11–20 of 860 posts
And it’s clear that Google’s Ad model ultimately created a priority inversion. The advertisers became the customer.
I am so glad Kagi came along with a business model that is actually working.
From a user perspective, Google search is the most useful it has been in years, though that doesn't feel entirely like intentional improvement, just a lucky side effect of the move to "AI mode". And yes, if you take what the AI tells you at face value it could be wrong. But if you are aware of this and aware of the ways in which LLMs are likely to shit the bed, it is quicker to get from request to useful information…
Also I realized the other day how hard it is to find song lyrics for anything other than quite mainstream songs.
I spent the last three days (off and on) using Gemini to configure my edge router 4 with my iOS devices on a vpn and it's been awesome. In the past I'd do a google search and read a few sources of documentation, do another google search and read another set of documentation. Now, Gemini aggregates multiple pages together so all of the work of reading source docs from multiple locations is now n a single step. Oh, I s…
There will come a day (and probably soon) when "training on the public internet" (Reddit, etc) will taint your model with metric tons of corporate contamination, political poison, and other adversarial content intentionally crafted to bias AIs for various reasons (corporate gain, geopolitical information warfare, etc). Basically the AI-equivalent of SEO.
It would be beneficial for the author to look at the revenue for Google Search. Revenue is still growing.
Not only is search revenue growing, but it is growing at an accelerating rate.
At the same time, operating margins are expanding.
I don't know the name of the logical fallacy where someone personally uses an LLM instead of Google Search and then infers that the search business is dying, without ever reading a financial statement.
I’ll add this article to the list of incorrect predictions lol
From a user perspective, Google search is the most useful it has been in years, though that doesn't feel entirely like intentional improvement, just a lucky side effect of the move to "AI mode". And yes, if you take what the AI tells you at face value it could be wrong. But if you are aware of this and aware of the ways in which LLMs are likely to shit the bed, it is quicker to get from request to useful information…
> But if you are aware of this and aware of the ways in which LLMs are likely to shit the bed, it is quicker to get from request to useful information than it has been with Google search since like 2017. The point is not about 'quicker' requests but precise requests. It definitely has worsened, though not on a single degree on al levels like the HN hivemind claims, but some aspects are still somewhat precise but othe…
Kagi search today is better than Google search ever was. And it’s clear that Google’s Ad model ultimately created a priority inversion. The advertisers became the customer. I am so glad Kagi came along with a business model that is actually working.
A lot of the "cultural record" the author refers to is just digital junk. Random digital content that very few people care about, if we're being honest. Trying to hoard every bit of digital information ever produced is not the same thing as preserving "culture".
Case in point:
> Even the increasing use of ephemeral formats like Instagram Stories and WhatsApp status updates means that large portions of cultural, social, and political communication are never conserved in the first place. As a society, we can probably survive bad search results and come up with another way to schedule a sunset make-out session. But we can’t aspire to sovereignty if we can’t retain and retrieve our collective memory.
For most of human history, nobody was trying to "conserve" every cultural, social or political communication ever produced, and I fail to see how Instagram Stories and WhatsApp status updates, many of which aren't even truly broadcast publicly for all to see, are part of some imaginary "collective memory."
If you find a web page, see an Instagram Story or receive a message that's important to you, save it or take a screenshot. But let's not pretend all these things belong in a global Digital Civilizational Archives.
From a user perspective, Google search is the most useful it has been in years, though that doesn't feel entirely like intentional improvement, just a lucky side effect of the move to "AI mode". And yes, if you take what the AI tells you at face value it could be wrong. But if you are aware of this and aware of the ways in which LLMs are likely to shit the bed, it is quicker to get from request to useful information…
As someone who regularly reads things online, then wants to read them again like 3 years later, Google has been monotonically declining in quality. Also I realized the other day how hard it is to find song lyrics for anything other than quite mainstream songs.
I generally agree, but I think AI mode actually improved things somewhat compared to how things were just prior to it existing.
And I'm not saying what we have now is better than Golden Age Google, but things were just getting worse and worse for almost a decade. AI didn't fix the decade worth of decline, but it is the first thing I've seen from Google that at least partially reversed it for my own usage.