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Google changes its search box

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Re: Google changes its search box

#611

Post by ultrarunner »

thedougd wrote: post #582
gsk22 wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Admittedly I’m unsure if it was Google or DuckDuckGo. I switch between both. I quickly asked the in search AI for a UTC time conversion like a lazy fool and it got it off by almost a day wrong.

I avoid any asking any agent a fact-based (especially math) request. It's a great compression algorithm and a great language generator, and I guess the intersection of those two things is "an answer". Calculation doesn't intersect.

Re: Google changes its search box

#614

Post by LastTrain »

SoftTalker wrote: post #115
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…

"I never want to have a conversation with a website that is geared towards advertising me products." Since this is how Google makes all their money, why are they killing it off? Do they think people will eventually pay for LLM search? Do they plan to stuff the results with ads, not even sharing the ad revenue with the content sources?

Wait, you guys don’t think Google AI responses will be geared for advertising? It already is FFS, massively.

Re: Google changes its search box

#616

Post by thincopperfoil »

arcanemachiner wrote: post #534
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…

Reminds me of this gem: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fn...

Straight of of x-files s02e03

Re: Google changes its search box

#617

Post by codebje »

Robotbeat wrote: post #585
codebje wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because LLMs aren't sentient, they don't draw on facts, and they don't have nuance. The answer given is similar to answers you might expect to see for similar questions. It's really amazing we can make machines do that, and it's really depressing that we think a stochastic bullshit machine is going to give us something we can rely on.

Or… the default LLM Google uses for search has been quantized to s**. Ask a proper Thinking model, with browsing enabled, and odds of a correct answer are much higher. There’s been substantial improvement in AI in even the last year. Ask a human a question like this, and they also have a chance of getting it wrong, even when confident.

I think that it feels a little wasteful to go to Google search to ask a question like this, only for the AI that's giving you an answer instead of page results to perform its own web search to get you the response.

Also, I asked a thinking model with browsing enabled and got this:

> The Google Pixel 10 is expected to support Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be), based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 / Tensor G5 chipset it will likely use, which includes an integrated Wi-Fi 7 modem. Specific finalized specs aren't confirmed until Google's official announcement.

(Model GLM-5-Turbo - two months old - using Kilo Code in the "Ask" profile; in its thinking token churn it reasoned that it should keep the response brief and direct. Perhaps not the best suite of model+harness for this task, but it's what I had to hand that's not quantized to shit, is a thinking model, and has a web search tool available to it.)

Re: Google changes its search box

#618

Post by pclowes »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #403
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…

> My Google search usage is easily down 50%+. I doubt I am unique here. The question though: Why is that? Is your Google search usage down because LLMs are "so much better"? Or because Google actively chose to destroy the quality of their search results to juice advertising revenue, and appears to continue to do so to juice AI adoption? > and have them provide me links for source data. And therein lies the answer: Yo…

Yes, but with an LLM can also say drop those links into a markdown file then use research agents to identify and stack rank the ones that are most relevant to this criteria. Add summaries and rationale for the ranking to the markdown etc.

This is a common flow for me and works with other skills such “as find recent PR’s in our code base that are related to this research topic”

Also yes, I don't care about the LLM and I am just using it to get what I want because that is what LLMs are for.

Re: Google changes its search box

#620

Post by terribleperson »

WarmWash wrote: post #545
terribleperson wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a user and fan of kagi, the problem with kagi is that it reveals how badly degraded the web is. The vast majority of original content is now in one or another social network or on discord. News articles are an exception, though the news has its own problems. Some wikis still exist and are actively maintained, of course, but not a ton. If it's a topic that's academically studied you might find information in papers…

When you run a website where 80% of users are ad-blocking, and less than 0.5% donate, you quickly realize why these centralized websites (which turned apps to force ads) are the only survivors.

I think it's less expense-driven and more user-driven. Most forums I frequented in the 2000s were funded by donations. The userbase, though, disappeared. The network effects of facebook and reddit and such are hard to overcome, and worse when you consider how google search prefers to surface either social media sites or blogspam/content theft sites.
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