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Google changes its search box

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Re: Google changes its search box

#591

Post by awesome_dude »

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.

To be fair - for all of those years Google has been serving up some atrocious results - remember when googling health symptoms got you rabies or pregnancy.

There's even the meme where people ask if the code was the result of a stack overflow question, or answer

Re: Google changes its search box

#592

Post by satvikpendem »

mrtksn wrote: post #495
jefftk wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I write things on the internet because I want to share ideas. If someone reads my post and tells a friend, that's great. If an AI crawls my posts and passes along the ideas that's great too. (It doesn't work for ad-funded writing, but while I have substantial sympathy there this has historically been an unpopular argument on HN)

Sure but this means that you’re no longer eligible to make living from your ideas, which can be fine by you but it eliminates entire class of people who used to make living from intellectual work. This also could have been fine, it can bring back authenticity however for this to happen no one should be making money from it. Instead, only megacorps make money and they can just ignore your ideas and generate theirs. Th…

Not making a living from ads specifically, sure, but many have things like Substack which actually directly incentivizes them to make good content rather than serving ads.

Re: Google changes its search box

#593

Post by dyauspitr »

simonw wrote: post #10

Nilay Patel has been talking about "Google Zero" - the moment when Google effectively stops sending any traffic to other sites - for a few years now: https://www.theverge.com/24167865/google-zero-search-crash-h...

They will not do that because their cash cow ad revenue depends on it

Re: Google changes its search box

#594

Post by dyauspitr »

BrunoBernardino wrote: post #179
SoftTalker wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web as we know it is over. Websites will die on the vine if LLMs intermediate all the content. The "website" of the future will be an API optimized for LLM crawlers, serving plain-text content that no end-user will ever view directly. The SEO game will change to LLMAO.

Alternatively, we can collectively "fight back" by not using Google and teaching others around us to do so as well. There are plenty of decent [1] and great (better) alternatives, where you're not the product [2]! [1]: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-search/?license=fr... [2]: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-search/?license=co...

Fighting back is stupid, these things are inevitable, and honestly probably for the best over the long-term.

Re: Google changes its search box

#595

Post by mcphage »

johnny_canuck wrote: post #537
thelastgallon wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of Walmarts squeezing strategy with all the manufacturers. Business with us at the price we say or out of business.

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.

> But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right?

No. Temporarily it’s good for the consumer. Ultimately it is bad for the consumer, because as prices drop, so to does quality.

Re: Google changes its search box

#596

Post by Forgeties79 »

macic wrote: post #442
arionhardison wrote: post #218

I'm old enough to remember when "Google" was something that ended conversations. People — myself included — would literally say "Google it," the facts would be located, and that was that. Now that Google wants to be the conversation, I'm worried there will no longer be a bias-free source of information for the masses. This is all new, so I may be a bit hyperbolic, but the reason OpenAI introducing ads bothers me is t…

Google is not bias-free, and has not been for a long time.

Never has been. No source or tool is. It’s a noble dream that can’t be achieved

Re: Google changes its search box

#598

Post by Forgeties79 »

WarmWash wrote: post #544
arionhardison wrote: post #218

I'm old enough to remember when "Google" was something that ended conversations. People — myself included — would literally say "Google it," the facts would be located, and that was that. Now that Google wants to be the conversation, I'm worried there will no longer be a bias-free source of information for the masses. This is all new, so I may be a bit hyperbolic, but the reason OpenAI introducing ads bothers me is t…

My takeaway is that the internet would be a dramatically cooler place today if people were just willing to pay for stuff. The ad version of the web, where ~60% of people carry the ad burden for everyone, and defacto aligns the service providers with advertisers, is just a guaranteed bad outcome. The only real upside, which frankly people take for granted, is that the ad-web is classless web. Broke or rich you get the…

My other main issue with the no-net neutrality world is that it also means websites would have to pay ISP’s or be artificially throttled. That’s a huge problem.

It’s one thing to say we need to pay. It’s another for ISP’s to get 3 pulls at the hose (paid for a connection, paid for what we can browse, paid for who provides the sites) when some of those elements don’t even require more (or at least much) effort or infrastructure on their part. I don’t like the idea of their picking winners and losers. We’ve got enough of that as it is.

Re: Google changes its search box

#599

Post by wvenable »

burnte wrote: post #309
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 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…

Free AI's are dumb. Extremely dumb. The Google AI result is dumb on purpose -- being smart requires more compute.

Re: Google changes its search box

#600

Post by gwbas1c »

bbondo wrote: post #561
redsparrow wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We just won't get countless recipe websites where you have to scroll, scroll, scroll through slop about someone's day to read a scraped recipe that every other website has.

This is just disruption.

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