[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?

[aprdm]

great question, probably around 1998 ! How is it relevant to 2026 ?

[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!