[qsort]

I truly don't get Google's move.

I'm sure the model is fine, but it's not Google Search, and when I want Search I want Search. If I wanted to ask an AI, why can't I ask the one from my subscription... that I'm already paying for... that's actually good... that can also search the web?

I assume it's a play to test the waters for how the ad market is going to work, because as a product I really can't see why I would ever use it. Dropbox comment moment incoming?

[mrdependable]

They want to capture more of the value that was previously going to others. That's basically what this has all been leading to. Why let a cooking website get visitors and ad revenue when they are free to take the content and show it as their own? Now they are going to do the same to e-commerce. Either they are going to let customers buy their products through Google's interface, or they won't be discovered. No more ownership of the customer relationship. Stores will be a backend warehouse and manufacturer now with Google taking a percentage of all profits.

[eithed]

> Why let a cooking website get visitors and ad revenue when they are free to take the content and show it as their own?

I think this is a step beyond that - why should people be creating cooking websites when you can ask LLM how to cook given thing, while indeed, serving their own ads. It's the continuation of "we own content other people produce" policy

[watwut]

Google already killed cooking websites - when it refused to show them in search unless they added long slop content to it. And it killed blogosphere when it decided blogs wont be found if they just contain content without deliberate SEO play.

And I think the rest of it will end the same way. People will be significantly less eager to do all that free work when no one will be able to find it.

[rolph]

recall the pizza sauce glue trick, to stop cheese from sliding off.

there are other such goodies like mashed potatoes with broken lightbulb gravy, or fiberglass omelette, enjoyed by beldar conehead.

i wouldnt trust an AI for any recipe that i dont have personal experience with.

the safety rails are not very strong yet.

[cogogo]

If you are half decent at cooking it is actually pretty helpful to explore cooking something new. Just like coding it is nice to get specific answers to your specific question and it is pretty easy to reason about the quality using your own experience.

[goosejuice]

I would be interested in an example of this. LLMs will often combine recipes from random sites. If you're experienced enough at cooking to reason about the quality _for something new to you_, what value is there in an LLM here? I don't see any similarities to coding here.

[cogogo]

To me the similarity is I know exactly what I want to do but cannot really remember syntax (coding) or key variables (cooking) like temp and time. But I have enough experience to know if the output makes sense. Either one I can ask an llm a specific question and get a somewhat reliable specific answer that I feel comfortable parsing… this is actually one of the reasons I think I am eventually going to be on the local inference bandwagon. It is not far from being good enough for my use cases. And I will be able to skip the inevitable enshittification.

[eithed]

I agree and this response was following OPs example. But the point still stands - the goal is to outsource, in a weird way, the results being served = Google as such wouldn't need to pay for content. Now, if accuracy of such sources doesn't matter (or is good enough) for casual user...

[andrepd]

Given most cooking or recipe websites have been AI slop for a few years now......

I'll stick with my mom's handwritten recipe book.

[redsocksfan45]

There are virtually no combinations of food which are toxic, you can mix any food with any food and, while it might not be good, it will still be food. (The only exception I know of is alcohol and mushrooms containing coprine, e.g. inky caps)

Point is, unless you're stupid enough to add glue or broken glass to your meal just because a recipe told you to, it's perfectly safe. More than just safe, LLM recipes these days are utterly boring in their normalacy, and, unlike cookbook recipes, can dynamically adapt to what you actually have in your pantry.

[onemoresoop]

What really sucks is that Google pushed actual content creators out of the way in the first place. That is horrible. I think they should be challenged on this. Food bloggers, recipe writers, and creators have helped shape a huge amount of food culture, and they deserve to be protected rather than erased. If this kind of theft continues from the AI industry Im not sure what type of culture is is going to be left or what it is going to replace it to. I hope humanity is going to find a creative way around it, but I’m also aware how easy to manipulated the masses are.

[bflesch]

Their assumption is that all relevant culture has already been invented and capturing the status quo is enough to get 80% of the benefits.

[badc0ffee]

Evidently you're not familiar with Swedish Lemon Angels.

[alberto467]

You can also tell the LLM exactly what you have in the fridge or what allergies you have and get customized recipes. It’s just a better experience, 2026 is rough for a recipe site.

[xigoi]

Would you trust the tool that recommended putting glue on pizza to give you a good recipe?

[coryrc]

I have/make rice starch glue. Can you put it on food? How are you supposed to know whether it's food safe?

Okay, so you don't trust LLM, so you go to a website instead. And... LLM-generated pages are SEO'd to get the top links. So you can't trust any website now (shoot, so much nonsense even before LLM, just more obvious to some of us). So basically everything on a computer is untrustworthy, directly from an LLM or not, unless you got yourself a copy of Encarta '97.

So you pick up a book at the local library. Librarians picked some books to order in subject matters they aren't expert in. How do you know those are accurate and safe? If the book says to use rice starch glue, how do you know the author didn't just copy that from an LLM? Or make it up?

Trust is fading entirely.

[throwway120385]

Presumably you test some things and use common sense for others. Like if you search for "grain filling oak" using an engine like Kagi(because Google just sells you the same product repackaged over and over) then you'll get people telling you variously to buy this grain filler compound that worked on their particular project, or you get people telling you to use drywall patch compound, or watered down wood filler.

The thing is, these things do produce some kind of result that looks like what you want. But it is still up to you to test these things on a project before you rely on them for whatever it is you really wanted them for, and that requirement doesn't go away just because you sourced the information from some LLM, or a book at the library, or Nick Offerman, or whoever else.

[alberto467]

Yes.

There isn't a robot straight up putting glue on my pizza. I will be following the recipe myself and since i trust myself to accurately detect that glue shouldn't belong on food i have zero issues with doing this.

[CamperBob2]

Got anything from 2025 or 2026?

AI got better over the last couple of years, and you didn't keep up, and because that's not going to stop, it will eventually become a problem for you.

[xigoi]

The fundamental technology is still the same, just with more fossil fuel burning.

> because that's not going to stop, it will eventually become a problem for you.

How? Will it stop being possible to cook without AI?

[lpapez]

If the user puts glue on their pizza because a computer said so, that's a human problem.

The computer generated recipes can be useful as inspiration, but of course common sense is required.

[thwarted]

This "common sense" you refer to, is it the same common sense Babbage was subject to?

"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

~ Charles Babbage

[eithed]

This video tells me otherwise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDQds7VZkfg ( Cold Ones - We Drank AI's Horrible Cocktail Ideas). This is a tongue in cheek response though, as LLMs improved significantly since then.

[leereeves]

> You can also tell the LLM exactly what you have in the fridge or what allergies you have and get customized recipes.

Can you really though? Are the results delicious? I've never tried that.

[alberto467]

It is pretty good yeah. I usually ask what traditional recipes (with some time/difficulty limits depending on time availability) might fit with the ingredients i have and let it suggest substitutions.

I wouldn't just ask it to make me a "novel and interesting recipe" giving it a bunch of weird ingredients that don't fit together. It would probably try its best but garbage in garbage out also work for food! At that point i ask it what should i get from the shop to make a recipe with x ingredient that i have in the fridge and i want to finish.

It's also pretty good with meal planning if you do that, it can estimate portions with calories breakdowns etc...

[hilariously]

It's worse than you think, many recipe sites do not taste test their stuff at all, and often have very stupid instructions.

That being said, an LLM can give creative ideas, mix and match components, but you should not trust the details at all.

[ben_w]

Case in point, when "minced meat" and "mincemeat" were mixed up: https://metro.co.uk/2019/12/09/american-website-includes-act...

[justsomehnguy]

Is this mushroom edible.jpg

[hansmayer]

> You can also tell the LLM exactly what

You can - but it's not advisable, not in the least.

[jeltz]

It is the same thing as when they pushed for AMP. They wanted to prevent traffic from leaving google.com then too.

[dpkirchner]

In that case at least they could point out that end users got better results with AMP than they do with news sites w/o ad blockers. The AI results are just wrong so often I don't really get it.

[JumpCrisscross]

> The AI results are just wrong so often I don't really get it

They believe they won’t be wrong for long.

[pluc]

The results are not wrong, they are AI. Google wants that to become a distinct thing that is neither. What's a better answer for Google than one that generates more usage? If we all push in the same direction we can make AI work, we just need to accept we will need to hold its hand for a while.

[Forgeties79]

I think this is sarcastic but man some people really do have some wild defenses for LLM’s so I can’t be sure lol

[866-RON-0-FEZ]

Maybe it's high time to burn it all down.

Block Googlebot from your sites.

Let's go back to webrings.

[xp84]

It's certainly long been clear that Google is phasing out even the idea that they serve end-users "links" to other websites. They're just refining the idea and making it more and more explicit. It absolutely places them in an obviously adversarial position to every single other website on the Internet, and anyone who continues to cooperate with Google today is probably handing Google the tools to put them out of business. Unfortunately, whole generations of people have grown up learning that the safest and easiest way to navigate to a website is to type some version of the brand into their browser (which Google likely owns outright) and click the first thing Google spits back, so Google enters this battle holding most of the cards :(

[georgeecollins]

Exactly! They also have been letting the results of google search get seriously degraded by ads. Would many people prefer AI over google search circa 2010?

They killed their competition and now they will give you the product that gives them the most money.

[jackp96]

Also — it's objectively a better search product to give users what they're looking for right away.

Though that's not to say they're acting altruisticly here.

Google seems to be racing toward a new dark pattern where users learn to trust rely on the AI for neutral, smart objectively correct answers — which boosts trust in its sponsored product recommendations. Super gross.

[throwaway27448]

Why would anyone go to google anymore tho? If it doesn't furnish results it's just a chatbot

[c7b]

I would assume that they've A/B-tested any such important change extensively and basically know that it won't affect their numbers for the worse.

[throwaway27448]

Given my own time at google, I highly doubt these a/b tests are constructed to actually yield a better product rather than push pet products

[c7b]

Then we should take your word over mine. My assumption was that those A/B tests will lead to products that do increase the numbers they were measuring (retention, conversion,...) at the expense of enshittified UX (up to the point of things feeling objectively broken, like notification badges re-appearing for the same items, settings that reset after user changes, search results missing,...). At least that was my explanation for how products by major tech giants like LinkedIn, Facebook, Outlook,... could end up being shipped with such flaws. What would you say?

[strifey]

This has been their MO with their search for a decade+ now. "Native" results hiding actual search results below the fold killed many 2010s era websites that relied on search traffic.

[worik]

"Greed is bad"

[crazygringo]

> but it's not Google Search, and when I want Search I want Search.

Not me. I really appreciate having both results simultaneously. I can scan the first couple sentences of the AI response, and if that already has the answer then great. I can expand it to see if there's more.

Or, if I see that the AI mode didn't understand my brief search query, I just glance at the search results below.

And often times, when I do need to follow a link, I find the source result links in the AI mode to be a better quality than the search result links.

It's the best of both worlds.

[tredre3]

> I can scan the first couple sentences of the AI response, and if that already has the answer then great.

But how do make the determination that the answer is good and you should stop reading the page? Vibes?

[gbalduzzi]

I think it depends on what you are looking for.

Most of the time I'm looking for something very specific that there are plenty of articles about, but clicking on the articles results in popups, banners and an unhealthy amount of scrolling to get to the answer.

AI overview provides me the answer instantly.

Think about suff like "does china borders afghanistan". In those cases you can be confident that the AI overview is right, and saved you time.

If it is a complex or niche question I tend not to trust the overview and go straight for legitimate-looking results

[ChoGGi]

Popups, banners? What are those?

[aprdm]

How do you make it without AI ? Are you parsing through millions of pages yourself ?

[Forgeties79]

The LLM results are presented confidently and succinctly in a way that is designed to tell you “yes” OR, it not applicable, it just mashes together statements (which often leads to a response that contradicts itself one sentence later). That’s not the same as your vetting search results.

Well before Google screwed it all up there used to be some correlation between top hits and what you were looking for. SEO has muddied the waters for many years now and it’s never been truly “merit based” or “objective” or whatever we want to call it, but generally speaking, the first results were the best by default.

[aprdm]

That hasn't been my experience. It has been working really well for what I need.

SEO optimization totally ruined google search for me for the past few years

[Forgeties79]

>that hasn’t been my experience

Ok, but it’s been mine. And clearly I’m not alone.

I feel like at this point any discussion about LLM’s has an implied “my experience” because LLM’s are super inconsistent due to not being refined tools at all. I’m sure your experience has been different, just like my experience has been different. I imagine you’ll want to chalk it up to operator error, but it sure seems like a lot of people have variations of my experience. If so many people are operating it wrong, then maybe the tool is poorly designed.

Understand that I use LLM’s pretty frequently. I am not “anti-AI.” I’ve used production tools incorporating machine learning for years now. But LLM’s simply aren’t the bespoke tools that these companies want you to believe, and they are definitely not a suitable replacement for search. It’s simply too inconsistent and will hallucinate answers. Google search didn't make up answers, it presented indexed sources that you ver in real time which I find to be a far superior way to do research. I don’t like having to guess when an LLM is just making shit up as it asserts something with simulated extreme confidence. Not only that, you can take a correct answer from a LLM and just start saying “know that is not right,” and it will start apologizing to you and generating other answers. That is a huge problem! I shouldn’t be able to “convince it” to give me a different answer.

Yes SEO made things objectively worse. Doesn’t mean we need to add another layer of issues on top of that.

[asdff]

No, you engage in what appears to be the lost art of media literacy and abrogate high quality sources.

[aprdm]

Right, so I have to do manual work going over 10000000 of results ? Or trusting SEO / google algorthm instead ?

[asdff]

No... When did you start using the internet?

[Kiro]

Before AI people got the answer they needed from the snippets. That's the level most search queries are at.

[crazygringo]

Common sense.

The same way I make the determination as to whether a linked search result is good and I don't need to click on another search result.

It's not like non-AI webpages are inherently more trustworthy or anything. The internet is full of misinformation everywhere, you know?

[culi]

It replaced some of my most used tools with google search. I used to be able to search "define inoculant" and I would get a definition, synonyms, and even a history of the word usage. Now it's replaced by an often mistaken AI summary. Even "inoculant synonyms" doesn't work.

[miltonlost]

Hope the answer in the AI response is right!

[mrweasel]

> I truly don't get Google's move.

Users aren't adopting their AI at the rate shareholders expect, so they now force the adoption at the cost of search.

[Legend2440]

According to Google, users are adopting it. They say AI mode is the most popular feature they've ever introduced, and is driving an increase in total search queries.

>Just one year after its debut, AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users, with queries more than doubling every quarter since launch. As people have realized just how much more Search can do for them, they’re searching more than ever before — so much so that last quarter, we saw queries reach an all-time high.

>Another place where we’ve been rapidly innovating is in the Gemini app. Last year at I/O, the Gemini app had 400 million monthly active users. Today, we’ve surpassed 900 million, more than doubling in a year. In that same time, daily requests have grown over seven times.

[Sleaker]

Isnt this essentially just slight of hand? Google basically defaults to AI search now doesn't it? So of course it will be 'fastest adopted' it's what is shoved in peoples faces.

If the results are garbage, or people have difficulty with it... Of course number of searches goes up. That doesn't mean the product is better or its not resulting in brand damage.

[largbae]

Don't believe your lying eyes, AI results are better!

[dpkirchner]

These are the same folks that removed the very useful Google cache feature because people weren't using it any more. What they forgot to say is they hid the feature beforehand.

Of course they have more AI queries every day. They have full control over what goes to LLMs and what doesn't.

[xp84]

Really smells like some high-ups' bonus was tied to these KPIs and they're guaranteeing that they can't lose.

[mrweasel]

While I'm not opposed to the idea that Google AI mode is so good that people use it more, I also feel like the average person only have so many queries per day. Google statement would indicate that people had a number of queries that they just opted to ignore, because find the answers was to cumbersome.

I'm not entirely sure I'm buying that, unless users keep prompting the AI to reduce the amount of reading they need to do. Sort of interrogating the AI, rather than reading a Wikipedia page.

[Legend2440]

AI mode isn't for queries, it's for questions. You ask it direct, specific things like 'how do I do <x> in <y>' and it provides a fast answer.

People have many more questions in their life than they do queries.

[gbalduzzi]

In programming forums like Hacker News people are incredibly detached from the average experience with technology, sometimes it is buffling.

Most non technical people I know asked questions to Google even before the AI overview. Instead of looking for the answer in seo-bloated articles, they find it in the overview.

I think google should improve in detecting the kind of query when I need a link that I don't remember, and deactivate the overview on those. If I search for "ryanair booking" I clearly need the url for booking a Ryanair flight, AI overview is useless

[Legend2440]

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1497/

If programmers and engineers are saying "why would anyone want that?", odds are the product will be a gigantic success.

[dandanua]

The fact that users are using more search queries means they can't find what they want with a lesser number of queries. It seems that Google's PR team doesn't have an incentive to understand that, or thinks that everyone else is stupid.

[bluefirebrand]

My guess is that they are spinning it as "users enjoy talking to the AI instead of searching, so they do it more"

Rather than "users don't find what they want with the AI as easily so they have to spend longer with it"

[gazebo2]

I mean, "AI Mode" is the default result when you Google something, so of course they're seeing high usage. Driving an increase in total queries is probably because instead of just Googling something and getting the right results like it was 10~ years ago, now you have to interrogate a chatbot or try multiple queries. I would think higher total queries is more an indicator that your search function isn't effective.

[SirFatty]

"I mean, "AI Mode" is the default result when you Google something"

No, it's not. AI mode is something you have to select (in the search window). There is an AI overview provided with your basic search results.

[pbhjpbhj]

I agree with their assessment that '"AI mode" is the default' - https://ibb.co/Pz9LqKRb.

That's what I get, in the UK, logged out of Google, from a search in Firefox omnibar using "Google" as provider.

I'm aware that they have other things that can be described as AI modes.

[blueg3]

That's AI Overview, just like it says at the top of the box.

AI Mode in that screenshot is the tab to the left of All.

[esseph]

> Driving an increase in total queries is probably because instead of just Googling something and getting the right results like it was 10~ years ago, now you have to interrogate a chatbot or try multiple queries. I would think higher total queries is more an indicator that your search function isn't effective.

I wonder how much the search results thing is related to language and locality. I have a hunch but I haven't really dug into it.

I live in the US, I speak English, and my browser is normally chrome.

The number of times I've gone to the 2nd page in Google search results you can probably count on one hand in the last 15yr or so.

I use the standard Google search things when I want specifics... Using quotes, site:news.ycombinator.com to search a site, or add a "-" to remove results from that site. I use a "+" when needed. Nothing fancy.

When people say they can't find things in Google search, I'm genuinely baffled. I have a strong suspicion that it has something to do with the combination of browser, locality, and language. Why? Could be tons of reasons for that, some probably anti-competitive on the browser side.

I have tried to use ecosia, start page, duckduckgo, etc. Was never happy with those results and always ended up back at Google search.

I just want to know what's different, you know? I look up some pretty obscure stuff sometimes.

Note: I do normally have my Google account logged in in the browser when doing search, however I have search personalization and history turned off, so that should not be influencing the quality of my search results compared to whatever "baseline" is.

[WarmWash]

It started when Google made a hard push to improve search for everyday people. They essentially nerfed "expert google skills" to bolster "noob google skills".

Regular people are/were really bad at using google, so google moved towards showing what it thinks you want rather than what you want. They paved over the skill gap between people who understood keywords and word order, and people who just typed in a quasi legible sentence to find something. In doing so though, they killed a lot of skill that people had developed with google for years.

Basically they made the game worse for pros so it could be better for amateurs. I have never heard a non-tech person complain about google getting worse over the years, and they seem to overwhelmingly use AI overviews now too.

[esseph]

I just don't know what I'm doing different, I'm just keyword searching and using a couple of inclusive/exclusive flags.

Was I the frog in the pot and now I'm cooked? I don't feel like in search Google any different from maybe 2005 or so.

[xp84]

> they seem to overwhelmingly use AI overviews now too.

Hard agree. The only thing I've ever witnessed another person do on Google (this is only an incredibly slight exaggeration) is:

1. Type a 'query' - either a brand/website name or some kind of stream of thought like "dishwasher error 03F" (without quotes)

2. Click or look at the very top thing in the results.

This used to mean 80% of the time they'd click the top ad, 20% the top organic result. Then they started putting non-clickable "answers" in that top spot, which would always be accepted as 'the right answer'. When those appeared, approximately no one would ever click any 'blue links.' These started out pretty reliable because they were just direct extracts from sites like IMDB: "Brad Pitt is 44 years old" etc.

Now it's like 60% of the time an ad, 40% of the time their bargain-basement-model "AI Overview" slop. Either way, approximately all users always just use whatever is on top and ignore everything else.

[pbhjpbhj]

>"a hard push to improve search for everyday people"

Citation needed. A hard push to change their search offering, sure. To improve it? Well, if by improve you mean 'require more interaction and viewing of more adverts on average before leaving' ...

[khimaros]

this has not been my experience on desktop or Android. did you opt into something? are you accessing via browser search or Google.com?

[watwut]

> driving an increase in total search queries

I search more when I cant find the thing I am looking for. I search less when I find the thing I am looking for.

Second, it takes additional effort to not do AI search.

[kungp]

Yeah, seems obvious that more searches = results are worse. Who would go "Google sure is good nowadays, I'm gonna ask it for more things than I used to"

[rolph]

how many of those queries contain keyword groups such as "how do i get rid of the AI search?"

[autoexec]

> They say AI mode is the most popular feature they've ever introduced, and is driving an increase in total search queries.

Technically, all the people who google "how do I disable this shitty AI mode in google" would count as "driving an increase in total search queries."

An easy way to make a feature popular is to force it on everyone. Then you can pat yourself on the back when 100% of your users are using it!

[baggachipz]

I remember when Internet Explorer was the most used browser. The fact that people were just using it to download Chrome doesn't matter to stats.

[nova22033]

That doesn't make sense. Presumably AI search costs more

[burnte]

I think it's a multifold problem and they've chosen bad solutions.

1. To protect ad revenue they make search results worse to increase the number of searches by making people refine their searches. This made people upset because search result quality went down. 2. "AI everywhere!" put them in a panic, so they shoved am LLM into results, hoping it could pick through bad results and give good data to the user. 3. LLMs are expensive to run, so they're using a cheap model.

Cheap model + bad results = abysmal user experience.

There are too many groups with opposed interests fighting. Ad groups wants worse results so people search more (not realizing this just drives users away). Search groups want a better product so they stop losing users, and the AI group is being given a bad name because management is using their worst AI product on search. So the whole experience is just garbage.

[gruez]

>1. To protect ad revenue they make search results worse to increase the number of searches by making people refine their searches. This made people upset because search result quality went down.

Why would this work? Were yahoo and askjeeves sandbagging their results too just so they can get more clicks?

[burnte]

> Why would this work?

Humans are predictable and hate change. For a short while it DOES work, people are used to great results, assume they're not using the the best keywords, and they'll reformulate their searches. For a while. After a while of all searches being not as good as they used to be, people start looking for other alternatives, which is why DDG is seeing an uptick.

It's called enshittification. It's easier than improving a product.

> Were yahoo and askjeeves sandbagging their results too just so they can get more clicks?

No idea.

[alex1138]

I don't know how much control Goog has over Youtube despite owning them but I do note in passing they removed dislikes, removed upload dates (apparently?), removed 5 stars. Easier to trick people into ads

The platform has been various kinds of hostile for a few years now

[jm4]

They probably lose a ton of traffic to AI or anticipate that happening. This is a way to keep people on Google search.

Like you, I use both search and AI separately. Even casual, nontechnical users are starting to work like that. Including AI with traditional search results will keep a lot of users from jumping ship in the first place and will help win back users from ChatGPT.

I know a lot of people hate AI - at a minimum, there’s a vocal minority - but the reality is AI is eating search like nothing we’ve ever seen.

[basisword]

I imagine most people aren't actually searching the web these days. They're searching for an answer to a question. They already now the 5-10 websites they use and go to those directly. They're mostly living in walled gardens, streaming services, or Amazon. When they use Google they want an answer and AI provides that.

[varenc]

> that can also search the web?

Slight digression: Claude/ChatGPT/etc all can search the web, but Google's AI already has a local copy of the web. It's much faster because of Google's TPUs, but also because Google has a copy of almost the entire web available locally. I recall others testing this and they observe that Google doesn't actually make HTTP requests to sites it references. It just uses its local cache. That's an advantage that all others seem to lack.

Of course, I agree that when I want search, I want search. But personally I've found if I want an LLM to very quickly answer a simple question, the type of thing all of them would do an equally good job on, I prefer Google's for its sheer speed.

[JoeOfTexas]

I find it useful, and use it almost daily. Helps answer "how to" questions for working on my house, development or just general questions. If I need more info, I just look at the links or videos which are also right there.

To each their own.

[shevy-java]

> I truly don't get Google's move.

Because Google wants to kill off its search engine here. It is very clear.

> I assume it's a play to test the waters for how the ad market is going to work, because as a product I really can't see why I would ever use it. Dropbox comment moment incoming?

This assumes that Google search is still a high priority for Google. With their privatized adNetwork, they are trying to get people to trust them, and abuse users via their ads. That is their business model. Google is an adCompany. It stopped being a tech company many years ago already.

Also they control the adMarket for the most part. Just look at youtube.

[paustint]

On the flip side I retrained myself to ask llm questions on my phone or computer browser search bar with the expectation of getting an llm response toy question with no desire to look at anything else.

If I truly want to search I will ignore the llm results, but I like the convenience of a quick llm search that knows "all the things". I get the answer to my question without searching multiple ad-ridden websites (since the ad provider does all the things)

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

"I truly don't get Google's move."

"AI" gets higher volume of use than search. This was disclosed by Google under oath

More traffic, more usage time, more data collection

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

"AI Mode queries are doubling every quarter."

https://www.wired.com/story/even-if-you-hate-ai-you-will-use...

[BiraIgnacio]

Well, if the marketing teams are being told to reach people using AI or something like that, then Google is just playing to their real customers.

[dandanua]

The intention is to kill the web in its current form, obviously. If only 1/3 of their users have left, then it is still a win for them in the long run, as they will gain the fraction of content they directly supply to users. Singularity is here and it's spreading faster than a cancer.

[osigurdson]

I don't see search and AI as fundamentally distinct things. Usually I just want an answer.

[scottmcmac]

Maybe we use search differently, but I very often don't just want an answer, I want to find a website to help me. Maybe it is because I need to do business with a company and need to find their website to interact with them, or maybe I saw a cool site awhile ago that's relevant to what I'm doing now and didn't bookmark it (because I dropped that habit when Google search was good), or want to read the official documentation about a product I bought, that someone already put a lot of effort into making complete enough and digestible to a wide audience... and the LLM responses tend to get in the way.

Like the parent I use good/paid AI when I want an AI response. So, yeah, an omnibox that knows when I want "an answer" and one that knows when I want to find a thing sounds slightly more convenient than switching between two tools, but Google search is not that Omnibox.

[ttctciyf]

If you don't care about the facticity of the answer, AI is less clicks, granted.

[hilariously]

I dont think about less keypresses though - google search would let you type two words and get the thing you know you want, an ai search doesn't really fit the mode that old school search folks were using

[malfist]

For the same reason I read a book instead of just the plot summary on the back cover

[gruez]

You really want to read the author's life story when searching for a recipe? Or wade through some content marketing plug for some vacuum cleaner shop in Albuquerque when all you want to do is figure out how to change filters on your vacuum? There are definitely gems on the web out there, but chances are I'm not discovering them via search, and I'd rather get the straight answer from the AI.

[bluefirebrand]

All of this stuff is Google's fault in the first place with page ranking shit they built!

So now you're trusting them to provide the cure?

[SecretDreams]

Soon, the internet will be so completely full of AI crap enabled by the mega corps that search will be quite a bit less relevant anywho. Maybe google is trying to front run the demise of the internet that they were supposed to protect?

[mauriciolange]

I thought the same at first, but now I find myself relying on the AI answer (as it is usually reliable) and, also more and more, I continue interacting in the AI mode on the topic that motivated my search in the first place.

[pupppet]

They see AI killing the incentive for anyone to produce human-generated content so they're squeezing the last few bucks out of the internet as we know it before it finally goes belly-up.

[nomel]

My read on it is "AI is taking over internet content generation, and we can't filter because we'll end up filtering everything that makes us the most money"

[aprdm]

I don't disagree with you, but google search has gone so downhill that I had stopped using it before they moved to the AI approach, which is actually pretty decent.

[elorant]

What if their move is to make AI search horrible so that OpenAI has no moves left here because trust in the product collapses?

[ptdorf]

> I truly don't get Google's move.

Because the goal is not to provide the best answers.

It's for users to train their AI.

[stainablesteel]

initially, not a lot of people were using gemini

google pushed it into their other products to attract people to AI

there was and still are a decent number of people who haven't really used it, as crazy as that sounds

[ubermonkey]

Bad results keep you on their site longer, increasing ad revenue.

[jeffwask]

> it's not Google Search

...and it really hasn't been for a good number of years now. I left a while ago when results were all SEO copy pasta blogs this is just a final nail in the coffin.

[micromacrofoot]

they ruined search a while ago and they want to stop the bleeding