search and the webpage was not), or it was an answer but the answer was wrong (because the webpage was wrong).

The AI summary now isn't perfect because it can still regurgitate wrong information from the Internet, or hallucinate information when there isn't any -- but it seems to actually understand what I want now, so it doesn't suffer from the incorrect matching problem.

Also, there are way more AI answers now than there ever were snippet answers.

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

#70

Post by echelon »

warner25 wrote: post #43
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…

But "search" and "getting an answer to a question" are two different things, aren't they? I realize that the trend has been going this way for a long time - probably since Ask Jeeves started blurring the line - and this is indeed how a lot of people try / want to use search engines, but still... I wish that Google (and competitors) would have separate pages for something like "Ask Google" vs. traditional search (wher…

I get very wrong and dangerous answers from AI frequently.

I just searched "what's the ld50 of caffeine" and it says:

> 367.7 mg/kg bw

This is the ld50 of rats from this paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27461039/

This is higher than the ld50 estimated for humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeinism

> The LD50 of caffeine in humans is dependent on individual sensitivity, but is estimated to be 150–200 milligrams per kilogram of body mass (75–100 cups of coffee for a 70 kilogram adult).

Good stuff, Google.

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