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Google changes its search box

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Re: Google changes its search box

#392

I don't trust facts from LLMs. When I am searching for something, I usually want to find primary sources. As soon as a number is involved, I do my best to not even look at the AI output. Even though the result is often good and combines information from multiple sources, it can also get things wrong by combining information from different eras or just plain outdated advice. AFAICT, without primary sources, the result…

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.

Dont they all do that ?

I know that deepseek has links for every chain it makes where you can read the source and it's actually a good thing to check on that.

Re: Google changes its search box

#393
It's not clear to me from this announcement. The articles make it sound like all searches now go to ai mode and no more blue links.

But Google's description seems more minimal, like easier to get to ai mode, search box can expand intelligently based on input. Is there any clearer description of the magnitude of the change?

Re: Google changes its search box

#394
Google search itself is becoming useless. It tends to promote social media results even when scarcely relevant, and just can't find things like part numbers that even baidu can find on English language pages. The AI then summarises social media posts.

Re: Google changes its search box

#395
Google search box has basically become an AI aggregator that doesn't give anything back to those websites it scraps data from, and it'll result in the death of the internet as we came to know it At this point, google might as well stop showing website links in search results. with AI Overviews, barely anyone’s clicking through it anymore

Re: Google changes its search box

#396

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…

> when instead it's just aggregating almost random stuff

How do you know that?

Scraping websites is literally what Google does best, stringing together information in the pattern of "some people x, other people y" requires 0 AI and could have been done since forever. I find it implausible that otherwise obviously capable models would be reduced to do something akin to just that.

Re: Google changes its search box

#397
In the last 10 (maybe longer) years I've noticed I've changed how I am approaching these changes.

In the past, I excited. It was the first to sign up for all kinds of betas.

I don't know what triggered the my reasoning, but now whenever I see these upcoming announcements I don't think about how it's gonna be better, but how it is objectively gonna be worse. How much harder is it going to be for me to compare things.

How much more do I now need to go and explain people that the output is merely a mathematical average of what's out there, and if it's out there on the internet doesn't make it correct.

Re: Google changes its search box

#398
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What scares me about this new AI mode thingy What scares me is the rampant inaccuracy. In my experience, the AI responses are wrong about 65% of the time. I just did a search today about an error talking about a disconnected link between apps, and Google AI result summary told me that the error was related to my pulling a USB drive too quickly in windows. The ONLY word similar to my query and that AI response was t…

[flagged]

It hallucinates greatly about many things when I ask about C++ things. Things that you can easily find the right answer in cppreference or by just inspecting headers in your own IDE.

Re: Google changes its search box

#399
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LLMs-as-search-proxies have some pretty nice capabilities. For instance you can say "limit your search to scientific papers" and they'll do a much nicer job. I've also had some success recently prompting them with "I'm looking for reputable sources", e.g. recently I was looking for ways to repel deer from my apple tres. A naive internet search had vendors of shady crap jumping me. The LLMs pulled up relevant papers a…

> I get much better results from the LLMs I pay for than the free ones with Google or DuckDuckGo, which seem to be way way way more prone to just make crap up based on your search

Same here. The free version probably gets orders of magnitude less of a compute budget, though, so I am not really surprised.

What I find really surprising though is how many people still have only ever used the free version of any LLM, even those that are heavy users and could easily afford it. It seems like a pretty big and basic product marketing mistake to me to limit capabilities instead of usage time in the free version! How are people supposed to learn what they'd get if they were to pay?

Re: Google changes its search box

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The iem sub has a post with some recommendations at various price points. I’d probably start there, not sure your budget and I don’t know have the most experience with the super cheap ones: https://reddit.com/r/iems/comments/1la65kr/top_5_iems_in_eve...

I also encourage finding the right tips. Tips are cheap and finding proper fitting ones is important.

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