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Google changes its search box

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Re: Google changes its search box

#161

Post by alt227 »

sublinear wrote: post #42

While I can certainly see this upsetting some people, I'm not sure if this is necessarily "bad". Web 2.0 was Yahoo Pipes, public APIs, IFTTT, etc. while this new "Web 3.0" acknowledges that those capabilities would rather be gatekept behind AI instead of entirely removed. At the very least we do get some of that functionality back without resorting to scraping anymore and it's now accessible to the layperson. I would…

Web 3.0 was very famously empty blockchain promises. I guess that makes this Web 4.0?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3

Re: Google changes its search box

#162

Post by nostrademons »

nilamo wrote: post #54
nostrademons wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can ask them to cite their sources. It's very good practice to do so, and to check those sources, because I've found that about 30-40% of the time their source doesn't support their answer at all.

If it's wrong 2 out of 5 times, why even waste your time going to it in the first place? That's a massive failure rate.

If I'm going to an LLM (as with websearch before it), it's usually because I don't know the answer, don't have anyone close to me that knows the answer, and can't pay anyone (or don't know who to pay) for the answer. In other words, my failure rate without the LLM would be 100%.

Re: Google changes its search box

#163

Post by pests »

hnsr wrote: post #79
notatoad wrote: post #52

>Google’s AI Overviews will also allow users to ask follow-up questions in AI Mode, beginning Tuesday, the company noted. have i been A/B tested into something, or has this been live for months? this doens't seem new.

Yeah, I've also already seen this for at least ~2 months

I wish the chats ended up in the gemini app. I never know which model or how much personalization its using in AI mode after a search.

Re: Google changes its search box

#164

Post by SkyBelow »

nilamo wrote: post #54
nostrademons wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can ask them to cite their sources. It's very good practice to do so, and to check those sources, because I've found that about 30-40% of the time their source doesn't support their answer at all.

If it's wrong 2 out of 5 times, why even waste your time going to it in the first place? That's a massive failure rate.

Because being right 60% of the time with minimal work is still amazing, as long as one accounts for the failure rate correctly.

Say I want to look up some game from my childhood, which I barely remember any details for. Going to google and trying is likely going to be very difficult unless I happen to get lucky with some key element. But if an LLM can get it right even a minority of the time, it can lead to me quickly finding the game I'm looking for.

This does depend upon the ability to evaluate the answer, like checking against source or some other option where you know a good answer from bad. If you can't, then it does become much more dangerous. Perhaps part of the reason AI seem to empower experts more than novices in some domains?

Re: Google changes its search box

#165

Post by wvenable »

ekidd wrote: post #65
simonw wrote: post #10

Nilay Patel has been talking about "Google Zero" - the moment when Google effectively stops sending any traffic to other sites - for a few years now: https://www.theverge.com/24167865/google-zero-search-crash-h...

Which as some running a website raises a fascinating question. If Google is just going to crawl my sites and present information as an AI summary on their site, then what exactly do I gain by allowing Googlebot to crawl my sites?

It's a catch-22. Without google crawling your site, you don't get any new traffic. But with google crawling your site, you also might not get any traffic.

AI summarization has already causes issues for sites like rtings where people are no longer visiting the site but still making use of the data presented there. Leading to rtings not getting enough traffic to continue to post their data.

It is an existential crisis for websites and when they go away it'll be an existential crisis for AI.

Re: Google changes its search box

#166

Post by calmbonsai »

I don't care. Aside from a single dormant GMail account I keep solely for "parental tech support", I de-Googled 5 years ago and strongly encourage everyone to do likewise.

Google stopped being a customer-focused company after their 2nd major revision to GOffice and the PM shake-up in search from Raghavan https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ .

Re: Google changes its search box

#167

Post by tedd4u »

torben-friis wrote: post #12
ivraatiems wrote: post #4

Kind of Google to create a market opening for its competitors like this. I hope Kagi, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are taking notes.

My literal first thought was "do I seriously need to use bing now?".

DuckDuckGo uses the bing index/backend. I’ve had it as default for 5-8 years. Probably once a day I’ll add the !g to pop it over to Google. Works great. I search a lot, many different types of queries. When I pop over to Google it’s usually a Boolean query looking for a needle in a haystack (that one comment somewhere where someone is using the same combination of two or three rare items together).

Re: Google changes its search box

#168

Post by fooey »

alt227 wrote: post #159

So how does google now make money when it is just providing us with direct answers from ai, instead of showing us both paid for search results and directing us to sites which host targetted ads? How does adsense work when there are no search results?

I expect a flavor of affiliate marketing where you can never trust if the LLM is giving you the best recommendations or the most highly bidded recommendations

Re: Google changes its search box

#169

Post by ben_w »

SoftTalker wrote: post #138
simonw wrote: post #10

Nilay Patel has been talking about "Google Zero" - the moment when Google effectively stops sending any traffic to other sites - for a few years now: https://www.theverge.com/24167865/google-zero-search-crash-h...

The web as we know it is over. Websites will die on the vine if LLMs intermediate all the content. The "website" of the future will be an API optimized for LLM crawlers, serving plain-text content that no end-user will ever view directly. The SEO game will change to LLMAO.

> Websites will die on the vine if LLMs intermediate all the content.

The current zeitgeist of them will, but I think not all.

My first website (GeoCities) was either before Google existed or very close to it. Connected to people via WebRings and directory listings. More recently, RSS feeds.

Re: Google changes its search box

#170

Post by cibyr »

maybewhenthesun wrote: post #127
fidotron wrote: post #23

Objecting to this from the user end seems a bit like complaining the original Google was trying to be too magic when what you wanted was AltaVista. This has been the inevitable direction the whole time. The real problem here is assuming this takes off what incentives will anyone have to provide the information to feed the beast?

I strongly disagree. Altavista had exactly the same function as google, but with worse results. Both linked to original sources. Early google had a very good idea with pagerank and that payed off. An llm rephrashing / regurgitating other websites is imo different, because you loose the direct connection to the original source. Even if llms give sources they also directly give you a plausible (but unreliable) answer t…

And Altavista was slow! Google was so much faster, it felt way nicer to use. But LLMs are slow; forcing my google queries through an LLM is destroying that speed.
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