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Google changes its search box

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Re: Google changes its search box

#561

Post by bbondo »

redsparrow wrote: post #554
johnny_canuck wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right? In this context, if Google is going to give me the recipe without having to scroll through the story, that seems like a win to me. The ad-revenue driven Internet of web 2.0 is finally dead and I'm not sure I'm all that sad.

Without some way to generate revenue, people aren't going to publish recipes (for Google to scrape into their AI.) Maybe we could live without more recipes being fed into the machine, but there are many other types of content that will suffer the same fate. It would be nice to find something better than an ad-revenue driven web, but I'm not sure this is it. We'll find out I guess...

> people aren't going to publish recipes

Sure they are. I can attest that musicians will gladly publish their music even when no recompense is offered. Surely culinary artists are the same.

Re: Google changes its search box

#562

Post by HDBaseT »

xmcp123 wrote: post #484
data-ottawa wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reCaptcha is a pretty strong wall to allow only Google to index websites, especially now that you need device verification. Throw in Cloudflare too. There’s not much room to squeeze in when your competitors hold the keys to 15 million top websites.

I write a lot of scrapers. Both of those are pretty trivial to bypass at scale.

What about not at scale?

I find it wild that "at scale" we can bypass anti-bot measures, but just "normal" internet use (i.e Non-Google Browser or VPN) will throw a million captchas at you.

cgnat is pretty bad too.

Re: Google changes its search box

#563

Post by HDBaseT »

octygen wrote: post #536

Why replace something deterministic with something non-deterministic? I can no longer tell someone "just google it" because I don't actually know what will come up...

Google Search hasn't been deterministic in well over a decade.

Two devices searching something will never bring up the exact same results, in the exact same order.

Re: Google changes its search box

#565

Post by pants2 »

sanitycheck wrote: post #321
burnte wrote: 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…

Yep. For years we've been telling people to 'just fucking google it', and now when they do they're getting bullshit AI answers. Worst thing is, some of these bullshit answers will be medical, some of them financial, it seems pretty certain people are being harmed.

Yeah the Google AI results are more dangerous than ChatGPT, not only because it uses a smaller model but because Google's knowledge graph used to deliver very accurate and authoritative information but now that's been replaced by a stochastic system in the same place, so people are used to trusting it.

Re: Google changes its search box

#567

Post by jredwards »

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…

It's tough for me to square the two things happening simultaneously in AI right now:

1. LLM Model providers are starting to charge real costs to users, revealing that AI usage is much more expensive than the subsidized rates we've been seeing for years.

2. Google is now using an LLM to answer every single google search that happens, for which Google bears the entire cost.

Re: Google changes its search box

#569

Post by stephen_g »

gsk22 wrote: post #453
RyanOD wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me one needs to consider the complexity of the question they are asking before searching it. To stick with your post, consider people asking medical or financial questions. For a wide variety of reasons, many of such questions don't have an answer. In such cases, AI is still going to take a crack at it. AI shouldn't be blamed for "bullshit answers" to such questions. Before using AI, I think people should…

The problem is Google's AI results get even simple factual questions wrong all the time. Earlier today, I searched "pixel 10 wifi 7" because I was confused that GSMArena showed my Pixel 8 supports Wifi 7, but the Pixel 10 only Wifi 6. Gemini confidently claimed that the Pixel 10 does support Wifi 7 -- but that's not true at all. Only the Pixel 10 _Pro_ supports it, as I discovered when actually reading the non-AI sea…

I had a similar thing when I was gooling a few days ago, I can't remember exactly but it was like "why does [product] not support [feature]" and the AI summary was confidently wrong, saying "The product does support [feature]", which knew was completely incorrect, and I did find a Reddit discussion or something in the actual results with discussions that were actually about what I was looking for!

It's really depressing how bad things are getting...

Re: Google changes its search box

#570

Post by Robotbeat »

sanitycheck wrote: post #321
burnte wrote: 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…

Yep. For years we've been telling people to 'just fucking google it', and now when they do they're getting bullshit AI answers. Worst thing is, some of these bullshit answers will be medical, some of them financial, it seems pretty certain people are being harmed.

I think we’re getting what we deserve by snarkily telling people to Google stuff instead of answering accurately. Google results have never ever been pure accuracy
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