Ask HN: Why) are you using AI to browse the web?

[ATechGuy]

[Posting again in hopes of gaining further perspectives and insights]

Do you still browse the web the same way you did (say 5 years ago) or you use AI to browse, summarize, etc. on websites? Is it about speed/efficiency, instant answers (gratification), or something else?

I've noticed I'm less willing to read long articles now that I can get instant summaries. I'm curious to understand if AI is saving us time or is it training us to avoid effort.

[PaulHoule]

I definitely use the "AI Mode" a lot in Google Search in preference to the old search interface.

[reliefcrew]

It seems the relentless pursuit of greater profit has diluted "the old search interface" toward simply regurgitating adverts.

Customers realize this, even if subconsciously, and so the new "AI Modes" offered by search companies are required to stay relevant.

It's the process of creative destruction at work... round and round we go.

[PaulHoule]

The search was terrible before the AI mode was introduced. Personally my take on the enshittification of search was that it was a thing long before Doctorow came on the scene, in the late 2000s I rubbed shoulders with grey-hat and darker SEO people and by 2010 or so the people doing affiliate marketing had mostly given up on spamming the SERPs and had become well-behaved buyers of AdWords.

Since that time this blogger

http://www.seobook.com/blog

has been relentless about how unfair it is so when I see people upset about how their precious posts are being hoovered up for ChatGPT I can only think “Jesse they are really slow on the draw, maybe ChatGPT would be better off not hovering that stuff up”

But to take that hat off, AI mode works on many queries that would never have worked with the old Google. If I am having a conversation with somebody in a language I barely know I can go back and forth to make very precise replies and ask it “why does it have … in it?” and get a good answer. If I remember there was a scientific paper that came to a certain conclusion I can describe the conclusion and… get it first thing. No way that would have worked with the old google, pubmed, arXiv search…

Of course, if Google didn’t come out with a useful search engine based on the new tech, somebody else would have.

[reliefcrew]

Oh, yes... I didn't mean to imply that the newer "AI modes" aren't better and that we're somehow standing still. More that the differentiation is made much starker due to so-called "enshittification". Whether that contrast is deliberate or coincidental I'm not completely sure, but I'd wager it's the former.