Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

chuckwnelson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 504 posts

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#101

Post by TiredOfLife »

m_ke wrote: post #12
binkHN wrote: post #7

> Enter 2024 with AI. The top 20% of search results are a wall of text from AI... I'll be the contrarian here and say I actually like Google's AI Overview? For the first time in a long time, I can search for an answer to a question and, instead of getting annoying ads and SEO-optimized uselessness, I actually get an answer. Google is finally useful again. That said, once Google screws with this and starts making sear…

It would be great if it wasn't completely wrong 50% of the time.

Compared to 0% of relevant results in first 10 pages it's an enormous improvement.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#102

Post by weberer »

wwweston wrote: post #26
msoad wrote: post #17

I remember when the more tech savvy folks were migrating from Altavista and Yahoo to Google because they understood it is better sooner than others. The same thing is happening. I consider myself tech savvy (still!) and I have to admit that I rarely use Google for all sort of information. As a side note: I am using Safari and I noticed that Apple's search is also replacing my Google searches. In the past if I knew na…

Of course the savvy are using LLMs now, but they’re also reckoning with two things: * you have to check an LLM result, especially if it cites something (because it may or may not exist) * you can’t cite an LLM result It’s a useful tool, but it lacks certain utility features that a useful web + effective search has. Or had.

Even without using LLMs, Duckduckgo is good at providing little widgets that just give you a straight answer. Try searching "150 usd to eur" or "Weather Philadelphia".

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#103

Post by tonyedgecombe »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #65
wwweston wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Libraries and librarians are starting to seem very relevant again. As are journalistic institutions.

Journalistic institutions have been requiring so much fact-checking, cross referencing and research lately it's a full time job to get informed. Whenever I read or hear anything from the medias now, I'm now always asking myself "what are their political inclinations? who is owning them ? what do they want me to believe? how much of a blind spot do they got ? how lazy or ignorant they are in that context ? etc." They…

That's not new, it's always been the case.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#104

Post by weberer »

Deegy wrote: post #29
zknowledge wrote: post #13

Definitely agree, but I'm surprised Perplexity wasn't mentioned in this post. It's currently Perplexity Vs. Google

Once chatGPT and Claude (through MCP) added web search functionality I completely dropped Perplexity. I assume I'm not unique in this regard. Feels like the writing is on the wall for Perplexity.

Could you explain more? Are the results better, or are there other features?

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#105

Post by gundmc »

AJRF wrote: post #77

The example he shows here has the answer to his question highlighted in the AI overview, and in huge text in the InfoBox. He got his answer instantly without having to go to another page. Really wish such bold claims had better evidence.

Agreed, I actually prefer the Google page in the example screenshots. And in my experience Google still returns much much faster than GPT Search.

I'm open to the suggestion that OpenAI can disrupt Google, but this was a weird case to highlight.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#106

Post by morkalork »

potsandpans wrote: post #42

Just sharing an anecdote: I was searching for a quote that I'd heard in an audiobook the other day. I just had the general paraphrase, and didn't feel like scanning through the chapters to go find it. This was a somewhat obscure source. Google had just straight garbage for me. The quote was political in nature, and I felt like the results were fighting general tone-policing filters and were tuned for recent events. o…

That's where I'm at too, I wanted to find the origin a quote and couldn't remember the exact words. Google was just pulling up random shit related to the words in the query and nothing related to the quote itself. ChatGPT figured it out in a minute. Same goes for looking stuff up in books, just ask what chapter something happens in.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#108

Post by TiredOfLife »

lubujackson wrote: post #66
toddmorey wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For quick simple steps like how to get a Bluetooth keyboard into pairing mode, it seems to work really well. I hated the prior world where everyone attempted to hide the real answer 3/4ths of the way through a useless blog post or YouTube video.

Which, we should note, didn't happen 10 years ago before the accountants took over search at Google. Those good, lean, helpful pages still exist. Google incentives websites to have pages of slop on everything now because they track how long you spend on a site as a "metric of a good match". Forrest for the trees...

Stack overflow launched 16 years ago, when for many years most of google results already were expertexchange type of sites with the obfuscated answers hidden pages deep in the link.

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#109

Post by nicbou »

zblevins wrote: post #53
nicbou wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answers come from the same websites. They just get stripped of their traffic. As someone who puts a ton of work into writing accurate, helpful guides, it's devastating to have my work plundered like that. Once these monopolies have successfully established themselves, they will become indistinguishable from the ad-invested websites they replace. The only difference is that they will create no new information of t…

Where are you publishing your guides? Would love to add another bookmark to my collection.

Unless you are thinking of moving to Germany, it might not be helpful to you.

https://allaboutberlin.com

Re: Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

#110

Post by dagmx »

A lot of folks are focusing on the AI answers that Google gives, but for me the real downgrade has been the change in their algorithm a few years ago where it tries to search for what it thinks I mean instead of what I search for.

Even putting entire chunks of text in quotes isn’t enough anymore. I can never get Google to search for what I want without trying to engineer a prompt, when it could at some point.

In trying to become more helpful, it’s become worse.

Post reply on HN