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Google changes its search box

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Re: Google changes its search box

#901

Post by mghackerlady »

agmater wrote: post #729
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…

I'm reading a book on Vim and the author mentioned the old "Google is your friend". That aged poorly as well :')

eh, for vi you can limit your search to stackexchange

Re: Google changes its search box

#902

Post by [deleted] »

notsydonia wrote: post #898

Wow, I just asked Google A.I. mode some pointed questions about a site of mine which has been up and successful for about as long as Google and if Google had any guidance for creators/site owners. I had to push it but I got some remarkably frank answers and I am posting here as an FYI. "The accepted ideal case for Google is a highly consolidated, walled-garden internet where a small array of corporate media partners…

[deleted]

Re: Google changes its search box

#903

Post by data-ottawa »

einpoklum wrote: post #873
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.

> reCaptcha is a pretty strong wall to allow only Google to index websites Why would website authors _want_ to prevent crawling by other search engines?

Because there's been a string of bad actors including OpenAI with incredibly inefficient scrapers.

Previously captcha was just for spam limiting, but I actually looked at our system logs and about half of traffic was bad behaving scrapers.

In logs I see these scrapers are hitting every link on the page. If you have a collection page then it's hitting every filter option and then hitting each pagination button, the different sort orders, etc. People running something like Forgejo it will hit every commit.

If you have expensive to compute pages, they're getting hit by these incredibly naive bots that don't respect any robots.txt or discriminate on what they do.

Re: Google changes its search box

#904

Post by jedberg »

dullcrisp wrote: post #480
divbzero wrote: post #445

It’s diverged quite a bit from the original: ... Search the web using Google! 10 results 30 results 100 results Index contains ~25 million pages (soon to be much bigger) ... https://web.archive.org/web/19981111183552/http://google.sta...

When did they change the "query" to q?

When they got big enough that that change made a noticeable difference in both performance and their bandwidth bill (which was pretty early on).

Re: Google changes its search box

#906

Post by Andrex »

chadgpt3 wrote: post #823
Andrex wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the future I see happening. And, I don't think it will be a total apocalypse. The web will endure.

It's kind of like any extinction scenario though: Yeah, there will still be a big ball of rock after the nuclear apocalypse, there will still be life on the rock, and probably even still humans, but that only makes it slightly less tragic.

I have to focus on the silver linings or things are too sad. :(

Re: Google changes its search box

#907

Post by comex »

andrepd wrote: post #755
wodenokoto wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you could still dig through it and find those primary sources. That is, in my opinion, the primary purpose of a search engine. And you are a small minority. People go to google to get answers, not to look for articles in order to look for answers in the articles.

Yeah all you need is answer-shaped text. Why would the truth of that answer matter at all?

Personally I think I've developed a pretty good sense of when a question is easy enough that I can just trust the AI overview, and when I need to dig deeper. Google's original AI overviews were not reliable enough to ever trust, but now they are usually accurate summaries of the cited sources.

Job market statistics are actually probably a strong point for the AI overview. I just Googled 'us job market last month' and got an AI overview that accurately summarized a New York Times article for qualitative information ("surprisingly strong 115,000 jobs", "no-hire, no-fire"), followed by accurately summarizing the official Bureau of Labor Statistics website for raw stats, followed by some other stuff I didn't check. Not everyone would prefer The New York Times' take, but the citation prominently displays their name and logo, so you can tell what you're getting.

Weak points are when the topic is obscure enough that the AI overview conflates two different things or overgeneralizes, or trusts the wrong sources.

Re: Google changes its search box

#908

Post by keeda »

bookofjoe wrote: post #803
Gareth321 wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. For what it's worth, I think Google's business model is in trouble. They're putting in heroic effort to stay relevant during this shift to AI search, but how does their advertising model work when people expect summarised and accurate information instead of scrolling pages of ads? The search space is actually not that unhealthy. There are competitors. They just lack the reach of Google. These competitor will…

>... I think Google's business model is in trouble. >Google parent Alphabet profit jumps 81% in Big Tech earnings roundup https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/04/30/google-parent-a...

This comment thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47954579 is relevant.

TL;DR: Google is heavily stuffing more and more ads into every monetizable SERP, which explains the ever-increasing revenue.

But my theory (expanded in more detail here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47957708) is that its cash cow is heavily optimized towards its current anti-competitive, multi-sided chokehold of the online ad market -- look up the AdTech Antitrust findings around manipulating ad auctions, e.g. Project Bernanke -- which relies on ad volume.

With agents however, I suspect that volume will shrink drastically even if they stuff ads at each step of the conversation. Because it's only the final click that will matter, and those ads will be meaningless.

It's not clear that Google can charge enough for that final click to compensate for the loss of both, the value of all the ads that lead to it, as well as their ad auction manipulation premium.

Re: Google changes its search box

#909

Post by flenserboy »

We need a second, new internet that cuts these rent-seekers out. The backbone is there, we can use mesh, we could use Starlink (there's a real opportunity there) — locking out & starving the current titans of cash is where we need to be. It won't happen, but it should, for all sorts of economic, cultural, & liberty-oriented reasons.

Re: Google changes its search box

#910

Post by nostrademons »

lunar_mycroft wrote: post #295
jrmg wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search engines don’t do that any more - they just give you a bunch of SEO spam sites, now mostly filled with plausible slop. Answers from search are _less_ reliable than answers from an LLM now. I worry that the LLMs are just the equivalent of a ‘lagging indicator’ of web quality though - that they will also soon be overwhelmed with the sheer volume of plausible nonsense that is the web now, just like search engines…

If the LLM is capable of providing good citations, then those citations could be returned in the same format as traditional search engines, not the new, LLM generated content first format. If they aren't capable of providing good citations, then the suggestion I was replying to is incorrect (and you'd have no way of knowing if they were right or not)

In general users don't like to have to follow citations, even if they should. They'd rather have an answer right in front of them, even if there's a good chance that it's wrong.

Google, like most consumer product companies, designs for the majority. Citations are a niche feature for the 5-10% of users that like to do their own research. The majority just wants an answer, which has been the direction Google's gone in since Knowledge Panels and the Answer OneBox came out in 2012.

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