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Google changes its search box

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Re: Google changes its search box

#361

Post by thunderfork »

stefan_ wrote: post #349
fscaramuzza wrote: post #290

What scares me about this new AI mode thingy is that every answer sounds like a systematic literature review, but only for the results. For example, if I look for users feedback about a specific product, it says "People think that..., but also that...; It's important to notice that some people ..." where with 'people' it means just a random comment on a random website just because it thought it was a good contributio…

What scares me are the basic usability fails it still has. Search for a few foreign language words and it will come back with paragraphs upon paragraphs of AI output in that foreign language despite me telling Google in 15 different ways that I don't speak it, nor anything else on the Google page being in that language. How are all their products always made by and for the most narrow minded people on this planet.

Kysely is the name of a typescript query builder and also Finnish for "query".

Recently, it's started answering any search about Kysely with a blob of Finnish. Awesome stuff, guys, great work.

Re: Google changes its search box

#362

Post by tapland »

OGWhales wrote: post #324
fscaramuzza wrote: post #290

What scares me about this new AI mode thingy is that every answer sounds like a systematic literature review, but only for the results. For example, if I look for users feedback about a specific product, it says "People think that..., but also that...; It's important to notice that some people ..." where with 'people' it means just a random comment on a random website just because it thought it was a good contributio…

Yup, I was looking up a pair of IEMS vs another pair of IEMs. It said option A is overall better, when really it was just reciting a single person's opinion. I've been aware it will summarize only a single source and present it as an aggregation of many opinions, but it stood out to me how matter-of-fact it was that the one was definitely better than the other. I simply wanted to find forum discussions on people's th…

Since the best resource is personal recommendations, got any entry level cheap IEM recommendations?

Primarily to avoid even more headphone dent, not an audiophile

Re: Google changes its search box

#364

Post by AlienRobot »

jerf wrote: post #62

Does the math math on this to be "free" for a long period of time? Ads can only pay for so much and AI can really suck down the money. Ads have been close enough to covering costs for conventional internet search that even though I'm clearly the product and not the customer the relationship has still generally worked. If AI makes the "searching" 50 times more expensive, though, that could shift the relationship prett…

To be completely honest, search is already so terrible it's difficult to imagine how could it get worse.

Sometimes I get SO questions from 13 years ago with a version of a library nobody uses anymore. If I search in my native language almost every result is a Reddit thread that was originally in English but was machine translated to Portuguese and Google is fine with that for some reason. Searching for images just gets you AI images.

If you need opinions on "what is the best X" you end up getting some content marketing from a website that offers some online service and probably has an .ai or .io domain.

No matter what you search you get an AI overview wasting space and slowly generating an answer that could be completely made up, just wasting your time in two ways at once.

Most long queries are simply completely ignored by Google. Almost every word ignored in order to show some sort of most popular result. You don't even know if there are no pages on the internet with what you searched for or if Google simply doesn't care to show any website that isn't sufficiently popular. In other words, never personal websites or blogs, only platforms and cloud services' content marketing blogs are allowed to appear in the results.

I've found myself several times asking Claude if there is "research" on a subject or another because I don't want to have to try to wade through the AI overview, sponsored results, SEO spam, reddit, repeated results on the second page, etc. just to find something that ressembles actual relevant information.

Re: Google changes its search box

#367

Post by tencentshill »

ivraatiems wrote: post #27
pclowes wrote: post #22

I understand why they are doing this. My Google search usage is easily down 50%+. I doubt I am unique here. While there are times where I want pure search (Kagi, Old Google) I mostly use LLMs to search now and have them provide me links for source data. When I do use LLMs as a search engine I always want it integrated into my AI workflows with access to tools and scripts etc. I never want to have a conversation with…

I'm not at all in the same boat as you; I do not and likely will never primarily rely on LLMs for information. But it's fascinating to hear that even folks who do don't find this approach useful.

Google has optimized their hardcoded search engine so much for the natural language searches people actually use, that they made it useless as an actual tool for someone who wants to find information. AI jumped over all of that and is BETTER at natural language searches, leaving the google search engine largely useless for anyone.

Re: Google changes its search box

#368

Post by kylehotchkiss »

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.

Cloudflare seems like they have the capability to take this on.

Human produced content should be separated from sites primarily hosting slop. That seems solvable?

Re: Google changes its search box

#369

Post by yubblegum »

> Designed to anticipate your intent, it also helps you formulate your question with AI-powered suggestions that go beyond autocomplete.

The first red flag for me. The +/- of this type of feature are well worth exploring.

Re: Google changes its search box

#370

Post by DANmode »

OGWhales wrote: post #324
fscaramuzza wrote: post #290

What scares me about this new AI mode thingy is that every answer sounds like a systematic literature review, but only for the results. For example, if I look for users feedback about a specific product, it says "People think that..., but also that...; It's important to notice that some people ..." where with 'people' it means just a random comment on a random website just because it thought it was a good contributio…

Yup, I was looking up a pair of IEMS vs another pair of IEMs. It said option A is overall better, when really it was just reciting a single person's opinion. I've been aware it will summarize only a single source and present it as an aggregation of many opinions, but it stood out to me how matter-of-fact it was that the one was definitely better than the other. I simply wanted to find forum discussions on people's th…

> I simply wanted to find forum discussions on people's thought

Why didn’t you tell the robot that, as your query?

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