Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sriram_malhar 46 days ago
Anyone who does a Google search gets a satisfactory looking answer as the very first entry. I daresay most people don't go beyond that, not even the entries on the first page, let alone go to the next. I argue that this is at the level of everyone for everything.
6 comments

> Anyone who does a Google search gets a satisfactory looking answer as the very first entry.

Google has search results still? I don't use Google much anymore (thanks Kagi), but this is what ends up showing for me, I don't even see any search results anymore: https://i.imgur.com/eHIA2Df.png It seems like it's 50/50 on page reload if the LLM-reply UI expands automatically or not, which covers my entire screen. I guess Google is doing some A/B testing perhaps.

Google still has search results but they mostly point to AI generated blog posts filled with adverts.
> Google still has search results

They should investigate if placing these search results above the limit of the screen/canvas height might lead to more people seeing them.

I don't think they want more people to see them.
What Im question is how is Google increasing Price-per-Click each year if people are clicking less and less on the links below the AI search result
I don’t see the contradiction? If the inventory of clicks is declining and the number of businesses bidding on clicks is more or less constant, why wouldn’t that increase price?
A "satisfactory looking answer" was what I got yesterday when I queried Google about a Pyodide question. It produced some code in html format that was supposed to work, but failed on execution. The AI generated result was incorrect and it was only 30ish lines of code that was supposed to print "hello world" to the console.
You still used AI, even if the results weren't correct.
It's been difficult to do, but I have recently picked up the habit of scrolling directly past the AI overview. It's not what I wanted, so it's useless to me (regardless of whether or not it's correct). I wanted search results. Sometimes that's a Wikipedia page, documentation, video results. But, web search results.

If I wanted to read an AI response to a query, I would use that tool specifically - I consider them different tools entirely.

It's definitely taken some time to get into the habit - perhaps defaulting to Google as the search engine was my first mistake.

However, most people I've seen run a quick search DO in fact just read the AI response (often with a caveat of "this is just from AI but..." which I appreciate), because for a lot of things it IS good enough or exactly what they needed.

When was the last time you used Google? The first entry (and a few after that) is always spam.

Anyone who does a search and accepts the first answer just doesn't care much or is incompetent. Anyone with any critical thinking whatsoever does way more than that if they want a correct answer.

Google searches are still part of my everyday use if you're a power user like me that ctrl/cmd+L to the browser bar and the first auto complete is a web search rather than a bookmark or history item
Pretty sure he's talking about the summary / AI answer and not the first search result
Not the first result. The AI summary generated by gemini.
Even if we accept that all people are satisfied with the AI search overviews, that would still only be everyone for one thing.